Tom Fool Read online

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, you’re not afraid to talk up and say what you think,” said Tooze, as though he were addressing a Christian martyr, at some period earlier than that of Constantine.

  There were to be many more such incidents.

  Tom had the naïveté to ask James Watson, a former senator from Indiana, his own state, to vote for him. “I understand you are not.”

  “No, I’m not,” said Watson.

  “Well, we’re both from Indiana, I had hoped you would.”

  There are differences between being naïve and being hatefully childish.

  “I will tell you why,” said Watson. “You have been a Democrat all your life. I don’t mind the Church converting a whore, but I don’t like her to lead the choir the first night.”

  There are some insults in this world one has to take. Yet there are certain aspects of human character one would rather not see. Tom turned away and left Watson to his intellectual toy trains. There wasn’t anything else he could do.

  He was beginning to learn how much the professionals hated him. That left him the people. Unfortunately, as his advisers told him, it was first necessary to get to the people. He had to turn to such of the professionals as he could gather in, after all.

  Their first move was to shift his hotel. Appearances are important. Dewey had seventy-eight rooms at the Hotel Walton, with a personal flag hung out the windows; Taft had a hundred and two rooms at the Franklin; and Vandenberg, another candidate, who had offered to flip a coin with Dewey, to see which one of them would be Presidential and which Vice-Presidential nominee, and who in consequence had been spared his presence ever since, had forty-eight rooms in various hotels, most of them at the Adelphia. Tom found himself installed in a suite in the Warwick, which annoyed his personal advisers very much, who were so eager to persuade the world he was not a well-to-do professional man, that they would have folded him up into a closet like an ironing-board, if he would have fitted into it.

  Coming down the hall to his new rooms, Tom saw his name over the door at the end of it, like the name carved over the entrance to a family crypt. For a moment that startled him.

  It was by then midnight of Sunday. These preliminaries concluded, the convention might safely begin. Safely, that is, for Tom. Taft, Dewey, and Vandenberg hated every minute of it.

  *

  There is, perhaps fortunately, nothing quite like a Presidential Nomination Convention. There were two thousand delegates and alternates on the floor of the hall, and fifteen thousand spectators in the galleries. The spectators made everybody nervous. Nobody wanted them, and at every other Republican convention, they had not been there. Nor was there any doubt in anybody’s mind why they were there. They were there to shout for Tom. Had they been paid to come, they wouldn’t have been so bad. What made them really dangerous, was that they’d come of their own accord.

  The convention was called to order. Everybody got up and sang America. If you come right down to it, America is a pretty good song, harmonically easier to follow than the National Anthem, and reassuringly peaceable, with its waving fields of grain instead of rockets’ red glare.

  The Reverend Dr. Albert Joseph McCartney, a Presbyterian, pronounced the invocation, and the fight began, though it did not reach a climax until the third session, whose invocation was delivered by a Catholic. His Eminence Cardinal Dougherty, who invoked Divine Guidance from the middle of a blue spotlight. This set the stage for the performance of one of the most god-awful pieces of hokum perpetrated around that time, a cantata entitled Ballad for Americans, words by John LaTouche, music by Earl Robinson, not to be confused with either the baseball player or the prize-fighter of that name. This self-conscious little epic dealt with the Revolution, the Growth of the Union, the Civil War, and the Machine Age, chiefly in the form of sprechstimme for baritone and chorus. All told, it took fifteen minutes to perform and cost eight thousand dollars, money which might better have been spent buying an air cushion for Charles Ives, of whom, characteristically, no one in that hall had heard, with the possible exception of Mr. Robinson himself.

  Question: Did they all believe in Liberty in those Days? (Baritone)

  Answer: Nobody who was anybody believed it.

  Everybody who was anybody—they doubted it.

  Nobody had faith.

  Nobody, nobody, but Washington, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Lafayette. (Chorus)

  Still, it was a little better than it sounded, and perhaps because of the lighting, which was still blue, the convention members found it moving. Heard over the radio, as Tom heard it in his hotel suite, it sounded more as though somebody had taken Carl Sandberg to the cleaners.

  Having created this spiritualized setting for a most unspiritual procedure, everyone got down to business, and Tom’s name was not mentioned at all. It was not to be mentioned until Wednesday, chiefly because nobody wanted to mention it. They were afraid of setting off the galleries. The convention was being broadcast. How would waves of cries for Tom sound over the radio? It would make them difficult to ignore.

  Dewey, a nonentity called Gannett, and Senator Taft were nominated. Then at last a member of the Indiana delegation rose to nominate Tom. That was greeted by firm booing from the Taft and Dewey delegations. It is customary that upon nomination, the candidate’s home state raises his banners and marches around the hall. The galleries cheered for Tom, but that meant nothing to the delegates. Nobody on the Indiana delegation cared to raise a standard. Nobody likes a convinced man. Nobody likes an outsider.

  Their immobility became embarrassed, particularly with all that public cheering going on over their heads. But though they might quail, they did not move. They would rather lose the election, than go along with anybody who wasn’t a member of the party machine.

  Finally, the Mayor of Syracuse, from the New York delegation, stood up. Somebody had to do something. He was an enormous man, weighing 220 pounds, but as he grabbed the New York standard, five Dewey supporters grabbed him and tried to bear him down to the ground. Dewey was a man who stood for dignity and sobriety, but he was also standing for election. Marvin of Syracuse, who was in pretty good physical condition, turned out not to tackle well. Others piled into the mêlée. It made a fine sight for the galleries. Marvin broke free and started to parade the banner round the hall. A few of the New York delegation fell in, people who personally disliked Dewey mostly, or weren’t afraid of his influence, and some delegates from other states rather timidly followed. Each time Marvin came abreast of the New York delegation, the Dewey supporters tried to jump him again. But they were middle-aged men. They might not have any manners or sense of decorum, but neither did they have much wind. After thirteen circuits of the convention floor, Marvin sat down and put his banner back exactly in its socket.

  Under the circumstances, the Chairman thought it wise to bring the session to a halt as soon as possible. The gallery was still cheering.

  It was the beginning of a landslide.

  Dewey could have stopped it, by giving his pledged votes to Taft, but he wasn’t going to do that, and neither was Taft going to give his votes to him. The gallery was chanting Tom’s name. That made no difference. Tom was known to be anti-isolationist and pro-British and goodness only knew what else besides.

  Then there was Governor Landon of Kansas to win over. Kansas had eighteen votes. Finally, luring him into the building’s freight elevator, one of Tom’s supporters rode him up and down, up and down from the basement to the top floor. It was a bumpy elevator, with a distinctly sinking sensation on the drop. After nine or ten trips Landon agreed to cast Kansas’ eighteen votes for Tom.

  On the sixth ballot Tom was in. The galleries went wild. Tom, who was listening from his hotel, on the radio, felt a cold shudder up his spine and along his arms. So did a lot of people, all over the country, at their radios. The time was 1.57 a.m., on Friday. It was, said the newspapers, the most revolutionary thing the Republican Party had done since the nomination of Lincoln in 1860. Bu
t then they had done nothing. They had only given in.

  Tom went to bed and slept for eleven hours.

  *

  Then, getting up refreshed, he made his first mistakes.

  The first of these was the choice of a vice-presidential running mate. He chose Senator McNary of Oregon, in order to influence the western farm vote. McNary’s farm background consisted of having commercialized filbert-growing in Oregon and of having developed a market for the Imperial Prune. Whatever may be said of the filbert, it is not an essential grain crop, even in Persia, and as for the prune, imperial or not, few people can forget that in childhood they were forced to eat dampened dried prunes as a diarrhoeic. It is difficult to ennoble the prune. It has none of the glamour of wheat. It tends to ribaldry. And McNary, though a good man to have around once the battle was won and there were treaties to be signed, was unconvincing as a crusader.

  Once, when Tom was a boy, about eight or ten, camping up at his father’s cabin in the winter, some damn fool had set bear-traps in the snow on the path to the privy. Tom was groggy in the morning, even then, and though he’d danced his way out of that one, he’d been so mad he’d grabbed the idiot boy who set them and flung him through the ice of the horse trough. But he couldn’t throw reporters into a horse trough in the middle of Philadelphia, and there were bear-traps set everywhere, by both his supporters and the opposition.

  There was, for instance, his wife. It was Tom’s theory that a man’s wife is his own damn business, and that was Edna’s theory, too. Tom was accounted a handsome man, though he’d been scrawny when young, but as a jealous friend had said at the time, Edna had married him for his brains, not his looks. And so she had. She enjoyed him. For twenty years she had watched him getting rumpled while he played with a variety of exciting and dangerous toys and set off intellectual pinwheels to his heart’s content. He enjoyed her. They had a perfectly adequate son they both enjoyed. Neither one of them had ever been exactly poor, they came of good sound families, and they knew exactly what to do with money once they had it. They went on living their own lives exactly as they had before, a little better, of course, and with security, but privately, for since they had a quite enjoyable life of their own, they had seen no point in trying to live up to somebody else’s, which is what most newly rich Americans try to do; and so they hadn’t.

  Now she found herself thrust into the foreground, while the opposition tried to use her as a booby-trap. A picture of the Deweys at home had appeared in Life magazine a few weeks before. Mrs. Dewey was at the piano. Mr. Dewey was at the armchair. And the piano, a long one, looked remarkably like a coffin on a trestle at an old-fashioned Irish wake. Mr. Dewey had been wearing transparent black silk socks, and it was Edna’s conviction that there was something innately sleezy about anybody who would wear black silk socks in the afternoon, but that was the sort of remark you made before going to bed at night, rather than in public, and she was quite equal to the bear-traps set for her.

  How did she like to be surrounded by police guards?

  She didn’t. “I’m much too independent to enjoy being followed everywhere.”

  A reporter wanted to know if she thought the First Lady should hold press conferences, write a newspaper column, and generally take part in public affairs.

  That, no doubt, was supposed to evoke a snide remark about Mrs. Roosevelt, who did all those things, and on the whole did them quite well.

  “Yes, I do, if she is able to do them,” said Edna, which rather disappointed the Republican press. As a sop, she confessed to an admiration of Mrs. Coolidge, a non-topical reference no one could possibly object to. “I only hope I can be as gracious,” she said, having the art of the apposite rebuke.

  The second error in strategy was a bad one. At 4.35 on Saturday afternoon, Tom and Edna went to the Convention Hall. The organ thundered. Everybody waved flags, hats, and handkerchiefs. Tom bowed left and right. It was a pity, thought Edna, that he had a slight paunch, but it was very slight, and fortunately he was tall enough to carry it well. They both mounted the platform to be presented to the delegates. Edna had seen a pond of faces many times, at practically any women’s committee, but this was her first sea of them. A sea has storms, tides, barrier reefs, and shoals. She had not realized that before. She smiled at everyone anyway, flashbulbs went off, and it was time for the acceptance speech.

  That is what the error was. There wasn’t one. There was only a greeting.

  That was Sideboard’s doing. Sideboard was Tom’s chief adviser, a sincere man. It seemed to Tom he was being a mighty poor strategist. He was also much given to legends, and saw Tom as a legend, perhaps even an epic. The liberal mind is impervious to reality, but Tom was not yet impervious to the slow drip of Sideboard’s idealism, and Sideboard saw Tom as a simple unspoiled child of the people, despite the evidence of his own senses. Therefore the acceptance speech must be delivered from the steps of his quaint Indiana high school. Not his equally quaint college. That would have offended those members of the electorate who had never attended college.

  So all Tom could do at the Convention was to deliver a few banalities which, since they had been expecting something much worse, say a word of truth or two, would have greatly reassured the delegates, had he not referred to them as “You Republicans”.

  He meant nothing by that, one way or the other. Professionally he was a consultant lawyer, and hence an expert. He was used to being called in to straighten something out, he felt he had been called in now; as an expert, he was the eternal but necessary outsider; and so he said “You Republicans”, as he would have said, “You men in management”, or “You people in the Boardroom here”. But hearing that phrase, his auditors instantly remembered he had once been a Democrat, and they would sooner have forgiven him had he been a blood boiler, bone scraper, or mortician, than that he had once voted for the opposition party.

  Tom went back to New York, to resign his directorship of a bank and chairmanship of a corporation. This symbolic dance of the seven veils is supposed to assure the voter that the candidate comes forward with naked purity.

  The result was a visit from Philip, his son, whose formal manner concealed a good deal of tight-jawed perturbation. Suppose Tom should lose? What then would keep the family from starvation?

  Tom was amused and gratified to see that his son was at least aware of his father’s responsibilities, for that seemed to indicate that in due course he would be just as aware of his own, and did his best to reassure him. The whole visit tickled his sense of humour.

  Then he departed for Colorado Springs and the retreat.

  Colorado Springs

  It was here that he listened to the Democratic Convention, broadcast from Chicago. He sat alone on the terrace of the Broadmoor Hotel, a pseudo-Spanish-Italianate concoction which surprisingly enough went with the landscape quite well. There was a pond, to stand in for Lake Garda, some trees, a lawn, a bridge, and behind that, the Rockies heaved up in rows towards a blue and cumulated sky. He was forty-eight and felt just fine. At his feet a white hound-dog bitch with economical brown spots, provided by the management, made an endearing composition for the photographers and kept him company. It had been ages since he had owned a dog. Perhaps in the White House.

  As it happened, he did not much care for dogs, but having one round was part of the baby-kissing routine, and preferable to the actual kissing of a baby. His only request was that he not be forced to wear an Indian head-dress, which would have made him, as he said, feel like a nickel, and that he not be forced to go fishing, since he didn’t fish. He forgot about church, until he read a press release saying that “The candidate regretted that he could not go to church today”. Since the candidate never went to church and had long since given up regretting it, he thought this a piece of atrocious hypocrisy, though in actuality it was only a minor stroke of genius on the part of the Pattersons, but since he had to give in somewhere, he duly allowed himself to be photographed gazing somewhat apprehensively at the open doorway o
f an Episcopalean church. Since he found the world both interesting and a good place to live in, God was not among his preoccupations, though it did always mildly annoy him to find that Deity so often evoked in so many causes, like those gentlemen who make quite an adequate living out of lending their admittedly impeccable names to as certainly peccant corporations.

  Anyhow, here he was, in an interval between churches, listening to the Democratic National Convention. Senator Byrnes, a political strawboss, had just finished assuring the delegates that theirs was an unbossed convention.

  “Byrnes,” he said to the dog, “sure has a sense of humour.” The dog ignored him and bit its rump. No doubt one of the lesser fleas that bite ’em.

  It was not an edifying convention. The issue was the third term. Could it be gotten away with? The President was discreetly absent in Washington. Jim Farley, who did not believe in third terms, was running for President from a suite of rooms at the Stevens. Harry Hopkins, the President’s chief aide, was at the Blackstone, doing his best to make the proceedings look respectable. Mayor Kelly of Chicago, whose town it was, was doing his best to make the doing of Hopkins’s best extremely difficult. He had stationed his Director of Sewers rather appropriately in the basement of the convention hall with a microphone attached to the loudspeakers upstairs. This gentleman, whose name was Thomas D. Garry, at least seemed to know the hand and mouth gestures of hog-calling. From time to time, standing on tiptoe to reach the microphone, he would shout, “We Want Roosevelt.” This hoarse Cumean rumble from the bowels of the earth was extremely efficacious, and though no complementary lightning struck the temples of the local Stock Exchange, and no eagles perched on the coping of the Blackstone Hotel, the result was an immediate landslide. As Tom Garry said next day, “I did it all natural”. He then went back to his sewers. He was, as he explained, “Just an ordinary lug who loves the game of politics,” and there was no one to dispute him.