It Can't Happen Here (17 page)

So, with the hundreds of thousands who should have been the
progenitors of new American generations drained away, we could show
the world, which from 1780 to 1860 had so admired men like
Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, the Adamses,
Webster,
only such salvages as McKinley, Benjamin Harrison, William Jennings
Bryan, Harding … and Senator Berzelius Windrip and his rivals.

Slavery had been a cancer, and in that day was known no remedy save
bloody cutting. There had been no X-rays of wisdom and tolerance.
Yet to sentimentalize this cutting, to justify and rejoice in it,
was an altogether evil thing, a national superstition
that was
later to lead to other Unavoidable Wars—wars to free Cubans, to
free Filipinos who didn’t want our brand of freedom, to End All
Wars.

Let us, thought Doremus, not throb again to the bugles of the Civil
War, nor find diverting the gallantry of Sherman’s dashing Yankee
boys in burning the houses of lone women, nor particularly admire
the calmness of General Lee as he watched thousands
writhe in the
mud.

He even wondered if, necessarily, it had been such a desirable
thing for the Thirteen Colonies to have cut themselves off from
Great Britain. Had the United States remained in the British
Empire, possibly there would have evolved a confederation that
could have enforced World Peace, instead of talking about it. Boys
and girls from Western ranches and Southern plantations
and
Northern maple groves might have added Oxford and York Minster and
Devonshire villages to their own domain. Englishmen, and even
virtuous Englishwomen, might have learned that persons who lack the
accent of a Kentish rectory or of a Yorkshire textile village may
yet in many ways be literate; and that astonishing numbers of
persons in the world cannot be persuaded that their chief aim in
life
ought to be to increase British exports on behalf of the
stock-holdings of the Better Classes.

It is commonly asserted, Doremus remembered, that without complete
political independence the United States could not have developed
its own peculiar virtues. Yet it was not apparent to him that
America was any more individual than Canada or Australia; that
Pittsburgh and Kansas City were to be preferred
before Montreal and
Melbourne, Sydney and Vancouver.

No questioning of the eventual wisdom of the “radicals” who had
first advocated these two American revolutions, Doremus warned
himself, should be allowed to give any comfort to that eternal
enemy: the conservative manipulators of privilege who damn as
“dangerous agitators” any man who menaces their fortunes; who jump
in their chairs at the
sting of a gnat like Debs, and blandly
swallow a camel like Windrip.

Between the rabble-rousers—chiefly to be detected by desire for
their own personal power and notoriety—and the un-self-seeking
fighters against tyranny, between William Walker or Danton, and
John Howard or William Lloyd Garrison, Doremus saw, there was the
difference between a noisy gang of thieves and an honest man
noisily
defending himself against thieves. He had been brought up
to revere the Abolitionists: Lovejoy, Garrison, Wendell Phillips,
Harriet Beecher Stowe—though his father had considered John Brown
insane and a menace, and had thrown sly mud at the marble statues
of Henry Ward Beecher, the apostle in the fancy vest. And Doremus
could not do otherwise than revere the Abolitionists now, though he
wondered
a little if Stephen Douglas and Thaddeus Stephens and
Lincoln, more cautious and less romantic men, might not have done
the job better.

“Is it just possible,” he sighed, “that the most vigorous and
boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress
instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the
humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the
heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls who have shoved their
way in among the masses and insisted on saving them?”

I joined the Christian, or as some call it, the Campbellite Church
as a mere boy, not yet dry behind the ears. But I wished then and
I wish now that it were possible for me to belong to the whole
glorious brotherhood; to be one in Communion at the same time with
the brave Presbyterians that fight the pusillanimous, mendacious,
destructive, tom-fool Higher Critics, so-called; and with the
Methodists who so strongly oppose war yet in war-time can always be
counted upon for Patriotism to the limit; and with the splendidly
tolerant Baptists, the earnest Seventh-Day Adventists, and I guess
I could even say a kind word for the Unitarians, as that great
executive William Howard Taft belonged to them, also his wife.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

Officially, Doremus belonged to the
Universalist Church, his wife
and children to the Episcopal—a natural American transition. He
had been reared to admire Hosea Ballou, the Universalist St.
Augustine who, from his tiny parsonage in Barnard, Vermont, had
proclaimed his faith that even the wickedest would have, after
earthly death, another chance of salvation. But now, Doremus could
scarce enter the Fort Beulah Universalist Church.
It had too many
memories of his father, the pastor, and it was depressing to see
how the old-time congregations, in which two hundred thick beards
would wag in the grained pine benches every Sunday morning, and
their womenfolks and children line up beside the patriarchs, had
dwindled to aged widows and farmers and a few schoolteachers.

But in this time of seeking, Doremus did venture there.
The church
was a squat and gloomy building of granite, not particularly
enlivened by the arches of colored slate above the windows, yet as
a boy Doremus had thought it and its sawed-off tower the superior
of Chartres. He had loved it as in Isaiah College he had loved the
Library which, for all its appearance of being a crouching red-brick toad, had meant to him freedom for spiritual discovery—still
cavern of a reading room where for hours one could forget the world
and never be nagged away to supper.

He found, on his one attendance at the Universalist church, a
scattering of thirty disciples, being addressed by a “supply,” a
theological student from Boston, monotonously shouting his well-meant, frightened, and slightly plagiaristic eloquence in regard to
the sickness of Abijah, the son
of Jeroboam. Doremus looked at the
church walls, painted a hard and glistening green, unornamented, to
avoid all the sinful trappings of papistry, while he listened to
the preacher’s hesitant droning:

“Now, uh, now what so many of us fail to realize is how, uh, how
sin, how any sin that we, uh, we ourselves may commit, any sin
reflects not on ourselves but on those that we, uh, that we hold
near and dear—”

He would have given anything, Doremus yearned, for a sermon which,
however irrational, would passionately lift him to renewed courage,
which would bathe him in consolation these beleagured months. But
with a shock of anger he saw that that was exactly what he had been
condemning just a few days ago: the irrational dramatic power of
the crusading leader, clerical or political.

Very well then—sadly. He’d just have to get along without the
spiritual consolation of the church that he had known in college
days.

No, first he’d try the ritual of his friend Mr. Falck—the Padre,
Buck Titus sometimes called him.

In the cozy Anglicanism of St. Crispin’s P. E. Church, with its
imitation English memorial brasses and imitation Celtic font and
brass-eagle reading desk and dusty-smelling
maroon carpet, Doremus
listened to Mr. Falck: “Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he
may turn from his wickedness, and live; and hath given power and
commandment to his Ministers, to declare and pronounce to his
people, being penitent, the Absolution and Remission of their sins—”

Doremus glanced at the placidly pious façade
of his wife, Emma.
The lovely, familiar old ritual seemed meaningless to him now, with
no more pertinence to a life menaced by Buzz Windrip and his Minute
Men, no more comfort for having lost his old deep pride in being an
American, than a stage revival of an equally lovely and familiar
Elizabethan play. He looked about nervously. However exalted Mr.
Falck himself might be, most of the congregation
were Yorkshire
pudding. The Anglican Church was, to them, not the aspiring
humility of Newman nor the humanity of Bishop Brown (both of whom
left it!) but the sign and proof of prosperity—an ecclesiastical
version of owning a twelve-cylinder Cadillac—or even more, of
knowing that one’s grandfather owned his own surrey and a
respectable old family horse.

The whole place smelled to Doremus of
stale muffins. Mrs. R. C.
Crowley was wearing white gloves and on her bust—for a Mrs.
Crowley, even in 1936, did not yet have breasts—was a tight
bouquet of tuberoses. Francis Tasbrough had a morning coat and
striped trousers and on the lilac-colored pew cushion beside him
was (unique in Fort Beulah) a silk top-hat. And even the wife of
Doremus’s bosom, or at least of his breakfast coffee, the
good
Emma, had a pedantic expression of superior goodness which
irritated him.

“Whole outfit stifles me!” he snapped. “Rather be at a yelling,
jumping Holy Roller orgy—no—that’s Buzz Windrip’s kind of jungle
hysterics. I want a church, if there can possibly be one, that’s
advanced beyond the jungle and beyond the chaplains of King Henry
the Eighth. I know why, even though she’s painfully conscientious,
Lorinda never goes to church.”

Lorinda Pike, on that sleety December afternoon, was darning a tea
cloth in the lounge of her Beulah Valley Tavern, five miles up the
river from the Fort. It wasn’t, of course, a tavern: it was a
super-boarding-house as regards its twelve guest bedrooms, and a
slightly too arty tearoom in its dining facilities. Despite his
long affection for Lorinda, Doremus
was always annoyed by the
Singhalese brass finger bowls, the North Carolina table mats, and
the Italian ash trays displayed for sale on wabbly card tables in
the dining room. But he had to admit that the tea was excellent,
the scones light, the Stilton sound, Lorinda’s private rum punches
admirable, and that Lorinda herself was intelligent yet adorable—particularly when, as on this gray afternoon,
she was bothered
neither by other guests nor by the presence of that worm, her
partner, Mr. Nipper, whose pleasing notion it was that because he
had invested a few thousand in the Tavern he should have none of
the work or responsibility and half the profits.

Doremus thrust his way in, patting off the snow, puffing to recover
from the shakiness caused by skidding all the way from Fort Beulah.
Lorinda nodded carelessly, dropped another stick on the fireplace,
and went back to her darning with nothing more intimate than
“Hullo. Nasty out.”

“Yuh—fierce.”

But as they sat on either side the hearth their eyes had no need of
smiling for a bridge between them.

Lorinda reflected, “Well, my darling, it’s going to be pretty bad.
I guess Windrip & Co. will put the woman’s struggle right back
in
the sixteen-hundreds, with Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomians.”

“Sure. Back to the kitchen.”

“Even if you haven’t got one!”

“Any worse than us men? Notice that Windrip never
mentioned
free
speech and the freedom of the press in his articles of faith? Oh,
he’d ‘ve come out for ‘em strong and hearty if he’d even thought of
‘em!”

“That’s so. Tea, darling?”

“No. Linda, damn it, I feel
like taking the family and sneaking
off to Canada
before
I get nabbed—right after Buzz’s inauguration.”

“No. You mustn’t. We’ve got to keep all the newspapermen that’ll
go on fighting him, and not go sniffling up to the garbage pail.
Besides! What would I do without you?” For the first time Lorinda
sounded importunate.

“You’ll be a lot less suspect if I’m not around. But I guess
you’re
right. I can’t go till they put the skids under me. Then
I’ll have to vanish. I’m too old to stand jail.”

“Not too old to make love, I hope! That
would
be hard on a girl!”

“Nobody ever is, except the kind that used to be too young to make
love! Anyway, I’ll stay—for a while.”

He had, suddenly, from Lorinda, the resoluteness he had sought in
church. He would go on trying to sweep back
the ocean, just for
his own satisfaction. It meant, however, that his hermitage in the
Ivory Tower was closed with slightly ludicrous speed. But he felt
strong again, and happy. His brooding was interrupted by Lorinda’s
curt:

“How’s Emma taking the political situation?”

“Doesn’t know there is one! Hears me croaking, and she heard Walt
Trowbridge’s warning on the radio, last evening—did you
listen
in?—and she says, ‘Oh my, how dreadful!’ and then forgets all
about it and worries about the saucepan that got burnt! She’s
lucky! Oh well, she probably calms me down and keeps me from
becoming a
complete
neurote! Probably that’s why I’m so darned
everlastingly fond of her. And yet I’m chump enough to wish you
and I were together—uh—recognizedly together, all the time—and
could fight
together to keep some little light burning in this
coming new glacial epoch. I do. All the time. I think that, at
this moment, all things considered, I should like to kiss you.”

“Is that so unusual a celebration?”

“Yes. Always. Always it’s the first time again! Look, Linda, do
you ever stop to think how curious it is, that with—everything
between us—like that night in the hotel at Montreal—we
neither
one of us seem to feel any guilt, any embarrassment—can sit and
gossip like this?”

“No, dear… . Darling! … It doesn’t seem a bit curious.
It was all so natural. So good!”