It Can't Happen Here (5 page)

No one, even among the Washington correspondents, seemed to know
precisely how much of a part in Senator Windrip’s career was taken
by his secretary, Lee Sarason. When Windrip had first seized power
in his state, Sarason
had been managing editor of the most widely
circulated paper in all that part of the country. Sarason’s
genesis was and remained a mystery.

It was said that he had been born in Georgia, in Minnesota, on the
East Side of New York, in Syria; that he was pure Yankee, Jewish,
Charleston Huguenot. It was known that he had been a singularly
reckless lieutenant of machine-gunners as a youngster during
the
Great War, and that he had stayed over, ambling about Europe, for
three or four years; that he had worked on the Paris edition of the
New York Herald; nibbled at painting and at Black Magic in Florence
and Munich; had a few sociological months at the London School of
Economics; associated with decidedly curious people in arty Berlin
night restaurants. Returned home, Sarason had become decidedly
the
“hard-boiled reporter” of the shirt-sleeved tradition, who asserted
that he would rather be called a prostitute than anything so
sissified as “journalist.” But it was suspected that nevertheless
he still retained the ability to read.

He had been variously a Socialist and an anarchist. Even in 1936
there were rich people who asserted that Sarason was “too radical,”
but actually he had lost
his trust (if any) in the masses during
the hoggish nationalism after the war; and he believed now only in
resolute control by a small oligarchy. In this he was a Hitler, a
Mussolini.

Sarason was lanky and drooping, with thin flaxen hair, and thick
lips in a bony face. His eyes were sparks at the bottoms of two
dark wells. In his long hands there was bloodless strength. He
used to surprise
persons who were about to shake hands with him by
suddenly bending their fingers back till they almost broke. Most
people didn’t much like it. As a newspaperman he was an expert of
the highest grade. He could smell out a husband-murder, the
grafting of a politician—that is to say, of a politician belonging
to a gang opposed by his paper—the torture of animals or children,
and this last sort of
story he liked to write himself, rather than
hand it to a reporter, and when he did write it, you saw the moldy
cellar, heard the whip, felt the slimy blood.

Compared with Lee Sarason as a newspaperman, little Doremus Jessup
of Fort Beulah was like a village parson compared with the twenty-thousand-dollar minister of a twenty-story New York institutional
tabernacle with radio affiliations.

Senator Windrip had made Sarason, officially, his secretary, but he
was known to be much more—bodyguard, ghost-writer, press-agent,
economic adviser; and in Washington, Lee Sarason became the man
most consulted and least liked by newspaper correspondents in the
whole Senate Office Building.

Windrip was a young forty-eight in 1936; Sarason an aged and
sagging-cheeked forty-one.

Though he probably
based it on notes dictated by Windrip—himself
no fool in the matter of fictional imagination—Sarason had
certainly done the actual writing of Windrip’s lone book, the Bible
of his followers, part biography, part economic program, and part
plain exhibitionistic boasting, called
Zero Hour—Over the Top
.

It was a salty book and contained more suggestions for remolding
the world than the three volumes
of Karl Marx and all the novels of
H. G. Wells put together.

Perhaps the most familiar, most quoted paragraph of
Zero Hour
,
beloved by the provincial press because of its simple earthiness
(as written by an initiate in Rosicrucian lore, named Sarason) was:

“When I was a little shaver back in the corn fields, we kids used
to just wear one-strap suspenders on our pants, and we called them
the
Galluses on our Britches, but they held them up and saved our
modesty just as much as if we had put on a high-toned Limey accent
and talked about Braces and Trousers. That’s how the whole world
of what they call ‘scientific economics’ is like. The Marxians
think that by writing of Galluses as Braces, they’ve got something
that knocks the stuffings out of the old-fashioned ideas of
Washington and
Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Well and all, I
sure believe in using every new economic discovery, like they have
been worked out in the so-called Fascist countries, like Italy and
Germany and Hungary and Poland—yes, by thunder, and even in Japan—we probably will have to lick those Little Yellow Men some day, to
keep them from pinching our vested and rightful interests in China,
but don’t
let that keep us from grabbing off any smart ideas that
those cute little beggars have worked out!

“I want to stand up on my hind legs and not just admit but frankly
holler right out that we’ve got to change our system a lot, maybe
even change the whole Constitution (but change it legally, and not
by violence) to bring it up from the horseback-and-corduroy-road
epoch to the automobile-and-cement-highway
period of today. The
Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in
an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer
congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates.
But
—and it’s a But as big as Deacon Checkerboard’s hay-barn back
home—these new economic changes are only a means to an End, and
that End is and must be, fundamentally,
the same principles of
Liberty, Equality, and Justice that were advocated by the Founding
Fathers of this great land back in 1776!”

The most confusing thing about the whole campaign of 1936 was the
relationship of the two leading parties. Old-Guard Republicans
complained that their proud party was begging for office, hat in
hand; veteran Democrats that their traditional Covered Wagons were
jammed
with college professors, city slickers, and yachtsmen.

The rival to Senator Windrip in public reverence was a political
titan who seemed to have no itch for office—the Reverend Paul
Peter Prang, of Persepolis, Indiana, Bishop of the Methodist
Episcopal Church, a man perhaps ten years older than Windrip. His
weekly radio address, at 2 P.M. every Saturday, was to millions the
very oracle of God.
So supernatural was this voice from the air
that for it men delayed their golf, and women even postponed their
Saturday afternoon contract bridge.

It was Father Charles Coughlin, of Detroit, who had first thought
out the device of freeing himself from any censorship of his
political sermons on the Mount by “buying his own time on the air”—it being only in the twentieth century that mankind has
been able
to buy Time as it buys soap and gasoline. This invention was
almost equal, in its effect on all American life and thought, to
Henry Ford’s early conception of selling cars cheap to millions of
people, instead of selling a few as luxuries.

But to the pioneer Father Coughlin, Bishop Paul Peter Prang was as
the Ford V-8 to the Model A.

Prang was more sentimental than Coughlin; he shouted
more; he
agonized more; he reviled more enemies by name, and rather
scandalously; he told more funny stories, and ever so many more
tragic stories about the repentant deathbeds of bankers, atheists,
and Communists. His voice was more nasally native, and he was pure
Middle West, with a New England Protestant Scotch-English ancestry,
where Coughlin was always a little suspect, in the Sears-Roebuck
regions, as a Roman Catholic with an agreeable Irish accent.

No man in history has ever had such an audience as Bishop Prang,
nor so much apparent power. When he demanded that his auditors
telegraph their congressmen to vote on a bill as he, Prang, ex
cathedra and alone, without any college of cardinals, had been
inspired to believe they ought to vote, then fifty thousand people
would telephone,
or drive through back-hill mud, to the nearest
telegraph office and in His name give their commands to the
government. Thus, by the magic of electricity, Prang made the
position of any king in history look a little absurd and tinseled.

To millions of League members he sent mimeographed letters with
facsimile signature, and with the salutation so craftily typed in
that they rejoiced in a personal
greeting from the Founder.

Doremus Jessup, up in the provincial hills, could never quite
figure out just what political gospel it was that Bishop Prang
thundered from his Sinai which, with its microphone and typed
revelations timed to the split-second, was so much more snappy and
efficient than the original Sinai. In detail, he preached
nationalization of the banks, mines, waterpower, and transportation;
limitation of incomes; increased wages, strengthening of the labor
unions, more fluid distribution of consumer goods. But everybody
was nibbling at those noble doctrines now, from Virginia Senators to
Minnesota Farmer-Laborites, with no one being so credulous as to
expect any of them to be carried out.

There was a theory around some place that Prang was only the humble
voice of his vast organization,
“The League of Forgotten Men.” It
was universally believed to have (though no firm of chartered
accountants had yet examined its rolls) twenty-seven million
members, along with proper assortments of national officers and
state officers, and town officers and hordes of committees with
stately names like “National Committee on the Compilation of
Statistics on Unemployment and Normal Employability
in the Soy-Bean
Industry.” Hither and yon, Bishop Prang, not as the still small
voice of God but in lofty person, addressed audiences of twenty
thousand persons at a time, in the larger cities all over the
country, speaking in huge halls meant for prize-fighting, in cinema
palaces, in armories, in baseball parks, in circus tents, while
after the meetings his brisk assistants accepted membership
applications and dues for the League of Forgotten Men. When his
timid detractors hinted that this was all very romantic, very jolly
and picturesque, but not particularly dignified, and Bishop Prang
answered, “My Master delighted to speak in whatever vulgar assembly
would listen to Him,” no one dared answer him, “But you aren’t your
Master—not yet.”

With all the flourish of the League and its
mass meetings, there
had never been a pretense that any tenet of the League, any
pressure on Congress and the President to pass any particular bill,
originated with anybody save Prang himself, with no collaboration
from the committees or officers of the League. All that the Prang
who so often crooned about the Humility and Modesty of the Saviour
wanted was for one hundred and thirty million people
to obey him,
their Priest-King, implicitly in everything concerning their
private morals, their public asseverations, how they might earn
their livings, and what relationships they might have to other
wage-earners.

“And that,” Doremus Jessup grumbled, relishing the shocked piety of
his wife Emma, “makes Brother Prang a worse tyrant than Caligula—a
worse Fascist than Napoleon. Mind you, I don’t
really
believe all
these rumors about Prang’s grafting on membership dues and the sale
of pamphlets and donations to pay for the radio. It’s much worse
than that. I’m afraid he’s an honest fanatic! That’s why he’s
such a real Fascist menace—he’s so confoundedly humanitarian, in
fact so Noble, that a majority of people are willing to let him
boss everything, and with a country this size, that’s
quite a job—quite a job, my beloved—even for a Methodist Bishop who gets
enough gifts so that he can actually ‘buy Time’!”

All the while, Walt Trowbridge, possible Republican candidate for
President, suffering from the deficiency of being honest and
disinclined to promise that he could work miracles, was insisting
that we live in the United States of America and not on a golden
highway to Utopia.

There was nothing exhilarating in such realism, so all this rainy
week in June, with the apple blossoms and the lilacs fading,
Doremus Jessup was awaiting the next encyclical of Pope Paul Peter
Prang.

I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in
spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest or
the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can
put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their
greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their
all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they stand
out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

The June morning shone, the last petals of the wild-cherry blossoms
lay dew-covered on the grass, robins were about their brisk
business on the lawn. Doremus, by nature a late-lier and pilferer
of naps after he had been called at eight, was stirred to spring up
and stretch his arms out fully five or six times
in Swedish
exercises, in front of his window, looking out across the Beulah
River Valley to dark masses of pine on the mountain slopes three
miles away.

Doremus and Emma had had each their own bedroom, these fifteen
years, not altogether to her pleasure. He asserted that he
couldn’t share a bedroom with any person living, because he was a
night-mutterer, and liked to make a really good, uprearing,
pillow-slapping job of turning over in bed without feeling that he was
disturbing someone.

It was Saturday, the day of the Prang revelation, but on this
crystal morning, after days of rain, he did not think of Prang at
all, but of the fact that Philip, his son, with wife, had popped up
from Worcester for the week-end, and that the whole crew of them,
along with Lorinda Pike and Buck Titus, were
going to have a “real,
old-fashioned, family picnic.”

They had all demanded it, even the fashionable Sissy, a woman who,
at eighteen, had much concern with tennis-teas, golf, and
mysterious, appallingly rapid motor trips with Malcolm Tasbrough
(just graduating from high school), or with the Episcopal parson’s
grandson, Julian Falck (freshman in Amherst). Doremus had scolded
that he
could’t
go to any blame picnic; it was his
job
, as editor,
to stay home and listen to Bishop Prang’s broadcast at two; but
they had laughed at him and rumpled his hair and miscalled him
until he had promised… . They didn’t know it, but he had slyly
borrowed a portable radio from his friend, the local R. C. priest,
Father Stephen Perefixe, and he was going to hear Prang whether or
no.