The Return of Lanny Budd

by Sinclair, Upton;

  ‘It is just the realiest thing going. It is being recited day and night by tens of thousands of inspired fanatics. They are teaching it to millions; they are teaching it to the young, and in one generation more there will be whole countries full of people who have never heard anything else and who take it just as seriously as you take the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’.

  ‘An amazing development, Mr Budd. What are we going to do about it?’

  ‘The first thing we have to do is to realise it, and that is difficult enough. I have talked to people who are close to the scene and who know what is going on. Even before the war came to an end the Politburo held a meeting, with Stalin present, and threshed out the problems of their policy. There was some opposition, I am told, but Molotov and Malenkov carried the day, and the Bolshevik tempo, as they call it, was ordered to be resumed. What that means is the deadliest kind of war, open and secret, to be pushed on every front and by every device. It means that the whole force of the Communist machine in every country of the world is to be devoted to the spreading of hatred for America. I know that it is hard for a man from Independence, Missouri, to understand this. You have been brought up on a gospel of love; but this is a gospel of hate, pushed with the very same determination as a matter of religious conviction. You would be willing to die to teach men to love one another, and the Communists are willing to die in order to teach men to hate you. In the process they are willing to tell any lies, and they employ the most highly skilled psychologists to invent the lies which are most plausible and most harmful. It was Hitler who said that the bigger the lie the easier to get it believed; it was Mussolini who taught Hitler that maxim, and it was from the Bolsheviks that Mussolini learned it’.

  The President was a good listener and never failed to get the point. He replied, ‘We’re going to have to rearm, Mr Budd. It hurts like the devil, but I have no choice. And you may trust me for this—I’m not going to let it turn me into a reactionary. There is no reason why we can’t have an army and at the same time have social progress. I won’t be able to accomplish much with this new Congress the people have given me, but at least I’m going to make the demands and keep them before the public mind. I shall keep the flag flying’.

  Lanny smiled and said, ‘There was a song written about that, Mr. President; it is called “The Star-Spangled Banner’”.

  It was a satisfactory interview, and Lanny went back to the hotel and told his wife about it. When he got through he saw that there were tears in her eyes. America was going to get ready for another war! After all, in spite of anything she could do, she was a ‘mom’; she had a little four-year-old at home, and could figure that it would be only fifteen years before they would be taking him into the Army. By that time the Soviets might have got the atomic bomb, and it would be a new kind of war, with horrors hitherto undreamed of on this unhappy earth.

  XI

  Back in Edgemere, Lanny studied the mail which came in after that broadcast. He was saddened to notice that most of the listeners had swallowed the generalizations of Professor Philips and found satisfaction in his high-sounding words. Only a critical few wanted to ask exactly what he meant, and whether by any chance Soviet Russia had any of the faults so easily found in America. Lanny was resolved that from this time on no speaker would escape without questioning, to bring out what he meant, or to make sure whether he really knew what he meant.

  The first persons to be consulted were, of course, Rick and Nina. These were the old-timers, the elders—Rick being a year older than Lanny, and Nina half-a-dozen years older than Laurel. Lanny knew that they had been thinking along the same lines as himself and was relieved to discover that they had formed the same opinion of the fellow-travelling professor. These were the times which tried men’s thinking powers, and Rick was a man who had no pleasure in being fooled or in fooling himself.

  It was their practice to hold a staff meeting one evening in the week to discuss programmes and policies, exchange experiences, and report on the state of the enterprise. At the next meeting Lanny brought up his suggestion, and it was threshed out. The only objection came from the elderly philosopher who delivered the town’s laundry and called himself an Anarchist. ‘We are going to hear that we have taken up red-baiting’, said he. His wife, the stout lady who did the town’s laundry, replied that they were not to let themselves be frightened by names. Mother Tipton had recently discovered that she had a long line of ancestors and had joined the Daughters of the American Revolution. She had done it partly as a joke, in order to prove that a Socialist could be as patriotic as any other lady of the community; now’ perhaps she was taking it seriously, for she said she would like to coin a new word and put it on the air. ‘Let us talk about sambaiting, for those people who see everything wrong with Uncle Sam and can’t see anything wrong with his opponents’.

  BOOK THREE

  When First We Practice to Deceive

  7 HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE

  I

  Esther and Robbie Budd always had a Thanksgiving Day dinner for the family; they had the space and the servants for such a function. Lanny and Laurel went, and had been asked to bring Rick and Nina, who were almost a part of Lanny’s family—and besides, Rick was a baronet and Nina a baronet’s wife. Frances was following behind with Scrubbie in her car. Bess and her husband were also invited, but Bess wouldn’t go because she hated families and knew that her presence would put a damper upon them all. Hansi would go to the Robin family dinner.

  Lanny saw his wife safely bundled up on the rear seat of his car. Nina rode with her, and Junior between them; Rick sat with Lanny in front. On the previous night there had been the first snowfall of the year, and they drove across the George Washington Bridge and north along the beautiful series of parkways which took them into Connecticut. Tens of thousands of other people were on their way to Thanksgiving dinners, and tens of thousands of youngsters were out with their sleds in the bright sunshine.

  The president of Budd-Erling Aircraft had been chained to his desk for five-and-a-half years of terrible war. His features were careworn, and he had lost weight, with the result that he had jowls hanging from the sides of his face. Now he was supposed to be resting—but how could he, with orders for fighting aircraft having absolutely vanished? The company had to exist on its fat, and the workers who had come swarming into Newcastle had to go back to their farms or to the woods of Canada or the plains of Texas. Robbie had made enemies because he wouldn’t distribute dividends freely enough, but now everybody saw why he had hung on to his company’s funds.

  Robbie was a kindhearted old man, and very proud of his family; he shook hands with all the men and kissed all the women and the children. His two sons were now middle-aged men, and their wives were proper ladies of high social station, keeping themselves slender and competent after the modern fashion. Also in that fashion, they did not have large broods of children; three each was a full supply. There were cousins and some old people—the big dining table was extended so far that there was barely room to get around it, and all the young people and two or three of the old ones had to be relegated to the breakfast room.

  When Lanny had first come to Newcastle, which was during the First World War, Grandfather Samuel Budd had been alive and had personally carved the twenty-pound turkey in patriarchal style. But now that too was managed in the modern fashion; the butler carried it ceremoniously around on a large silver platter and then carved it in the pantry, and a footman made the rounds and permitted each guest in turn to choose his slices. That footman had just been released from the Army, having fought all the way from Omaha Beach to the River Elbe; he was content to come back to his old job—like the admirable Crichton in Barrie’s play. Two maids carried the trimmings and the extras, and the people at the table had nothing to do but eat and laugh and tell about everything that had happened to them during the year. The religious implications of Thanksgiving Day had been pretty well forgotten; the ladies and gentlemen played golf instead of goin
g to church, and they made the holiday an occasion for feasting and forgetting their old grudges.

  In the course of the afternoon Lanny had a chat with his father and heard once more the story of how America loved its arms manufacturers whenever it was in trouble and the moment the war was over took to calling them merchants of death. Robbie wanted to know what Lanny had been doing abroad, and Lanny said nothing about counterfeiters, but he was free to tell of his visit to the White House and of the messages he had brought back from Europe. The president of Budd-Erling Aircraft had a supreme contempt for an ex-haberdasher named Harry S. Truman and used him as a sample of American incompetence in self-government. All the same, he was curious about the queer bird and plied Lanny with questions. Lanny could imagine Robbie telling his cronies at the office and the country club about it, and not without pride.

  Lanny was able to tell the old man news that cheered him greatly: that the way the wind was blowing it might soon be expected to blow Robbie some orders for new and improved fighter planes. It was all going to be jets now, Robbie said; propeller planes were dead as the dodo, and he was expending a lot of his stored-up surplus upon experiments with sweptback wings; all this at the huge testing plant he had out in the deserts of New Mexico.

  II

  Toward dark, Frances took Rick and Nina and Junior into her car to drive them home, and Lanny and his wife stopped off at the family nest of the Robins. Here was another large group, this time Jewish; since the Christians had forgotten the religious meaning of their holiday it was proper for the Jews to share it as a day of feasting and family reunion. Here was the elderly Johannes Robin, whom the Nazis had treated so badly; he had been a multimillionaire, and now considered himself a poor man, though as head of the sales department of Budd-Erling he had plenty of money and hadn’t failed to invest it carefully.

  There was Mama Robin, who was family love and care incarnate. She was Grandmama now, with quite a brood, not restricted by fashion; there were Hansi’s two boys, and there was Freddie, Jr., and four children of Rahel, Freddie’s widow who had remarried and had a devoted husband. When Lanny and Laurel came that made fourteen, quite a party. They had a light supper since no one was hungry, and then Hansi played for them and Lanny accompanied—not very well, since he was badly out of practice, but he managed to keep up and no one was critical. Mama Robin adored him, for he had once helped them all to get away from the dreadful Nazis, and he was her ideal of what an Anglo-Saxon gentleman ought to be.

  Hansi Robin never drove a car; he did nothing that might interfere with the flexibility of his precious fingers—each one of them was insured for a quarter of a million dollars, for obviously if any one of them was lost or injured the others would be of no further use. Lanny drove him to his home, and the three of them sat until after midnight, discussing the state of the world. Lanny was free to tell about his visit to Germany and what Monck and others had said about conditions there. They talked over the changes in the programme, and Hansi’s heart was wrung at the thought of having to give way to the warmongers and the redbaiters; but he agreed that there was nothing else to be done and assented to President Truman’s dictum that it took two to keep the peace. Hansi’s opinion of Truman was strikingly different from Robbie Budd’s.

  III

  Lanny and Laurel were planning to spend the night with the Hansibesses, as they called them. Laurel had her mind made up to have a quiet talk with Bess, but Bess wasn’t there; she was attending a meeting of the Agitprop Committee, so Hansi reported. It was the custom of the Communists to use holidays for a series of meetings that working people could attend.

  It was about one o’clock in the morning when they heard Bess putting her car in the garage. She came in, looking tired and somewhat drab. She had been a lovely blond child; now she was forty, and the colour had gone out of her cheeks and she made no effort to replace it; she wore her hair tied in a knot on the top of her head and covered with a little hat without ornament. She used no cosmetics; she wasn’t trying to win your attention that way. If you had a mind and wanted to use it she would explain to you why all the troubles of the world were due to the capitalist system.

  She knew that her half-brother and sister-in-law were in the house; she had seen their car in the drive. She said ‘Hello’, and they responded in kind. She took off her driving gloves and the long coat which she wore and dropped them into a chair, then dropped herself into another. ‘Well’, she said, ‘I see that you won’t let any more people believe in peace’.

  It was a challenge, of course. Late as it was, she was ready for an argument. It was the Communist technique: attack, attack again, and then again.

  Nobody had an impulse to say anything, so nobody did. Bess continued, ‘I take it to mean that you think all the people who really want peace sympathise with the Communists and know that that is the only way to get it; so you have to cut short their talks and use the time to challenge them and bait them. Tell me, Lanny, is that a deliberate policy, or do you expect me to believe it’s just an accident?’

  To this direct question it was necessary to answer, and Lanny said mildly, ‘We thought it would make the programme more interesting if we had questions and answers’.

  ‘The questions being always directed to pin the speaker down and force him to admit that all the threats of war at present are coming from the Soviet Union. Don’t think you can fool the public, Lanny. They are beginning to wake up and realise who are the true enemies of peace in this world’.

  ‘It would be a waste of time to discuss it, Bess—’

  ‘No, the only place you want to discuss it is over the air where you have all the say and where the fallacies and falsehoods cannot be pointed out’.

  ‘I am sorry you feel that way about it, Bess. We try to get a varied list of speakers—’

  ‘And when you get one who has any trace of understanding for the liberal or democratic view you proceed to bait him and make him ridiculous. I had some hopes that you were going to let both sides be heard, but I suppose the pressure upon you has been too great. Tell me, has the F.B.I. been paying you a visit—or is it the American Legion or the Ku Kluxers?’

  They had had rows like this before, and for Hansi’s sake Lanny didn’t want to have another. He said, ‘It’s late, Bess—’

  ‘Why don’t you give me a straight answer? Tell me what pressure was put upon you’.

  ‘There wasn’t any pressure whatever, Bess. It was just that I heard Professor Philips and decided he wasn’t very clear in his mind. I talked it over with the others, and we agreed that we would ask the speakers questions and clear up their point of view’.

  ‘In other words, you think that James Alverson Philips is a Red! Is that it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Bess’.

  ‘I can tell you from the inside—he’s as much of a Red as Herbert Hoover. You’ve got to the point where you can’t let a speaker find the slightest thing wrong with the capitalist system or hint at the slightest thing good in the Soviet Union. You taught me to be a Socialist, Lanny, and I thought you were at least a liberal. What has happened to you? Is it that you’re afraid of losing Robbie’s money? Or have you made so much of your own?

  ‘It has nothing to do with money, Bess. It is just that I have seen too much killing in the Soviet Union’.

  ‘Killing! My God, you talk about killing! You have seen the capitalist powers fly at one anothers’ throats—twice you have seen it, in the two greatest slaughters of history. You saw the great capitalists of Germany set up Hitler in power and give him arms, and you saw him burn six million Jews and murder some ten or twenty million Russians in an unprovoked attack—and you talk about killing! You see the Soviet Union putting down traitors and capitalist intriguers—putting most of them in prison—I doubt if they have killed one per cent of the number that were slaughtered in the last holocaust. But you call that killing! You can stand any number of world wars apparently—you’re getting ready for another as fast as you know how—but you can’t stan
d the killing of traitors and spies; I suppose because you were one yourself’.

  ‘Oh, Bess!’ broke in Laurel. ‘How perfectly horrible!’

  ‘You know he was a spy. He was a spy against Göring, and that was all right. What I want to know is, is he going to be a spy against the Soviet Union? I call him a traitor to the cause of the workers, because he espoused it and he taught me to espouse it, and now he can’t find enough bitter things to say against it. You are both taking Emily Chattersworth’s money and using it for the very opposite of what she wanted. I had hopes when you started; both of you were so eloquent I thought you really meant to plead for peace. But now the whole country has gone crazy against the Soviet Union—that horrid Truman is calling for war and preparing for it—and you have joined the wolf pack and are howling with the rest of them!’

  Hansi got up. ‘It is late’, he said quietly. ‘We all ought to have some sleep, and Laurel especially. This is Thanksgiving Day, and we can all count our blessings. We live in a free country where each can think as he pleases and go his own way in the morning and do as he pleases’.

  Hansi was the host, and it was possible to take his statement as a command. Lanny got up and took his wife by the arm and they said good night. He helped her upstairs to the guest room, where they had stayed for weeks at a time and felt at home. Hansi and Bess were sleeping apart, and Hansi went to his room. What Bess did they did not know.

  Laurel exclaimed, ‘Poor Hansi!’ and repeated it several times in a voice full of grief. She had come here with the thought that she would take Bess off alone and plead with her gently, both as a sister-in-law and a friend; but she saw there was nothing to be done. She said, ‘They ought to part, Lanny. One or the other should get a divorce. Hansi might meet some woman he could love and who would be decent to him. He will just be destroyed if he goes on like this’.