It Can't Happen Here (3 page)

He was a tall man, Tasbrough, with a yellow mustache and a
monotonously emphatic voice. He was fifty-four, six years younger
than Doremus Jessup, and when he had been four, Doremus had
protected him from the results of his singularly unpopular habit of
hitting the other small boys over the head with things—all kinds
of things—sticks and toy wagons and lunch boxes
and dry cow flops.

Assembled in his private barroom tonight, after the Rotarian
Dinner, were Frank himself, Doremus Jessup, Medary Cole, the
miller, Superintendent of Schools Emil Staubmeyer, R. C. Crowley—Roscoe Conkling Crowley, the weightiest banker in Fort Beulah—and,
rather surprisingly, Tasbrough’s pastor, the Episcopal minister,
the Rev. Mr. Falck, his old hands as delicate as porcelain,
his
wilderness of hair silk-soft and white, his unfleshly face
betokening the Good Life. Mr. Falck came from a solid Knickerbocker
family, and he had studied in Edinburgh and Oxford along with the
General Theological Seminary of New York; and in all of the Beulah
Valley there was, aside from Doremus, no one who more contentedly
hid away in the shelter of the hills.

The barroom had been professionally
interior-decorated by a young
New York gentleman with the habit of standing with the back of his
right hand against his hip. It had a stainless-steel bar, framed
illustrations from La Vie Parisienne, silvered metal tables, and
chromium-plated aluminum chairs with scarlet leather cushions.

All of them except Tasbrough, Medary Cole (a social climber to whom
the favors of Frank Tasbrough were as
honey and fresh ripened
figs), and “Professor” Emil Staubmeyer were uncomfortable in this
parrot-cage elegance, but none of them, including Mr. Falck, seemed
to dislike Frank’s soda and excellent Scotch or the sardine
sandwiches.

“And I wonder if Thad Stevens would of liked this, either?”
considered Doremus. “He’d of snarled. Old cornered catamount.
But probably not at the whisky!”

“Doremus,”
demanded Tasbrough, “why don’t you take a tumble to
yourself? All these years you’ve had a lot of fun criticizing—always being agin the government—kidding everybody—posing as such
a Liberal that you’ll stand for all these subversive elements.
Time for you to quit playing tag with crazy ideas and come in and
join the family. These are serious times—maybe twenty-eight
million on relief, and beginning
to get ugly—thinking they’ve got
a vested right now to be supported.

“And the Jew Communists and Jew financiers plotting together to
control the country. I can understand how, as a younger fellow,
you could pump up a little sympathy for the unions and even for the
Jews—though, as you know, I’ll never get over being sore at you
for taking the side of the strikers when those thugs were trying
to
ruin my whole business—burn down my polishing and cutting shops—why, you were even friendly with that alien murderer Karl Pascal,
who started the whole strike—maybe I didn’t enjoy firing
him
when
it was all over!

“But anyway, these labor racketeers are getting together now, with
Communist leaders, and determined to run the country—to tell men
like
me
how to run our business!—and just like
General Edgeways
said, they’ll refuse to serve their country if we should happen to
get dragged into some war. Yessir, a mighty serious hour, and it’s
time for you to cut the cackle and join the really responsible
citizens.”

Said Doremus, “Hm. Yes, I agree it’s a serious time. With all the
discontent there is in the country to wash him into office, Senator
Windrip has got an excellent chance
to be elected President, next
November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us
into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the
world that we’re the huskiest nation going. And then I, the
Liberal, and you, the Plutocrat, the bogus Tory, will be led out
and shot at 3 A.M. Serious? Huh!”

“Rats! You’re exaggerating!” said R. C. Crowley.

Doremus went on: “If Bishop
Prang, our Savonarola in a Cadillac
16, swings his radio audience and his League of Forgotten Men to
Buzz Windrip, Buzz will win. People will think they’re electing
him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God
knows there’s been enough indication that we
can
have tyranny in
America—the fix of the Southern share-croppers, the working
conditions of the miners and garment-makers,
and our keeping Mooney
in prison so many years. But wait till Windrip shows us how to say
it with machine guns! Democracy—here and in Britain and France,
it hasn’t been so universal a sniveling slavery as Naziism in
Germany, such an imagination-hating, pharisaic materialism as
Russia—even if it has produced industrialists like you, Frank, and
bankers like you, R. C., and given you altogether
too much power
and money. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy’s
given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had. That may
be menaced now by Windrip—all the Windrips. All right! Maybe
we’ll have to fight paternal dictatorship with a little sound
patricide—fight machine guns with machine guns. Wait till Buzz
takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!”

“Nonsense!
Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen
here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.”

“The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will
forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the
world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than
America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over
Louisiana, and how the
Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius
Windrip owns
his
State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin
on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually
most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and
the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees?
Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux
Klan? Remember our war hysteria,
when we called sauerkraut
‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German
measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest
papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet
of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée
McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona
desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother
Eddy? …
Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in
Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith
told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would
illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon?
Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience
to William Jennings
Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious
old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the
whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of
evolution? … Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how
trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen
here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they
might
be
transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t
happen in
America
! Why,
where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a
dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s
Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots
Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!”

“Well, what if they are?” protested R. C. Crowley. “It might not
be so bad. I don’t like all these irresponsible attacks on us
bankers
all the time. Of course, Senator Windrip has to pretend
publicly to bawl the banks out, but once he gets into power he’ll
give the banks their proper influence in the administration and
take our expert financial advice. Yes. Why are you so afraid of
the word ‘Fascism,’ Doremus? Just a word—just a word! And might
not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief
nowadays, and living
on my income tax and yours—not so worse to
have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or
Bismarck in the good old days—and have ‘em really
run
the country
and make it efficient and prosperous again. ‘Nother words, have a
doctor who won’t take any back-chat, but really boss the patient
and make him get well whether he likes it or not!”

“Yes!” said Emil Staubmeyer. “Didn’t
Hitler save Germany from the
Red Plague of Marxism? I got cousins there. I
know
!”

“Hm,” said Doremus, as often Doremus did say it. “Cure the evils
of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics. I’ve
heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but
I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient
syphilis!”

“Think that’s nice language to use in the
presence of the Reverend
Falck?” raged Tasbrough.

Mr. Falck piped up, “I think it’s quite nice language, and an
interesting suggestion, Brother Jessup!”

“Besides,” said Tasbrough, “this chewing the rag is all nonsense,
anyway. As Crowley says, might be a good thing to have a strong
man in the saddle, but—it just can’t happen here in America.”

And it seemed to Doremus that the softly moving
lips of the
Reverend Mr. Falck were framing, “The hell it can’t!”

Doremus Jessup, editor and proprietor of the
Daily Informer
, the
Bible of the conservative Vermont farmers up and down the Beulah
Valley, was born in Fort Beulah in 1876, only son of an impecunious
Universalist pastor, the Reverend Loren Jessup. His mother was no
less than a Bass, of Massachusetts. The Reverend Loren, a bookish
man and fond of flowers, merry but not noticeably witty, used
to
chant “Alas, alas, that a Bass of Mass should marry a minister
prone to gas,” and he would insist that she was all wrong
ichthyologically—she should have been a cod, not a bass. There
was in the parsonage little meat but plenty of books, not all
theological by any means, so that before he was twelve Doremus knew
the profane writings of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen,
Tennyson, Byron, Keats,
Shelley, Tolstoy, Balzac. He graduated
from Isaiah College—once a bold Unitarian venture but by 1894 an
inter-denominational outfit with nebulous trinitarian yearnings, a
small and rustic stable of learning, in North Beulah, thirteen
miles from “the Fort.”

But Isaiah College has come up in the world today—excepting
educationally—for in 1931 it held the Dartmouth football team down
to 64 to 6.

During college, Doremus wrote a great deal of bad poetry and became
an incurable book addict, but he was a fair track athlete.
Naturally, he corresponded for papers in Boston and Springfield,
and after graduation he was a reporter in Rutland and Worcester,
with one glorious year in Boston, whose grimy beauty and shards of
the past were to him what London would be to a young Yorkshireman.
He was
excited by concerts, art galleries, and bookshops; thrice a
week he had a twenty-five-cent seat in the upper balcony of some
theater; and for two months he roomed with a fellow reporter who
had actually had a short story in The Century and who could talk
about authors and technique like the very dickens. But Doremus was
not particularly beefy or enduring, and the noise, the traffic, the
bustle
of assignments, exhausted him, and in 1901, three years
after his graduation from college, when his widowed father died and
left him $2980.00 and his library, Doremus went home to Fort Beulah
and bought a quarter interest in the
Informer
, then a weekly.

By 1936 it was a daily, and he owned all of it … with a
perceptible mortgage.

He was an equable and sympathetic boss; an imaginative news
detective;
he was, even in this ironbound Republican state,
independent in politics; and in his editorials against graft and
injustice, though they were not fanatically chronic, he could slash
like a dog whip.

He was a third cousin of Calvin Coolidge, who had considered him
sound domestically but loose politically. Doremus considered
himself just the opposite.

He had married his wife, Emma, out of Fort
Beulah. She was the
daughter of a wagon manufacturer, a placid, prettyish, broad-shouldered girl with whom he had gone to high school.

Now, in 1936, of their three children, Philip (Dartmouth, and
Harvard Law School) was married and ambitiously practicing law in
Worcester; Mary was the wife of Fowler Greenhill, M.D., of Fort
Beulah, a gay and hustling medico, a choleric and red-headed young
man, who was a wonder-worker in typhoid, acute appendicitis,
obstetrics, compound fractures, and diets for anemic children.
Fowler and Mary had one son, Doremus’s only grandchild, the bonny
David, who at eight was a timid, inventive, affectionate child with
such mourning hound-dog eyes and such red-gold hair that his
picture might well have been hung at a National Academy show or
even been reproduced
on the cover of a Women’s Magazine with
2,500,000 circulation. The Greenhills’ neighbors inevitably said
of the boy, “My, Davy’s got such an imagination, hasn’t he! I
guess he’ll be a Writer, just like his Grampa!”

Third of Doremus’s children was the gay, the pert, the dancing
Cecilia, known as “Sissy,” aged eighteen, where her brother Philip
was thirty-two and Mary, Mrs. Greenhill, turned
thirty. She
rejoiced the heart of Doremus by consenting to stay home while she
was finishing high school, though she talked vigorously of going
off to study architecture and “simply make
millions
, my dear,” by
planning and erecting miraculous small homes.

Mrs. Jessup was lavishly (and quite erroneously) certain that her
Philip was the spit and image of the Prince of Wales; Philip’s
wife, Merilla
(the fair daughter of Worcester, Massachusetts),
curiously like the Princess Marina; that Mary would by any stranger
be taken for Katharine Hepburn; that Sissy was a dryad and David a
medieval page; and that Doremus (though she knew him better than
she did those changelings, her children) amazingly resembled that
naval hero, Winfield Scott Schley, as he looked in 1898.