It Can't Happen Here (20 page)

The M.M.’s hadn’t, in dreary hours of bayonet drill, known this
would be such sport. They’d have more of it now—and hadn’t the
President of the United States himself
told each of them,
personally, that he needed their aid?

When the remnants of Congress ventured to the Capitol, they found
it seeded with M.M.’s, while a regiment of Regulars, under Major
General Meinecke, paraded the grounds.

The Speaker of the House, and the Hon. Mr. Perley Beecroft, Vice-President of the United States and Presiding Officer of the Senate,
had the power to declare that quorums
were present. (If a lot of
members chose to dally in the district jail, enjoying themselves
instead of attending Congress, whose fault was that?) Both houses
passed a resolution declaring Point Fifteen temporarily in effect,
during the “crisis”—the legality of the passage was doubtful, but
just who was to contest it, even though the members of the Supreme
Court had not been placed under protective
arrest … merely
confined each to his own house by a squad of Minute Men!

Bishop Paul Peter Prang had (his friends said afterward) been
dismayed by Windrip’s stroke of state. Surely, he complained, Mr.
Windrip hadn’t quite remembered to include Christian Amity in the
program he had taken from the League of Forgotten Men. Though Mr.
Prang had contentedly given up broadcasting ever since the
victory
of Justice and Fraternity in the person of Berzelius Windrip, he
wanted to caution the public again, but when he telephoned to his
familiar station, WLFM in Chicago, the manager informed him that
“just temporarily, all access to the air was forbidden,” except as
it was especially licensed by the offices of Lee Sarason. (Oh,
that was only one of sixteen jobs that Lee and his six hundred
new
assistants had taken on in the past week.)

Rather timorously, Bishop Prang motored from his home in
Persepolis, Indiana, to the Indianapolis airport and took a night
plane for Washington, to reprove, perhaps even playfully to spank,
his naughty disciple, Buzz.

He had little trouble in being admitted to see the President. In
fact, he was, the press feverishly reported, at the White House
for
six hours, though whether he was with the President all that time
they could not discover. At three in the afternoon Prang was seen
to leave by a private entrance to the executive offices and take a
taxi. They noted that he was pale and staggering.

In front of his hotel he was elbowed by a mob who in curiously
unmenacing and mechanical tones yelped, “Lynch um—downutha enemies
Windrip!”
A dozen M.M.’s pierced the crowd and surrounded the
Bishop. The Ensign commanding them bellowed to the crowd, so that
all might hear, “You cowards leave the Bishop alone! Bishop, come
with us, and we’ll see you’re safe!”

Millions heard on their radios that evening the official
announcement that, to ward off mysterious plotters, probably
Bolsheviks, Bishop Prang had been safely shielded in
the district
jail. And with it a personal statement from President Windrip that
he was filled with joy at having been able to “rescue from the foul
agitators my friend and mentor, Bishop P. P. Prang, than whom there
is no man living who I so admire and respect.”

There was, as yet, no absolute censorship of the press; only a
confused imprisonment of journalists who offended the government or
local officers of the M.M.’s; and the papers chronically opposed to
Windrip carried by no means flattering hints that Bishop Prang had
rebuked the President and been plain jailed, with no nonsense about
a “rescue.” These mutters reached Persepolis.

Not all the Persepolitans ached with love for the Bishop or
considered him a modern St. Francis gathering up the little fowls
of the fields in his
handsome LaSalle car. There were neighbors
who hinted that he was a window-peeping snooper after bootleggers
and obliging grass widows. But proud of him, their best
advertisement, they certainly were, and the Persepolis Chamber of
Commerce had caused to be erected at the Eastern gateway to Main
Street the sign: “Home of Bishop Prang, Radio’s Greatest Star.”

So as one man Persepolis telegraphed
to Washington, demanding
Prang’s release, but a messenger in the Executive Offices who was a
Persepolis boy (he was, it is true, a colored man, but suddenly he
became a favorite son, lovingly remembered by old schoolmates)
tipped off the Mayor that the telegrams were among the hundredweight
of messages that were daily hauled away from the White House
unanswered.

Then a quarter of the citizenry
of Persepolis mounted a special
train to “march” on Washington. It was one of those small
incidents which the opposition press could use as a bomb under
Windrip, and the train was accompanied by a score of high-ranking
reporters from Chicago and, later, from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and
New York.

While the train was on its way—and it was curious what delays and
sidetrackings it encountered—a company
of Minute Men at
Logansport, Indiana, rebelled against having to arrest a group of
Catholic nuns who were accused of having taught treasonably. High
Marshal Sarason felt that there must be a Lesson, early and
impressive. A battalion of M.M.’s, sent from Chicago in fast
trucks, arrested the mutinous company, and shot every third man.

When the Persepolitans reached Washington, they were tearfully
informed, by a brigadier of M.M.’s who met them at the Union
Station, that poor Bishop Prang had been so shocked by the treason
of his fellow Indianans that he had gone melancholy mad and they
had tragically been compelled to shut him up in St. Elizabeth’s
government insane asylum.

No one willing to carry news about him ever saw Bishop Prang again.

The Brigadier brought greetings to the Persepolitans
from the
President himself, and an invitation to stay at the Willard, at
government expense. Only a dozen accepted; the rest took the first
train back, not amiably; and from then on there was one town in
America in which no M.M. ever dared to appear in his ducky forage
cap and dark-blue tunic.

The Chief of Staff of the Regular Army had been deposed; in his
place was Major General Emmanuel Coon.
Doremus and his like were
disappointed by General Coon’s acceptance, for they had always been
informed, even by the Nation, that Emmanuel Coon, though a
professional army officer who did enjoy a fight, preferred that
that fight be on the side of the Lord; that he was generous,
literate, just, and a man of honor—and honor was the one quality
that Buzz Windrip wasn’t even expected to understand.
Rumor said
that Coon (as “Nordic” a Kentuckian as ever existed, a descendant
of men who had fought beside Kit Carson and Commodore Perry) was
particularly impatient with the puerility of anti-Semitism, and
that nothing so pleased him as, when he heard new acquaintances
being superior about the Jews, to snarl, “Did you by any chance
happen to notice that my name is Emmanuel Coon and that Coon might
be a corruption of some name rather familiar on the East Side of
New York?”

“Oh well, I suppose even General Coon feels, ‘Orders are Orders,’”
sighed Doremus.

President Windrip’s first extended proclamation to the country was
a pretty piece of literature and of tenderness. He explained that
powerful and secret enemies of American principles—one rather
gathered that they were a combination
of Wall Street and Soviet
Russia—upon discovering, to their fury, that he, Berzelius, was
going to be President, had planned their last charge. Everything
would be tranquil in a few months, but meantime there was a Crisis,
during which the country must “bear with him.”

He recalled the military dictatorship of Lincoln and Stanton during
the Civil War, when civilian suspects were arrested without
warrant. He hinted how delightful everything was going to be—right away now—just a moment—just a moment’s patience—when he
had things in hand; and he wound up with a comparison of the Crisis
to the urgency of a fireman rescuing a pretty girl from a
“conflagration,” and carrying her down a ladder, for her own sake,
whether she liked it or not, and no matter how appealingly she
might kick her pretty
ankles.

The whole country laughed.

“Great card, that Buzz, but mighty competent guy,” said the
electorate.

“I should worry whether Bish Prang or any other nut is in the
boobyhatch, long as I get my five thousand bucks a year, like
Windrip promised,” said Shad Ledue to Charley Betts, the furniture
man.

It had all happened within the eight days following Windrip’s
inauguration.

I have no desire to be President. I would much rather do my humble
best as a supporter of Bishop Prang, Ted Bilbo, Gene Talmadge or
any other broad-gauged but peppy Liberal. My only longing is to
Serve.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

Like many bachelors given to vigorous hunting and riding, Buck
Titus was a fastidious housekeeper, and his mid-Victorian farmhouse
fussily neat. It was also
pleasantly bare: the living room a
monastic hall of heavy oak chairs, tables free of dainty covers,
numerous and rather solemn books of history and exploration, with
the conventional “sets,” and a tremendous fireplace of rough stone.
And the ash trays were solid pottery and pewter, able to cope with
a whole evening of cigarette-smoking. The whisky stood honestly on
the oak buffet, with siphons,
and with cracked ice always ready in
a thermos jug.

It would, however, have been too much to expect Buck Titus not to
have red-and-black imitation English hunting-prints.

This hermitage, always grateful to Doremus, was sanctuary now, and
only with Buck could he adequately damn Windrip & Co. and people
like Francis Tasbrough, who in February was still saying, “Yes,
things do look kind of hectic
down there in Washington, but that’s
just because there’s so many of these bullheaded politicians that
still think they can buck Windrip. Besides, anyway, things like
that couldn’t ever happen here in New England.”

And, indeed, as Doremus went on his lawful occasions past the red-brick Georgian houses, the slender spires of old white churches
facing the Green, as he heard the lazy irony of familiar
greetings
from his acquaintances, men as enduring as their Vermont hills, it
seemed to him that the madness in the capital was as alien and
distant and unimportant as an earthquake in Tibet.

Constantly, in the
Informer
, he criticized the government but not
too acidly.

The hysteria can’t last; be patient, and wait and see, he counseled
his readers.

It was not that he was afraid of the authorities.
He simply did
not believe that this comic tyranny could endure.
It can’t happen here
, said even Doremus—even now.

The one thing that most perplexed him was that there could be a
dictator seemingly so different from the fervent Hitlers and
gesticulating Fascists and the Cæsars with laurels round bald
domes; a dictator with something of the earthy American sense of
humor of a Mark Twain, a George
Ade, a Will Rogers, an Artemus
Ward. Windrip could be ever so funny about solemn jaw-drooping
opponents, and about the best method of training what he called “a
Siamese flea hound.” Did that, puzzled Doremus, make him less or
more dangerous?

Then he remembered the most cruel-mad of all pirates, Sir Henry
Morgan, who had thought it ever so funny to sew a victim up in wet
rawhide and watch it
shrink in the sun.

From the perseverance with which they bickered, you could tell that
Buck Titus and Lorinda were much fonder of each other than they
would admit. Being a person who read little and therefore took
what he did read seriously, Buck was distressed by the normally
studious Lorinda’s vacation liking for novels about distressed
princesses, and when she airily insisted that they were
better
guides to conduct than Anthony Trollope or Thomas Hardy, Buck
roared at her and, in the feebleness of baited strength, nervously
filled pipes and knocked them out against the stone mantel. But he
approved of the relationship between Doremus and Lorinda, which
only he (and Shad Ledue!) had guessed, and over Doremus, ten years
his senior, this shaggy-headed woodsman fussed like a thwarted
spinster.

To both Doremus and Lorinda, Buck’s overgrown shack became their
refuge. And they needed it, late in February, five weeks or
thereabouts after Windrip’s election.

Despite strikes and riots all over the country, bloodily put down
by the Minute Men, Windrip’s power in Washington was maintained.
The most liberal four members of the Supreme Court resigned and
were replaced by surprisingly
unknown lawyers who called President
Windrip by his first name. A number of Congressmen were still
being “protected” in the District of Columbia jail; others had seen
the blinding light forever shed by the goddess Reason and happily
returned to the Capitol. The Minute Men were increasingly loyal—they were still unpaid volunteers, but provided with “expense
accounts” considerably larger than
the pay of the regular troops.
Never in American history had the adherents of a President been so
well satisfied; they were not only appointed to whatever political
jobs there were but to ever so many that really were not; and with
such annoyances as Congressional Investigations hushed, the
official awarders of contracts were on the merriest of terms with
all contractors… . One veteran lobbyist
for steel corporations
complained that there was no more sport in his hunting—you were
not only allowed but expected to shoot all government purchasing-agents sitting.

None of the changes was so publicized as the Presidential mandate
abruptly ending the separate existence of the different states, and
dividing the whole country into eight “provinces”—thus, asserted
Windrip, economizing by reducing
the number of governors and all
other state officers and, asserted Windrip’s enemies, better
enabling him to concentrate his private army and hold the country.