It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

  “Yeh, that was comical. Old Reverend certainly blatted like a goat!”

  (Could she kill him? Would it be wise to kill him? Had Mary meant to kill Swan? Would They be harder on Julian and her father if she killed Shad? Incidentally, did it hurt much to get hanged?)

  He was yawning, “Well, Sis, ole kid, how about you and me taking a little trip to New York in a couple weeks? See some high life. I’ll get you the best soot in the best hotel in town, and we’ll take in some shows—I hear this Callin’ Stalin is a hot number—real Corpo art—and I’ll buy you some honest-to-God champagne wine! And then if we find we like each other enough, I’m willing for us, if you are, to get hitched!”

  “But, Shad! We could never live on your salary. I mean—I mean of course the Corpos ought to pay you better—mean, even better than they do.”

  “Listen, baby! I ain’t going to have to get along on any miserable county commissioner’s salary the rest of my life! Believe me, I’m going to be a millionaire before very long!”

  Then he told her: told her precisely the sort of discreditable secret for which she had so long fished in vain. Perhaps it was because he was sober. Shad, when drunk, reversed all the rules and became more peasant-like and cautious with each drink.

  He had a plan. That plan was as brutal and as infeasible as any plan of Shad Ledue for making large money would be. Its essence was that he should avoid manual labor and should make as many persons miserable as possible. It was like his plan, when he was still a hired man, to become wealthy by breeding dogs—first stealing the dogs and, preferably, the kennels.

  As County Commissioner he had not merely, as was the Corpo custom, been bribed by the shopkeepers and professional men for protection against the M.M.’s. He had actually gone into partnership with them, promising them larger M.M. orders, and, he boasted, he had secret contracts with these merchants all written down and signed and tucked away in his office safe.

  Sissy got rid of him that evening by being difficult, while letting him assume that the conquest of her would not take more than three or four more days. She cried furiously after he had gone—in the comforting presence of Mrs. Candy, who first put away a butcher knife with which, Sissy suspected, she had been standing ready all evening.

  Next morning Sissy drove to Hanover and shamelessly tattled to Francis Tasbrough about the interesting documents Shad had in his safe. She did not ever see Shad Ledue again.

  She was very sick about his being killed. She was very sick about all killing. She found no heroism but only barbaric bestiality in having to kill so that one might so far live as to be halfway honest and kind and secure. But she knew that she would be willing to do it again.

  The Jessup house was magniloquently rented by that noble Roman, that political belch, Ex-Governor Isham Hubbard, who, being tired of again trying to make a living by peddling real estate and criminal law, was pleased to accept the appointment as successor to Shad Ledue.

  Sissy hastened to Beecher Falls and to Lorinda Pike.

  Father Perefixe took charge of the N.U. cell, merely saying, as he had said daily since Buzz Windrip had been inaugurated, that he was fed-up with the whole business and was immediately going back to Canada. In fact, on his desk he had a Canadian time-table.

  It was now two years old.

  * * *

  Sissy was in too snappish a state to stand being mothered, being fattened and sobbed over and brightly sent to bed. Mrs. Candy had done only too much of that. And Philip had given her all the parental advice she could endure for a while. It was a relief when Lorinda received her as an adult, as one too sensible to insult by pity—received her, in fact, with as much respect as if she were an enemy and not a friend.

  After dinner, in Lorinda’s new tea room, in an aged house which was now empty of guests for the winter except for the constant infestation of whimpering refugees, Lorinda, knitting, made her first mention of the dead Mary.

  “I suppose your sister did intend to kill Swan, eh?”

  “I don’t know. The Corpos didn’t seem to think so. They gave her a big military funeral.”

  “Well, of course, they don’t much care to have assassinations talked about and maybe sort of become a general habit. I agree with your father. I think that, in many cases, assassinations are really rather unfortunate—a mistake in tactics. No. Not good. Oh, by the way, Sissy, I think I’m going to get your father out of concentration camp.”

  “What?”

  Lorinda had none of the matrimonial moans of Emma; she was as business-like as ordering eggs.

  “Yes. I tried everything. I went to see Tasbrough, and that educational fellow, Peaseley. Nothing doing. They want to keep Doremus in. But that rat, Aras Dilley, is at Trianon as guard now. I’m bribing him to help your father escape. We’ll have the man here for Christmas, only kind of late, and sneak him into Canada.”

  “Oh!” said Sissy.

  * * *

  A few days afterward, reading a coded New Underground telegram which apparently dealt with the delivery of furniture, Lorinda shrieked, “Sissy! All you-know-what has busted loose! In Washington! Lee Sarason has deposed Buzz Windrip and grabbed the dictatorship!”

  “Oh!” said Sissy.

  35

  IN HIS TWO YEARS of dictatorship, Berzelius Windrip daily became more a miser of power. He continued to tell himself that his main ambition was to make all citizens healthy, in purse and mind, and that if he was brutal it was only toward fools and reactionaries who wanted the old clumsy systems. But after eighteen months of Presidency he was angry that Mexico and Canada and South America (obviously his own property, by manifest destiny) should curtly answer his curt diplomatic notes and show no helpfulness about becoming part of his inevitable empire.

  And daily he wanted louder, more convincing Yeses from everybody about him. How could he carry on his heart-breaking labor if nobody ever encouraged him? he demanded. Anyone, from Sarason to inter-office messenger, who did not play valet to his ego he suspected of plotting against him. He constantly increased his bodyguard, and as constantly distrusted all his guards and discharged them, and once took a shot at a couple of them, so that in all the world he had no companion save his old aide Lee Sarason, and perhaps Hector Macgoblin, to whom he could talk easily.

  He felt lonely in the hours when he wanted to shuck off the duties of despotism along with his shoes and his fine new coat. He no longer went out racketing. His cabinet begged him not to clown in barrooms and lodge entertainments; it was not dignified, and it was dangerous to be too near to strangers.

  So he played poker with his bodyguard, late at night, and at such times drank too much, and he cursed them and glared with bulging eyes whenever he lost, which, for all the good-will of his guards about letting him win, had to be often, because he pinched their salaries badly and locked up the spoons. He had become as unbouncing and unbuzzing a Buzz as might be, and he did not know it.

  All the while he loved the People just as much as he feared and detested Persons, and he planned to do something historic. Certainly! He would give each family that five thousand dollars a year just as soon now as he could arrange it.

  * * *

  And Lee Sarason, forever making his careful lists, as patient at his desk as he was pleasure-hungry on the couch at midnight parties, was beguiling officials to consider him their real lord and the master of Corpoism. He kept his promises to them, while Windrip always forgot. His office door became the door of ambition. In Washington, the reporters privily spoke of this assistant secretary and that general as “Sarason men.” His clique was not a government within a government; it was the government itself, minus the megaphones. He had the Secretary of Corporations (a former vice-president of the American Federation of Labor) coming to him secretly every evening, to report on labor politics and in especial on such proletarian leaders as were dissatisfied with Windrip as Chief—i.e., with their own share in the swag. He had from the Secretary of the Treasury (though this functionary, one Webster Skittle, was
not a lieutenant of Sarason but merely friendly) confidential reports on the affairs of those large employers who, since under Corpoism it was usually possible for a millionaire to persuade the judges in the labor-arbitration courts to look at things reasonably, rejoiced that with strikes outlawed and employers regarded as state officials, they would now be in secure power forever.

  Sarason knew the quiet ways in which these reinforced industrial barons used arrests by the M.M.’s to get rid of “trouble-makers,” particularly of Jewish radicals—a Jewish radical being a Jew with nobody working for him. (Some of the barons were themselves Jews; it is not to be expected that race-loyalty should be carried so insanely far as to weaken the pocketbook.)

  The allegiance of all such Negroes as had the sense to be content with safety and good pay instead of ridiculous yearnings for personal integrity Sarason got by being photographed shaking hands with the celebrated Negro Fundamentalist clergyman, the Reverend Dr. Alexander Nibbs, and through the highly publicized Sarason Prizes for the Negroes with the largest families, the fastest time in floor-scrubbing, and the longest periods of work without taking a vacation.

  “No danger of our good friends, the Negroes, turning Red when they’re encouraged like that,” Sarason announced to the newspapers.

  It was a satisfaction to Sarason that in Germany, all military bands were now playing his national song, “Buzz and Buzz” along with the Horst Wessel hymn, for, though he had not exactly written the music as well as the words, the music was now being attributed to him abroad.

  * * *

  As a bank clerk might, quite rationally, worry equally over the whereabouts of a hundred million dollars’ worth of the bank’s bonds, and of ten cents of his own lunch money, so Buzz Windrip worried equally over the welfare—that is, the obedience to himself—of a hundred and thirty-odd million American citizens and the small matter of the moods of Lee Sarason, whose approval of him was the one real fame. (His wife Windrip did not see oftener than once a week, and anyway, what that rustic wench thought was unimportant.)

  The diabolic Hector Macgoblin frightened him; Secretary of War Luthorne and Vice-President Perley Beecroft he liked well enough, but they bored him; they smacked too much of his own small-town boyhood, to escape which he was willing to take the responsibilities of a nation. It was the incalculable Lee Sarason on whom he depended, and the Lee with whom he had gone fishing and boozing and once, even, murdering, who had seemed his own self made more sure and articulate, had thoughts now which he could not penetrate. Lee’s smile was a veil, not a revelation.

  It was to discipline Lee, with the hope of bringing him back, that when Buzz replaced the amiable but clumsy Colonel Luthorne as Secretary of War by Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the Northeastern Province (Buzz’s characteristic comment was that Luthorne was not “pulling his weight”), he also gave to Haik the position of High Marshal of the M.M.’s, which Lee had held along with a dozen other offices. From Lee he expected an explosion, then repentance and a new friendship. But Lee only said, “Very well, if you wish,” and said it coldly.

  Just how could he get Lee to be a good boy and come play with him again? wistfully wondered the man who now and then planned to be emperor of the world.

  He gave Lee a thousand-dollar television set. Even more coldly did Lee thank him, and never spoke afterward of how well he might be receiving the still shaky television broadcasts on his beautiful new set.

  As Dewey Haik took hold, doubling efficiency in both the regular army and the Minute Men (he was a demon for all-night practice marches in heavy order, and the files could not complain, because he set the example), Buzz began to wonder whether Haik might not be his new confidant. . .. He really would hate to throw Lee into prison, but still, Lee was so thoughtless about hurting his feelings, when he’d gone and done so much for him and all!

  Buzz was confused. He was the more confused when Perley Beecroft came in and briefly said that he was sick of all this bloodshed and was going home to the farm, and as for his lofty Vice-Presidential office, Buzz knew what he could do with it.

  Were these vast national dissensions no different from squabbles in his father’s drugstore? fretted Buzz. He couldn’t very well have Beecroft shot: it might cause criticism. But it was indecent, it was sacrilegious to annoy an emperor, and in his irritation he had an ex-Senator and twelve workmen who were in concentration camps taken out and shot on the charge that they had told irreverent stories about him.

  * * *

  Secretary of State Sarason was saying good-night to President Windrip in the hotel suite where Windrip really lived.

  No newspaper had dared mention it, but Buzz was both bothered by the stateliness of the White House and frightened by the number of Reds and cranks and anti-Corpos who, with the most commendable patience and ingenuity, tried to sneak into that historic mansion and murder him. Buzz merely left his wife there, for show, and, except at great receptions, never entered any part of the White House save the office annex.

  He liked this hotel suite; he was a sensible man, who preferred straight bourbon, codfish cakes, and deep leather chairs to Burgundy, trout bleu, and Louis Quinze. In this twelve-room apartment, occupying the entire tenth floor of a small unnotorious hotel, he had for himself only a plain bedroom, a huge living room which looked like a combination of office and hotel lobby, a large liquor closet, another closet with thirty-seven suits of clothes, and a bathroom with jars and jars of the pine-flavored bath salts which were his only cosmetic luxury. Buzz might come home in a suit dazzling as a horse blanket, one considered in Alfalfa Center a triumph of London tailoring, but, once safe, he liked to put on his red morocco slippers that were down at the heel and display his red suspenders and baby-blue sleeve garters. To feel correct in those decorations, he preferred the hotel atmosphere that, for so many years before he had ever seen the White House, had been as familiar to him as his ancestral corn cribs and Main Streets.

  The other ten rooms of the suite, entirely shutting his own off from the corridors and elevators, were filled night and day with guards. To get through to Buzz in this intimate place of his own was very much like visiting a police station for the purpose of seeing a homicidal prisoner.

  * * *

  “Haik seems to me to be doing a fine job in the War Department, Lee,” said the President. “Of course you know if you ever want the job of High Marshal back——”

  “I’m quite satisfied,” said the great Secretary of State.

  “What do you think of having Colonel Luthorne back to help Haik out? He’s pretty good on fool details.”

  Sarason looked as nearly embarrassed as the self-satisfied Lee Sarason ever could look.

  “Why, uh—I supposed you knew it. Luthorne was liquidated in the purge ten days ago.”

  “Good God! Luthorne killed? Why didn’t I know it?”

  “It was thought better to keep it quiet. He was a pretty popular man. But dangerous. Always talking about Abraham Lincoln!”

  “So I just never know anything about what’s going on! Why, even the newspaper clippings are predigested, by God, before I see ‘em!”

  “It’s thought better not to bother you with minor details, boss. You know that! Of course, if you feel I haven’t organized your staff correctly——”

  “Aw now, don’t fly off the handle, Lee! I just meant—— Of course I know how hard you’ve tried to protect me so I could give all my brains to the higher problems of State. But Luthorne—— I kind of liked him. He always had quite a funny line when we played poker.” Buzz Windrip felt lonely, as once a certain Shad Ledue had felt, in a hotel suite that differed from Buzz’s only in being smaller. To forget it he bawled, very brightly, “Lee, do you ever wonder what’ll happen in the future?”

  “Why, I think you and I may have mentioned it.”

  “But golly, just think of what might happen in the future, Lee! Think of it! Why, we may be able to pull off a North American kingdom!” Buzz half meant it seriously—or perhaps quarter meant
it. “How’d you like to be Duke of Georgia—or Grand Duke, or whatever they call a Grand Exalted Ruler of the Elks in this peerage business? And then how about an Empire of North and South America after that? I might make you a king under me, then—say something like King of Mexico. How-juh like that?”

  “Be very amusing,” said Lee mechanically—as Lee always did say the same thing mechanically whenever Buzz repeated this same nonsense.

  “But you got to stick by me and not forget all I’ve done for you, Lee, don’t forget that.”

  “I never forget anything!. . .By the way, we ought to liquidate, or at least imprison, Perley Beecroft, too. He’s still technically Vice-President of the United States, and if the lousy traitor managed some skullduggery so as to get you killed or deposed, he might be regarded by some narrow-minded literalists as President!”

  “No, no, no! He’s my friend, no matter what he says about me. . .the dirty dog!” wailed Buzz.

  “All right. You’re the boss. G’night,” said Lee, and returned from this plumber’s dream of paradise to his own gold-and-black and apricot-silk bower in Georgetown, which he shared with several handsome young M.M. officers. They were savage soldiers, yet apt at music and at poetry. With them, he was not in the least passionless, as he seemed now to Buzz Windrip. He was either angry with his young friends, and then he whipped them, or he was in a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their wounds. Newspapermen who had once seemed to be his friends said that he had traded the green eyeshade for a wreath of violets.

  * * *

  At cabinet meeting, late in 1938, Secretary of State Sarason revealed to the heads of the government disturbing news. Vice-President Beecroft—and had he not told them the man should have been shot?—had fled to Canada, renounced Corpoism, and joined Walt Trowbridge in plotting. There were bubbles from an almost boiling rebellion in the Middle West and Northwest, especially in Minnesota and the Dakotas, where agitators, some of them formerly of political influence, were demanding that their states secede from the Corpo Union and form a coöperative (indeed almost Socialistic) commonwealth of their own.