Tom Fool Page 10

  She was in a fury. She had had five hundred letters and telegrams about that Pittsburgh speech, half of them from Republican women.

  The President was delighted.

  “He was going good when he said all that guff about labours’ ranks,” said the President. “That was legitimate political talk. But why did he have to insult every woman in the United States? It will make them mad. It will lose him votes.” Which was as good a statement of the President’s political morality as any. He was very happy. “He’s sure to make other boners as time goes on. If we don’t do anything to break the spell, I’m pretty sure he will talk himself out of enough votes to carry me without much effort.” He seemed to see the third term rising before him like dawn, over the same continuous familiar scene that, for a few moments, because the moon was so bright, he had thought never to see again.

  The next day, in the political columns, he was pleased to note that Mr. Raymond Clapper, a weathercock well worth watching, said that “if this campaign is symptomatic of Tom’s genius at administration, God help America if he is elected”.

  Well, God helps those who help themselves. Which is decent of Him, but then God moves with the times. He has realized that what is really needed is a God with enough sense to know when to keep his mouth shut.

  How delightful, says Rochefoucauld, are the misfortunes of our friends. “I shall call him,” thought the President, “when I meet him, by his first name. Only. That will be friendly.”

  Coatesville, Pa.

  A pleasant enough town. As the motorcade passed through, a crowd of children lined up along the road and began to boo. A month ago that would have bothered Tom. Now he just wondered who had paid for it.

  This was October 4th, the day Hitler and Mussolini met at the Brenner Pass. Still, things could have been worse. It had been possible to get enough people into the National Cathedral in Washington to pray for Great Britain so that the place didn’t look too empty, even if nobody would do anything else.

  The campaign had exactly a month to run.

  Chicago Again

  The President could not be drawn. He had made one of his famous non-political speeches on September 2nd, at the dedication of the Chickamauga Dam, which was part of the TVA Development which Tom, as a private businessman, had devoted the past eight years to fighting to a draw. It was a delicate reminder that the Republican candidate was against those works which the Democratic Incumbent had designed for the people’s good, though unemployment had not been licked until recently, now that war defence plant spending was draining off the labour pool.

  It did Tom no good once more to point out that an economy based upon war-time spending was no economy at all.

  On October 5th, in the course of dedicating a WPA high school near Hyde Park, the President defended himself against the uselessness of interim measures such as the WPA, by allowing himself to be photographed before the school, a solid brick building which would not have been there otherwise. Naturally he was smiling. Public benefactors always smile, and why not, for who would kill a golden goose?

  Somewhere

  Tom went right on speaking. But sometimes he got disheartened.

  Looking out at a typical sea of grasping, avaricious, greedy, diappointed, shrewd, but utterly ignorant faces, how could anybody believe in the dignity of the universal franchise? Well, you put back the veil of sentiment. You saw them as a yearning, perhaps slightly uninformed, but still, well-intentioned army of voters. The trouble was, that as the tour went on the veil kept slipping at the oddest times. Democracy, so called, was nothing but Pitcairn Island on a large scale, and it doesn’t work on a large scale. How big was the Assembly at Athens? Not more than 2,500 at the most; and it even managed to ostracize all its best and ablest men.

  But at least the Athenians, like the English, had some sense of interest in what went on in the government. These people, for the most part (the part whose votes counted), weren’t interested in anything unless they could buy it. And even then, it was the advertisements they bought, not the product.

  Of course the problem was to sell him. For that he would have to be repackaged and given an attractive wrapper. He shut his eyes. The thing to remember was that these people were Yahoos. No, the thing to remember was that they were not Yahoos, they were thinly disguised Houyhnhnms. It must be true. Anybody who had ever tried to sell them anything had always said so.

  And the whole principle of that was quite sound. Since they were totally irresponsible, short-sighted, conservative, and bigoted, and since they did have the vote, the only thing to do with them was to manipulate them for their own good. The President was a master of that. And whatever his shortcomings, the President had acted in the common good as much of the time as anybody could humanly expect. The venality lay not with the manipulation, which was obligatory, and hence amoral, but with the manipulator, who if he wasn’t corrupt, was messianic, which was just as bad.

  Swift was right: they were Yahoos.

  Swift was also wrong: they were Houyhnhnms. They had once believed in something, even if now all those beliefs were turned inside out, to show the terror in the lining. There were still a few people left, utterly disenfranchised and scorned, who lived as close to the landscape and the tradition as they could. Some day they might be able to save it. Certainly they loved it, no matter what happened, which was more than you could say for most of the population, which was damned because it didn’t love anything. If next year’s model is going to be better, and if you’re going to move every year, what’s the point of love?

  You couldn’t blame them. It was just that they camped out in life, as though it were hostile territory, until they died. It was part of the cult of youth. Never sink down roots, or you may grow, and if you grow at all, then you are doomed to grow old. They couldn’t have that.

  But neither should they be allowed to tyrannize and invalidate the responsible vote. The Founding Fathers made no provision for a vote. They specified only a choice of electors. Perhaps that was because they thought of life in terms of choice, rather than in terms of bribery. Until 1824, when Jackson ran against Adams, got more votes, and the House of Representatives chose in Adams’s favour, America had had no popular vote. Perhaps the Founding Fathers foresaw the corruption it would lead to. Jackson got in next time, and the House of Representatives was never bothered with such a decision again. Jackson served his two terms and went back to the Hermitage, that noble and spacious house on whose steps, a hundred years later, F. Scott Fitzgerald was to sit at dawn, his fortunes at low ebb, to meditate upon suicide and the death of the republic. The house had seemed a little lonely and vacated still, after a hundred years. Fitzgerald was not, in the 1930’s, credited with brains or a social conscience, but he did have eyes in his head. As he said, at each end of his life, a man needed nourishment, a breast or a shrine, something to lay himself beside, any old how, when he wasn’t wanted any more, and it was time to put a bullet through his head.

  If only one could have done so, but that takes a kind of courage only cowards have. Besides, for the rest of us, it is not quite necessary yet, though to be sure, death by spiritual inanition is no more merciful, and just as pathetic and contemptible.

  Upstate New York

  Dorothy Thompson was at it again. She might not have been a power in the land, but she was a considerable force in the suburbs. The women’s magazines sometimes printed her at the front of their monthly issues, among the female hygiene and deodorant ads, before settling down to the serious work of saccharine fiction to follow. She was on the radio now, yelling like the Sybil of the North. The Nazis were getting closer. We must not abandon our leader. We must not change horses in midstream, otherwise we’ll find a nightmare sitting at the foot of the bed. It has big saucer eyes, like Elsa Maxwell, jack-boots, it resembles something we saw behind the barn when we were five, or in a vacant lot anyhow, and unless we are careful, the Republicans will let it in.

  Moving into Massachusetts

  On October 8th t
he staff had to fling one of the women reporters off the train, it having been discovered that she had been planted on it by a Democratic Committee and was sending out those quotes from Tom’s future speeches which had begun to turn up in Democratic speeches made the day before. She went quietly. If this had been a war, she would have been shot as a spy. As it was, she had had a lot of fun.

  Providence, Rhode Island

  Tom was worn out. He cancelled an appointment made by one of the local politicians, a man named Farley, and then, driving himself a little harder, said to set it up again. Farley went aboard the train and found the train too much to take. There were too many people on it, and most of them seemed the wrong people. It was a one-man show all right, but the puppets had tugged lose from the strings and were running around like devil dolls.

  “What goes on round here, anyway?” he asked.

  Bühl, who was tired, told him. He’d had a month to think out his definition, so he had his phrasing ready.

  “This place is like a whorehouse on Saturday night,” he said, “when the madam is out, and all the girls are running around dropping nickels in the juke-boxes.”

  It relieved his feelings some. He’d been having trouble with Sideboard. He’d also been having trouble, as usual, with Tom. Trying to give Tom advice was just about as effective as trying to give castor oil to the Sphinx. In the first place, you couldn’t get it in. In the second, if you did, there was a rumble in the bowels somewhere, and you were practically carried away in the wave of what came out.

  October 11th was a nice day. That was the day the Germans goose-stepped, radiant but stiff-lipped with conquest, into the Roumanian oilfields.

  The more thoughtful and refined of the German commandants, however, were looking forward to a lovely time in Greece, mostly to scooping up small bronzes from the Athens Museum and shipping them back home under armed guard. Once the crash comes a museum is about as inviolable as a bank vault the day after a run on the tellers upstairs. And just about as empty.

  In Indiana, Tom’s home state, the Democratic State chairman, a former circus owner, put on a programme of singers, a contortionist, and a boy soprano, all Democrats, so the entertainment cost nothing. Poor lad, he would never be the politician Farinelli was, but singing Carrie Jacobs Bond, he was not bad.

  The Republican rebuttal was a diverse little charade in Philadelphia, while the liberty bell tolled 164 times, like the Berlioz Dies Irae from the Fantastic Symphony, once for each year of the Union, and a group of people disguised as Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, denounced the iniquities of a third term. The gentleman who introduced this crew was not disguised as anybody, except possibly himself, and looked like a pickled stoat. Of course, not everybody can be good-looking, as Elinor Glyn once pointed out, in her advice to plain girls, but there’s no reason to look like a pickled stoat, either, though that seems to be the ideal professional look for men over forty, these days. Perhaps because so many of the less professional among them are pickled stoats.

  Though a few, mostly Irish, still clung to the immigrant policeman or palace eunuch look produced by Tammany Hall and immortalized by Thomas Nast, back in the Civil War days.

  Responsible public opinion was mixed. Kathleen Norris, the authoress of Foolish Virgin, Wife for Sale, Beauty’s Daughter, and other thoughtful works, was for Tom. She told mothers to vote for him on the Keep-out-of-War issue. What non-mothers did was no concern of hers: she knew her audience. In Hollywood, Mary Pickford emitted three hundred words, at a Win with Tom garden party. “They say we must not change horses in midstream,” she said. “But how did we get in midstream?” It would have been a brilliant remark, had it meant anything.

  Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, was a reasonable man. His voice did not carry very well. Gloria Swanson was for Tom because, as she said, she didn’t care for Roosevelt’s charm. Daniel J. Tobin, of the AFL Teamsters Brotherhood, said Lewis, who was for Tom, was merely being pettish. Which was true enough. Clare Booth Luce, authoress of Kiss the Boys Goodbye, told her public that the Democratic Party was the party of fear; a columnist, that the Republican was a holy terror. Irvin S. Cobb, a humorist of the period, said he’d rather risk despotism from without than within, but since he was a humorist, that didn’t count. Helen Gahagan Douglas, who had once played the Eternal Woman in a movie version of H. Rider Haggard’s She, the locale shifted, for some reason, to Greenland, said that an army of nearly 48,000,000 women had benefited directly under the New Deal, and she liked it that way. Later, she ran for Congress, got elected, and appeared on the House floor with a wicker market basket filled with groceries, to protest the forces of inflation, though her own shopping was usually done by phone, and nobody used market baskets any more anyhow. They used bags. Alfred E. Smith, the Happy Warrior, was for Tom on the dictatorship and class hatred issues, but was a Catholic, on which grounds he had been defeated in a Presidential campaign himself, so that didn’t count for much either. And Martha Taft, the then wife of the Senator, and a nice enough woman who should either have had fewer dental fillings, or else kept her mouth closed more often, a rather hectic woman, but still, she meant no harm, said Tom knew the difference between a plane on order and a plane in the air, a sybillic remark, somewhat akin to that of the liberal writers who had said he could add and subtract.

  Mrs. Deborah Delano, ninety-three, the President’s third cousin, told an interviewer that she did not intend to vote for the incumbent. “Franklin does not need the money he makes as President, and now it is time to give a poor man the job.” She was an aristocrat. Anyone who lived on earned income, even if Tom did have 500,000 stashed away, was a poor man, in her opinion. Her mind boggled at the thought of anyone conceivably being poorer. And Franklin had really been rather naughty.

  Ah well, it was a confused period. Governor Ralph L. Carr of Colorado, for instance, who was running for re-election himself about then, accidentally campaigned in Nebraska, thirty miles across the state border, or at any rate his sound truck did, and feeling a little futile, had had to drive back where he had come from. Amusing enough.

  On the Train

  On the 13th the polls said he was rallying. He pushed himself all the harder. On the 14th, his Detroit Federated Women’s Clubs speech came out in a national magazine, which found it soul-warming and innocuous enough, the perfect combination, to be given a place of honour in those pages. Everybody on the train had a copy.

  Tom went into the washroom in the reporters’ car. The men’s washroom was decorated with a reproduction, elephant folio size, of Audubon’s Blue Heron. No doubt it was there because it was a manly picture. The only other artist popular that year was Renoir, and you couldn’t very well put a Renoir in the men’s John. He was fond of that picture. It reminded him of the President, perhaps because of the way the bird held its beak.

  In Audubon’s day the great forest had covered all Ohio, and when the birds passed over, the sky was black with them, the sun blotted out. A good many of them were extinct since then. They had been profitable to shoot. The woods were gone, too. They had been profitable to cut down.

  One of the reporters was standing in front of the mirror, with a glass in his hand, and the magazine open to that damn Women’s Club address.

  “I pledge allegiance to the flag

  Of the United States of America,” he chanted,

  “And to the advertiser for which it stands,

  One product, indispensable,

  With easy instalments for all.”

  Tom burst out laughing. That stuff in the glass looked remarkably like whisky, and he could use a drink about then. He sat down and asked for one.

  On the Train

  Bühl, the ghost writer, came into the drawing-room of the Pioneer looking tired.

  “What’s got you so beat?” asked Tom, who didn’t much care for Bühl, had had trouble with him before, but was trying to be agreeable.

  “I had to get off your article to the Nation, and the deadline’s tomorrow.”


  “What article of mine?”

  “Just an article. They asked for one, so I ran one up. You’ll have to read it some day. It’s a pretty good article.”

  The Nation was one of America’s White Cows. Like the New Statesman and Nation, it had discredited itself, some thought, by devoting too much space to the fulminations and irresponsible maggots and King Charles’s Heads of the rabid liberal left, to the point of being no more than a toy box for intellectuals, but it still had its original reputation, just the same.

  “Why wasn’t I told about that?”

  “Hell, you were busy. What difference does it make?”

  It made a lot of difference, but you couldn’t explain that to Bühl. It was a matter of integrity, a thing for which those on this train didn’t seem to care two pins.

  That which an artist, or for that matter anyone who makes something, takes for granted, is as often as not just what makes him seem unique to others, since he is so accustomed to the tools of his own trade, that he never thinks about them. The tools of a man’s trade are his own propensities and traits, so it never occurred to Tom that he was anything out of the ordinary, until one of his friends told him he was a thinker—after all, he had always thought—and that he read too much, for he had always read; when one was at a loose end, taking a train, or couldn’t sleep, naturally one pulled a book out. His hobby was history. People seemed to find it strange that a business man should read history rather than economics, but history was economics, economics was a part of history, and since he was insatiably curious, like the Elephant Child, about people and how they got that way, the reading of history seemed natural enough. Without the past there could be no present, as Santayana said, and unless we know the past, we can’t know much about the present. But to Americans history was a forbidden subject. It suggested age and death, it destroyed the eternal moment, which alone made eternal youth possible, and they were terrified of anything that cast doubts upon a daily immortality.