What neither Rick nor Lanny understood was the number of queer people there were in America, each with a cause of his or her own and the firm conviction that it was the most important cause in the world. Before that morning was over Rick had several callers, and each time he went down in the elevator to the reception room of this large apartment hotel. First, an elderly sweet-faced lady who was interested in a movement to forbid the use of animals in medical experiments; she had a handbag full of pamphlets with horrifying pictures of things being done to dogs that might have been her own beloved pets. She besought Rick to read these, and she also pressed upon him a copy of the previous day’s Hearst newspaper, from which Rick learned that an immensely wealthy press lord, who in his early days had promoted many causes on behalf of human beings, now was crusading to let human beings perish in order to spare the feelings of dogs.
The next was a threadbare old gentleman with trembling voice, who had had some difficulty in getting by the august, resplendent doorman of an apartment house just off Park Avenue; he had said that he was a friend of Sir Eric, and it was true because he was a friend of all mankind. He had a plan to end poverty by what he called the “Bacon and Eggs Plan,” in order to distinguish it from the “Ham and Eggs Plan” which had been put on the ballot in California a few years before. It involved the distribution of paper money to the aged and needy, for both of which classes this gentleman appeared eligible. He was ready to start publication of a paper, he said, and all he wanted was for Sir Eric to put up the money.
Also, before the day was over, there came a severe-looking, pale-faced man about seven feet tall—at any rate he towered over Rick. He had a trace of Swedish accent and announced in solemn basso profundo, “I have a revelation direct from God.”
“Indeed?” said the Englishman politely. “What is it?”
“It is a manuscript,” replied the man—he had a large parcel under his arm.
“And may I see it?” asked Rick, still more politely.
The answer was given in a voice as near like God’s as possible. “No human eye has ever beheld it. No human eye ever will behold it.”
Rick took care in extracting himself from that situation, for he knew from ancient Hebrew days that God had sometimes given alarming instructions to his prophets. Rick gave instructions to the girl at the switchboard that in the future Sir Eric would receive visitors only by appointment and that strangers were to write and tell him what they wanted.
XI
It took the couple no more than a day or two to get settled in Zoltan’s comfortable apartment, full of books and objets d’art. The four collaborators would go out for one square meal each day and feed one another in picnic style for the rest. A cleaning woman would come once a week, and the rest of the time they could have the two places to themselves. People who set out to change the world need all the time there is; and perhaps if they knew in advance what a small amount of success they would have, they wouldn’t make a start. However, it is clear that the world would never change at all if nobody tried to change it; and you would have a hard time finding any adult person in the present world who would say that he or she was entirely pleased with things as they stood.
What these four persons wanted was to put a set of important ideas before as large a number of people as possible; and what was the best way to do it? By the spoken voice? They might all four have become lecturers and taken to the platform and the road. It was a slow and trying way, and for Rick it would have been especially hard. They might write and publish books, or offer prizes for the best books by others; but that too was a slow way, and the A-bomb had filled them all with a sense of urgency.
Pamphlets were easier and quicker; but how would you get them circulated? In the old days people had read pamphlets; Tom Paine had helped to make the history of America with his Common Sense and his The Crisis. But pamphleteering had been by-passed as the American way. What the masses in America read was newspapers and low-priced magazines; also, they listened to the radio and went to the movies. If you wanted mass circulation, those were the ways to get it. They were all enormously expensive and conducted for the profit of private owners; a genuine liberal among the owners was as rare as a white blackbird, and that was why opinion in America lagged so far behind mechanical development—including the aforesaid A-bomb.
Lanny said, “Whatever we publish ought to look like what the people are used to reading.”
To which the experienced Rick replied, “The trouble with that is, everything the people are used to is produced on a mass scale, and to reproduce it on a smaller scale would be very costly. You could use up your million dollars in a few months.”
“The people want to be entertained, and only a few want to be instructed”—thus pronounced Laurel. Such was the barrier, and to break through it was possible only to top genius, to which none of the four laid claim. Rick suggested gallantly that maybe Laurel had it; anyhow, she was the only one of them who had managed to get mass circulation for her work. “My plays were written for the carriage trade,” he declared. “You can laugh at such people, and make them enjoy it—if you are a Bernard Shaw; but when you become too explicit they drop you—or the producer does it for them.”
XII
They needed figures and expert advice, but they distrusted the publicity people and the promoters, who charged fancy fees and whose advice might be shaped by their own interests. Laurel went to her magazine editors, who thought highly of her and passed her on to others in the trade who had experience of different kinds. She also interviewed printers who could tell her about prices—and about the difficulties of getting paper in these times.
Rick went to the Socialists, whose job was carrying on various kinds of small-scale propaganda; they were glad to tell a British comrade about it, especially when he consented to write something about the miracle that had just been produced in his homeland. Rick found the American Socialists in a somewhat discouraged state because they had not been able to achieve either mass circulation or a mass vote. They were inclined to lay the blame upon F.D.R., who had misled the masses with doles and delusive promises. They thought now that things would be going better for the party, because Harry Truman was turning rapidly to the Right, and the returning soldiers would surely be ready to consider the need for fundamental change.
As for Lanny, he got into his car and went scouting, first on Long Island and then among the Oranges—so called not because they grew there, but because the Dutch had been there. He wanted a place where they would have access to a moderate-sized library and where they could find a printing establishment, an office with half a dozen rooms, and a residence large enough—they had decided to keep house together since they got along so well and it was a nuisance visiting back and forth. These things were easier to find since the war had come to an end, and a lot of people had the idea fixed in their heads that there was going to be a slump and widespread unemployment. It had happened a couple of years after the last war, and few of the rich put any faith in those taxing-and-spending techniques which they hated and which obliged them to earn their money over and over again instead of salting it away the first time they got it.
That left Nina, and she didn’t sit at home. She put on her best clothes and, looking very much the lady, went visiting the business offices of radio stations. She had the idea that the radio was a more important social force than her friends realized, and she didn’t let herself be bluffed by the statement that the cost of a single coast-to-coast broadcast would be something like five thousand dollars for a single quarter-hour. Why did you have to reach two coasts? Why not start on one and see what happened? Maybe there were radio managers who were worried about business prospects too.
The English lady discovered that there were a number of small independent stations in and around New York, and they were glad to talk with anybody who looked like money. They were not too choosy about programs; if you paid for the time in advance you could oppose the vivisection of cats and dogs, you could advoca
te government printing and distribution of paper money, or you could tell about a revelation direct from God. You could even advocate birth control, provided you didn’t go into detail as to how it was done—and of course you mustn’t offend the Catholic Church.
No less important, some of these stations had friendly relations with others scattered over the northeastern part of the country, and they sometimes hooked up when they had a program of wider interest. You could build up a temporary chain that way, and if you had something the public really wanted you would accumulate a clientele; have a regular period once or twice a week, and people would get into the habit of listening to you. For a thing like ending war there were thousands of people who would be interested, and if you had something convincing to propose you could ask them for money, and it might pour in. That was the way Father Coughlin had built up his influence, back in the twenties; station by station, he had put together his radio chain, and it could still be done. “It don’t matter if it’s an idea or a soap powder,” was the slogan that Nina brought away with her.
XIII
This research went on for several weeks, and by that time they had a dossier which might have cost fifty thousand dollars if they had bought it from one of the concerns specializing in business research. But they were learning by doing; their questions awakened interest, and it was pleasant to discover how many business people showed an interest in the idea of ending war in the world and wanted to be told how it could be done. Americans, it appeared, weren’t nearly as bad as their business system tried to make them. They were friendly and genial and glad to take time off to give information when they were approached in the right way. They even wanted to have their names put down and to be informed when the enterprise got started. If the four had been soliciting subscriptions they might have taken in enough to keep them going.
The lecture at the Rand School came off. This institution, founded by the wife of George D. Herron some forty years earlier, was dedicated to the cause of democratic Socialism. The Communists, dedicated to the cause of Socialism by dictatorship, hated the Rand School more than they hated any capitalist institution. Their headquarters were only three blocks distant, and the organs of the rival parties gave a good part of their space to pointing out each other’s errors.
The auditorium, which could accommodate close to a thousand, sitting and standing, was crowded that evening. The victory of the British Labour party was perhaps the most sensational event in the history of the movement. How had it been won, what did it signify, and what use would be made of it? A good part of the audience was made up of Jews; their fathers had been educated at this school. The families had moved to the Bronx or Brooklyn, and now the sons and daughters went to City College or Brooklyn College by day and to the Rand School in the evening. They came with alert and eager faces, taking the intellectual life seriously; the awful things which had been happening in Central Europe had made them into a thoughtful generation.
The chairman explained that Sir Eric Pomeroy-Nielson had lost a part of one knee when he had been shot down as a pilot fighting over France in World War I; therefore he was accustomed to speak sitting. He sat behind a small desk as if he were a college professor giving a lecture. He had known personally the men and women of two generations who had built the British Labour movement: Keir Hardic, Ramsay MacDonald, Tom Mann, H. M. Hyndman, and the Webbs of the past, and Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin, Clement Attlee, Stafford Cripps of the present. Sir Eric himself had written for Labour papers and spoken at Labour meetings for the past quarter of a century; he told how the movement had been built, how the workers had been educated, the extremists restrained, and a large part of the middle classes won over. He said that in his opinion this taking over of the British Commonwealth of Nations by its organized workers was the most important single event of modern times.
What was Labour going to do with its victory? It was going to do what it had promised in an official campaign pamphlet which had been studied by the voters. It was going to make a basic portion of the nation’s industries into national properties, paying for them at the market price with government bonds. It would reorganize them, abolishing the wastes of competition, and turn them to public service. It would do this in peaceable and orderly fashion under the constitution, without killing or robbing anybody. The task wouldn’t be easy, for Britain had spent the greater part of her resources on the war and now was a poor country; everybody would have to work hard and make sacrifices, and anybody who thought that Socialism was going to mean ease and luxury at once was doomed to bitter disappointment.
The Labour movement would explain this to its people, as it had explained other problems and dangers in the past. What the Webbs had called “the inevitability of gradualness” was something that emanated from the national temperament; the British people were not extremists or revolutionists, and they didn’t trust people who bragged and made large promises. Said Sir Eric, “If you watch our movement for the next five years you will see that we do what we were elected to do, no less and not much more.”
XIV
The question period is the most interesting part of any lecture, and there were many who wanted to have their doubts cleared up, and others, the Commies or fellow travelers, who wanted to put the speaker in a hole. Many of the questions had to do with the application of British tactics to America, and the speaker said he had no competence to discuss that. The general principle of achieving socialization by popular consent would apply to all the peoples of the world who possessed democratic institutions and were accustomed to using them. That meant the Anglo-Saxon lands and the Scandinavian, also Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland. It would include France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, provided that the Communists would allow it to happen, which he thought was doubtful.
The Communists, who put an end to free speech wherever they can, found it suited their purposes in the Rand School auditorium. A bespectacled young woman arose and wanted to know if the speaker really thought that the capitalist class of Britain would permit the abolition of their privileges without forcible resistance. The speaker answered that they had already done it. The Coalition government was out and the Labour government was in, and Winston Churchill had already taken his place as leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. He would criticize and he would scold, as the free institutions of Britain permitted him to do; but he wouldn’t dream of sedition, and if in 1950 the Labour party carried the elections with a program for further socialization, he would submit as he had done before, regretfully but politely.
Again and again someone wanted to know how these lessons applied to America. Rick said that the problem was different because America’s political ways were different. America had the primary system, which enabled the people to select their party candidates by direct vote. That made it possible for the people to take possession of an old party and use it for a new purpose. By that means it had been possible for Roosevelt to take and use the Democratic party, and had thus made it difficult to interest the workers in a new, or third party.
Then, of course, the fat was in the fire. What relationship did the New Deal bear to British Socialism? Lanny, who had placed himself at one side where he could watch the audience, saw that everybody was sitting forward on his or her seat; this was the topic of debate of which you never heard an end in the Rand School. Sir Eric quoted the saying of an old-time British political leader, that the Tories had caught the Whigs in swimming and stolen their clothes. Rick said, “We Labour people have always felt that our business was to have our ideas stolen by our opponents. For half a century they have been taking our programs of social security and putting them into effect. You in America didn’t feel the need of such measures until fifteen years ago; then the Democratic party began putting them into effect, and I should think you would let the Republicans do the worrying about it.”
Did the speaker think that the Socialists should use the Democratic party? An earnest young girl student asked the question, and Rick smiled and said he wou
ldn’t tell even if he knew which he didn’t. Americans knew their own institutions best, and they wouldn’t need an Englishman to tell them how to go to work.
An old-time Socialist whom Lanny remembered from the days when he had visited the Rand School before the great depression inquired whether the speaker thought there was any prospect of the socialization of basic industry in America. Rick said that basic changes would come only when there was basic need for them. American industry was now at its peak of prosperity, and only when the next slump came would drastic action be forced. And did he expect a slump soon? He answered that this depended upon whether international understanding could be achieved. If there should be another war, of course there would be no slump; even preparation for war would postpone it, perhaps for years.
“So,” said the Englishman, “if our Communist friends who anticipate a slump are wise, they will keep hands off and let this country follow its normal boom-and-bust cycle, as it has been doing for more than a century. What I fear is that the Kremlin will yield to the temptation to grab while the grabbing looks good. In that case they will compel the capitalist world to rearm, and thus will keep the capitalists in the saddle for nobody knows how much longer.”
Oh, how mad that made the Communists! They got up and started an argument, and the audience started to hiss and boo them. But Sir Eric said, “Let them ask their questions. We Englishmen are used to being heckled. It is a difference of opinion that makes horse races, and if nobody disagrees with me I’d be sure I hadn’t said anything worth listening to.” So they laughed and listened, and the meeting was a success.
20
Multitude of Counselors
I
Professor Goudsmit went to Washington to make a report, and then he came to New York and phoned Lanny. They had a lot to talk about, and he came to dinner and spent the evening. The atomic bomb, which had been the most closely guarded of secrets, was now something you could sit and chat about in drawing-rooms—and this the old-timers found hard to get used to. Nina and Rick came, and Lanny answered the Professor’s questions about what he had seen in New Mexico, and what Einstein had said, and Oppy, and the others; all the things that had been top secret until the 6th of August.
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 41