It Can't Happen Here Page 19
They were rather disconcertingly surrounded by men in masking flying-helmets, men carrying automatic pistols, who handcuffed the guards that were still awake, picked up the others, and stored all twelve of them in the barred baggage compartment of the plane.
The raiders’ leader, a military-looking man, said to Walt Trowbridge, “Ready, sir?”
“Yep. Just take those four boxes, will you, please, Colonel?”
The boxes contained photostats of letters and documents.
Unregally clad in overalls and a huge straw hat, Senator Trowbridge entered the pilots’ compartment. High and swift and alone, the plane flew toward the premature Northern Lights.
Next morning, still in overalls, Trowbridge breakfasted at the Fort Garry Hotel with the Mayor of Winnipeg.
A fortnight later, in Toronto, he began the republication of his weekly, A Lance for Democracy, and on the cover of the first number were reproductions of four letters indicating that before he became President, Berzelius Windrip had profited through personal gifts from financiers to an amount of over $1,000,000. To Doremus Jessup, to some thousands of Doremus Jessups, were smuggled copies of the Lance, though possession of it was punishable (perhaps not legally, but certainly effectively) by death.
But it was not till the winter, so carefully did his secret agents have to work in America, that Trowbridge had in full operation the organization called by its operatives the “New Underground,” the “N.U.,” which aided thousands of counter revolutionists to escape into Canada.
18
In the little towns, ah, there is the abiding peace that I love, and that can never be disturbed by even the noisiest Smart Alecks from these haughty megalopolises like Washington, New York, & etc.
Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.
* * *
DOREMUS’S POLICY of “wait and see,” like most Fabian policies, had grown shaky. It seemed particularly shaky in June, 1937, when he drove to North Beulah for the fortieth graduation anniversary of his class in Isaiah College.
As the custom was, the returned alumni wore comic costumes. His class had sailor suits, but they walked about, bald-headed and lugubrious, in these well-meant garments of joy, and there was a look of instability even in the eyes of the three members who were ardent Corpos (being local Corpo commissioners).
After the first hour Doremus saw little of his classmates. He had looked up his familiar correspondent, Victor Loveland, teacher in the classical department who, a year ago, had informed him of President Owen J. Peaseley’s ban on criticism of military training.
At its best, Loveland’s jerry-built imitation of an Anne Hathaway cottage had been no palace—Isaiah assistant professors did not customarily rent palaces. Now, with the pretentiously smart living room heaped with burlap-covered chairs and rolled rugs and boxes of books, it looked like a junkshop. Amid the wreckage sat Loveland, his wife, his three children, and one Dr. Arnold King, experimenter in chemistry.
“What’s all this?” said Doremus.
“I’ve been fired. As too ‘radical,’ “growled Loveland.
“Yes! And his most vicious attack has been on Glicknow’s treatment of the use of the aorist in Hesiod!” wailed his wife.
“Well, I deserve it—for not having been vicious about anything since A.D. 300! Only thing I’m ashamed of is that they’re not firing me for having taught my students that the Corpos have taken most of their ideas from Tiberius, or maybe for having decently tried to assassinate District Commissioner Reek!” said Loveland.
“Where you going?” inquired Doremus.
“That’s just it! We don’t know! Oh, first to my dad’s house—which is a six-room packing-box in Burlington—Dad’s got diabetes. But teaching—— President Peaseley kept putting off signing my new contract and just informed me ten days ago that I’m through—much too late to get a job for next year. Myself, I don’t care a damn! Really I don’t! I’m glad to have been made to admit that as a college prof I haven’t been, as I so liked to convince myself, any Erasmus Junior, inspiring noble young souls to dream of chaste classic beauty—save the mark!—but just a plain hired man, another counter-jumper in the Marked-down Classics Goods Department, with students for bored customers, and as subject to being hired and fired as any janitor. Do you remember that in Imperial Rome, the teachers, even the tutors of the nobility, were slaves—allowed a lot of leeway, I suppose, in their theories about the anthropology of Crete, but just as likely to be strangled as the other slaves! I’m not kicking——”
Dr. King, the chemist, interrupted with a whoop: “Sure you’re kicking! Why the hell not? With three kids? Why not kick! Now me, I’m lucky! I’m half Jew—one of these sneaking, cunning Jews that Buzz Windrip and his boyfriend Hitler tell you about; so cunning I suspected what was going on months ago and so—I’ve also just been fired, Mr. Jessup—I arranged for a job with the Universal Electric Corporation. . .. They don’t mind Jews there, as long as they sing at their work and find boondoggles worth a million a year to the company—at thirty-five hundred a year salary! A fond farewell to all my grubby studies! Though—” and Doremus thought he was, at heart, sadder than Loveland
“—I do kind of hate to give up my research. Oh, hell with ‘em!”
* * *
The version of Owen J. Peaseley, M.A. (Oberlin), LL.D. (Conn. State), president of Isaiah College, was quite different.
“Why no, Mr. Jessup! We believe absolutely in freedom of speech and thought, here at old Isaiah. The fact is that we are letting Loveland go only because the Classics Department is overstaffed—so little demand for Greek and Sanskrit and so on, you know, with all this modern interest in quantitative bio-physics and aëroplane-repairing and so on. But as to Dr. King—um—I’m afraid we did a little feel that he was riding for a fall, boasting about being a Jew and all, you know, and—— But can’t we talk of pleasanter subjects? You have probably learned that Secretary of Culture Macgoblin has now completed his plan for the appointment of a director of education in each province and district?—and that Professor Almeric Trout of Aumbry University is slated for Director in our Northeastern Province? Well, I have something very gratifying to add. Dr. Trout—and what a profound scholar, what an eloquent orator he is!—did you know that in Teutonic ‘Almeric’ means ‘noble prince’?—and he’s been so kind as to designate me as Director of Education for the Vermont-New Hampshire District! Isn’t that thrilling! I wanted you to be one of the first to hear it, Mr. Jessup, because of course one of the chief jobs of the Director will be to work with and through the newspaper editors in the great task of spreading correct Corporate ideals and combating false theories—yes, oh yes.”
It seemed as though a large number of people were zealous to work with and through the editors these days, thought Doremus.
He noticed that President Peaseley resembled a dummy made of faded gray flannel of a quality intended for petticoats in an orphan asylum.
* * *
The Minute Men’s organization was less favored in the staid villages than in the industrial centers, but all through the summer it was known that a company of M.M.’s had been formed in Fort Beulah and were drilling in the Armory under National Guard officers and County Commissioner Ledue, who was seen sitting up nights in his luxurious new room in Mrs. Ingot’s boarding-house, reading a manual of arms. But Doremus declined to go look at them, and when his rustic but ambitious reporter, “Doc” (otherwise Otis) Itchitt, came in throbbing about the M.M.’s and wanted to run an illustrated account in the Saturday Informer, Doremus sniffed.
It was not till their first public parade, in August, that Doremus saw them, and not gladly.
The whole countryside had turned out; he could hear them laughing and shuffling beneath his office window; but he stubbornly stuck to editing an article on fertilizers for cherry orchards. (And he loved parades, childishly!) Not even the sound of a band pounding out “Boola, Boola” drew him to the window. Then he was plucked up by Dan Wilgus, the veteran job compositor and head of
the Informer chapel, a man tall as a house and possessed of such a sweetning black mustache as had not otherwise been seen since the passing of the old-time bartender. “You got to take a look, Boss; great show!” implored Dan.
Through the Chester-Arthur, red-brick prissiness of President Street, Doremus saw marching a surprisingly well-drilled company of young men in the uniforms of Civil War cavalrymen, and just as they were opposite the Informer office, the town band rollicked into “Marching through Georgia.” The young men smiled, they stepped more quickly, and held up their banner with the steering wheel and M.M. upon it.
When he was ten, Doremus had seen in this self-same street a Memorial Day parade of the G.A.R. The veterans were an average of under fifty then, and some of them only thirty-five; they had swung ahead lightly and gayly—and to the tune of “Marching through Georgia.” So now in 1937 he was looking down again on the veterans of Gettysburg and Missionary Ridge. Oh—he could see them all—Uncle Tom Veeder, who had made him the willow whistles; old Mr. Crowley with his cornflower eyes; Jack Greenhill who played leapfrog with the kids and who was to die in Ethan Creek—— They found him with thick hair dripping. Doremus thrilled to the M.M. flags, the music, the valiant young men, even while he hated all they marched for, and hated the Shad Ledue whom he incredulously recognized in the brawny horseman at the head of the procession.
He understood now why the young men marched to war. But “Oh yeh—you think so!” he could hear Shad sneering through the music.
* * *
The unwieldy humor characteristic of American politicians persisted even through the eruption. Doremus read about and sardonically “played up” in the Informer a minstrel show given at the National Convention of Boosters’ Clubs at Atlantic City, late in August. As end-men and interlocutor appeared no less distinguished persons than Secretary of the Treasury Webster R. Skittle, Secretary of War Luthorne, and Secretary of Education and Public Relations, Dr. Macgoblin. It was good, old-time Elks Club humor, uncorroded by any of the notions of dignity and of international obligations which, despite his great services, that queer stick Lee Sarason was suspected of trying to introduce. Why (marveled the Boosters) the Big Boys were so democratic that they even kidded themselves and the Corpos, that’s how unassuming they were!
“Who was this lady I seen you going down the street with?” demanded the plump Mr. Secretary Skittle (disguised as a colored wench in polka-dotted cotton) of Mr. Secretary Luthorne (in black-face and large red gloves).
“That wasn’t no lady, that was Walt Trowbridge’s paper.”
“Ah don’t think Ah cognosticates youse, Mist’ Bones.”
“Why—you know—’A Nance for Plutocracy.’ ”
Clean fun, not too confusingly subtle, drawing the people (several millions listened on the radio to the Boosters’ Club show) closer to their great-hearted masters.
But the high point of the show was Dr. Macgoblin’s daring to tease his own faction by singing:
Buzz and booze and biz, what fun!
This job gets drearier and drearier,
When I get out of Washington,
I’m going to Siberia!
It seemed to Doremus that he was hearing a great deal about the Secretary of Education. Then, in late September, he heard something not quite pleasant about Dr. Macgoblin. The story, as he got it, ran thus:
Hector Macgoblin, that great surgeon-boxer-poet-sailor, had always contrived to have plenty of enemies, but after the beginning of his investigation of schools, to purge them of any teachers he did not happen to like, he made so unusually many that he was accompanied by bodyguards. At this time in September, he was in New York, finding quantities of “subversive elements” in Columbia University—against the protests of President Nicholas Murray Butler, who insisted that he had already cleaned out all willful and dangerous thinkers, especially the pacifists in the medical school—and Macgoblin’s bodyguards were two former instructors in philosophy who in their respective universities had been admired even by their deans for everything except the fact that they would get drunk and quarrelsome. One of them, in that state, always took off one shoe and hit people over the head with the heel, if they argued in defense of Jung.
With these two in uniforms as M.M. battalion leaders—his own was that of a brigadier—after a day usefully spent in kicking out of Columbia all teachers who had voted for Trowbridge, Dr. Macgoblin started off with his brace of bodyguards to try out a wager that he could take a drink at every bar on Fifty-second Street and still not pass out.
He had done well when, at ten-thirty, being then affectionate and philanthropic, he decided that it would be a splendid idea to telephone his revered former teacher in Leland Stanford, the biologist Dr. Willy Schmidt, once of Vienna, now in Rockefeller Institute. Macgoblin was indignant when someone at Dr. Schmidt’s apartment informed him that the doctor was out. Furiously: “Out? Out? What d’you mean he’s out? Old goat like that got no right to be out! At midnight! Where is he? This is the Police Department speaking! Where is he?”
Dr. Schmidt was spending the evening with that gentle scholar, Rabbi Dr. Vincent de Verez.
Macgoblin and his learned gorillas went to call on De Verez. On the way nothing of note happened except that when Macgoblin discussed the fare with the taxi-driver, he felt impelled to knock him out. The three, and they were in the happiest, most boyish of spirits, burst joyfully into Dr. de Verez’s primeval house in the Sixties. The entrance hall was shabby enough, with a humble show of the good rabbi’s unbrellas and storm rubbers, and had the invaders seen the bedrooms they would have found them Trappist cells. But the long living room, front- and back-parlor thrown together, was half museum, half lounge. Just because he himself liked such things and resented a stranger’s possessing them, Macgoblin looked sniffily at a Beluchi prayer rug, a Jacobean court cupboard, a small case of incunabula and of Arabic manuscripts in silver upon scarlet parchment.
“Swell joint! Hello, Doc! How’s the Dutchman? How’s the antibody research going? These are Doc Nemo and Doc, uh, Doc Whoozis, the famous glue lifters. Great frenzh mine. Introduce us to your Jew friend.”
Now it is more than possible that Rabbi de Verez had never heard of Secretary of Education Macgoblin.
The houseman who had let in the intruders and who nervously hovered at the living-room door—he is the sole authority for most of the story—said that Macgoblin staggered, slid on a rug, almost fell, then giggled foolishly as he sat down, waving his plug-ugly friends to chairs and demanding, “Hey, Rabbi, how about some whisky? Lil Scotch and soda. I know you G?nim never lap up anything but snow-cooled nectar handed out by a maiden with a dulcimer, singing of Mount Abora, or maybe just a little shot of Christian children’s sacrificial blood—ha, ha, just a joke, Rabbi; I know these ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ are all the bunk, but awful handy in propaganda, just the same and—— But I mean, for plain Goyim like us, a little real hootch! Hear me?”
Dr. Schmidt started to protest. The Rabbi, who had been carding his white beard, silenced him and, with a wave of his fragile old hand, signaled the waiting houseman, who reluctantly brought in whisky and siphons.
The three coördinators of culture almost filled their glasses before they poured in the soda.
“Look here, de Verez, why don’t you kikes take a tumble to yourselves and get out, beat it, exeunt bearing corpses, and start a real Zion, say in South America?”
The Rabbi looked bewildered at the attack. Dr. Schmidt snorted, “Dr. Macgoblin—once a promising pupil of mine—is Secretary of Education and a lot of t’ings—I don’t know vot!—at Washington. Corpo!”
“Oh!” The Rabbi sighed. “I have heard of that cult, but my people have learned to ignore persecution. We have been so impudent as to adopt the tactics of your Early Christian Martyrs! Even if we were invited to your Corporate feast—which, I understand, we most warmly are not!—I am afraid we should not be able to attend. You see, we believe in only one Dictator, God, and I am afraid we cannot see
Mr. Windrip as a rival to Jehovah!”
“Aah, that’s all baloney!” murmured one of the learned gunmen, and Macgoblin shouted, “Oh, can the two-dollar words! There’s just one thing where we agree with the dirty, Kike-loving Communists—that’s in chucking the whole bunch of divinities, Jehovah and all the rest of ‘em, that’ve been on relief so long!”
The Rabbi was unable even to answer, but little Dr. Schmidt (he had a doughnut mustache, a beer belly, and black button boots with soles half-an-inch thick) said, “Macgoblin, I suppose I may talk frank wit’ an old student, there not being any reporters or loutspeakers arount. Do you know why you are drinking like a pig? Because you are ashamt! Ashamt that you, once a promising researcher, should have solt out to freebooters with brains like decayed liver and——”
“That’ll do from you, Prof!”
“Say, we oughtta tie those seditious sons of hounds up and beat the daylight out of ‘em!” whimpered one of the watchdogs.
Macgoblin shrieked, “You highbrows—you stinking intellectuals! You, you Kike, with your lush-luzurious library, while Common People been starving—would be now if the Chief hadn’t saved ‘em! Your c’lection books—stolen from the pennies of your poor, dumb, foot-kissing congregation of pushcart peddlers!”
The Rabbi sat bespelled, fingering his beard, but Dr. Schmidt leaped up, crying, “You three scoundrels were not invited here! You pushed your way in! Get out! Go! Get out!”
One of the accompanying dogs demanded of Macgoblin, “Going to stand for these two Yiddles insulting us—insulting the whole by God Corpo state and the M.M. uniform? Kill ‘em!”
Now, to his already abundant priming, Macgoblin had added two huge whiskies since he had come. He yanked out his automatic pistol, fired twice. Dr. Schmidt toppled. Rabbi de Verez slid down in his chair, his temple throbbing out blood. The houseman trembled at the door, and one of the guards shot at him, then chased him down the street, firing, and whooping with the humor of the joke. This learned guard was killed instantly, at a street crossing, by a traffic policeman.