Tom Fool Read online

  Congress passed a resolution condemning such rowdyism and the President himself denounced it as reprehensible. Besides every egg and every stone flung at Tom meant a few more thousand votes for the Republicans.

  Detroit

  He was there, among other things, to speak to the National Federation of Women’s Republican Clubs, a restful group made up of the sort of women he was used to, brittle-ankled elderly ladies in smart black frocks (they still thought of them as frocks even though they called them dresses), who knew what to say to their brokers, and a sprinkling of the busybody, self-consciously alert kind. He liked such women, they liked him, one had only to be boyish and feed them pap, and so he gave an excellent if porous address, since women are unamenable to ideas.

  “Gather your children together on one of our great national holidays,” he said. “Read them the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address. Say with your children and think and mean it while you say it and live every word of this declaration of American faith:

  “I pledge allegiance to my flag

  And to the Republic for which it stands,

  One nation, indivisible,

  With liberty, and justice for all.”

  Sideboard again, by the sound of it, but it was restful to talk about nothing for a change, and it was just what they had come for (actually they had come to see whether he was attractive or not, and though they were dying to know about Edna, they were too well-bred to ask. What was it like, they wondered, to be married to a man like that, and would she make mistakes in the White House? She was middle-class, after all. One of the real things they had against Mrs. Roosevelt was that she quite clearly wasn’t, and was therefore difficult to patronize properly. To judge by his taste in ties, they wouldn’t have that trouble with Edna).

  He was a little late getting back to the hotel, so he quickened his pace as he started into the Book-Cadillac. A woman pushing behind him suddenly half stumbled, and her head and hair began to blossom with torn bits of business paper and rivulets of blood. A waste-paper basket bounced on the street. The woman did not even moan, but put her hands up before her, shaking with shock. The plain-clothes men got Tom inside and the woman was taken off to hospital. Short of plastic surgery, she was probably disfigured for life.

  The morning papers carried a picture of the woman who had thrown the waste-paper basket, sitting pertly in a swivel chair, her eyes sparkling, and a broad smile on her face. She was one Doris LaRue, age thirty-one, an RFC stenographer. She had meant the waste-paper basket for Tom, but as she explained, she had only thrown it in a spirit of fun.

  That was what life was for, wasn’t it, fun?

  On the Train

  Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York, a man who on every count of background and common sense should have known better, undoubtedly did, but didn’t seem to care, got up before the Democratic State Convention on September 30th, and said that nothing could give greater satisfaction to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and the Japanese militarists, than the defeat of Roosevelt by Tom.

  He was only seconding Dorothy Thompson, a female columnist whose oracular manner, to some people, suggested that the Cumean Sybil in some unaccountable way had wound up as housemother in a reform school, who, while admitting that Tom was probably as patriotic as any other American, and not pro-Hitler, pro-Mussolini, pro-Stalin, or pro the Japanese militarists, said you could be sure that in the coming election Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and the Japanese militarists were solidly Republican. This was too much even for her home-base New York newspaper, which refused to print the column and suggested she get another syndicate, which she did, and continued as before.

  As Sinclair Lewis, one of her previous husbands, had once said about Miss Thompson, she’d disappeared into a revolving door ten years ago, and he hadn’t seen her since.

  It might, come to think of it, be a weather clock, not a revolving door.

  Henry Wallace, the Democratic vice-Presidential candidate, a gentleman who consulted an Indian chief spirit control, so Washington gossip said, made it plainer than that. “The Nazi support of the Republican candidate”, he said, “is part of Adolf Hitler’s plan to weaken and eventually conquer the United States. A Republican victory in November is a necessity for the dictator’s plans to overthrow our peace and our liberties.”

  Wallace’s real specialty was the cross-breeding of corn, something he really knew about, and to which he returned eventually, after leaving politics, a not uncognate subject.

  Mr. Lehman made neither an apology nor a retraction. The Democratic Committee Chairman released a statement saying that “Every Nazi and Fascist organization in the United States is for a Republican Presidential candidate”, and Miss Thompson, happily settled in her new syndicate, said over the Columbia Broadcasting System that a vote for Tom “was a vote for Fascism”.

  Michigan

  It was dinner-time when they went through Grand Rapids. One of the reporters was in the dining-car, cutting a slice of Virginia baked ham, when he heard something shatter, felt something warm, looked down at his hand, and saw that trickles of blood were spreading beneath his fingers. He looked at his hand unbelievingly for a minute, held it up before him, swore, and took out his handkerchief.

  Across the aisle a man reached down, picked up the rock, and put it on the table in front of him, with the same absent-minded surprise, but nobody said anything.

  Rather hastily the conductor came through the car and pulled down the shades.

  Yes, it was a crusade. But just what was it the people out there feared and hated so much? Not surely the candidate. He was a decent man.

  Or was that it?

  Or was it just that he was beginning to sum up everything every reactionary coward in this country was afraid of, which chiefly meant themselves, the world outside, and the world inside, that great gulf of yawning spiritual starvation which lay beneath the instalment buying which alone gave meaning to their lives?

  Suppose the country were invaded. Is this what they would do, throw rocks at each other, instead of doing a damn thing to defend themselves?

  It seemed to the reporter, probably so. It would be the roads out of Paris, all over again. Already there were signs along the roads, on the West Coast, saying, “evacuation route”, though the roads didn’t lead anywhere.

  The reporter had not exactly led a sheltered life, but just the same, he looked down at his hand with wonder and surprise.

  Near Pittsburgh

  The Pattersons felt that they had fought a good campaign, despite the candidate.

  They had spent 14,941,142 dollars, or at least, a good part of it, through such organizations as The National Committee to Defend Life Insurance and Savings, the War Veterans for Tom, and the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government; 30,000,000 campaign buttons had been distributed, at three dollars a thousand. There was a corps of Tomettes, girls in striped blouses and pancake berets, who hustled citizens in the streets to vote for Tom. In bad neighbourhoods they travelled in pairs, and one of them had even been spanked by an enraged Democrat, on the lower East Side of New York City. It was possible to buy Tom gum, Tom kites, Tom matches, Tom compacts, and for men, Tom neckties. The Pattersons had co-ordinated the efforts of the Committee of Unemployed Friends, the Businessmen’s Committee for Honest Elections, and the Non-Partisan Women Drawn Together by Fear of the Dangers of a Third Term, Inc., most of them devices for getting around the Hatch Act, which endeavoured to limit campaign expenditure. They had organized sky-writing, bingo parties, garden parties, motorcades and puppet shows. All of which was quite routine. But they kept a finger in the wind, and though the reliable Republican families, the Pews and the DuPonts, paid up handsomely, they paid up less than they had given for Landon or Hoover. The Pattersons knew what that meant, this was just one Presidential election, and they did not want to be lost with it by offending the party machine. Their eyes began to get a wistful, far-away look.

  It is difficult to describe the Pattersons, for
like most of their kind, they had traits, but no character. Indeed, they were not people at all, only a bank account and that odd, vacant look in the eyes.

  They were getting ready to abandon ship. Who had the best chance of winning next time, who would control the most capital contributions to the campaign fund, Dewey or Taft?

  Cleveland

  His defeat could not entirely be blamed on his refusal to deal with his own party’s politicians, or with the splenetic reactionary policies of certain Republican Congressmen and wealthy party whips. It could also be blamed upon the narrow-minded hatreds of the very people he was trying to rouse.

  On the way to Cleveland the train stopped at Sylvania, a manufacturing suburb outside Toledo, and he left it to drive through the slums. It was not an edifying journey He had wanted to speak to the workers, but the workers did not want to be spoken to. They were not amenable to reason. That was one reason they were workers. They shook their fists at him, and called him a shit, a warmonger, a Wall Street jackal, and all the other phrases they had inherited from their own union leaders and from the more emotional propaganda of the Democratic Party itself. They waved crude signs saying Roosevelt Forever and To Hell with Tom. There was nothing for Tom to do but sit there, with a stiff smile on his face, as the car went slowly through the crowds.

  They were not interested in freedom, the dangers of a police state, or of an irresponsible government. By and large, they had no principles of any kind. They were consumers. They were interested only in things, in deep freezers, washing machines, detergents, wider, roomier cars, smooth, easy cigarettes, bigger, better radios; and that they would spend the rest of their lives captive to an exorbitant interest rate upon instalment-buying, under the contrived tyranny of planned obsolescence, getting less and less quality for more and more interest, did not occur to them. Nor did it occur to them that they were as much prisoners of the industries they supported as a southern tenant sharecropper was of the fantastic prices of the local company store. That their own frequently racketeering union leaders were almost as bad as the employers who had preceded them scarcely fazed them at all. They wanted shorter hours and more retirement benefits, even though that meant a bigger kick-back in union dues; they wanted a closed shop and more money to spend, even if the first was immoral, and the second worth only a third of what it had been worth before.

  Nor could you blame them. For a hundred years they had been tricked, lied to, cheated, suppressed, roughed up, killed, squeezed out, and underpaid. No wonder they hated the sons of the men who had done that, and for that matter, sometimes the men who were still trying to do it. But they had been underprivileged for so long that they no longer knew what a privilege was; sapped by an educational system designed in no way to ruffle their mediocrity, they did not even know they were mediocre; and knowing nothing else worth having in this life, they knew they wanted things.

  And so they would get things. But that was all they would get. And who was to say, even so, whether they were wrong, in preferring to be cheated by their own kind, rather than by outsiders?

  “Please listen to me on the radio; please listen to me before you decide,” said Tom. “If we go down this New Deal road, democracy will disappear. Please listen to me. Don’t let them lead you like cattle to the shambles. Boos don’t hurt me. All I ask is a square shake.”

  He talked faster and faster. He slurred his words. Sometimes what he said was unintelligible. But he meant what he said.

  “Labour is prior to and independent of capital,” he told them, quoting Lincoln. “Capital is only the fruit of labour, could never have existed if labour had not existed. Labour is, therefore, the superior of capital and deserves much higher consideration.”

  They knew that. That was why they would not listen.

  “I stand with Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “I have earned my bread by the sweat of my brow and I know, as well as any man, the strong bond that unites those who labour.”

  And so he had. But he had made a success of his labour, and so labour hated him. It could imagine no labour not physical. So, to it, he seemed to do, and to be doing, nothing. It was only empty words.

  “Property is the fruit of labour,” said Lincoln. “Property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example, assuring that his own will be safe when built.”

  But Lincoln in his day had paid only 6,000 for his house in Springfield, and there was nothing in his day to equal the vast, relentless sheds of Willow Run. In Lincoln’s day a man could still lay his own bricks, without having to pay a union stand-in for the privilege of doing so, or, for that matter, management sixty-five cents per brick.

  Also, Lincoln wrote good prose and knew what to do about a bad man when he saw one. He had not had to finish his education in public, as Tom did, by the trial and error method.

  And in Pittsburgh Tom made an error so serious as partially to sink him for good.

  Pittsburgh

  It was because he was old-fashioned and had always lived among men, in a man’s world. If the world of business was run so, then surely labour must indeed be masculine, and so have the prejudices of a male world. But, alas, it is not the men who run America any more, but their wives. So he committed a sin against the matriarchy. If he had attacked the Holy Ghost the effects could not have been worse.

  He lit into Secretary of Labour Perkins, a woman not without talents, but whose character and nature were best summed-up in her name. She was a Perkins. From head to foot. The type is not without a certain perky humour, but it can be deadly in the clinches.

  This was his speech to pay for the speech Lewis would make in his defence later. It went well until the wind-up.

  “I will appoint a Secretary of Labour directly from the ranks of organized labour, and it will not be a woman, either,” he said, and was puzzled by the lack of applause.

  There had been a confetti motorcade through Pittsburgh and cheering crowds along the way. That was in the financial district. Why did they not cheer now?

  He was always chivalrous with women himself. But their place was not in government. They were dangerous as policymakers, for they have such an irrational hatred of everything they do not understand and cannot control, such an immunity to ideas and beliefs and theory, which they regard as meaningless, that not only can they not be reasoned with, but they cannot be shown the suicidal ultimate results of their own attitude. Since, by the laws set forth in insurance tables, they control most of the wealth and property of the United States, as relicts, the country grinds to a standstill. For they will not face new situations or make new decisions. And sometimes decisions do have to be made.

  Frances Perkins seldom made them.

  Hyde Park

  An odd man, the President, a very odd man. Not a great man: a great man is the catalyst of an idea, and he had no ideas. But great in his ambition, great in his moment, great in his enormous political skill. Without him the country would have collapsed. With him, it had an excuse not to pull itself together. He was an opportunist. It was one of his weaknesses to set people against each other, and enjoy what opportunities the resultant controversy produced. And though great men have often, and indeed of necessity, been opportunists, they have been great only because the opportunity matched their own predilections. And the President had none.

  He enjoyed being President, that was all. He was one of those who feel justified by office, not one of those who feel they have to justify it. Personal integrity he had, among his family. But not in office, for he wished to keep in office, at any price. He had none of the agility of Jefferson, the Puritanical, purblind righteousness of Wilson, the ameliorated realism of Jackson, or the contumacious grace of Monroe. He had not been regenerated by office, as had Johnson and Truman. He did not even have the inspired idiocy of Teddy, his cousin, that Mark Twain among Presidents, which is perhaps why Mark Twain had despised the old Bull Moose so; nor
the impersonal but amiable corruption of Cleveland. He was instead an odd mixture of Talleyrand, the Vicar of Bray, and the Man without Qualities. For he did not have qualities. He was hand coloured. He was a megalomaniac, of course, but there were three hundred years of breeding behind that ambition, and so, on the whole, he did quite well. He could do a foolish thing. He could do a bad one. He was amoral. But breeding saw to it, that he never did a wicked one.

  Not, anyway, outside of the politics of office.

  Though he made nothing of the matter publicly, being wise, and though he kept the fact out of sight, he was, after all, in part a padroon, and the padroons were people who took themselves seriously. One has only to sail up the Hudson River to understand the Roosevelts of this world. It is a haunted river, a majestic river, a diverse river, an overweening river, but a real river, despite these attributes. A river older and wilier than American history. The President was a one-man dynasty. That gave him the dignity, and alas the pathos, of a starfish taken off the north side of a rock, at low tide.

  At the moment he was soothing Miss Perkins, not always an easy thing to do. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, with a talent for widow’s weeds, a High Church Episcopal, who would have been an Anglo-Catholic except for an accident of birth, she had once, to settle a strike, written Mr. Sloan, the President of General Motors, a homiletic upon the Golden Rule, decided not to send it, but had read it, all the same, to the press. She was the essence of New England. If virtue had been a sports mistress at a good finishing school, she would have been a good Secretary of Labour. As it was, the President sometimes found it necessary to work around her.