It Can't Happen Here (6 page)

He was glad they
were going to have Lorinda Pike—he was fond of
that sardonic saint—and Buck Titus, who was perhaps his closest
intimate.

James Buck Titus, who was fifty but looked thirty-eight, straight,
broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, long-mustached, swarthy—Buck was
the Dan’l Boone type of Old American, or, perhaps, an Indian-fighting cavalry captain, out of Charles King. He had graduated
from Williams, with
ten weeks in England and ten years in Montana,
divided between cattle-raising, prospecting, and a horse-breeding
ranch. His father, a richish railroad contractor, had left him the
great farm near West Beulah, and Buck had come back home to grow
apples, to breed Morgan stallions, and to read Voltaire, Anatole
France, Nietzsche, and Dostoyefsky. He served in the war, as a
private; detested his
officers, refused a commission, and liked the
Germans at Cologne. He was a useful polo player, but regarded
riding to the hounds as childish. In politics, he did not so much
yearn over the wrongs of Labor as feel scornful of the tight-fisted
exploiters who denned in office and stinking factory. He was as
near to the English country squire as one may find in America. He
was a bachelor, with a
big mid-Victorian house, well kept by a
friendly Negro couple; a tidy place in which he sometimes
entertained ladies who were not quite so tidy. He called himself
an “agnostic” instead of an “atheist” only because he detested the
street-bawling, tract-peddling evangelicism of the professional
atheists. He was cynical, he rarely smiled, and he was
unwaveringly loyal to all the Jessups. His coming
to the picnic
made Doremus as blithe as his grandson David.

“Perhaps, even under Fascism, the ‘Church clock will stand at ten
to three, and there will be honey still for tea,’” Doremus hoped,
as he put on his rather dandified country tweeds.

The only stain on the preparations for the picnic was the
grouchiness of the hired man, Shad Ledue. When he was asked to
turn the ice-cream freezer he
growled, “Why the heck don’t you
folks get an electric freezer? He grumbled, most audibly, at the
weight of the picnic baskets, and when he was asked to clean up the
basement during their absence, he retorted only with a glare of
silent fury.

“You ought to get rid of that fellow, Ledue,” urged Doremus’s son
Philip, the lawyer.

“Oh, I don’t know,” considered Doremus. “Probably just
shiftlessness
on my part. But I tell myself I’m doing a social
experiment—trying to train him to be as gracious as the average
Neanderthal man. Or perhaps I’m scared of him—he’s the kind of
vindictive peasant that sets fire to barns… . Did you know
that he actually reads, Phil?”

“No!”

“Yep. Mostly movie magazines, with nekked ladies and Wild Western
stories, but he also reads the papers. Told me he greatly
admired
Buzz Windrip; says Windrip will certainly be President, and then
everybody—by which, I’m afraid, Shad means only himself—will have
five thousand a year. Buzz certainly has a bunch of philanthropists
for followers.”

“Now listen, Dad. You don’t understand Senator Windrip. Oh, he’s
something of a demagogue—he shoots off his mouth a lot about how
he’ll jack up the income tax and grab the
banks, but he won’t—that’s just molasses for the cockroaches. What he will do, and
maybe only he
can
do it, is to protect us from the murdering,
thieving, lying Bolsheviks that would—why, they’d like to stick
all of us that are going on this picnic, all the decent clean
people that are accustomed to privacy, into hall bedrooms, and make
us cook our cabbage soup on a Primus stuck on a bed! Yes,
or maybe
‘liquidate’ us entirely! No sir, Berzelius Windrip is the fellow
to balk the dirty sneaking Jew spies that pose as American
Liberals!”

“The face is the face of my reasonably competent son, Philip, but
the voice is the voice of the Jew-baiter, Julius Streicher,” sighed
Doremus.

The picnic ground was among a Stonehenge of gray and lichen-painted
rocks, fronting a birch grove high up
on Mount Terror, on the
upland farm of Doremus’s cousin, Henry Veeder, a solid, reticent
Vermonter of the old days. They looked through a distant mountain
gap to the faint mercury of Lake Champlain and, across it, the
bulwark of the Adirondacks.

Davy Greenhill and his hero, Buck Titus, wrestled in the hardy
pasture grass. Philip and Dr. Fowler Greenhill, Doremus’s son-in-law (Phil plump and
half bald at thirty-two; Fowler belligerently
red-headed and red-mustached) argued about the merits of the
autogiro. Doremus lay with his head against a rock, his cap over
his eyes, gazing down into the paradise of Beulah Valley—he could
not have sworn to it, but he rather thought he saw an angel
floating in the radiant upper air above the valley. The women,
Emma and Mary Greenhill, Sissy and
Philip’s wife and Lorinda Pike,
were setting out the picnic lunch—a pot of beans with crisp salt
pork, fried chicken, potatoes warmed-over with croutons, tea
biscuits, crab-apple jelly, salad, raisin pie—on a red-and-white
tablecloth spread on a flat rock.

But for the parked motorcars, the scene might have been New England
in 1885, and you could see the women in chip hats and tight-bodiced, high-necked
frocks with bustles; the men in straw boaters
with dangling ribbons and adorned with side-whiskers—Doremus’s
beard not clipped, but flowing like a bridal veil. When Dr.
Greenhill fetched down Cousin Henry Veeder, a bulky yet shy enough
pre-Ford farmer in clean, faded overalls, then was Time again
unbought, secure, serene.

And the conversation had a comfortable triviality, an affectionate
Victorian
dullness. However Doremus might fret about “conditions,”
however skittishly Sissy might long for the presence of her beaux,
Julian Falck and Malcolm Tasbrough, there was nothing modern and
neurotic, nothing savoring of Freud, Adler, Marx, Bertrand Russell,
or any other divinity of the 1930’s, when Mother Emma chattered to
Mary and Merilla about her rose bushes that had “winter-killed,”
and the
new young maples that the field mice had gnawed, and the
difficulty of getting Shad Ledue to bring in enough fireplace wood,
and how Shad gorged pork chops and fried potatoes and pie at lunch,
which he ate at the Jessups’.

And the View. The women talked about the View as honeymooners once
talked at Niagara Falls.

David and Buck Titus were playing ship, now, on a rearing rock—it
was the bridge,
and David was Captain Popeye, with Buck his bosun;
and even Dr. Greenhill, that impetuous crusader who was constantly
infuriating the county board of health by reporting the slovenly
state of the poor farm and the stench in the county jail, was lazy
in the sun and with the greatest of concentration kept an
unfortunate little ant running back and forth on a twig. His wife
Mary—the golfer, the
runner-up in state tennis tournaments, the
giver of smart but not too bibulous cocktail parties at the country
club, the wearer of smart brown tweeds with a green scarf—seemed
to have dropped gracefully back into the domesticity of her mother,
and to consider as a very weighty thing a recipe for celery-and-roquefort sandwiches on toasted soda crackers. She was the
handsome Older Jessup Girl again,
back in the white house with the
mansard roof.

And Foolish, lying on his back with his four paws idiotically
flopping, was the most pastorally old-fashioned of them all.

The only serious flare of conversation was when Buck Titus snarled
to Doremus: “Certainly a lot of Messiahs pottin’ at you from the
bushes these days—Buzz Windrip and Bishop Prang and Father
Coughlin and Dr. Townsend (though
he seems to have gone back to
Nazareth) and Upton Sinclair and Rev. Frank Buchman and Bernarr
Macfadden and Willum Randolph Hearst and Governor Talmadge and
Floyd Olson and—Say, I swear the best Messiah in the whole show is
this darky, Father Divine. He doesn’t just promise he’s going to
feed the Under-privileged ten years from now—he hands out the
fried drumsticks and gizzard right along with
the Salvation. How
about
him
for President?”

Out of nowhere appeared Julian Falck.

This young man, freshman in Amherst the past year, grandson of the
Episcopal rector and living with the old man because his parents
were dead, was in the eyes of Doremus the most nearly tolerable of
Sissy’s suitors. He was Swede-blond and wiry, with a neat, small
face and canny eyes. He called Doremus “sir,”
and he had, unlike
most of the radio-and-motor-hypnotized eighteen-year-olds in the
Fort, read a book, and voluntarily—read Thomas Wolfe and William
Rollins, John Strachey and Stuart Chase and Ortega. Whether Sissy
preferred him to Malcolm Tasbrough, her father did not know.
Malcolm was taller and thicker than Julian, and he drove his own
streamline De Soto, while Julian could only borrow his
grandfather’s
shocking old flivver.

Sissy and Julian bickered amiably about Alice Aylot’s skill in
backgammon, and Foolish scratched himself in the sun.

But Doremus was not being pastoral. He was being anxious and
scientific. While the others jeered, “When does Dad take his
audition?” and “What’s he learning to be—a crooner or a hockey-announcer?” Doremus was adjusting the doubtful portable
radio.
Once he thought he was going to be with them in the Home Sweet Home
atmosphere, for he tuned in on a program of old songs, and all of
them, including Cousin Henry Veeder, who had a hidden passion for
fiddlers and barn dances and parlor organs, hummed “Gaily the
Troubadour” and “Maid of Athens” and “Darling Nelly Gray.” But
when the announcer informed them that these ditties were being
sponsored by Toily Oily, the Natural Home Cathartic, and that they
were being rendered by a sextette of young males horribly called
“The Smoothies,” Doremus abruptly shut them off.

“Why, what’s the matter, Dad?” cried Sissy.

“‘Smoothies’! God! This country deserves what it’s going to get!”
snapped Doremus. “Maybe we need a Buzz Windrip!”

The moment, then—it should have been announced by
cathedral
chimes—of the weekly address of Bishop Paul Peter Prang.

Coming from an airless closet, smelling of sacerdotal woolen union
suits, in Persepolis, Indiana, it leapt to the farthest stars; it
circled the world at 186,000 miles a second—a million miles while
you stopped to scratch. It crashed into the cabin of a whaler on a
dark polar sea; into an office, paneled with linen-fold oak looted
from a Nottinghamshire castle, on the sixty-seventh story of a
building on Wall Street; into the foreign office in Tokio; into the
rocky hollow below the shining birches upon Mount Terror, in
Vermont.

Bishop Prang spoke, as he usually did, with a grave kindliness, a
virile resonance, which made his self, magically coming to them on
the unseen aerial pathway, at once dominating and touched with
charm; and whatever his purposes might be, his words were on the
side of the Angels:

“My friends of the radio audience, I shall have but six more weekly
petitions to make you before the national conventions, which will
decide the fate of this distraught nation, and the time has come
now to act—to act! Enough of words! Let me put together certain
separated phrases out of the sixth chapter of
Jeremiah, which seem
to have been prophetically written for this hour of desperate
crisis in America:

“‘Oh ye children of Benjamin, gather yourselves together to flee
out of the midst of Jerusalem… . Prepare ye war … arise
and let us go up at noon. Woe unto us! for the day goeth away, for
the shadows of the evening are stretched out. Arise, and let us go
by night and let us destroy her palaces…
 . I am full of the
fury of the Lord; I am weary with holding it in; I will pour it out
upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men
together; for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the
aged with him that is full of days… . I will stretch out my
hand upon the inhabitants of this land, saith the Lord. For from
the least of them even unto the greatest, every one is
given to
covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest, every one
dealeth falsely … saying Peace, Peace, when there is no Peace!’

“So spake the Book, of old… . But it was spoken also to
America, of 1936!

“There is no Peace! For more than a year now, the League of
Forgotten Men has warned the politicians, the whole government,
that we are sick unto death of being the Dispossessed—and
that,
at last, we are more than fifty million strong; no whimpering
horde, but with the will, the voices, the
votes
to enforce our
sovereignty! We have in no uncertain way informed every politician
that we demand—that we
demand
—certain measures, and that we will
brook no delay. Again and again we have demanded that both the
control of credit and the power to issue money be unqualifiedly
taken
away from the private banks; that the soldiers not only
receive the bonus they with their blood and anguish so richly
earned in ‘17 and ‘18, but that the amount agreed upon be now
doubled; that all swollen incomes be severely limited and
inheritances cut to such small sums as may support the heirs only
in youth and in old age; that labor and farmers’ unions be not
merely recognized as instruments
for joint bargaining but be made,
like the syndicates in Italy, official parts of the government,
representing the toilers; and that International Jewish Finance
and, equally, International Jewish Communism and Anarchism and
Atheism be, with all the stern solemnity and rigid inflexibility
this great nation can show, barred from all activity. Those of you
who have listened to me before will understand
that I—or rather
that the League of Forgotten Men—has no quarrel with individual
Jews; that we are proud to have Rabbis among our directors; but
those subversive international organizations which, unfortunately,
are so largely Jewish, must be driven with whips and scorpions from
off the face of the earth.