It Can't Happen Here. Sinclair Lewis
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persons in it, and the only banners were three flags and two large placards.
Leading it, in old blue uniforms, were two G.A.R. veterans, and between, arm-in-arm with them, a Confederate in gray. They were such very little old men, all over ninety, leaning one on another and glancing timidly about in the hope that no one would laugh at them.
The Confederate carried a Virginia regimental banner, torn as by shrapnel; and one of the Union veterans lifted high a slashed flag of the First Minnesota.
The dutiful applause which the convention had given to the demonstrations of other candidates had been but rain-patter compared with the tempest which greeted the three shaky, shuffling old men. On the platform the band played, inaudibly, "Dixie," then "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again," and, standing on his chair midway of the auditorium, as a plain member of his state delegation, Buzz Windrip bowed—bowed—bowed and tried to smile, while tears started from his eyes and he sobbed helplessly, and the audience began to sob with him.
Following the old men were twelve Legionnaires, wounded in 1918—stumbling on wooden legs, dragging themselves between crutches; one in a wheel chair, yet so young-looking and gay; and one with a black mask before what should have been a face. Of these, one carried an enormous flag, and another a placard demanding: "Our Starving Families Must Have the Bonus—We Want Only Justice—We Want Buzz for President."
And leading them, not wounded, but upright and strong and resolute, was Major General Hermann Meinecke, United States Army. Not in all the memory of the older reporters had a soldier on active service ever appeared as a public political agitator. The press whispered one to another, "That general'll get canned, unless Buzz is elected—then he'd probably be made Duke of Hoboken."
Following the soldiers were ten men and women, their toes through their shoes, and wearing rags that were the more pitiful because they had been washed and rewashed till they had lost all color. With them tottered four pallid children, their teeth rotted out, between them just managing to hold up a placard declaring, "We Are on Relief. We Want to Become Human Beings Again. We Want Buzz!"
Twenty feet behind came one lone tall man. The delegates had been craning around to see what would follow the relief victims. When they did see, they rose, they bellowed, they clapped. For the lone man—Few of the crowd had seen him in the flesh; all of them had seen him a hundred times in press pictures, photographed among litters of books in his study—photographed in conference with President Roosevelt and Secretary Ickes—photographed shaking hands with Senator Windrip—photographed before a microphone, his shrieking mouth a dark open trap and his lean right arm thrown up in hysterical emphasis; all of them had heard his voice on the radio till they knew it as they knew the voices of their own brothers; all of them recognized, coming through the wide main entrance, at the end of the Windrip parade, the apostle of the Forgotten Men, Bishop Paul Peter Prang.
Then the convention cheered Buzz Windrip for four unbroken hours.
In the detailed descriptions of the convention which the news bureaus sent following the feverish first bulletins, one energetic Birmingham reporter pretty well proved that the Southern battle flag carried by the Confederate veteran had been lent by the museum in Richmond and the Northern flag by a distinguished meat-packer of Chicago who was the grandson of a Civil War general.
Lee Sarason never told anyone save Buzz Windrip that both flags had been manufactured on Hester Street, New York, in 1929, for the patriotic drama, Morgan's Riding, and that both came from a theatrical warehouse.
Before the cheering, as the Windrip parade neared the platform, they were greeted by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, the celebrated author, lecturer, and composer, who—suddenly conjured onto the platform as if whisked out of the air—sang to the tune of "Yankee Doodle" words which she herself had written:
Berzelius Windrip went to Wash., A riding on a hobby— To throw Big Business out, by Gosh, And be the People's Lobby!
Chorus: Buzz and buzz and keep it up, Our cares and needs he's toting, You are a most ungrateful pup, Unless for Buzz you're voting!
The League of the Forgotten Men Don't like to be forgotten, They went to Washington and then They sang, "There's something rotten!"
That joyous battle song was sung on the radio by nineteen different prima donnas before midnight, by some sixteen million less vocal Americans within forty-eight hours, and by at least ninety million friends and scoffers in the struggle that was to come. All through the campaign, Buzz Windrip was able to get lots of jolly humor out of puns on going to Wash., and to wash. Walt Trowbridge, he jeered, wasn't going to either of them!
Yet Lee Sarason knew that in addition to this comic masterpiece, the cause of Windrip required an anthem more elevated in thought and spirit, befitting the seriousness of crusading Americans.
Long after the convention's cheering for Windrip had ended and the delegates were again at their proper business of saving the nation and cutting one another's throats, Sarason had Mrs. Gimmitch sing a more inspirational hymn, with words by Sarason himself, in collaboration with a quite remarkable surgeon, one Dr. Hector Macgoblin.
This Dr. Macgoblin, soon to become a national monument, was as accomplished in syndicated medical journalism, in the reviewing of books about education and psychoanalysis, in preparing glosses upon the philosophies of Hegel, Professor Guenther, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Lothrop Stoddard, in the rendition of Mozart on the violin, in semi-professional boxing, and in the composition of epic poetry, as he was in the practice of medicine.
Dr. Macgoblin! What a man!
The Sarason-Macgoblin ode, entitled "Bring Out the Old-time Musket," became to Buzz Windrip's band of liberators what "Giovanezza" was to the Italians, "The Horst Wessel Song" to the Nazis, "The International" to all Marxians. Along with the convention, the radio millions heard Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch's contralto, rich as peat, chanting:
BRING OUT THE OLD-TIME MUSKET
Dear Lord, we have sinned, we have slumbered, And our flag lies stained in the dust, And the souls of the Past are calling, calling, "Arise from your sloth—you must!" Lead us, O soul of Lincoln, Inspire us, spirit of Lee, To rule all the world for righteousness, To fight for the right, To awe with our might, As we did in 'sixty-three.
Chorus See, youth with desire hot glowing, See, maiden, with fearless eye, Leading our ranks Thunder the tanks, Aeroplanes cloud the sky.
Bring out the old-time musket, Rouse up the old-time fire! See, all the world is crumbling, Dreadful and dark and dire. America! Rise and conquer The world to our heart's desire!
"Great showmanship. P. T. Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put on a better," mused Doremus, as he studied the A.P. flimsies, as he listened to the radio he had had temporarily installed in his office. And, much later: "When Buzz gets in, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms. Hm."
The thunderstorm, which had mercifully lulled, burst again in wrathful menace.
All afternoon the convention balloted, over and over, with no change in the order of votes for the presidential candidate. Toward six, Miss Perkins's manager threw her votes to Roosevelt, who gained then on Senator Windrip. They seemed to have settled down to an all-night struggle, and at ten in the evening Doremus wearily left the office. He did not, tonight, want the sympathetic and extremely feminized atmosphere of his home, and he dropped in at the rectory of his friend Father Perefixe. There he found a satisfyingly unfeminized, untalcumized group. The Reverend Mr. Falck was there. Swart, sturdy young Perefixe and silvery old Falck often worked together, were fond of each other, and agreed upon the advantages of clerical celibacy and almost every other doctrine except the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. With them were Buck Titus, Louis Rotenstern, Dr. Fowler Greenhill, and Banker Crowley, a financier who