Wide Is the Gate

by Upton Sinclair

  When Lanny neared the little village called Hyde Park, he found that he was ahead of time, and stopped for a while in a shady spot and waited, going over in his mind for the tenth time what he was going to say to the man who held the destiny of the Spanish democracy in his hands. Would this busy man give him time to say it all? On chance that he wouldn’t, what was the first thing to make sure of? Ever since the spring of 1919 Lanny Budd had been trying to change the history of the world—off and on, of course, and in between playing the piano, looking at paintings, and making himself agreeable to the smart friends of his mother and father.

  IX

  The old Dutch farms run from the highway to the bluffs which confine the river, a distance which may be half a mile or more. Each has its own gates and perhaps a porter’s lodge. Lanny drove slowly until he came to gates having a sentry-box with two State troopers on guard. He stopped and gave his name to one who came forward; the man nodded, and Lanny drove on, up a long treeshaded avenue, like a thousand other approaches to mansions that he had visited in the course of his playboy life. This mansion was modest, according to playboy standards: a two-story structure which had been lived in and added to; part frame and part stucco, with towers; the sort of house which really rich people discard as no longer big or elegant enough.

  Lanny parked his car in a shady spot on the circular drive. A colored butler opened the door before he rang, and a woman secretary came to meet him in the entrance hall. When he gave his name she led him without delay along the hall and down half a dozen stairs having a ramp alongside. These gave into the library, a spacious room which appeared comfortable and much used. The books were mostly legislative reports; there was a Winged Victory in marble against one of the walls, a model of a ship under glass, and a lady’s sewing-bag hanging over the back of one of the overstuffed chairs. These details Lanny Budd took in with swift and practiced eyes. Then he saw a large flat-topped desk near the fireplace, and seated at it, facing him—That Man!

  A large man with a large head, powerful shoulders and arms, wearing a white pongee shirt open at the throat. In his middle years he had been stricken with the dread disease called poliomyelitis, and as a result his legs were shrunken; he had to wear braces, and in public you observed him leaning upon the arm of a strong companion. In his home he used a wheelchair, which was the meaning of the ramp leading into the library. Such a stroke would have crushed most men; but one who had the courage to defy his fate, the power of will to persist and train his shrunken muscles all over again—such a man might come out of the ordeal stronger and more self-possessed. Many persons had doubted whether it could be possible for a man so handicapped to stand the strain which the office of President inflicts upon its victims, but F.D.R. had managed to enjoy the job. He was blessed with a buoyant disposition and could make jokes, look at movies or postage stamps, and not lie awake at night trying to solve problems of state.

  He was seated in a large leather chair, and offered a cordial hand and welcoming smile. Lanny was to be exposed to the famous “Roosevelt charm,” and had wondered: “What will it do to me?” He had encountered various kinds of charm on the old continent where he had been raised; many kinds false, some dangerous, and he had learned to distinguish among them. He saw at once that here was a man genuinely interested in human beings and in what they had to bring him. On his desk within close reach was a stack of reports and documents a foot high. These would be hard going; but when somebody like the grandson of Budd’s came along, having traveled all over the cultured world and met its élite—someone who shared F.D.’s own joy of living and his; prejudice in favor of the “forgotten man”—then his face lighted up and his eyes sparkled and it was as if he had had a glass or two of champagne. “You two are made for each other”—so Alston had said to each.

  X

  They talked about the ex-geographer; the President said that he had found him a highly useful man, and Lanny replied: “I made that discovery when I was still in my teens.” He described himself, a youngster who hadn’t even finished prep school, plunged suddenly into the caldron of old Europe’s hottest hatreds. Everybody connected with the American peace delegation, even a secretary-translator, had been pulled and hauled this way and that by national interests, racial interests, business interests. With his father’s help Lanny had come to recognize the real forces behind that conference: the great cartels which controlled steel and coal and shipping and banking and above all munitions throughout Europe; which owned newspapers in the various capitals, subsidized political agents, and moved governments about as their pawns. Stinnes and Thyssen in Germany, Schneider and the de Wendels in France, Deterding in Holland, Zaharoff in all countries from Greece to Britain—these were the men who had had their way, and had broken the heart of Woodrow Wilson.

  Zaharoff, munitions king and “mystery man of Europe,” had been no mystery to Lanny. He told how this Knight Commander of the Bath and Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor had tried to buy a young American secretary, offering him the most tempting of bribes to betray his trust and reveal the secrets of the peacemakers. Later, not being entirely pleased with the treaties, Zaharoff had subsidized a private war of the Greek nation against the Turks. Lanny told how, with the help of Robbie Budd, he had tried to buy the Bolsheviks at the Genoa Conference; and how, in Lanny’s presence, he had burned his diaries and private papers and thus set fire to the chimney of his Paris mansion. When his beloved wife had died, this munitions king of Europe had taken to hiring spiritualist mediums. Lanny had brought him one, but the séance had produced, instead of the hoped-for wife, a horde of soldiers shouting vilifications. Among them had been one who proclaimed himself the Unknown Soldier, buried under the Arc de Triomphe. He had declared himself a Jew—something which would surely have distressed the anti-Semitic military cliques of France.

  A President who had distressed the numerous anti-Semitic cliques of his own country listened with manifest pleasure and remarked: “These are tales out of the Arabian Nights. I command you to come and tell me a thousand and one of them.”

  “Under penalty of having my head chopped off?” asked the visitor, and they chuckled together.

  XI

  One who had studied the social arts in France would not make the mistake of doing all the talking. Franklin D. Roosevelt had had his own Arabian Nights’ adventures, and Lanny let him tell them. “We have our masters of money on this side of the water, too,” he said. “They know just what they want, and are greatly shocked because they cannot get it from me. They were not entirely without influence in the previous administration, as you no doubt know.”

  “Indeed yes, Mr. President.”

  “You would be amused to hear of the efforts they made to trap me, after I was elected and before I was inaugurated. The country was in the midst of a panic, and if only I would consent to meet with Mr. Hoover and give him some idea of what I wanted done! The scheme was, of course, that I should be assuming responsibility, taking the panic over as my panic instead of my predecessor’s. I let him have it all, up to the very last moment.”

  “It took nerve, and I admired yours.”

  “You can’t imagine the pressure; it never let up, and hasn’t let up yet. They persuaded me into a World Economic Conference in London right after the inauguration, if you remember, the idea being to preserve the gold standard and fix all currencies at the then-existing levels. France and Britain had devalued their currencies and wanted to keep the dollar at the old level, so they could take over the trade of the world. When I realized what it was all about I dumped the chess-board, and I don’t expect ever to be forgiven for it. You doubtless know the sort of stories they tell about me.”

  “I have had them straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  “I am supposed to be drunk all the time, and in spite of my physical deficiencies I maintain a large harem.”

  “Have you heard the one about the psychiatrist who died and went to heaven and was invited to psychoanalyze God?”

  �
�No. Has that something to do with me?”

  “St. Peter explained that God was suffering from delusions of grandeur—He thought He was Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

  The President threw back his head and laughed heartily; he put his soul into his enjoyment of a joke, and it was a good thing to hear. Lanny remembered that Abraham Lincoln had sought the same kind of relief from too many burdens.

  “Just now,” said the Chief Executive, “I am in the midst of the hottest fight yet, brought on by my efforts to reform the Supreme Court. Those nine old gentlemen in their solemn black robes have blocked one after another of our New Deal measures, and the whole future of our program depends upon my efforts to break that stranglehold. I have called for an increase in the number of the justices, and this is called ‘packing the court,’ and is considered the opening wedge for Bolshevism. There is nothing the enemies of this plan will not do or say.” The President told some things they had done, and after one tale of senatorial skullduggery he asked: “What do you think of that?”

  Lanny said: “I think it shows you are almost as indiscreet as the previous Roosevelt.” This brought another burst of laughter, and after it they were friends.

  XII

  The son of Budd-Erling judged that it was time to bring up the subject which lay nearest to his heart: the peril to the democratic nations involved in the Nazi-Fascist preparations for war, and the demonstration of their program they were now giving on the Iberian peninsula. Lanny told about the trips he had made into Spain, and what he had learned there.

  “It is called a ‘Civil War,’ Mr. President, but it is nothing of the sort; it is an invasion of a free people by the Italian and German dictators. Its purpose is to give them practice in the use of their new tanks and airplanes, and to establish landing-fields and submarine bases to attack the shipping of the free nations when the real war begins.”

  Lanny described the Spanish ruling classes. “I have played tennis with King Alfonso; I know his set on the Riviera and I have met many of the same sort in Paris and London and in Spain itself. I believe they are the most ignorant, vain, and arrogant aristocracy in Europe. The younger set have learned to drive motorcars, and a few of them to fly, but that is as far as they have got with anything modern; I would have difficulty in naming half a dozen among them who have read a book. Their interest is in playing polo, shooting tame pigeons, gambling, and chasing women. They are superstitious, and at the same time utterly cynical; about government they know nothing, and if their man Franco wins this war they will turn the country into a paradise for Juan March and speculators like him, and a dungeon for every enlightened man and woman.”

  “I have no reason for doubting your opinion, Mr. Budd. If I could have my way, governments in many parts of the world would be changed. But I am not the ruler of any part of Europe.”

  “I believe, sir, that you have the say about the matter which is of greatest importance to the Spanish people’s government. I am told that up to this year it has been the invariable rule in international affairs that any established government has the right to buy whatever arms it needs for its own defense. That rule was rescinded last January, and it was you who urged Congress to do it. I couldn’t understand it then, and I understand it even less now, when you see that it means the death of one of the most enlightened and progressive of governments.”

  It was a challenge, deliberately made bold; Lanny all but held his breath while he waited for the reaction of the great man in front of him.

  The great man paused to think, and to light a cigarette in a long thin holder. The smile had gone out of the blue eyes, and a grave look had come upon the genial features. “Mr. Budd, you ask me about what has been and still is one of the most painful decisions of my life. I am called a dictator, but you know that such a role is farthest from my wishes or my thoughts. I am the duly elected executive officer of a great democratic people; I am pledged to uphold government by public opinion, and I can do only what the people will let me.”

  “Of course, Mr. President; but you can sometimes lead the people.”

  “Up to a certain point, but never beyond it. I can present them with one or two new ideas at a time. If I go too fast or too far, and lose contact with them, then I am powerless to accomplish any of the things I wish. The constant study of my life has to be: ‘How fast can I move? How far will the public follow me? Dare I do this? Dare I do that?’ Such is the art of government in a democracy, Mr. Budd; often it does not seem heroic, but it is the best way that I know of. It is slow, but also it is sure.”

  XIII

  The President took a couple of pulls at the long thin cigarette holder; at the same time watching his hearer, seeking to read the effect of his words. He resumed: “Call me statesman or politician, the fact remains that I must keep in power or I accomplish nothing. And I am not operating in a vacuum, but in a set of circumstances which I am unable to alter. I am the head of the Democratic Party in the summer of 1937. Have you made any study of this party?”

  “I am afraid I don’t know my own country as well as I ought to,” replied this foreign-born and foreign-raised American.

  “In my thoughts I compare myself to a man driving three horses; they had such a hitch-up in old-time Russia—a troika. I cannot go anywhere unless I can persuade the three horses to take me; if any one of them balks, the troika comes to a halt. One of these horses is young and wild; that is my New Deal group, backed by organized labor and its sympathizers, the intellectuals; they want to gallop all the time, and I have to put a curb-bit in that horse’s mouth. The second is much older, and inclined to be mulish; that is my block of Southern states. Those states are run by a land-owning aristocracy, and by new industrialists who are still in the pre-labor-union stage of political thinking. The poor, whether white or black, are largely disfranchised by the poll tax; therefore, the majority of congressmen and senators from the South are always looking for a reason to desert the New Deal. Right now they are finding one in the ‘court-packing’ program. You have read some of their utterances, I suppose.”

  “I have.”

  “And then my third horse, a nervous and skittish steed which I seldom dare to mention by name. You will consider my naming it confidential, please?”

  “Of course, Mr. President.”

  “My Roman Catholic charger. There are twenty million Catholics in this country, and the great bulk of them think and vote as their Church advises. That is especially true of those of foreign descent—Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles. They are strong in our great cities, New York and Boston, Chicago and St. Louis and San Francisco, and their vote determines any close election. They have been told that General Franco is defending their faith against atheistic Reds.”

  “What they have been told is Franco propaganda, and mostly false.”

  “That may be so—but will they believe it from a Protestant? I must have their support for my domestic program; so there I am.”

  That was all the President said; but later on Lanny learned from Professor Alston that the heads of the hierarchy had come to Washington and “talked cold turkey”; in other words, votes. They had said: “Either you keep arms from the Spanish Reds or else we defeat your party.” They could elect Republicans to Congress next year and bring to nought F.D.’s Supreme Court reform plan. They had threatened in so many words to do it.

  “Mr. Roosevelt,” remarked the visitor, “what you say is almost identical with what Léon Blum has told me. He carried an election on a program of domestic reforms, and is very proud of having pushed them all through. But he had to pay the price which the reactionaries exacted—no aid for Spain. I have warned him in vain—what good will it do him to nationalize the armament industry of France while Hitler is permitted to arm and prepare to overwhelm him? What will be the position of France with a Fascist Spain at her back door and German submarines using harbors on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean?”

  “The danger to France is plain enough, because Hitler is just across the border; but
you can’t use that argument with Americans, three thousand miles away from trouble. Believe me, Mr. Budd, the great mass of our people have just one thought with regard to the European mess: they want to keep out of it. They have no ifs, ans, or buts on the subject; they just say: ‘Let Europe go to hell in its own way, but keep us out.’ They fly into a fit at the thought of anything that might get us in—such as, for example, the sinking of an American ship carrying munitions to either side in the Spanish war.”

  “Will they feel that way, Mr. President, when they see the Reichswehr rolling into Paris, and General Göring’s bombing planes destroying London?”

  “The American people will believe that when they see it; and meantime there’s no use in you or me trying to tell it to them. I can say to Congress: ‘These are dangerous times, and we must have ships and planes to defend ourselves,’ and I can get away with that; but if I should say one word about defending the interests of any other nation or group, I would raise up a storm that would bowl me over. Believe me, I know my master’s voice, and when I hear it, I have no choice but to obey. If you want to save Spain, persuade your French friends to stick out their necks; or better yet, persuade Mr. Chamberlain and his Cabinet, the real authors and sustainers of the Non-Intervention policy. If the British cannot see that it is their fight, surely nobody can ask me to take it on my shoulders.”

  XIV

  So that was that. Lanny was just about to get up and offer to take his leave, but his host had something on his mind and said, abruptly: “Charlie Alston has told me a lot about you, Mr. Budd, all of it good. He thinks I ought to make some use of your abilities.”

  Lanny wasn’t entirely surprised; he had guessed what was in his onetime employer’s mind. He said: “I am afraid, sir, I haven’t enough training to be of any real use to anybody.”