“What do you have in mind to do?”
“I want you to keep this money. You are used to handling it and it won’t attract any attention.”
“That’s quite a responsibility, old man. I couldn’t even give you a receipt.”
“Of course not. It’ll just be an understanding between us—like so many others we’ve had. When I find a chance to use some of it for the cause, I’ll drop you a note. If you don’t hear from me in the course of a year, it’ll be safe for you to assume that the Nazis have got me, and you can find some other way to put the money to work.”
“And suppose something should happen to me?”
“That’s a chance I have to take. You look fairly healthy.”
Lanny grinned. “Last year an astrologer in Munich told me I was going to die in Hongkong within two or three years.”
“Well, you don’t believe in astrology and neither do I. So what?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Genosse. My father has a sealed envelope in his safe, containing my will. I’ll put in with it a memo that so-and-so many thousand belong to Tiergarten. If I die in Hongkong Robbie will open the envelope, and if you show up and ask for the money you’ll get it.”
“I don’t see any harm that can do.”
Lanny added: “I’ll put the money into Budd-Erling stock. If a war comes, it will shoot up to the ceiling, and you’ll make some new discoveries about American private enterprise. The stock will be registered in my name and so it cannot be stolen.”
“O.K. by me,” said the ex-Capitán, in English. Fresh from the International Brigade, he knew how Americans talked. Now he unpinned the bunch of “incentive” from an inside coat pocket, and counting aloud, took off seventeen notes from the roll. “I’ll keep one for my trip and for use in Germany,” he said. “No doubt I can manage to change it here.”
“Go into a smart restaurant and order a meal,” suggested the explayboy. “Tell them you haven’t anything smaller, and they’ll have to get you the change.” He took the notes and stuffed them into an inside pocket, but not bothering to pin them up. He was used to handling such notes, having sometimes bought a painting for as high as a hundred thousand dollars in cash.
They were in the neighborhood of Monck’s hotel, and Lanny drew up by the curb. He looked into the other man’s face by the dim street light, and said: “Lieber Genosse, we don’t meet very often, and we don’t express our feelings as freely as we might. We have been speaking about incentives, and I want to tell you that you have been one to me. I honor you for singleminded devotion to the cause of freedom and social justice, such as I have met only a few times in my life.”
“That is a very pleasant thing to hear,” replied the man of the underground. “You have said it better than I can, and I’ll just tell you that I feel the same way about you. You have given up far more than I ever had to give.”
“We could have quite an argument over that, Genosse. You have been risking your life continually during the five years that I have known you; and all the time I have been traveling de luxe all over two continents.”
“You gave up one wife for the cause, you lost another to the cause, and you have just told me that you cannot marry a third because of the cause. That ought to count in any balance, I should think.”
“Well,” said Lanny, “let’s leave it that way. You think I am tops and I think you are tops, and we will trust each other and do our best for what we believe in.”
So they said Auf Wiedersehen—see you again—on a New York sidewalk, the “again” to be on a Berlin sidewalk in about three months, so Lanny promised, and added: “God willing.”
11
The Trail of the Serpent
I
Lanny was motoring across the State of Pennsylvania; a land of low hills and many valleys, of endlessly changing views—dairy country, fruit country, meadows with fresh green grass and fields of newly sprouted grain. There were farmhouses tucked under great shade trees, red painted barns, orchards showing their first tints of green, little streams winding, and patches of what the farmers called wood-lots. The roads were well paved and not too curving, so that it was possible to drive five hundred miles a day without discomfort, and without paying heed to frequent April showers.
By Lanny’s side sat the suave and sophisticated Forrest Quadratt, a nervous, eager talker, keeping up a flow of conversation, as if it had been some time since he had had a really cultivated listener. Always his tone was low, his attitude that of gently smiling cynicism; he knew the world of men and women and expected very little of it; he found his satisfaction in a sense of superiority to its follies and treacheries. The world was like that, and to expect anything different was to be a dupe.
Only on one subject did this world-weary esthete change his tone, and that was the subject of Germany. Here dwelt a people whose great powers had been demonstrated in every field and whose future was limitless: a disciplined people, moved by a deeply rooted race consciousness, and capable not merely of ruling but of teaching a vital culture to the ruled. Quadratt called himself an American, but he was apt to forget this in his conversation, and rarely had anything good to say about his native land. Its culture appeared to him hopelessly tainted by its Puritan origin; it was immature, crude, hopelessly naïve. The qualities of which it was most proud, individualism and reckless competitiveness, made certain that its career in the world would be short.
The World War, Lanny gathered, had been a shock and disappointment to this retired poet; it hadn’t gone according to his formulas. Prior to 1917, he had labored tirelessly to keep America from coming in, and after that he had given the Fatherland as much help as was consistent with keeping out of jail. But it had all been in vain, and for the past twenty years Quadratt had been scolding at history. He had written an elaborate defense of his cousin, the Kaiser, based on intimate knowledge, since he had been a frequent visitor at Doorn. As Lanny had never read this book, Quadratt told him about it: a long story, involving many personalities whom Lanny had met.
A series of great wrongs had been done, and were in process of being righted. Unfortunately, there was no way to accomplish this but by force, and Germany was accumulating the force; the ex-poet reverted to the lyricism of his early youth on this subject. It was a great hour, but one of danger, and everyone who loved and honored German culture must be active in its defense. America must be made to realize where its true interests lay; surely not in alliance with Britain, its great rival for world trade and mastery! This German-American hated the British Empire with a bitterness which he had no reason to conceal. He hated it for its arrogance, its long period of success and the self-assurance this had begotten. He hated it for its hypocrisy, its covering of greed with a coating of piety. What a preposterous thing to grab all the most desirable parts of the earth and then set up the doctrine that the grabbing days were over, that law and order were permanently established and that anybody who tried to change the status quo was a criminal! Even the Versailles Diktat was called sacred!
Now there had stepped upon the scene of history a man who was going to end all that, a dynamic personality, who was proving that history was fluid, not fixed by edict of Number 10 Downing Street. They talked about Hitler; and Lanny, in exchange for many confidences, told some of the secrets of the Berghof, including the retreat on the Kehlstein. Quadratt had heard about this, but could not claim that he had ever visited it; neither had he ever heard the Führer open his heart on the subject of Mohammed, the man who above all others had succeeded in impressing his ideas and practices upon mankind.
Early in their talk Quadratt had laid down as one of the fixed principles, of Nazidom that they wanted nothing in the Western Hemisphere and therefore America had nothing to fear from them. Lanny had smiled and let it pass for the moment. He had learned a technique for unveiling the real opinions of intriguers; he would espouse the opinions himself, and with such eloquence that the hearer would be tempted to agree. After a while he brought up the subject of Sou
th America, and remarked that from his point of view Eastern and Western Hemispheres were geographical terms, having nothing to do with political or economic realities. “As a matter of fact,” said he, “Argentina is about the same distance from New York as from Berlin, and the bulge of Brazil and the bulge of Africa have brought it about that there is more air traffic with Germany than with North America. The greater part of the population of South America is made of ignorant and besotted Indians, and what culture the continent has is Catholic and reactionary. I have always considered that South America offers the best field for German expansion, and many of my friends agree. There doesn’t have to be any fighting—all we have to do is to let the Germans alone, and they will soon own both Argentina and Brazil, because of their superior organizing ability.”
So after that it wasn’t necessary for Quadratt to go on lying any longer. He said that all Germany wanted was free and fair opportunity. Already most of South America was covered by a network of German airlines, and they were all carrying Nazi propaganda literature, in German and Italian, Spanish and Portuguese and English; also picture pamphlets for the Indians who couldn’t read. Lanny knew the shrewd little doctor who directed this work, and he said that it was the first time in history that the science of mass psychology and the techniques of modern advertising and promotion had been applied to the spreading of a political system. “To me it is one of the modern miracles, and I long ago made up my mind that the people who invented the technique and applied it were entitled to reap the benefits it is bringing them.”
“Budd, I see that you are a man of discernment!” exclaimed the cousin of the Kaiser.
II
They sped past the sand dunes which border Lake Erie and came after dark to the great city of Cleveland, with its tall buildings and splendid drives. They spent the night there, and early next morning went on to Toledo and from there an hour or so to the north. The boulevard took them to the edge of a sort of plateau, and on a flat plain below them they beheld one of the great Works of man: a vast expanse of one-story factory buildings, with a row of eight or ten enormously tall chimneys, painted black and standing up like organ pipes—only the music which came out of them was that of industry and commerce, not that of Handel and Bach. It was the River Rouge plant of the Ford Motor Company, goal of their long drive.
A four-lane boulevard took them to the place; on one side were acres of parking space packed with rows of cars, and a high steel bridge carried the workers across the highway to the plant gates. Visitors went in by a separate entrance; and as Lanny and his friend were ahead of their appointment they followed the procession of tourists from all over America who came each day to visit this most exciting of all their country’s spectacles: the empire of the “flivver,” the birthplace and nursery of the most widely known of automobiles.
Visitors were taken about the plant in open “rubberneck-wagons,” and every now and then they got out and entered one of the buildings and were escorted along a gallery, looking down upon an assembly line known as “the belt.” First you saw parts of cars being made and then you saw the parts being put together until the finished product rolled off and out under its own power. You saw so many that—so the story ran—you came out scratching your head to see if any of the darned little things had got into your hair. There had been a period, a decade or two ago, when the favorite amusement of the American people had been the making up of jokes like that; and some bright fellow in the promotion department had had the idea of setting all the salesmen and agents to collecting them and publishing them in a pamphlet called The Ford Jokebook.
Promptly at the hour set, the two presented themselves at the office. Quadratt had phoned to Harry Bennett, the great man’s factotum and chief of police, for an appointment, and now without delay they were escorted to the inner sanctum, a place very hard to reach. It was simple and plain, like its owner; the room paneled in early American pine, and the owner clad in what might be called “modern American business.” He was tall and spare, one of those shrewd Yankees who eat lightly and live long; he had just had his seventy-sixth birthday and was slightly withered, but still spry and interested in what came along—or, more exactly, in what Harry Bennett allowed to get near him.
III
Henry Ford, the “Flivver King”! Lanny had been hearing about him since childhood; he stood for the United States of America to all the world; there was no place where his car hadn’t gone, except the tops of the high mountains and the bottoms of the deep oceans. A born machinist escaped from a farm, he had been seized by the determination to make a “horseless carriage,” a cheap one that common men like himself could afford to own and run. He had come on the scene at the right moment, and the more cars he made, the more he had to make until now he was past his ten millionth. Some of the oldest were still on the roads, and on trails in Tibet and the Andes mountains. “Tin Lizzies,” they were called, affectionately; oblong boxes on wheels, as ugly as man could imagine—Henry had said that the customer could have any color he wanted provided it was black.
This was, in all probability, the richest man in the world; his fortune was estimated at somewhere between one and two billions, and he, or members of his family, owned it all. He could not endure to have stockholders, idle persons drawing income from his labors, so he had bought them all out. He was the most self-willed of men; nobody could oppose him, and again and again he had fired a good part of his staff. “Do what I say,” was his life motto. He had forbidden unions in his plants, and was fighting them by every means, not excluding criminal. But the New Deal was determined to break his will and force unions into all his plants. This was the unbearable outrage which poisoned his old age, and the problem of thwarting the unions had become an obsession with him.
That was the basis of his interest in the Nazis. They had shown how to do it; they had no walking delegates in their shops and no Reds on soapboxes outside their plants; they had law and order, organization and mass-production, the things that Henry lived by and for. So, when friends of Germany came to tell him how it was done, he listened gladly, and when they asked him for jobs he made room for them. He had a grandson of the Kaiser on his staff, and one of his engineers was Fritz Kuhn, founder and head of the German-American Bund. As a result his plants swarmed with Nazis, and so did the city of Detroit and its surrounding towns.
In one of the early panics a group of Wall Street banks had sought to lend money to Henry Ford on terms which might have enabled them to take his company away from him. From that day on he had hated all bankers, and because someone had told him they were Jews, he hated Jews. He had carried on a crusade against them, and reprinted a grotesque invention, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This had hurt business, so Henry had been persuaded to retract and apologize; but he hadn’t really changed his mind, and that was one more reason why he admired the Nazis, and listened to their shrewd agents who whispered into his ear that what was needed for America was a pure native hundred per cent movement, combining all the other groups which were flourishing throughout the country—the Ku Klux, the Black Legion, the Silver Shirts, the Crusader Whiteshirts, the American Liberty League, the Anglo-Saxon Federation—this last the creation and pet of Henry’s own editor and radio propagandist, William J. Cameron. There was a “Ford radio hour,” and for some fifty minutes every Sunday evening, music lovers listened to Mozart and Beethoven, and in the middle of it they gnashed their teeth for six minutes while Mr. Cameron’s rasping voice propounded a worm’s-eye view of their country’s social problems.
IV
“Here is where you can get all the money in the world,”—so Forrest Quadratt had said to Lanny as they were approaching the plant. Lanny had answered: “For heaven’s sake don’t say a word about money, or even hint at it. These very rich men are shy as mountain sheep, and you have to know them intimately before you approach the subject.” The ex-poet, who had never been a rich man and had always had to live by his wits, conceived a new respect for a rich man’s son
who was one of the insiders and knew how to play the big-money game.
Quadratt kept quiet and listened, and Lanny listened, too; for the Flivver King was a great talker when he had what he considered the right audience. He was a genius in his special field, the large-scale production of material goods, and especially of means of transportation. Why people wanted to be able to roll at sixty miles an hour from one place to another, and what they would do at place number two that they couldn’t have done at place number one—these were questions which did not concern Henry Ford. He believed in the utmost liberty, except inside the Ford plants, and each Ford-owner would drive his car wherever he pleased, and somehow a mystical principle of progress would bring it about that mankind would benefit by his journey. Henry’s business was to reduce the price of the car, so that more people would be able to buy it, and thus his plants would grow in size while those of his rivals diminished.
To that end, a huge staff was engaged in every sort of research, and Henry watched and oversaw it, gloated over its progress, and enjoyed telling visitors about it. He was making everything that went into his car—and you would be astonished to hear how many things there were. All sorts of metals and combinations of metals; and plastics—he was making them out of soy beans, and couldn’t get enough; and if incidentally he learned to make a hundred other things out of soy beans, that was a hundred new businesses and new ways to make money. Henry didn’t care about the money, he assured Lanny; his pleasure was to make things. As it happened, the son of Budd-Erling had been hearing that from his father and his grandfather, ever since he could remember. It was what he had heard from every great moneymaker he had ever met in all his plutocratic career—with the sole exception of Hermann Wilhelm Göring, Reichsminister and Reichsmarschall of the German Third Empire, the only one who had made bold to say: “I like money, and I mean to get every mark and dollar and pound and franc that I can.”
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