The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  II

  It was agreed that Professor Alston was to have his say on the programme, and then Laurel was to set forth her idea that in addition to using military arms we should also use the arms of the mind and spirit. Congress should vote hundreds of millions instead of the few thousands it was voting for the Voice of America, to broadcast over the whole world, not merely by short wave but by powerful radio stations in Germany and Japan, the true meaning of democracy and the democratic process; to make plain to the peoples the difference between dictatorship and the noble ideal of Abraham Lincoln, ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’.

  Said Laurel, ‘We should explain to the world what free elections are and how we carry them out in our country, and how the British and the Scandinavians and the Swiss all enjoy that system and make it work; how truth can prevail only if speech and press are free, and how these principles of democracy can be made to apply to industry as well as to government’.

  Professor Alston said, ‘If you will give me ten seconds at the end I’ll be glad to state that I agree with every word of that’.

  They had a lively time on the programme. This man who had inside information scared his large audience by telling them he had reason to believe that the Soviets, with the German scientists they had pressed into their service and with the secrets they had managed to steal from the Western world, were now making rapid progress in the field of atomic fission. He said, ‘You hear talk about it being ten years before they can have the atomic bomb; but I predict that it won’t be more than two or three years before they have it, and some day they will set it off, and the physicists with their delicate instruments will know that it has happened. Then, friends of the Peace Programme, what is going to be our situation?’

  ‘We have no means of knowing how fast they can make the bomb, but let us assume that at the end of five or six years they have a hundred bombs while we have a thousand. They have other great advantages over us. They have a very active party in our country while we have no party in their country. We consequently know very little about them, while they know almost everything about us; they subscribe to our newspapers, illustrated magazines, and technical journals, which publish a kind of information they keep hidden. They have flooded our country with spies while we have very few, if any, in their country. More important yet, we have a conscience, while they have none. Therefore we have to wait for them to make the first attack. They make a minute scientific study of our whole set up and decide exactly where to place their hundred atomic bombs so as to paralyse us. You understand that bombs can be brought in by merchant ships or submarines. They can be deposited in harbours where they are most deadly; or a hundred heavy bombers can set out one night from bases in northern Russia and head across the North Pole to New York, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Seattle; also, of course, Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee’.

  ‘When I point this out to people they say that by the same means we could paralyse Russian industry. That is true; but what would be the result? When you destroy the factories where tanks and planes and guns are made, when you destroy oil refineries and railroad centres and so on, you reduce industry to primitive conditions and reduce fighting to the same conditions; you return the battle to masses of men armed with swords and spears, or maybe bows and arrows. It is the Soviets who have these masses of men and can produce these primitive weapons, and how can we get to Europe to fight them if the great ports have been ruined with atomic bombs? The victory will be to the primitive mass army that travels on foot and lives off the land it conquers. In that way the Reds will seize the whole of Europe and Asia, and we shall have no way to eject them. They will dig underground, and civilisation will be rebuilt in caves and tunnels—meaning by “civilisation” the ability to build aeroplanes and bombs and to produce poison gases and deadly bacteria. Such a war might well last for a century, indeed it might last forever, becoming the permanent state of life, because men will have reached such a low level morally that it would be impossible to trust one another or even to consider such an idea’.

  ‘You are very pessimistic, Professor Alston’, said Laurel in their closing discussion.

  ‘I am trying to be factual’, was the reply. ‘It is evident that the system of private enterprise, the production of goods for private profit, is breaking down, and we must replace it by a system of production for use. If we are going to war to restore and preserve the capitalist system we shall surely lose, because we cannot retain the support of the masses in any country. Under the stresses and sufferings of war we will be running the risk of revolution in our own country. The only possible chance of defeating Communist dictatorship is by setting up a system of industrial democracy by constitutional methods in which our political freedoms would be retained. That is the one way we can gain and keep the support of the masses and bring the Red dictatorships to defeat’.

  Never in the history of the Peace Programme had such a flood of letters poured in as after that broadcast. In one of the early sacks was a letter addressed to Mr and Mrs Lanny Budd, marked ‘Personal’. It was brief and to the point. It read: ‘This is the limit. I am through with you. Bess’. And underneath were three more words in a German-style handwriting: ‘I agree. Hansi’. Those last three words gave the recipients great delight. They could imagine the twinkle in Hansi’s eyes as he wrote them—and the care he would use to keep his eyes averted from his wife’s!

  III

  Jan Masaryk, foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, paid a flying visit to New York, and Lanny was invited to meet him at dinner. The host was one of Lanny’s oldest art patrons, a man of great wealth. His home was one of those fantastic apartments on Park Avenue, high up in the air and occupying an entire floor of a good-sized building; you could walk from room to room and look out over the whole city, at night a dazzle of lights outshining the Milky Way. By day you had glimpses of two rivers with their traffic, and a maze of buildings striving toward the clouds and sometimes reaching them. It was a dream city, built on a solid rock that had been purchased from the Indians for twenty-four dollars’ worth of trade goods; you thought about that and wondered what those Indians would make of their bargain if they could come back now, three hundred years later. What would old Henry Hudson make of it, sailing his tiny pinnace up that broad river now crowded with steamers large and small—they were still called steamers although they all had Diesel or petrol engines.

  A doorman in a long blue coat with brass buttons opened the door of your taxi and ceremoniously escorted you into the green marble lobby. A telephone operator sent up your name, and a uniformed operator shot you up in an elevator to the topmost floor. Inside the apartment were sumptuous rooms, quite literally out of old European palaces, but of course with all modern improvements: electric lights, central heating governed by thermostats, and organ music at the pressure of a button. There were bathrooms with tiled floors and marble walls and sunken tubs with fixtures of real gold and silver. (The host would apologise for them and put the blame on his architect.) It was a so-called penthouse apartment, and on all four sides there were porticos with gardens, the north for summer and the south for winter. There were flowers and plants appropriate to the season, and there was a greenhouse in which fresh vegetables were grown by the new hydroponics system, without earth.

  Most important of all to Lanny were the paintings on the walls of these rooms. Religion was excluded, because the owner believed in pleasure; he had favoured mostly the French Impressionists, everything bright and gay: Degas and Cézanne, Manet and Monet, nature scenes, sunlight, gardens full of flowers, ponds with lilies, children playing, lovely women smiling. Lanny had been responsible for some of these paintings, finding them, recommending them, and buying them. He remembered their prices—and he had got ten per cent of each price. Now he was welcome to come whenever he liked to renew his memories. ‘I am a part of all that I have met!’

  To this home of super-elegance came Jan Masaryk, the son of the man who had been the Ge
orge Washington of Czechoslovakia. Patriot and statesman, the elder Masaryk had sought refuge from the Germans during World War I and had become a professor at the University of Chicago. He had been a friend of Woodrow Wilson, and at the close of that war the republic of Czechoslovakia had been established. The elder Masaryk had become its first president. During the period of exile the son had earned his living first as a steel worker and then as a pianist in a motion-picture theatre. Concerning that period he had amusing stories to tell, including the one about his application for admission to the sweet land of liberty. He had filled out a questionnaire, and in reply to the word ‘race’ had written ‘human’.

  He was a man of the grand monde, a professional charmer, as much so as Beauty Budd, though very different. He told stories, laughed heartily, and spiced his comments with wit, even a bit of malice. He did not spare even his host, a great banker, to whom he had come perhaps seeking funds for his country’s support. He said, ‘Don’t let him fool you. You will think many times that he is stupid, but he just puts that on because he doesn’t want you to know how much he knows’.

  When Lanny asked what he thought of the dictators there was a sudden gleam of fun in his eyes. ‘O, I love them!’ he said. ‘I could be a wonderful dictator myself. Look!’ He struck out his lower jaw and set his lips in a grim expression, folded his arms and glared with staring popeyes. He was a man of fifty or more, with a round, half-bald dome. Suddenly the diners realized who he was—Il Duce! The living image of Mussolini! There was general laughter, and the daughter of the host cried, ‘Oh, do it again!’ So he did it again and gave them time to imprint the image upon their memories.

  But that gaiety was his company manner. Catch him off guard, and you saw a face of the profoundest melancholy, even grief. His young country was in deadly danger, and he had come to plead for its life. The Reds had it; and at Yalta they had made the promise that they would leave it in democratic liberty, it would be a republic and the people would rule. But this Yalta promise meant no more than the other Yalta promises, all of which were being broken systematically, by the tested technique of encroachment and terror. In Czechoslovakia there were seven political parties, and the bloc supporting Beneš and Masaryk had a majority, but the Communists would not leave it that way. The propaganda was furious, and secret arrests and torture were frequent. The only hope for the young nation lay in publicity, in appeal to the free world.

  Jan Masaryk was in the free world and he might have stayed; he would have been welcomed and given asylum in America. But he was going back; he was going back quietly, without any fuss, any histrionics. All he said was, ‘I have to go, of course’. He was going as a sacrifice, a demonstration to the whole world; he was known to the diplomats and the newspapermen, and what happened to him could not be concealed. He didn’t say anything about it at the dinner party, but afterward, going down in the elevator, Lanny asked him how long he thought the present situation could endure. He answered, ‘Not very long, Mr Budd. When you hear of my death you will know that I was murdered, and you will know the end has come’.

  Lanny never forgot those words, and they had something to do with his constantly increasing determination to oppose the Stalin dictatorship. From the time he spoke those words Jan Masaryk had little more than a year to live.

  IV

  Meeting a man of duty, a hero, even at a dinner party is a disturbing experience, troubling the conscience and the mind. Lanny went home and told his wife about it. He told Rick and Nina and all the Peace Group, and they were troubled. It is a difficult thing to change one’s mind, and many people are unable to achieve the feat. It is a truly agonising thing to love somebody and then through a long period of time to watch that loved one’s character deteriorating and turning into something you have to despise, even to fear. And if that is true with one person, how much more must it be true with a whole nation, a social system, a dream of social justice and of peace and good will on earth!

  Lanny and Laurel had been flown out of China and into Moscow immediately after America’s entrance into World War II. They had met Soviet officials and, more important, great numbers of the Russian people. They had found them kind, generous, intelligent, and eager for information of the outside world and the help the democratic nations were going to give in the battle against nazi-fascism and its cruelty and terror. Those people had represented Russia to Lanny and Laurel, and the couple had decided that they loved Russia and trusted Russia and believed in the future of Russia.

  But now they had to give all that up; they had to decide, not that the Russian people were evil, not that they were liars and murderers, but simply that they did not exist. They had no eyes; their eyes had been torn out, and they could not see what was going on in the world. They had no ears; their eardrums had been broken, and they could not hear what was going on in the world. Their tongues had been cut out, and they could not speak their thoughts about the world. Their brains had been cut out and pith had been substituted, and they could not think about the world. They had become automata, doing what they were ordered to do and doing nothing of themselves or for themselves.

  No, Russia and the Russians had come to have a new meaning; it meant a little group of masters who had seized the country and all its powers. They did the seeing, they did the hearing, they did the speaking, they did the thinking. They told the hundred and eighty millions what to believe, and the hundred and eighty millions believed it; they told the writers what was good writing, and the writers wrote it; they told the musicians what was music, and the musicians composed and played it; they told the scientists what was the truth, and the scientists accepted it; they told the teachers and professors what to teach, and it was taught; they set up a new religion with a new ritual and a new god, whose name was Stalin.

  His image was set up in every home; it was painted on screens a hundred feet high in public places. He was the great one, father of all, final authority, giver of all good things. He was God, and there was no other God, and all must bow down and worship him. Only those who bowed and worshipped him daily could live. All those who whispered objection, all those who even looked as if they objected, all those of whom any enemy chose to whisper that he might object—all these were shipped off to slave-labour camps in the far north of Siberia. There they lived and laboured twelve hours a day, half starved and half frozen; they perished in a year or two and were no more, and meanwhile what they did or what they thought or what they hoped or what they feared no longer made any difference. They were no longer Russians, they no longer counted. Ten or twenty millions of them so existed, and how many tens of millions had perished in thirty years no man could make a guess.

  V

  There came a letter from Monck. He reported, ‘Ferdinand is doing well’—that had become a formula. Then he went on to tell Lanny about the struggle that was going on for the minds of the German people. It had become more clear every day that the Soviets were determined to turn their half of Germany into Red territory, to separate it from the rest of Germany and make it into a satellite, as they were in process of doing in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the other lands they had taken. There was only one way to resist this, and that was by getting the ideas of the free world to the captive Germans. The Soviet techniques of misrepresentation must be countered by the truth; and to do that the Allies had only one weapon, a pitiful little radio station with a one-thousand-watt transmitter located on the back of an Army truck.

  Lanny had paid it a visit during his brief stay in Berlin and had met the newspaper people, two men and one woman, who were running it. They had called the station R.I.A.S.—Radio in American Sector. As it happened, the initials were the same in the German language, so the station had the same meaning to both nationalities. It had set itself up in the badly shattered Central Telephone Exchange. It had almost no equipment, no library, no files of clippings; it depended on American newspapers and magazines, and for music on a few gramophone records.

  The staff had been greatly interested in La
nny’s account of the Peace Programme. He had sent them scripts, and they had translated portions and used them to fill out the seven-hour programme they were giving every night. Monck had been advising them about German psychology and had spoken for them, under a name created for the occasion. He reported that now they had got an increase in funds and a twenty-thousand-watt portable station which had formerly been used by the German Army; they were planning to move into a damaged chemical factory and expand their programme to cover twenty-two hours a day. They had commissioned Monck to try to persuade Lanny to come to Berlin and give them advice and help for at least a short time.

  Then came a telephone call from the Information Services Division of the State Department; an official of R.I.A.S. wanted Mr Budd to come and consult with him. That was the way it was nowadays; those bureaucrats sat in Washington and summoned whomever they pleased and for whatever purpose. Lanny could look back upon the old days when the seat of power had been not in Washington but in Wall Street. There was the big money, and if you wanted to do anything on a significant scale you went there and sat with hat in hand in the office of some great banker. You disclosed your project and did your best to persuade him that there was a profit to be made; he would expect not merely security for the return of his money but a cut of the profits, in the form of a block of preferred stock. Now it was he who went to Washington to call on the bureaucrats, and as rumour had it he paid some ‘five-percenter’ for advice as to the proper ones to approach.