It Can't Happen Here (52 page)

In the cafés they
seized the newspapers from home. Men who had had
an eye gouged out on behalf of freedom, with the rheumy remaining
one peered to see who had won the Missouri Avenue Bridge Club
Prize.

They were brave and romantic, tragic and distinguished, and Doremus
became a little sick of them all and of the final brutality of fact
that no normal man can very long endure another’s tragedy, and that
friendly
weeping will some day turn to irritated kicking.

He was stirred when, in a hastily built American interdenominational
chapel, he heard a starveling who had once been a pompous bishop
read from the pine pulpit:

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we
remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof… . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in
a strange
land? If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the
roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”

Here in Canada the Americans had their Weeping Wall and daily cried
with false, gallant hope, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Sometimes Doremus was vexed by the ceaseless demanding wails of
refugees
who had lost everything, sons and wives and property and
self-respect, vexed that they believed they alone had seen such
horrors; and sometimes he spent all his spare hours raising a
dollar and a little weary friendliness for these sick souls; and
sometimes he saw as fragments of Paradise every aspect of America—such oddly assorted glimpses as Meade at Gettysburg and the massed
blue petunias in
Emma’s lost garden, the fresh shine of rails as
seen from a train on an April morning and Rockefeller Center. But
whatever his mood, he refused to sit down with his harp by any
foreign waters whatever and enjoy the importance of being a
celebrated beggar.

He’d get back to America and chance another prison. Meantime he
neatly sent packages of literary dynamite out from the N.U. offices
all day
long, and efficiently directed a hundred envelope-addressers who once had been professors and pastrycooks.

He had asked his superior, Perley Beecroft, for assignment in more
active and more dangerous work, as secret agent in America—out
West, where he was not known. But headquarters had suffered a good
deal from amateur agents who babbled to strangers, or who could not
be trusted to keep their
mouths shut while they were being flogged
to death. Things had changed since 1929. The N.U. believed that
the highest honor a man could earn was not to have a million
dollars but to be permitted to risk his life for truth, without pay
or praise.

Doremus knew that his chiefs did not consider him young enough or
strong enough, but also that they were studying him. Twice he had
the honor of interviews
with Trowbridge about nothing in
particular—surely it must have been an honor, though it was hard
to remember it, because Trowbridge was the simplest and friendliest
man in the whole portentous spy machine. Cheerfully Doremus hoped
for a chance to help make the poor, overworked, worried Corpo
officials even more miserable than they normally were, now that war
with Mexico and revolts against Corpoism
were jingling side by
side.

In July, 1939, when Doremus had been in Montreal a little over five
months, and a year after his sentence to concentration camp, the
American newspapers which arrived at N.U. headquarters were full of
resentment against Mexico.

Bands of Mexicans had raided across into the United States—always,
curiously enough, when our troops were off in the desert, practice-marching
or perhaps gathering sea shells. They burned a town in
Texas—fortunately all the women and children were away on a
Sunday-school picnic, that afternoon. A Mexican Patriot (aforetime
he had also worked as an Ethiopian Patriot, a Chinese Patriot, and
a Haitian Patriot) came across, to the tent of an M.M. brigadier,
and confessed that while it hurt him to tattle on his own beloved
country, conscience
compelled him to reveal that his Mexican
superiors were planning to fly over and bomb Laredo, San Antonio,
Bisbee, and probably Tacoma, and Bangor, Maine.

This excited the Corpo newspapers very much indeed and in New York
and Chicago they published photographs of the conscientious traitor
half an hour after he had appeared at the Brigadier’s tent …
where, at that moment, forty-six reporters happened
to be sitting
about on neighboring cactuses.

America rose to defend her hearthstones, including all the
hearthstones on Park Avenue, New York, against false and
treacherous Mexico, with its appalling army of 67,000 men, with
thirty-nine military aeroplanes. Women in Cedar Rapids hid under
the bed; elderly gentlemen in Cattaraugus County, New York,
concealed their money in elm-tree boles; and
the wife of a chicken-raiser seven miles N.E. of Estelline, South Dakota, a woman widely
known as a good cook and a trained observer, distinctly saw a file
of ninety-two Mexican soldiers pass her cabin, starting at 3:17
A.M. on July 27, 1939.

To answer this threat, America, the one country that had never lost
a war and never started an unjust one, rose as one man, as the
Chicago Daily Evening
Corporate put it. It was planned to invade
Mexico as soon as it should be cool enough, or even earlier, if the
refrigeration and air-conditioning could be arranged. In one
month, five million men were drafted for the invasion, and started
training.

Thus—perhaps too flippantly—did Joe Cailey and Doremus discuss
the declaration of war against Mexico. If they found the whole
crusade absurd,
it may be stated in their defense that they
regarded all wars always as absurd; in the baldness of the lying by
both sides about the causes; in the spectacle of grown-up men
engaged in the infantile diversions of dressing-up in fancy clothes
and marching to primitive music. The only thing not absurd about
wars, said Doremus and Cailey, was that along with their
skittishness they did kill a good many
millions of people. Ten
thousand starving babies seemed too high a price for a Sam Browne
belt for even the sweetest, touchingest young lieutenant.

Yet both Doremus and Cailey swiftly recanted their assertion that
all wars were absurd and abominable; both of them made exception of
the people’s wars against tyranny, as suddenly America’s agreeable
anticipation of stealing Mexico was checked by
a popular rebellion
against the whole Corpo régime.

The revolting section was, roughly, bounded by Sault Ste. Marie,
Detroit, Cincinnati, Wichita, San Francisco, and Seattle, though in
that territory large patches remained loyal to President Haik, and
outside of it, other large patches joined the rebels. It was the
part of America which had always been most “radical”—that
indefinite word, which
probably means “most critical of piracy.”
It was the land of the Populists, the Non-Partisan League, the
Farmer-Labor Party, and the La Follettes—a family so vast as to
form a considerable party in itself.

Whatever might happen, exulted Doremus, the revolt proved that
belief in America and hope for America were not dead.

These rebels had most of them, before his election, believed in
Buzz Windrip’s
fifteen points; believed that when he said he wanted
to return the power pilfered by the bankers and the industrialists
to the people, he more or less meant that he wanted to return the
power of the bankers and industrialists to the people. As month by
month they saw that they had been cheated with marked cards again,
they were indignant; but they were busy with cornfield and sawmill
and dairy
and motor factory, and it took the impertinent idiocy of
demanding that they march down into the desert and help steal a
friendly country to jab them into awakening and into discovering
that, while they had been asleep, they had been kidnaped by a small
gang of criminals armed with high ideals, well-buttered words and a
lot of machine guns.

So profound was the revolt that the Catholic Archbishop
of
California and the radical Ex-Governor of Minnesota found
themselves in the same faction.

At first it was a rather comic outbreak—comic as the ill-trained,
un-uniformed, confusedly thinking revolutionists of Massachusetts
in 1776. President General Haik publicly jeered at them as a
“ridiculous rag-tag rebellion of hoboes too lazy to work.” And at
first they were unable to do anything more
than scold like a flock
of crows, throw bricks at detachments of M.M.’s and policemen,
wreck troop trains, and destroy the property of such honest private
citizens as owned Corpo newspapers.

It was in August that the shock came, when General Emmanuel Coon,
Chief of Staff of the regulars, flew from Washington to St. Paul,
took command of Fort Snelling, and declared for Walt Trowbridge as
Temporary
President of the United States, to hold office until
there should be a new, universal, and uncontrolled presidential
election.

Trowbridge proclaimed acceptance—with the proviso that he should
not be a candidate for permanent President.

By no means all of the regulars joined Coon’s revolutionary troops.
(There are two sturdy myths among the Liberals: that the Catholic
Church is less Puritanical
and always more esthetic than the
Protestant; and that professional soldiers hate war more than do
congressmen and old maids.) But there were enough regulars who
were fed up with the exactions of greedy, mouth-dripping Corpo
commissioners and who threw in with General Coon so that
immediately after his army of regulars and hastily trained
Minnesota farmers had won the battle of Mankato, the forces
at
Leavenworth took control of Kansas City, and planned to march on
St. Louis and Omaha; while in New York, Governor’s Island and Fort
Wadsworth looked on, neutral, as unmilitary-looking and mostly
Jewish guerrillas seized the subways, power stations, and railway
terminals.

But there the revolt halted, because in the America, which had so
warmly praised itself for its “widespread popular free
education,”
there had been so very little education, widespread, popular, free,
or anything else, that most people did not know what they wanted—indeed knew about so few things to want at all.

There had been plenty of schoolrooms; there had been lacking only
literate teachers and eager pupils and school boards who regarded
teaching as a profession worthy of as much honor and pay as
insurance-selling
or embalming or waiting on table. Most Americans
had learned in school that God had supplanted the Jews as chosen
people by the Americans, and this time done the job much better, so
that we were the richest, kindest, and cleverest nation living;
that depressions were but passing headaches and that labor unions
must not concern themselves with anything except higher wages and
shorter hours and,
above all, must not set up an ugly class
struggle by combining politically; that, though foreigners tried to
make a bogus mystery of them, politics were really so simple that
any village attorney or any clerk in the office of a metropolitan
sheriff was quite adequately trained for them; and that if John D.
Rockefeller or Henry Ford had set his mind to it, he could have
become the most distinguished
statesman, composer, physicist, or
poet in the land.

Even two-and-half years of despotism had not yet taught most
electors humility, nor taught them much of anything except that it
was unpleasant to be arrested too often.

So, after the first gay eruption of rioting, the revolt slowed up.
Neither the Corpos nor many of their opponents knew enough to
formulate a clear, sure theory of self-government,
or irresistibly
resolve to engage in the sore labor of fitting themselves for
freedom… . Even yet, after Windrip, most of the easy-going
descendants of the wisecracking Benjamin Franklin had not learned
that Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” meant
anything more than a high-school yell or a cigarette slogan.

The followers of Trowbridge and General Coon—”The American
Cooperative
Commonwealth” they began to call themselves—did not
lose any of the territory they had seized; they held it, driving
out all Corpo agents, and now and then added a county or two. But
mostly their rule, and equally the Corpos’ rule, was as unstable as
politics in Ireland.

So the task of Walt Trowbridge, which in August had seemed
finished, before October seemed merely to have begun. Doremus
Jessup was called into Trowbridge’s office, to hear from the
chairman:

“I guess the time’s come when we need Underground agents in the
States with sense as well as guts. Report to General Barnes for
service proselytizing in Minnesota. Good luck, Brother Jessup!
Try to persuade the orators that are still holding out for
Discipline and clubs that they ain’t so much stalwart as funny!”

And all
that Doremus thought was, “Kind of a nice fellow,
Trowbridge. Glad to be working with him,” as he set off on his new
task of being a spy and professional hero without even any funny
passwords to make the game romantic.

His packing was done. It had been very simple, since his kit
consisted only of toilet things, one change of clothes, and the
first volume of Spengler’s Decline of the West. He was waiting in
his hotel lobby for time to take the train to Winnipeg. He was
interested by the entrance of a lady more decorative than the
females customarily seen in this modest inn: a hand-tooled
presentation copy
of a lady, in crushed levant and satin doublure;
a lady with mascara’d eyelashes, a permanent wave, and a cobweb
frock. She ambled through the lobby and leaned against a fake-marble pillar, wielding a long cigarette-holder and staring at
Doremus. She seemed amused by him, for no clear reason.

Could she be some sort of Corpo spy?