Tom Fool Page 4

  Some wit, however, had plastered Chicago with America Needs Roosevelt signs in some oddly chosen shop windows, above a We Do Repairing sign, and with less or more aptness, depending upon how you looked at it, in windows saying We Buy Everything; Waitress Wanted; and, more bleakly, Lunch. It may not have been sublime, but it was subliminal.

  Jim Farley, who still did not believe in third terms, said, all the same, that he would back the Democratic Party, and having had enough of it, went off to manage the New York Yankees, a simpler if no less edifying task.

  At that moment, the Cameron Highlanders were marching past the Great Pyramid, the Burma Road had just been closed, and the first of the great American super-highways, the Pittsburgh–Harrisburg Turnpike, was getting ready to open in the fall. Take the Time to be Safe, said a slogan just off the highway, which had been designed to make the public go a little faster. The Nazis were amusing themselves, rather gingerly, in Paris, and travel business was extremely bad. “Enjoy yourself”, said the automobile ads, “with a Plymouth”; and the isolationists, most of whom drove bigger cars than that, wished the world kept that way. No matter what happened elsewhere, Americans, they felt, should be allowed to go right on enjoying their Plymouths, on whose rock the country had been founded, and if Tom thought any otherwise, he would just have to learn to pipe down.

  Tom switched the radio off, knowing now, as he had been sure before, that he was up against the opposition he most wished for, not that he kidded himself any: the President was a formidable man.

  What he did not know was that he would have to fight the Pattersons as well, that they were harder to beat, and that in their own way they were equally formidable.

  They were approaching him now, down the path, with that air of deliberate ease usually assumed by people who, though they now have money enough to buy out most of the people they meet, which is what they want, can never quite get over a certain resentment that they did not have it before.

  There was nothing particularly noticeable about the Pattersons, a husband and wife team who had graduated from cheap journalism to work that though no more estimable, paid better. In the past eight years their pose of being simple, unassuming, down-to-earth people had marched with the times, and was now called sincerity, there being some sort of ghostly functionary who stands at the threshold of each decade to slap new labels on the same old empty trunks. They could be sincere about anything; they never espoused, as they frequently said, a cause they did not believe in, though sometimes they did not think it proper to admit to themselves that they had not believed in it before being paid to espouse it; and they never abandoned a cause until they were paid to take up another one, which since they were sincere, they did only after they stopped sincerely believing in it, which was usually shortly before they found a new one, but shortly after they said so. Sincerely.

  They were an orderly, spritely couple, with faintly weather eyes, and much given to smiling. Celia, the wife, still wore the simple housewifely dresses she had always worn, though they were now made of foulard silk, and was short-sighted and, when the need arose, deaf. Her husband, whom she had pushed into this new occupation, was thin and looked as though he had been pushed. He was particularly good at soothing the doubts of hen-pecked clients, just as Celia excelled at soothing neglected wives, who always felt that she “understood”, though if called on it, they could not for the life of them have said what.

  At the peak of a national campaign, or even a state campaign, if the state was rich enough, the Pattersons hired a staff of between fifty and one hundred people, and after expenses, kept a retaining fee of about 75 to 100,000 dollars between them. It was no more than they were worth. Their specialty was smear campaigns, if possible on a national scale, and they always got their retainer in advance. They were powers behind the throne, or rather the thrones, since politics was a game of musical chairs in which one was careful to sit down as soon as the trained ear detected from public pressure that the piano was about to stop, but they understood the meaning of real humility.

  So though they thought Tom a fool, they were careful not to show the way they felt. He shook hands with them vaguely, these days he seemed to shake hands with everybody, beamed at them, and promptly forgot about them. They were, he was told, part of his publicity staff.

  And so they were. They had been hired, without his knowledge, to see if something could not be done to keep their candidate in line and, despite him, perhaps to get him elected by siphoning the right kind of publicity out of him and directing it not to the general public, which didn’t count, but towards those minor members of the party machine who did.

  A hint had been extended to them, that if they did their job well, whatever their job might turn out to be, there would be a better one waiting for them, four years later, with a better candidate. With the Pattersons you knew where you stood. They could be trusted. Whereas who knew what Tom might do?

  The cheque was a little smaller than usual, but the Pattersons took it anyway, as soon as they had looked over the candidate. They hated to be out of things, though he looked as big a fool as Wilson must have been. The Pattersons didn’t know much about Wilson. They had been too young when he died. But they had seen the Palace of the League of Nations at Geneva once, a large empty building, very fine.

  Elwood

  Somewhat against his will, for he wished to pitch right into the campaign, Tom was induced to spend a futile little month-long villeggiatura in his ancestral spot. It was Sideboard’s idea that he should return to the great bucolic heartland of America from which he had arisen. In other words, that a month on the farm would be good for the farm vote.

  Tom, whose only pretension was that he didn’t have any, didn’t think much of that idea. He had already, in a speech, described himself as a purely conversational farmer. Hearing that, the Pattersons had shuddered from head to foot, and Sideboard himself had been deeply distressed. The Pattersons persuaded Tom to forego that line, by presenting him with speeches in which he didn’t say it. There seemed no way to make the man realize that elections were won not by the sincerity of your own convictions, but by the degree to which you truckled to those of others, and that the President, like the gods, is created in our own image, no matter what he may think of his new clothes.

  It was not a happy month.

  For the first time in eight years the President was worried about his own security of tenure. He said nothing, but his manner at press conferences became abrupt and irritable, and he was not displeased when Secretary of the Interior Ickes referred to Tom as “the barefoot boy of Wall Street”, a crack he had read in a newspaper and taken as his own, or when Senator Mead called him “The Pied Piper of the Utilities”.

  The Pied Piper remark was forgotten, but the barefoot boy of Wall Street one, which had been evoked by the Indiana villeggiatura, stuck. It was even, thought Tom unhappily, deserved, and no more than he could expect. Not being given to vituperation himself, he had naturally always been the sort of person who provoked it, and he was prepared for it. But public life was certainly a strain.

  One day Edna became so upset at being photographed all the time that she had gone into the bathroom, run cold water over her hair, and emerged stringy and defiant. He scarcely blamed her. This sort of life couldn’t be pleasant for her.

  On the 15th of August the party processed to Rushville, for the simple farmer bit, arriving at Indianapolis in two chartered planes, ploughing through a crowd of fifty-five thousand people, and motoring off to Rushville in a screaming wedge of motor-cycles. It was midnight before they reached their destination, but all six thousand inhabitants were up and about. Rushville was where he had his farms. It was Edna’s home town, not his, but over the street was a large sign saying he was “A Successful Rushville County Farmer”. It was true, there weren’t many. Profits didn’t amount to more than 3 per cent a year, and those he split with his tenant farmers. Farming was big business these days. Why, then, this ludicrous pretence that it was not?

>   Elwood was fifty-five miles away, and the speech was so awful that Tom forgot it, so that it had to be rushed after him by motor-cycle escort, sirens screaming, as though its delivery were a public procession of the Torah. It arrived on time, but Elwood was a mess. For one thing, the town was too small to handle the crowds.

  He had been photographed for a magazine that week, surrounded by an ashtray, cigarettes (the brand name carefully concealed), and wearing an awful tie. His taste in ties always had been bad. Some officious assistant had sprayed the desk in front of him with a carefully contrived array of appropriate texts which, if they did not give the show away, at least gave away the fact that somebody else was running it, not he. The books included More Power to Your Words, by Clement Wood, a graceful hint that though well educated, he had as much trouble with the language as everybody else; Your Key to Sales Opportunities, a work of obvious appeal; Your Career in Business, no less subtle; a gem called Attack on America, for chills; and tucked under his right arm, a copy of The Nazarene, which he may actually have been reading, but still, the apostolic hint was clear. Also displayed was a pair of blue glasses, no doubt for use in leading the blind.

  “Neither his personality, nor the weight of his ideas could conceivably have produced a fraction of the phenomenon we are living through,” wrote a commentator, which was true enough. His own reading matter for this period, snatched up while running for a plane, consisted of Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (too intellectual to be shown, an odd novel about a little girl who scrunches down in the shrubs to listen to Mozart being played in a private house); Ernest Morris’s Too Big (omitted as being too controversial); The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes (he admired Holmes, but the word dissent sounded radical); Mason Wade’s Margaret Fuller, Whetstone of Genius (genius is not, in America, a wholesome term); and Carl Snyder’s Capitalism, the Creator (too technical).

  However, here he was, a simple farmer, and the crowds were huge. There were two hundred thousand people. Cars jammed everywhere, there being only four roads. Electricity, water, telephones, a public address system, and broadcasting apparatus all had to be installed. Concessions had to be leased out, and stands built for them. Rest-rooms were essential, and first aid seemed necessary. To make matters worse, a professional exhibitionist called Shipwreck Kelly had engaged to pass the meeting seated on a flagpole, to advertise a national brand of coffee, and since the park where the meeting was to be held was not large enough to accommodate the crowd, it was necessary to rent an adjacent pasture from a Democrat active in state politics who hated Tom personally, with a hatred so intense it could be damped down only by payment of 12,000 dollars. Thirty thousand seats were set up, not for people to sit in, but merely to prevent them from crushing themselves to death by crowding round the platform.

  In addition to all this, the citizens of Elwood, his home town, were hostile to Tom. He had left twenty-three years before, and even though he had bought local property, he had bought it at Rushville, not here. Besides, the citizens of Elwood were Democrats. They refused to co-operate, though they had no objection to turning a sudden profit, and hotel rooms, as a result, shot up to ten dollars a day, payable thirty dollars in advance.

  Small towns are the same everywhere, and the local merchants resented the fact that those who came to hear the speech knew that and so brought their own food as a defence against scalpers’ prices. They retaliated by circulating letters and postcards saying that Tom had let his mother die in poverty and that she had been buried in a potter’s field. Since his mother, a spritely woman who had worn spike heels at the age of eighty-three, had died that spring and was not there to kick them in the teeth, they got away with it. Six people threatened Tom with violence if he came to town at all. Which merely proves that small towns are nicer to drive through than to live in. The campaign song was Back Home in Indiana, a tune which in the following weeks beat on the heads of everybody with all the sticky, metallic insistence of tropical rain.

  Elwood was backward, ugly, tree-lined, bigoted, and uninspiring. It was also poor. Hollyhocks grew through the railings of its abandoned tin factory. The town had an Epworth League, a citizens’ bank, and Lou Sullivan’s Golden Garden, to which the patrons as often as not brought their own liquor, but purchased a mix. It was not interested in anything that happened outside its own borders, except to hate it, and since nothing happened within those borders, it really had no interests at all.

  None the less, this is what gets called the backbone of America, which is the same ossifact as the spine, and Tom was there to make his speech.

  It was a disastrous speech. Norman Thomas, who was also running for President that year, though on his own, private, indoor track, described it, with hauteur and, alas, some truth, as a mixture of McGuffey’s First Reader, the Genealogy of Indiana, the Collected Speeches of Tom Girdler (a businessman Tom admired but Thomas did not), and the New Republic (the magazine, not the nineteenth-century political tract). It was even worse than that, for though Sideboard’s prose was somewhat like that, it did here and there contain a hard little nugget of truth.

  “We are here today”, he said, “to represent a sacred cause—the preservation of democracy.” And then he broke the news to them gently. “I cannot ask the American people to put faith in me, without recording my conviction that some form of Selective Service is the only democratic way in which to secure the trained and competent man-power we need for National Defence.”

  His audience did not like the sound of that. Four days later a bunch of frowsy, middle-aged American women of the sort who wear rimless glasses, teetotal, and call each other “girls”, hung an effigy of Senator Claude Pepper on the lawn of the Capitol, with a look of inane irresponsible joy on their faces, each one clutching her handbag, because he favoured conscription and what they called “other un-American activities”. They called themselves the Congress of American Mothers. It was quite useless to tell them that there was going to be a war, and that their sons, few of whom were resident at home anyway, would die all the sooner for being untrained.

  Tom next challenged the President to debate, on the fundamental issues of the campaign. “Of course I know that all his speeches will be strictly non-political,” he said. “Mine will be political, but they will be announced as such.”

  The President, in Washington, knowing that no campaign is ever won on fundamental issues, though it can be lost on them, chuckled and refused to be drawn. He was alarmed for the first time in his career, but he knew that if you speak into a vacuum long enough, people will eventually decide your voice sounds hollow, and that’s what he hoped the electorate would decide in Tom’s case.

  For a month things stood at a draw. That was the month Tom was constrained to stay in Rushville, surrounded by fifty presssmen and eight secretaries, obediently pretending to be a simple farmer.

  “It’s getting so”, Miss Sleeth, the manager of his farms, told him, “that every time a cameraman shows up, the hogs run right over and strike a pose.”

  Tom quite agreed with her. He’d had about enough of professional politicians. What he wanted to do now was to turn to the electorate. It was them he wanted to see. Down at the railroad yard the cars of his campaign train were already being coupled, and he could scarcely wait to get aboard.

  On September 12th, the week the heavy raids began over London, the train started out, streaming towards “the vast obscurity beyond the city”, as Fitzgerald says, “where the dark fields of the Republic roll on under the night”.

  “I am opposed to the most ruthless gang of buccaneers in history,” said Tom.

  The crusade was under weigh.

  On the Train

  “The business of the United States,” said Calvin Coolidge, with that bleak accuracy for which he was not loved, “is business.” Anything else, apparently, was inadmissible.

  “A Presidential candidate”, said a pundit named George L. Wick, in a manual he had prepared for the use of his betters, “ought to regard
himself as similar to the manager of a crew of house-to-house salesmen.”

  When Roosevelt stumped the country, in the election of 1936, he did so in much the same spirit that Elizabeth and James I and VI took their yearly progress. They visited Kenilworth, Theobalds, and anyone sufficiently rich to put them up. Roosevelt with his troop descended upon the great Machine Bosses, Kelly, Hague, and Prendergast. But this time the old fox was not to be drawn. He kept to his earth in the White House, and affected disdain and indifference to the baying of hounds.

  It was Tom, instead, who stumped the country this time.

  Nobody in America had ever seen anything like that train. It went across thirty-one states in fifty days, while Tom made 560 speeches, 520 of them off the cuff. It started with twelve cars, grew to sixteen, and ended with fourteen. It had a lounge car fitted out for the press, a darkroom, and a private car called the Pioneer, for Tom and his family, tacked on behind. It carried seventy-five reporters, radio and newsreel technicians, Sideboard, a staff of experts at one thing or another, an office floor of typewriters, filing cabinets, mimeograph machines, and reference libraries, and, their specialty undivulged, the Pattersons. Tom spent forty-two nights on it. The press, which began by being a little cynical, called it the Squirrel Cage. It was a bit much to take, that train, and by the end of the trip there were a good many people still aboard who never wanted to see each other again.

  Nobody seemed to know what anybody else was doing, and as for Tom, nobody knew what he was apt to do or say, until he had said or done it. The reporters wound up liking him, but he was just about the only thing on that train they did like.