It Can't Happen Here (48 page)

“Oh!” said Sissy.

A few days afterward, reading a coded New Underground telegram
which apparently dealt with the delivery of furniture, Lorinda
shrieked, “Sissy! All you-know-what has busted loose! In
Washington! Lee Sarason has deposed Buzz Windrip and grabbed the
dictatorship!”

“
Oh!
” said Sissy.

In his two years of dictatorship, Berzelius Windrip daily became
more a miser of power. He continued to tell himself that his main
ambition was to make all citizens healthy, in purse and mind, and
that if he was brutal it was only toward fools and reactionaries
who wanted the old clumsy systems. But after eighteen months of
Presidency he was angry that Mexico and Canada and South America
(obviously his own property, by manifest destiny) should curtly
answer his curt diplomatic notes and show no helpfulness about
becoming part of his inevitable empire.

And daily he wanted louder, more convincing Yeses from everybody
about him. How could he carry on his heartbreaking labor if nobody
ever encouraged him? he demanded. Anyone, from Sarason to inter-office messenger, who did not
play valet to his ego he suspected of
plotting against him. He constantly increased his bodyguard, and
as constantly distrusted all his guards and discharged them, and
once took a shot at a couple of them, so that in all the world he
had no companion save his old aide Lee Sarason, and perhaps Hector
Macgoblin, to whom he could talk easily.

He felt lonely in the hours when he wanted to shuck
off the duties
of despotism along with his shoes and his fine new coat. He no
longer went out racketing. His cabinet begged him not to clown in
barrooms and lodge entertainments; it was not dignified, and it was
dangerous to be too near to strangers.

So he played poker with his bodyguard, late at night, and at such
times drank too much, and he cursed them and glared with bulging
eyes whenever
he lost, which, for all the good-will of his guards
about letting him win, had to be often, because he pinched their
salaries badly and locked up the spoons. He had become as
unbouncing and unbuzzing a Buzz as might be, and he did not know
it.

All the while he loved the People just as much as he feared and
detested Persons, and he planned to do something historic.
Certainly! He would give each
family that five thousand dollars a
year just as soon now as he could arrange it.

And Lee Sarason, forever making his careful lists, as patient at
his desk as he was pleasure-hungry on the couch at midnight
parties, was beguiling officials to consider him their real lord
and the master of Corpoism. He kept his promises to them, while
Windrip always forgot. His office door became the door of
ambition. In Washington, the reporters privily spoke of this
assistant secretary and that general as “Sarason men.” His clique
was not a government within a government; it was the government
itself, minus the megaphones. He had the Secretary of Corporations
(a former vice-president of the American Federation of Labor)
coming to him secretly every evening, to report on labor politics
and in especial
on such proletarian leaders as were dissatisfied
with Windrip as Chief—i.e., with their own share in the swag. He
had from the Secretary of the Treasury (though this functionary,
one Webster Skittle, was not a lieutenant of Sarason but merely
friendly) confidential reports on the affairs of those large
employers who, since under Corpoism it was usually possible for a
millionaire to persuade the
judges in the labor-arbitration courts
to look at things reasonably, rejoiced that with strikes outlawed
and employers regarded as state officials, they would now be in
secure power forever.

Sarason knew the quiet ways in which these reinforced industrial
barons used arrests by the M.M.’s to get rid of “trouble-makers,”
particularly of Jewish radicals—a Jewish radical being a Jew with
nobody
working for him. (Some of the barons were themselves Jews;
it is not to be expected that race-loyalty should be carried so
insanely far as to weaken the pocketbook.)

The allegiance of all such Negroes as had the sense to be content
with safety and good pay instead of ridiculous yearnings for
personal integrity Sarason got by being photographed shaking hands
with the celebrated Negro Fundamentalist
clergyman, the Reverend
Dr. Alexander Nibbs, and through the highly publicized Sarason
Prizes for the Negroes with the largest families, the fastest time
in floor-scrubbing, and the longest periods of work without taking
a vacation.

“No danger of our good friends, the Negroes, turning Red when
they’re encouraged like that,” Sarason announced to the newspapers.

It was a satisfaction to Sarason
that in Germany, all military
bands were now playing his national song, “Buzz and Buzz” along
with the Horst Wessel hymn, for, though he had not exactly written
the music as well as the words, the music was now being attributed
to him abroad.

As a bank clerk might, quite rationally, worry equally over the
whereabouts of a hundred million dollars’ worth of the bank’s
bonds, and of ten cents of
his own lunch money, so Buzz Windrip
worried equally over the welfare—that is, the obedience to
himself—of a hundred and thirty-odd million American citizens and
the small matter of the moods of Lee Sarason, whose approval of him
was the one real fame. (His wife Windrip did not see oftener than
once a week, and anyway, what that rustic wench thought was
unimportant.)

The diabolic Hector Macgoblin
frightened him; Secretary of War
Luthorne and Vice-President Perley Beecroft he liked well enough,
but they bored him; they smacked too much of his own small-town
boyhood, to escape which he was willing to take the responsibilities
of a nation. It was the incalculable Lee Sarason on whom he
depended, and the Lee with whom he had gone fishing and boozing and
once, even, murdering, who had seemed
his own self made more sure
and articulate, had thoughts now which he could not penetrate.
Lee’s smile was a veil, not a revelation.

It was to discipline Lee, with the hope of bringing him back, that
when Buzz replaced the amiable but clumsy Colonel Luthorne as
Secretary of War by Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the
Northeastern Province (Buzz’s characteristic comment was that
Luthorne was
not “pulling his weight”), he also gave to Haik the
position of High Marshal of the M.M.’s, which Lee had held along
with a dozen other offices. From Lee he expected an explosion,
then repentance and a new friendship. But Lee only said, “Very
well, if you wish,” and said it coldly.

Just how
could
he get Lee to be a good boy and come play with him
again? wistfully wondered the man who now and
then planned to be
emperor of the world.

He gave Lee a thousand-dollar television set. Even more coldly did
Lee thank him, and never spoke afterward of how well he might be
receiving the still shaky television broadcasts on his beautiful
new set.

As Dewey Haik took hold, doubling efficiency in both the regular
army and the Minute Men (he was a demon for all-night practice
marches in heavy order,
and the files could not complain, because
he set the example), Buzz began to wonder whether Haik might not be
his new confidant… . He really would hate to throw Lee into
prison, but still, Lee was so thoughtless about hurting his
feelings, when he’d gone and done so much for him and all!

Buzz was confused. He was the more confused when Perley Beecroft
came in and briefly said that he was sick
of all this bloodshed and
was going home to the farm, and as for his lofty Vice-Presidential
office, Buzz knew what he could do with it.

Were these vast national dissensions no different from squabbles in
his father’s drugstore? fretted Buzz. He couldn’t very well have
Beecroft shot: it might cause criticism. But it was indecent, it
was sacrilegious to annoy an emperor, and in his irritation
he had
an ex-Senator and twelve workmen who were in concentration camps
taken out and shot on the charge that they had told irreverent
stories about him.

Secretary of State Sarason was saying good-night to President
Windrip in the hotel suite where Windrip really lived.

No newspaper had dared mention it, but Buzz was both bothered by
the stateliness of the White House and frightened by the
number of
Reds and cranks and anti-Corpos who, with the most commendable
patience and ingenuity, tried to sneak into that historic mansion
and murder him. Buzz merely left his wife there, for show, and,
except at great receptions, never entered any part of the White
House save the office annex.

He liked this hotel suite; he was a sensible man, who preferred
straight bourbon, codfish cakes, and
deep leather chairs to
Burgundy, trout bleu, and Louis Quinze. In this twelve-room
apartment, occupying the entire tenth floor of a small unnotorious
hotel, he had for himself only a plain bedroom, a huge living room
which looked like a combination of office and hotel lobby, a large
liquor closet, another closet with thirty-seven suits of clothes,
and a bathroom with jars and jars of the pine-flavored
bath salts
which were his only cosmetic luxury. Buzz might come home in a
suit dazzling as a horse blanket, one considered in Alfalfa Center
a triumph of London tailoring, but, once safe, he liked to put on
his red morocco slippers that were down at the heel and display his
red suspenders and baby-blue sleeve garters. To feel correct in
those decorations, he preferred the hotel atmosphere that,
for so
many years before he had ever seen the White House, had been as
familiar to him as his ancestral corn cribs and Main Streets.

The other ten rooms of the suite, entirely shutting his own off
from the corridors and elevators, were filled night and day with
guards. To get through to Buzz in this intimate place of his own
was very much like visiting a police station for the purpose of
seeing
a homicidal prisoner.

“Haik seems to me to be doing a fine job in the War Department,
Lee,” said the President. “Of course you know if you ever want the
job of High Marshal back—”

“I’m quite satisfied,” said the great Secretary of State.

“What do you think of having Colonel Luthorne back to help Haik
out? He’s pretty good on fool details.”

Sarason looked as nearly embarrassed as the self-satisfied
Lee
Sarason ever could look.

“Why, uh—I supposed you knew it. Luthorne was liquidated in the
purge ten days ago.”

“Good God! Luthorne killed? Why didn’t I know it?”

“It was thought better to keep it quiet. He was a pretty popular
man. But dangerous. Always talking about Abraham Lincoln!”

“So I just never know anything about what’s going on! Why, even
the newspaper clippings are predigested,
by God, before I see ‘em!”

“It’s thought better not to bother you with minor details, boss.
You know that! Of course, if you feel I haven’t organized your
staff correctly—”

“Aw now, don’t fly off the handle, Lee! I just meant—Of course I
know how hard you’ve tried to protect me so I could give all my
brains to the higher problems of State. But Luthorne—I kind of
liked him. He always had
quite a funny line when we played poker.”
Buzz Windrip felt lonely, as once a certain Shad Ledue had felt, in
a hotel suite that differed from Buzz’s only in being smaller. To
forget it he bawled, very brightly, “Lee, do you ever wonder
what’ll happen in the future?”

“Why, I think you and I may have mentioned it.”

“But golly, just think of what might happen in the future, Lee!
Think of it!
Why, we may be able to pull off a North American
kingdom!” Buzz half meant it seriously—or perhaps quarter meant
it. “How’d you like to be Duke of Georgia—or Grand Duke, or
whatever they call a Grand Exalted Ruler of the Elks in this
peerage business? And then how about an Empire of North and South
America after that? I might make you a king under me, then—say
something like King of Mexico.
Howjuh like that?”

“Be very amusing,” said Lee mechanically—as Lee always did say the
same thing mechanically whenever Buzz repeated this same nonsense.

“But you got to stick by me and not forget all I’ve done for you,
Lee, don’t forget that.”

“I never forget anything! … By the way, we ought to liquidate,
or at least imprison, Perley Beecroft, too. He’s still technically
Vice-President of
the United States, and if the lousy traitor
managed some skullduggery so as to get you killed or deposed, he
might be regarded by some narrow-minded literalists as President!”

“No, no, no! He’s my friend, no matter what he says about me …
the dirty dog!” wailed Buzz.

“All right. You’re the boss. G’night,” said Lee, and returned
from this plumber’s dream of paradise to his own gold-and-black
and
apricot-silk bower in Georgetown, which he shared with several
handsome young M.M. officers. They were savage soldiers, yet apt
at music and at poetry. With them, he was not in the least
passionless, as he seemed now to Buzz Windrip. He was either angry
with his young friends, and then he whipped them, or he was in
a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their wounds.
Newspapermen who
had once seemed to be his friends said that he had
traded the green eyeshade for a wreath of violets.

At cabinet meeting, late in 1938, Secretary of State Sarason
revealed to the heads of the government disturbing news. Vice-President Beecroft—and had he not told them the man should have
been shot?—had fled to Canada, renounced Corpoism, and joined Walt
Trowbridge in plotting. There were bubbles
from an almost boiling
rebellion in the Middle West and Northwest, especially in Minnesota
and the Dakotas, where agitators, some of them formerly of
political influence, were demanding that their states secede from
the Corpo Union and form a cooperative (indeed almost Socialistic)
commonwealth of their own.