The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  VI

  Such was the talk; the radio was turned off, and the little family discussed with their unexpected guest the free intellectual treat he had given them. Mrs Maple said it was a fine talk and that she was glad Mr Budd had stopped in. Henry Maple explained that his wife had lost one of her kid brothers in France, and Mrs Maple said that the other brother had just come home—‘He sure don’t want no more war’. Lanny realised that he was now in contact with the American people—the plain people, the man in the street and his wife in their home. He assured them that he was much interested in their opinion and would be obliged if they would speak frankly.

  Mrs Maple said that she always said what she thought; it was evident that she wore the pants of this family, and she declared that she didn’t see no reason why we had to go meddling in the affairs of all them countries on the other side of the world. There were so many of them that she couldn’t even get the names straight, and why couldn’t we let them alone and let them run their own affairs the way they wanted to? Maybe if they got into trouble like a famine or something it was our Christian duty to send them some food, but we didn’t have to go getting into wars about how they run their own affairs.

  Then Mr Maple said that there was a fellow who worked at the bench next to him who was always spouting against the Russians, but he didn’t go in for this redbaiting himself; he thought there was plenty of things here in America that could be improved and we had better be giving out thought to them. Mrs Maple said that her brother, the one who had come home, had saw a lot of Germans, and they seemed to him a good people and he thought maybe we had fought the wrong guys.

  Lanny asked what they thought about the war with Japan, and Mr Maple said of course that was different when they had attacked us like Pearl Harbour, but maybe what we ought to have done with them was put them down along time ago before they got so many planes. So it could be said that this Lanny-Gallup poll revealed the American people somewhat confused in their attitude toward foreign questions. It would appear that the women wanted to let all other nations alone while the men wanted to fight them while they were young and easy to beat.

  Lanny telephoned for a taxi, and when it came he thanked his hosts and shook hands all round, even with the children. He did not attempt to phone to Edgemere because he knew the studio phones would be busy for a long time. He had himself driven to Pennsylvania Station in the city, and there took the night local which stopped at Edgemere. All the way he thought about the discourse to which he had listened, and about the reaction it had caused in an American working-class family. The upshot of his thoughts was that he was going to have a serious talk with his wife, even in that condition which our grandfathers were accustomed to refer to as ‘delicate’.

  VII

  He surprised them all at the office, where they were accustomed to remain after the programme, accepting telephone calls and in moments of leisure, if they had any, discussing the evening’s event. The professor, who had come in his own motor car, had departed, so Lanny didn’t have to have a serious talk with him. He told Laurel that he had had a pleasant trip and had found all his foreign family well and happy. He told her that he had sent a telegram to President Truman from Pennsylvania Station, offering to make a report, and that he would probably receive a reply in the morning. If so, he would like Laurel to ride with him again.

  He said nothing about counterfeit money, nor about Kurt Meissner or Bernhardt Monck; but he was free to say that Truman had asked him to sound out key persons as to the success of Allied Military Government in Germany, and the attitude and intentions of the Kremlin thereto. He promised to tell her all about it during their drive to Washington; meantime he would make up for some lost sleep. He said this on account of Laurel, who was always excited on the night of a programme, and would have been willing to sit up half the night talking about it and about the world problems it had raised.

  In the morning Lanny phoned his father in Newcastle to tell of his safe homecoming and then settled down to read his accumulation of mail. He hadn’t got more than half through it before he was called to the telephone; the White House reported that the President would be happy to see Mr Budd that evening if it would be convenient. Mr Budd said that it would. He drew the conclusion that this accidental President of the United States was a man who knew what he wanted and wanted it right away.

  VIII

  The P.A. repacked a bag and got out of his desk a paper he had prepared especially for this visit. He put a warm robe over Laurel’s knees and tucked it under, and they set out to repeat that drive on U.S.I. on a crisp morning in late November. ‘Now’, he said, ‘we can really get acquainted. Tell me what you thought of last night’s programme’.

  Laurel’s answer was, ‘I thought the professor was a little vague. He didn’t get down to cases’.

  ‘Did you notice that all the faults he had to find were with our own country, and that all the moral obligations were ours also?’

  ‘Well, I suppose that is naturally the way with moral obligations. It is up to us to reform ourselves, and let the other fellow reform himself’.

  ‘Yes, but suppose the other fellow doesn’t want to reform himself and has no idea of it? Suppose he is glad to be confirmed in the opinion that the faults are all ours?’

  ‘Lanny, you are getting to be suspicious! Are you going to say that nice old gentleman is a fellow traveller?’

  ‘I don’t know that the nice old gentleman is a fellow traveller; I only know that if he were a Communist party member wishing to make an impression on a bourgeois audience his talk would have served very well. All the faults were America’s, all the obligations were America’s, and you’d have thought Stalin was gentle Jesus meek and mild. Let me tell you about how I heard that programme’.

  He described the Maple family, their home, and their remarks after they had listened. ‘I was talking with one of the mothers of America’, he said. ‘There are probably ten million of them, and each one of them has no idea but to get her son, or her husband, or her brother out of the Army and keep him out. Stalin can take all those foreign-sounding places, and it won’t mean a thing to the “moms”—they can’t even remember the names. Why can’t we stay at home and mind our own business, and let dear Jimmy, Johnny, or Tommy get a job and raise a family?’

  He told her about his trip, as much as he was free to tell; nothing about counterfeiting, but about the Germans and the French. He had talked to scores of people of all social groups, and everywhere a pall of fear was hanging over them. America was deserting them, or preparing to. America was disbanding its armies while the Soviets were keeping theirs and building them up. Stalin was going ahead as methodically, as irresistibly, as the movement of a glacier. He had all of Poland at his mercy, half of Germany and Austria, all of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria. He had solemnly promised to permit the setting up of democratic governments in all those lands; but now he was making his own definition of ‘democratic’, and what it meant was Communist dictation. They were all going to be turned into satellite states, with governments and armies controlled by Red commissars.

  Also, Stalin was going to bring about a Communist revolution in Greece and in the eastern provinces of Turkey. He had got hold of Azerbaijan and its oil; he had been slow to withdraw and had left his stooges there. He had got access to the Adriatic through Albania and would turn the Baltic into a Russian lake. He was going to get China and from there take Tibet and threaten India. He had got those warm-water ports, Dairen and Port Arthur, for which Russia had fought a war and been defeated by the Japanese. Everything that the old-time Tsars had tried to do and failed, Stalin was going to do with no more than a tap on the wrist from us; and in the meantime college professors would be talking over the radio, telling the American people to improve their morals and spiritualise their foreign policy.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ demanded this expectant ‘mom’. ‘Let ourselves be turned into redbaiters?’

  ‘Darling, I am tired of thes
e Communist phrases, and I don’t intend to let myself be bluffed by them. If Stalin’s actions are such that even to list them is to blame him, then I have to be a redbaiter. I went to Yalta with Roosevelt, and I met Stalin and saw him make a bargain and pledge his solemn word. He was given everything he asked for—even things that we had no right to give. He made fools of us; Roosevelt knew it before he died and told me so. We bought a pig in a poke, and we got—what shall I say?—a wolverine, the most ferocious of medium-sized creatures. I have talked with clear-sighted men, both Germans and Americans in Germany, and they are all absolutely clear on one point: the only thing in this world that has kept Stalin from taking Western Germany has been, not the pitiful little force we are keeping there, but his dread of the atomic bomb, which we have and he hasn’t and can’t get for a long time. Vishinsky says that we are dangling the atomic bomb as a sword of Damocles over his head, and that is exactly what we are doing; if we didn’t have it and didn’t dangle it the Red armies would be moving across France today and showering London with a new stock of the V-2 rockets, which the top German scientists are now teaching the Reds to manufacture. It wouldn’t be six months more before Stalin would be in Madrid, sitting on the severed head of Franco and thumbing his nose at us’.

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed the wife. ‘What an imagination you are developing!’

  ‘I am worried, and I can’t hide the fact. I didn’t intend to say anything to you about it until the baby was born; but that programme last night changed my mind. We simply haven’t the right to risk the safety of the American people any longer’.

  ‘You have changed your mind so suddenly, Lanny!’

  ‘No, I have been changing it slowly, but I have delayed to report the change. Two years ago, when we began working over this plan, all our hopes were rosy. Roosevelt said he had a fifty-year plan for making friends with the Soviet Union, and when I told Stalin that he broke into laughter. He made it appear genial laughter, but I know now that it was sardonic. Stalin had his programme, set forth in book after book written by his professors for him—but he knew that Roosevelt had never seen one of those books. Stalin’s attitude toward us is one of implacable, deadly hate, and when your nice old professor talks about spiritualising Stalin—well, Bernhardt Monck said to me that he might as well go to India and teach the tigers to stop eating meat’.

  ‘This that you are telling me is what Bernhardt Monck says?’

  ‘It is what everybody in Germany says who has any opportunity to observe and understand the Soviet system. Don’t forget, a third of all Germans are now in their hands, and in Berlin they come and go across the border—it is just a question of walking across the street. The Germans have friends in Czechoslovakia and all the other border countries, and they all know what the Red tactics are. As Kipling wrote a half-century ago, “The toad beneath the harrow knows/Exactly where each tooth-point goes”. I was warned of all these things more than a year ago, and now every day when I pick up my newspaper I see them coming true, one detail after another’.

  ‘Lanny, what are we going to do with Emily’s money?’

  ‘We are going to spend Emily’s money the way Emily would want it spent. I know what Emily’s thoughts would be—I knew her as intimately as any friend she ever had. She was horrified by what the Kaiser’s armies did in Belgium and was ardent for victory; she was a leader in Red Cross work, and no Frenchwoman was more patriotic. And she took the same attitude about Hitler—you know that. She would never accept the idea of Europe’s submitting to a Soviet dictatorship. That wasn’t her idea of peace, and she wouldn’t want us to be sheep led to the slaughter. I’m not calling for war; on the contrary, I think the only hope of preventing war is for us to rearm and do it quickly, to convince Stalin that he cannot take the rest of the world without war. I’m quite sure he doesn’t want war, because he has had a demonstration of what American industrial power can do, and he has seen what the atomic bombs have done in Japan’.

  IX

  Laurel didn’t hold out as long as Lanny had anticipated; she had been doing her own thinking while he was doing his. There was grief in her voice but no anger as she asked, ‘What are we going to do with the Programme—get military men to come and tell us how to arm?’

  He answered, ‘It seems to me that we have one definite thing to do, which is to adopt and carry out an open-forum policy. Whenever we get a speaker who takes the fellow-traveller line, get another speaker who takes the opposite line to answer him. For example, let’s get John Dewey to answer Philips; there’s another nice old man, but one who is clear-sighted and knows a fact when it jumps up and hits him on the head’.

  They arrived in Washington in time for dinner, and afterwards he walked to the White House on a pleasant, almost winter evening; this time the Secret Service men knew him and greeted him as a V.I.P. He was escorted to the President’s study, where again he found the tired man signing documents. The President was glad to welcome a herald of good tidings—good to this extent at least, that the American Army was behaving itself and winning friends among the Germans; also, that Truman Plan was giving them hope and courage. Lanny felt free to discuss the subject of counterfeiting and to tell how he had been able to bring out a pusher and had found a young German who might be able to penetrate the secrets of the Neo-Nazi underground. But he didn’t give any idea who this young man was or who the Bundists were. He told what Monck had said; Monck was the one who really knew, and Lanny would have been pleased to see him at Truman’s right hand as adviser on foreign affairs. But alas, no German could hold that position, and especially no German Social Democrat.

  Lanny produced the paper he had taken the trouble to prepare some time ago. He said, ‘Mr President, you expressed an interest in the writings of Joseph Stalin, so I took the liberty of collecting several extracts, giving his views on the subject of peace with the rest of the world. May I read you one or two of them?’

  The other said, ‘Surely’, and Lanny read from the volume called Problems of Leninism, which had been circulated by the millions in the Soviet Union:

  ‘We are living’, Lenin wrote, ‘not merely in a state but in a system of states, and it is inconceivable that the Soviet Republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialist states. Ultimately, one or the other must conquer. Meanwhile, a number of terrible clashes between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states are inevitable’.

  ‘That is what Lenin taught’, said Lanny, ‘and this is what Stalin, his faithful pupil, wrote in the Theses of the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International:

  “The proletariat of the Soviet Union harbours no illusions as to the possibility of a durable peace with the imperialists. The proletariat knows … that, in the process of a proletarian world revolution, wars between proletarian and bourgeois states, wars for liberation of the world from capitalism, are inevitable and necessary”.

  ‘Why don’t my advisers bring me things like that, Mr Budd?’ asked the President.

  ‘I suppose because they know you are too busy to read them. That is why I am taking the chance to read them to you’.

  ‘Go on, Mr Budd’. The President returned the visitor’s grin.

  So Lanny said, ‘This is Lenin again, in an article called ‘The United States of Europe Slogan’, in his Selected Works, volume five, page one-forty-one. This passage is a favourite of Stalin, quoted on many occasions, including his book Problems of Leninism.

  Lenin says, ‘The victorious proletariat … having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own production, would arise against the remaining capitalist world, attracting to itself the oppressed classes of the other lands, raising revolts in them against the capitalists, and, if necessary, even coming out with armed force against the exploiting classes and their governments’.

  ‘There you have the whole programme, Mr Truman,’ said Lanny. ‘That was written forty-two years ago, at the beginning of the First World War; and it is like the law of the Medes and Persians, whic
h, the Book of Daniel tells us, “altereth not”.’

  ‘Leave that paper with me, Mr Budd’, was the reply. ‘I will learn those passages by heart and recite them at my next Cabinet meeting’.

  Lanny said, ‘Tell the newspaper reporters about it, and the word will come to Mr Molotov and Mr Gromyko, and they will know that you won’t be so easy to fool—’ Lanny stopped, and the other finished the sentence. ‘As I was at Potsdam’.

  X

  The President thought for a space and then added, ‘Franklin Roosevelt tried so hard to be friends, and so did I. Tell me, what is the matter with them? What have we done to them?’

  ‘What we have done, Mr Truman, is to be a bourgeois nation, the biggest and richest in the world. Our affairs are run by immensely wealthy capitalists who choose dummy legislators and tell them what to do. The capitalists are automatically driven by the forces of an expanding economy to reach out to every corner of the earth for raw materials and markets. We take these by purchase where possible, but where we encounter resistance we are ready to use force. By this means we reduce all colonial peoples to the status of peons and we keep them there. But now come the heroic Bolsheviks, the followers of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist line, calling upon the awakening proletariat to arise and expropriate the expropriators. I don’t know whether you understand that jargon, Mr Truman, but you have to learn it, because that is what we have to face the balance of our lives’.

  ‘I have heard it, Mr Budd, but it is hard to make it real to myself’.