Presidential Agent

by Upton Sinclair

  So, when a thin-faced fanatical fellow with front teeth missing offered Lanny a copy of the Christian Mobilizer, he paid a nickel and put it into his pocket for future study. Then came a red-faced German with a copy of the Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter; then a frail, half-starved girl, selling Father Coughlin’s Social Justice. Lanny bought everything; even to a button with a white cross on it, which he pinned onto his coat as a preliminary to asking questions.

  The speech ended with an appeal to the audience to enroll in the “Christian Front” and give their support to the salvation of America. Many gathered around the truck for this purpose, and it occurred to Lanny Budd that it might some day be useful to a “P.A.” to possess a membership card in this organization. He gave his name, together with his hotel address, which wasn’t permanent. The card was made out by an elderly woman wearing a black alpaca coat, frayed at the cuffs; she did not fail to note the elegant appearance of this new applicant, and said: “God bless you, brother! Come and see us and give your support to our holy cause.”

  The paper sellers were busily hawking their wares. There was a table loaded with pamphlets and books, prominent among them the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. A strange social phenomenon that! An impecunious lawyer in Tsarist Moscow had adapted this document from a French work of fiction; the original version had had nothing to do with Jews, but the revised version was taken as gospel and had become a hate-weapon of Nazis all over the world. Henry Ford had distributed hundreds of thousands of copies, and wherever his cars traveled people learned on the authority of the world’s richest man that the Jews had a secret international organization plotting to destroy Christian society. Later on the Flivver King had taken it back, but few people knew that, or cared. From other literature for sale at these tables you could learn that the Jews had a rite which required the blood of freshly killed gentile babies.

  X

  Along with other members of the dispersing audience Lanny strolled toward the west, and found himself alongside the hatchet-faced fellow who had sold him the Christian Mobilizer. “Hot talk, that!” remarked the visitor, and the reply was: “You said it, brother!”

  This sadly depressed specimen of megalopolitan life gazed suspiciously at a spring overcoat of the latest cut and Homburg hat to match; however, he noted the little button with the white cross, and asked: “You one of us?”

  “I carry a card,” replied Lanny, and showed it in his hand; he didn’t mention that he had carried it for only five minutes. “You find a good sale for the paper?”

  “We’ve just started, but it’s going big.”

  “Not with the Jews, I imagine.”

  Lanny said it playfully, but there was no play in this child of the gutters. “Sometimes we sell to the kikes. They take a good look at us an’ guess they’d better.”

  Among the people walking on this cross street were several other vendors of literature, and others of a sort with whom Lanny would not have cared to be alone on any street. “Where do you go from here?” he inquired.

  “We allus go to Times Square after meetings. We get the the-ay-ter crowd, and sometimes we teach the sheenies a lesson. Come along, if you want to see the fun.”

  Lanny wanted to see everything, and wanted to learn all he could about a “Christian Fronter.” An Irish-Catholic boy, raised in the slum known as “Hell’s Kitchen” and educated in a parochial school, Mike Raftery had been told by his priest that the bloodthirsty “Rooshians” were trying to destroy Holy Mother Church, and that they were all Jews, or at any rate Jewish-inspired. He had not the least difficulty in believing that Jewish Bolsheviks and bankers were in a common conspiracy to dominate the world; he had but the vaguest idea of what bankers did or what Bolsheviks believed; he had learned from Father Coughlin’s papers that the bankers gave money to the Bolsheviks for the undermining of the Catholic religion and the American Constitution. Now he had shifted to the paper of “Bully-boy Joe,” which was new and even more violent. “Speeches ain’t enough,” said Mike. “We gotta have action; we gotta make them kikes pipe down.”

  What constituted “action” Lanny saw quickly enough. Reaching Times Square, the sellers spread out on the various corners made by Broadway and Forty-third Street. They began screaming: “Buy the Christian Mobilizer! Save America! Down with the Jews!” Meantime the group of toughs, the “goon squad,” moved from one seller to another; not conspicuously, but one here and one there; Lanny knew them, because he had walked a mile or so with them. When a Jew came along—preferably a poor one—a seller would approach him. “Buy a Christian Mobilizer—read all about the dirty sheenies!” If he didn’t stop, the seller would try to step on his toes; if he did stop, the seller would poke the paper under his nose. “Save America from the kikes!”

  The Jew thus assailed would do well to get out of the way quickly, and to keep his mouth closed. If he said anything angry, or tried to shove his tormenter out of the way, the man or woman would yell and the goon squad would leap in. They carried what appeared to be newspapers, but really were pieces of lead pipe with newspapers wrapped around them. They would bring these down on the victim’s head, splitting it open, or cracking his arm if he tried to defend his head; they would leave him bleeding and perhaps unconscious on the pavement, and disappear into the crowd in a flash.

  This went on night after night, Lanny was told; and it surprised him, for he had read little or nothing about it in the papers. The New York “cops” were in good part Catholic, and there was no law against their reading Father Coughlin’s paper; they came from the same slums as the paper sellers, and in their boyhood had spit upon many a “Christ-killer.” The mayor of New York was part Jewish, and was in an awkward position because he was a liberal and had been preaching freedom of speech all his life. The newspapers of New York lived upon department-store advertising, and reports of violence and especially of racial and religious violence were bad for trade; a large part of the buyers who came to the city were Jewish, and what if their wives became frightened and persuaded them to go elsewhere? As for Lanny Budd, playing the good Samaritan in the theater district would surely have been bad for his business.

  XI

  The presidential agent looked up the name of Forrest Quadratt in the phone book and called him. “I have just had the pleasure of spending ten days at the Berghof,” he said. “I was there during Schuschnigg’s visit.”

  “Oh, splendid!” exclaimed the poet turned propagandist; he didn’t get a call like that very often. “Won’t you come up to dinner? I have a friend, a high-ranking personality from overseas who happens to be in town, and I’ll invite him. I know you’d like to meet him.”

  Meeting high-ranking personalities was Lanny’s business, so the date was made. He took a taxi to the upper West Side, where the partisan of Nazism had an apartment on Riverside Drive, filled with the trophies of culture. The host had written a shelf of books, including a defense of the Kaiser, whose left-handed relative he was supposed to be. He was a smallish, near-sighted man, suave and gracious, caressing in manner. He had a sweet little wife about whom Lanny wondered, what did she make of the Nazi doctrines concerning her sex? Lanny had the suspicion that both husband and wife had Jewish blood, but this of course would never be put into words.

  The other guest was a tall Prussian aristocrat with a round blond head, wearing a monocle and introduced as Kapitän von Schnelling. He had commanded a U-boat during the World War and been one of those who sank their vessels at Scapa Flow. He had most formal manners, and knew Stubendorf, Herzenberg, the Donnersteins, all Lanny’s high-up friends in the Fatherland. What he was doing in America was made apparent during the course of the evening, and Lanny realized that he was dealing with a really important man and a shrewd one.

  They wanted to hear about his adventures in the Berghof and he told them in detail. He didn’t say anything about a spiritualist medium, or about having sold some paintings, which might have turned it into a business affair; he left it to be assumed that his long stay
had been owing to the Führer’s delight in his company. He talked about walks in the forest and the retreat under construction on the Kehlstein; about a great man’s household, his eating habits, his visitors—there could be no doubt that the teller had actually witnessed these things.

  Also he told about Vienna, the interview with Schuschnigg, and the misadventure of the lawyer-doctor in Berchtesgaden. Manifestly, no one would have been permitted to stay in the Führer’s home at such a critical time unless he had possessed his host’s confidence; nor was this confidence misplaced. The son of Budd-Erling was no Emporkömmling, a social climber, but understood the Führer’s ideas and his high destiny. He spoke with respect and even awe of a crusader who had set out to chain the wild beast of Bolshevism and put an end to the age-long quarrelings among Europe’s petty states.

  So the Kapitän could see no reason for secrecy, and talked frankly about his responsibilities in America. He was a sort of inspector-general, making a survey of Nazi educational work all over the country, and at the same time lending his prestige and cultivated intelligence to the task of influencing highly placed Americans. He had completed a tour of nearly two months, in the course of which he had visited a score of cities, all the way from Seattle to Palm Beach, as he put it. He was greatly pleased by what he had found; in most cases the propaganda was in excellent hands and the results most encouraging; America was ripe for a fundamental social change, and with hard work and wise guidance there was every reason to expect that the strong German elements throughout the country would play their full part. The main trouble, as this polished Junker saw it, was the reluctance of the Nazi partisans to Americanize themselves; they wanted to follow the Nazi ways, and to force these ways down American throats, which couldn’t be done. The Bund had been ordered to change its make-up, and to print the swastika in red, white, and blue. All this was hard, especially in the hinterlands.

  Lanny agreed, but said that he had noted a great many native groups springing up, having the Nazi program, but not acknowledging it as Nazi, and in many cases not even knowing it. They called themselves “Christian” or “Protestant,” “Yankee Freemen” or “American Patriots”—it didn’t really make any difference, so long as they saw the Red peril and the Jew menace, and fought the New Deal. The Kapitän agreed, and Quadratt put in: “Citizens’ Protective Associations and National Workers’ Leagues are a dime a dozen in New York right now.”

  XII

  This highly trained aristocrat spoke English without a trace of accent, and had no difficulty in “Americanizing” himself. He was here for America’s benefit, he declared, to give the country a chance to profit by the lessons which had been learned in Germany. He had found Americans an extremely receptive people, especially those who were highly placed, and had more to lose from reckless experimentation. He talked interestingly about his meetings with such men. He had spent the better part of a day with Henry Ford, an unusual privilege, and found him in a generous mood. He had spent an evening with Colonel McCormick and found him, as he said, “most congenial.” The same for Lammot du Pont in Wilmington; “a really powerful man, with whom we have done a great deal of business, as you know.” The same for Mr. Rand, of Remington-Rand, in Connecticut, who had recently had a painful experience with a great strike, and was bitter as a result.

  “My father knows him well,” said Lanny; and the Kapitän was quick to take that lead. “I have heard a great deal about your father, and would esteem it a privilege to meet him.” Lanny couldn’t do anything but offer an introduction. Poor Robbie would have to take his chances with this suave and subtle Junker!

  The greatest progress had been made in Washington, if you could believe the agent’s story. He mentioned hostesses such as Mrs. McLean and Mrs. Patterson who had entertained him, and the senators and congressmen who had heard him gladly and assured him of their sympathy. He was amusing on the subject of Senator Reynolds of North Carolina, who had begun life as a barker in a sideshow, and had got elected by accusing his rival of the crime of eating caviar. “Do you know what caviar is? Fish eggs! Do you want the Tarheel State to be represented in Washington by a man who eats fish eggs?” Now the Senator was congenial to the Nazis, though of course not carrying the label. He was planning a paper to be called the American Vindicator, and had shown the Kapitän his idea of the layout. “Pretty poor stuff, I thought it; but I judge the standard of education in the Senator’s part of the country is not very high.”

  Lanny wished that these misguided statesmen might have heard what a Nazi agent really thought of them in private. “Senator Wheeler appears to hate the Administration even more than he loves the Anaconda Copper Company.” And then: “Senator Nye, I gather, has been a pacifist for a long time. Now the Führer has got him bewitched, and he is a pacifist for everybody but us.” Then a congressman with the odd name of Ham Fish. “I am told that he comes from an old and wealthy family, and was a great football player when he was young. He should have stuck to that.”

  Forrest Quadratt took up the conversation. He knew Fish very well, and reported him as amiable, but bumptious, and stupid beyond belief. There was a convenient American arrangement known as the “franking privilege,” by which congressmen could send out mail free of charge; there was no limit upon it, and some had even shipped their furniture and liquors by that method. Ham Fish had turned over the matter to his secretary, and the secretary had given Quadratt the use of it, a device whereby unlimited Nazi speeches, pamphlets, and books could be distributed to the American people at their own expense. The ex-poet urged his Junker friend to realize the importance of this, and told about a publishing house which he had set up in a small town of New Jersey. It was carefully camouflaged to look American, and Quadratt showed his guests several books which he had written under pseudonyms and published through this concern.

  On another shelf of the same bookcase was a row of the decadent poets of France, Germany, Austria, Italy, England, and America. Lanny’s eyes ran over them: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Dowson, Symons, D’Annunzio—and Quadratt’s own youthful volume, Eros Unbound. The ex-poet saw Lanny’s glance, and remarked, nostalgically: “There used to be a day when I could recite whole pages from those books; now, alas, I have had to become a reformer, and my mind is a card catalogue of names and personalities all over my native land.” He meant America, and repeated the wheeze which was his stock-in-trade, that he was trying to interpret the land of his birth to the land of his forefathers, and vice versa.

  XIII

  The “inspector-general” of the Nazis had been invited to meet some of what he called the “key personalities of the American movement.” This was to be on the following evening, and Quadratt offered to get an invitation for Lanny, who accepted with pleasure. The Käpitan never made public speeches, he said, but was glad to talk confidentially with the leaders, and especially those who were in position to put up the funds, so essential to the building of any new movement. The gathering was to be in the home of a Miss van Zandt, on lower Fifth Avenue, now mostly pre-empted by the dress-making and book-publishing industries. Quadratt explained that this elderly lady was “slightly cracked, but harmless, and lousy with money.” He added that in America it was the women who had the money, and you had to put up with a certain amount of boredom and inconvenience in order to get it. Lanny remarked that it was not so different in Germany; he mentioned the Bechsteinhaus at the Berghof, named in honor of the widow of the piano manufacturer, who had financed the Führer all through his early struggles. It was a worthy precedent.

  At eight on the following evening Lanny descended from a taxicab in front of an ancient brownstone mansion, and the door was opened before him by an aged servitor in black. There he met and listened to the oddest assortment of upper-class intellectuals it had ever been his fate to encounter. His hostess, tall, thin, white-haired, and wearing pince-nez, greeted him in the entrance to her drawing-room, clad in a full-length and long-sleeved black silk dress in which her great-grandmother might have attended funeral
s in Grace Church. This lady’s ancestry went back to New York’s early Dutch beginnings, and she had inherited a small family farm, now covered with skyscrapers paying enormous incomes. When she went for a walk she carried a black silk umbrella faded green, and when she invited guests she gave them rather cheap refreshments, but would not hesitate to write a check for five thousand dollars when a plausible ex-poet persuaded her that he had a new book which would help to oust the Reds from their entrenchments in near-by Union Square.

  To this soirée the “slightly cracked” lady had invited persons of wealth whom it might be worth while for a Nazi Junker to meet: among them a White Russian count—White in the political, not the geographical sense—with the difficult name of Anastase Andreivitch Vonsiatskoy-Vonsiatsky. (Lanny never did find out the wherefore of the repetition with variation.) He was a giant of a man with huge hands and thick lips from which came a deep rumbling voice. He had married a wealthy widow more than two decades older than himself, and now he had Nazi Stormtroopers drilling on her immense estate in Connecticut. There also he edited and published a Russian-language magazine called The Fascist, and sent arms to the Mexican Gold Shirts—all this quite openly, boasting of it in loud bellows.

  And then a round-faced, soft-voiced American with graying hair and the aspect of a scholar, who had inherited a fortune from the paper-manufacturing business and purchased a literary magazine and turned it into an organ of American Fascism. Seward Collins politely explained to Lanny Budd that he had been converted by Hilaire Belloc to “distributionism”; he wanted to go back to the Middle Ages and have everybody cultivate small plots of land. He hated capitalism, and tolerated the Nazis because he thought they were destroying that evil system. He considered anti-Semitism an error, but even so had set up a bookshop for the sale of all sorts of Fascist literature.