It Can't Happen Here (2 page)

Dramatically she sat
down, and the sound of clapping filled the
room like a cloud of downy feathers. The crowd bellowed, “Come on,
General! Stand up!” and “She’s called your bluff—what you got?”
or just a tolerant, “Attaboy, Gen!”

The General was short and globular, and his red face was smooth as
a baby’s bottom and adorned with white-gold-framed spectacles. But
he had the military snort and a virile chuckle.

“Well, sir!” he guffawed, on his feet, shaking a chummy forefinger
at Mrs. Gimmitch, “since you folks are bound and determined to drag
the secrets out of a poor soldier, I better confess that while I do
abhor war, yet there are worse things. Ah, my friends, far worse!
A state of so-called peace, in which labor organizations are
riddled, as by plague germs, with insane notions out of anarchistic
Red Russia! A state in which college professors, newspapermen, and
notorious authors are secretly promulgating these same seditious
attacks on the grand old Constitution! A state in which, as a
result of being fed with these mental drugs, the People are flabby,
cowardly, grasping, and lacking in the fierce pride of the warrior!
No, such a state is far worse than war at its most monstrous!

“I guess maybe some of the things I said in my former speech were
kind of a little bit obvious and what we used to call ‘old hat’
when my brigade was quartered in England. About the United States
only wanting peace, and freedom from all foreign entanglements.
No! What I’d really like us to do would be to come out and tell
the whole world: ‘Now you boys never mind about the moral side of
this. We
have power, and power is its own excuse!’

“I don’t altogether admire everything Germany and Italy have done,
but you’ve got to hand it to ‘em, they’ve been honest enough and
realistic enough to say to the other nations, ‘Just tend to your
own business, will you? We’ve got strength and will, and for
whomever has those divine qualities it’s not only a right, it’s a
duty
, to use ‘em!’ Nobody in
God’s world ever loved a weakling—including that weakling himself!

“And I’ve got good news for you! This gospel of clean and
aggressive strength is spreading everywhere in this country among
the finest type of youth. Why today, in 1936, there’s less than 7
per cent of collegiate institutions that do not have military-training units under discipline as rigorous as the Nazis, and where
once it
was forced upon them by the authorities, now it is the
strong young men and women who themselves demand the
right
to be
trained in warlike virtues and skill—for, mark you, the girls,
with their instruction in nursing and the manufacture of gas masks
and the like, are becoming every whit as zealous as their brothers.
And all the really
thinking
type of professors are right with ‘em!

“Why, here,
as recently as three years ago, a sickeningly big
percentage of students were blatant pacifists, wanting to knife
their own native land in the dark. But now, when the shameless
fools and the advocates of Communism try to hold pacifist meetings—why, my friends, in the past five months, since January first, no
less than seventy-six such exhibitionistic orgies have been raided
by their fellow students,
and no less than fifty-nine disloyal Red
students have received their just deserts by being beaten up so
severely that never again will they raise in this free country the
bloodstained banner of anarchism! That, my friends, is
news
!”

As the General sat down, amid ecstasies of applause, the village
trouble maker, Mrs. Lorinda Pike, leaped up and again interrupted
the love feast:

“Look here,
Mr. Edgeways, if you think you can get away with this
sadistic nonsense without—”

She got no farther. Francis Tasbrough, the quarry owner, the most
substantial industrialist in Fort Beulah, stood grandly up, quieted
Lorinda with an outstretched arm, and rumbled in his Jerusalem-the-Golden basso, “A moment please, my dear lady! All of us here
locally have got used to your political principles.
But as
chairman, it is my unfortunate duty to remind you that General
Edgeways and Mrs. Gimmitch have been invited by the club to address
us, whereas you, if you will excuse my saying so, are not even
related to any Rotarian but merely here as the guest of the
Reverend Falck, than whom there is no one whom we more honor. So,
if you will be so good—Ah, I thank you, madame!”

Lorinda Pike had
slumped into her chair with her fuse still
burning. Mr. Francis Tasbrough (it rhymed with “low”) did not
slump; he sat like the Archbishop of Canterbury on the archiepiscopal
throne.

And Doremus Jessup popped up to soothe them all, being an intimate
of Lorinda, and having, since milkiest boyhood, chummed with and
detested Francis Tasbrough.

This Doremus Jessup, publisher of the
Daily Informer
,
for all that
he was a competent business man and a writer of editorials not
without wit and good New England earthiness, was yet considered the
prime eccentric of Fort Beulah. He was on the school board, the
library board, and he introduced people like Oswald Garrison
Villard, Norman Thomas, and Admiral Byrd when they came to town
lecturing.

Jessup was a littlish man, skinny, smiling, well tanned,
with a
small gray mustache, a small and well-trimmed gray beard—in a
community where to sport a beard was to confess one’s self a
farmer, a Civil War veteran, or a Seventh Day Adventist. Doremus’s
detractors said that he maintained the beard just to be “highbrow”
and “different,” to try to appear “artistic.” Possibly they were
right. Anyway, he skipped up now and murmured:

“Well, all the birdies
in their nest agree. My friend, Mrs. Pike,
ought to know that freedom of speech becomes mere license when it
goes so far as to criticize the Army, differ with the D.A.R., and
advocate the rights of the Mob. So, Lorinda, I think you ought to
apologize to the General, to whom we should be grateful for
explaining to us what the ruling classes of the country really
want. Come on now, my friend—jump
up and make your excuses.”

He was looking down on Lorinda with sternness, yet Medary Cole,
president of Rotary, wondered if Doremus wasn’t “kidding” them. He
had been known to. Yes—no—he must be wrong, for Mrs. Lorinda
Pike was (without rising) caroling, “Oh yes! I do apologize,
General! Thank you for your revelatory speech!”

The General raised his plump hand (with a Masonic ring as well
as a
West Point ring on the sausage-shaped fingers); he bowed like
Galahad or a head-waiter; he shouted with parade-ground maleness:
“Not at all, not at all, madame! We old campaigners never mind a
healthy scrap. Glad when anybody’s enough interested in our fool
ideas to go and get sore at us, huh, huh, huh!”

And everybody laughed and sweetness reigned. The program wound up
with Louis Rotenstern’s
singing of a group of patriotic ditties:
“Marching through Georgia” and “Tenting on the Old Campground” and
“Dixie” and “Old Black Joe” and “I’m Only a Poor Cowboy and I Know
I Done Wrong.”

Louis Rotenstern was by all of Fort Beulah classed as a “good
fellow,” a caste just below that of “real, old-fashioned
gentleman.” Doremus Jessup liked to go fishing with him, and
partridge-hunting; and he
considered that no Fifth Avenue tailor
could do anything tastier in the way of a seersucker outfit. But
Louis was a jingo. He explained, and rather often, that it was not
he nor his father who had been born in the ghetto in Prussian
Poland, but his grandfather (whose name, Doremus suspected, had
been something less stylish and Nordic than Rotenstern). Louis’s
pocket heroes were Calvin Coolidge,
Leonard Wood, Dwight L. Moody,
and Admiral Dewey (and Dewey was a born Vermonter, rejoiced Louis,
who himself had been born in Flatbush, Long Island).

He was not only 100 per cent American; he exacted 40 per cent of
chauvinistic interest on top of the principal. He was on every
occasion heard to say, “We ought to keep all these foreigners out
of the country, and what I mean, the Kikes just as
much as the Wops
and Hunkies and Chinks.” Louis was altogether convinced that if
the ignorant politicians would keep their dirty hands off banking
and the stock exchange and hours of labor for salesmen in
department stores, then everyone in the country would profit, as
beneficiaries of increased business, and all of them (including the
retail clerks) be rich as Aga Khan.

So Louis put into his
melodies not only his burning voice of a
Bydgoszcz cantor but all his nationalistic fervor, so that every
one joined in the choruses, particularly Mrs. Adelaide Tarr
Gimmitch, with her celebrated train-caller’s contralto.

The dinner broke up in cataract-like sounds of happy adieux, and
Doremus Jessup muttered to his goodwife Emma, a solid, kindly,
worried soul, who liked knitting, solitaire,
and the novels of
Kathleen Norris: “Was I terrible, butting in that way?”

“Oh, no, Dormouse, you did just right. I
am
fond of Lorinda Pike,
but why
does
she have to show off and parade all her silly
Socialist ideas?”

“You old Tory!” said Doremus. “Don’t you want to invite the
Siamese elephant, the Gimmitch, to drop in and have a drink?”

“I do not!” said Emma Jessup.

And in the end, as the
Rotarians shuffled and dealt themselves and
their innumerable motorcars, it was Frank Tasbrough who invited the
choicer males, including Doremus, home for an after-party.

As he took his wife home and drove up Pleasant Hill to Tasbrough’s,
Doremus Jessup meditated upon the epidemic patriotism of General
Edgeways. But he broke it off to let himself be absorbed in the
hills, as it had been his habit for the fifty-three years, out of
his sixty years of life, that he had spent in Fort Beulah, Vermont.

Legally a city, Fort Beulah was a comfortable village of old
red
brick, old granite workshops, and houses of white clapboards or
gray shingles, with a few smug little modern bungalows, yellow or
seal brown. There was but little manufacturing: a small woolen
mill, a sash-and-door factory, a pump works. The granite which was
its chief produce came from quarries four miles away; in Fort
Beulah itself were only the offices … all the money … the
meager shacks
of most of the quarry workers. It was a town of
perhaps ten thousand souls, inhabiting about twenty thousand
bodies—the proportion of soul-possession may be too high.

There was but one (comparative) skyscraper in town: the six-story
Tasbrough Building, with the offices of the Tasbrough & Scarlett
Granite Quarries; the offices of Doremus’s son-in-law, Fowler
Greenhill, M.D., and his partner,
old Dr. Olmsted, of Lawyer Mungo
Kitterick, of Harry Kindermann, agent for maple syrup and dairying
supplies, and of thirty or forty other village samurai.

It was a downy town, a drowsy town, a town of security and
tradition, which still believed in Thanksgiving, Fourth of July,
Memorial Day, and to which May Day was not an occasion for labor
parades but for distributing small baskets of flowers.

It was a May night—late in May of 1936—with a three-quarter moon.
Doremus’s house was a mile from the business-center of Fort Beulah,
on Pleasant Hill, which was a spur thrust like a reaching hand out
from the dark rearing mass of Mount Terror. Upland meadows, moon-glistening, he could see, among the wildernesses of spruce and
maple and poplar on the ridges far above him; and below, as his car
climbed, was Ethan Creek flowing through the meadows. Deep woods—rearing mountain bulwarks—the air like spring-water—serene
clapboarded houses that remembered the War of 1812 and the boyhoods
of those errant Vermonters, Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant,”
and Hiram Powers and Thaddeus Stevens and Brigham Young and
President Chester Alan Arthur.

“No—Powers and Arthur—they were weak sisters,”
pondered Doremus.
“But Douglas and Thad Stevens and Brigham, the old stallion—I
wonder if we’re breeding up any paladins like those stout, grouchy
old devils?—if we’re producing ‘em anywhere in New England?—anywhere in America?—anywhere in the world? They had guts.
Independence. Did what they wanted to and thought what they liked,
and everybody could go to hell. The youngsters today—Oh, the
aviators have plenty of nerve. The physicists, these twenty-five-year-old Ph. D.’s that violate the inviolable atom, they’re
pioneers. But most of the wishy-washy young people today—Going
seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere—not enough
imagination to
want
to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning
a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of
from Shakespeare and
the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner.
Pap-fed flabs! Like this smug pup Malcolm Tasbrough, hanging
around Sissy! Aah!

“Wouldn’t it be hell if that stuffed shirt, Edgeways, and that
political Mae West, Gimmitch, were right, and we need all these
military monkeyshines and maybe a fool war (to conquer some sticky-hot country we don’t want on a bet!) to put some starch and git
into these marionettes
we call our children? Aah!

“But rats—These hills! Castle walls. And this air. They can
keep their Cotswolds and Harz Mountains and Rockies! D. Jessup—topographical patriot. And I
am
a—”

“Dormouse, would you mind driving on the right-hand side of the
road—on curves, anyway?” said his wife peaceably.

An upland hollow and mist beneath the moon—a veil of mist over
apple blossoms and the
heavy bloom of an ancient lilac bush beside
the ruin of a farmhouse burned these sixty years and more.

Mr. Francis Tasbrough was the president, general manager, and chief
owner of the Tasbrough & Scarlett Granite Quarries, at West Beulah,
four miles from “the Fort.” He was rich, persuasive, and he had
constant labor troubles. He lived in a new Georgian brick house on
Pleasant Hill, a little
beyond Doremus Jessup’s, and in that house
he maintained a private barroom luxurious as that of a motor
company’s advertising manager at Grosse Point. It was no more the
traditional New England than was the Catholic part of Boston; and
Frank himself boasted that, though his family had for six
generations lived in New England, he was no tight Yankee but in his
Efficiency, his Salesmanship, the complete
Pan-American Business
Executive.