O Shepherd, Speak!

by Sinclair, Upton;

  “It is reported that Stalin at Yalta said he did not see why Honduras should have the right to decide what the Soviet Union should or should not do. The proposal sounds funny when you put it that way. But suppose we had a world court with a judge from each of five small nations, say Honduras and Iceland and Switzerland and Ceylon and New Zealand; and now ask Stalin, ‘Which do you think would offer the better chance of justice, a decision of that court, or two atomic bombs dropped, one on Moscow and one on Leningrad?’

  “Do not think for a moment that Stalin is alone to blame for the veto. Our own government has made it plain that we are no more willing than Stalin to give Honduras a voice as to what we shall do. No one of the Big Three is ready to submit to a world government—and that is why we do not have a world government, but only a place to argue in. I am glad to have that place, a sounding board to carry voices all over the world, for it is only by discussion that we can find out who is to blame and what is needed in our desperate situation. It is only by the trial and error of parliament plus veto that we can convince ourselves of the need of a real world authority, with a world police force to back up what it says. We all have to watch our United Nations, criticize it, and find out how to improve it, or else to put the real authority in its place.”

  IV

  They had agreed that in this opening program they would say nothing to alarm the most timid member of their audience. There wasn’t time to get down to cases; they would be satisfied if they could cause their hearers to tell their friends about it, and to come back a week later. So now this earnest lady made a moral appeal to the public. So many people complained of the triviality and cheapness of radio programs, and here was a test of the public’s desire for real intellectual food.

  “We do not believe,” said Laurel, “that the American people wish to drift blindfolded into a war of atomic bombs. We have gone to the trouble and expense of setting up a publishing plant and a radio program because of our faith that there are people all over this broad land who want to be able to live at peace and who will be concerned to discover why they cannot. We do not come as dogmatists, with ready-made solutions to force into your minds, but to give a hearing to various types of thinkers who know the subject and have something vital to say.

  “Our program is dedicated to the American way. We believe in freedom of discussion and in government by popular consent. We subscribe to Jefferson’s motto, that truth has nothing to fear from error where reason is left free to combat it. That does not mean that we grant the use of our platform to those whose purpose it is to undermine freedom of discussion. We grant them the right to try their undermining, but we let them do it in their own papers and at their own expense.

  “And the same thing applies to those who are satisfied with the world as it is, and who value their dividend checks more than a just and ordered human society. They too have their organs of opinion and make use of them. The Peace Program is intended for those men and women who consider that world wars are monstrous and horrible things, and that the coming of two of them only twenty-one years apart indicates something vitally and fundamentally wrong with our society. If you agree with this statement, stay with us, and let us have peace.”

  Billy Burns the announcer was standing in front of the speaker with his watch in hand. Thirty seconds before her time would be up he signaled by raising his arm, and she began her peroration. When he dropped his arm she finished, and he began:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you have been listening to Mary Morrow, novelist and magazine writer, speaking on the opening quarter-hour of the Peace Program. This program has been set up by a group of friends who believe that world wars have their causes and that these causes can be discovered and remedied. The program will be heard over Station WYZ, New York, at seven every Thursday evening. It may also be heard over other stations which consent to carry it.

  “Next Thursday’s speaker will be Sir Eric Pomeroy-Nielson, English baronet, now visiting this country. Sir Eric was a flyer in World War I, and was severely wounded. Two of his sons were flyers in the recent war, both wounded, so you may believe that he knows about war. He is well known as a playwright and journalist, and will report to you on the English attitude to the hoped-for peace and the feared next war. The following week the eminent violinist, Hansi Robin, will play for you, and will answer questions on the subject of war and peace. Other programs of equal interest are being planned.

  “We wish to inform you also that the Peace Group has arranged for the publication of a small weekly paper, to carry these broadcasts and make it possible for you to pass them on to your friends. This is to be a small four-page paper, devoted to the subject of world peace. We have put the price so low that no one who wants it will have to do without it. The price is fifty cents per year, which means that each copy will cost slightly less than one cent. Since fifty cents is inconvenient to send in the mail, we suggest that you send a dollar and list one friend as well as yourself. Or you may send five dollars and list ten persons. You may order it in bundles, one hundred for one dollar, and distribute it in your club, your school, your labor union or place of business. If you want to be munificent, you may send us your local telephone book and put everybody in your town on our mailing list.

  “This paper, which is called Peace, is now in type, all but the broadcast of Mary Morrow, which has just been taken down by a stenographer. Tomorrow morning the printer will put it into type and the paper will go to press. We hope to start mailing tomorrow night. The address is easy to remember: Box One Thousand, Edgemere, New Jersey. You don’t have to put anything else on the envelope; just Box One Thousand, Edgemere, New Jersey.

  “And now our time is up. We thank you for listening and hope that you found it worth while. Let us have peace.”

  V

  Well, they had got through alive, and they were all smiles and congratulations. They had put their hearts into it, and things began to happen right off the bat. The phone rang; it was Mr. Archibald, congratulating them on the broadcast; it was good, and they were proud of it. And then another jingle; it was a Mrs. Meyer Herzkowitz in New York; she wanted them to print a thousand copies of the paper for her, and she would mail them a check in the morning. So it went; they had only two telephones and these weren’t enough, but it was almost impossible to get more on account of postwar shortages. The ladies would have to go, one after another, and exercise their charms upon the telephone company manager. This was a public service, something different from the usual appeals to such officials.

  They had brought a basket with a picnic meal, and they took turns eating and answering phone calls. It was most exhilarating; no fewer than three persons were sending telephone books of small towns, and the group began to doubt if the ten thousand copies of the paper they had planned to print would suffice. The printer had known where he could get newsprint, provided they would put up the money; that being what their million dollars was for, they had put up for all the paper he could find, and it was stored in a warehouse in the town. In the morning they would tell him to run the press day and night.

  Then they all had a good laugh. There was a telephone call for Miss Morrow, and Freddi, who answered, reported it was a man with a voice like a bassoon. Said the bassoon, “Is this Miss Morrow? My name is Harold Partridge and I wrote making you an honorable proposal of marriage, and you didn’t answer.” Said Laurel, “I am truly sorry, sir, but I am already married and have a son more than two years old. The thing for you to do is to help circulate our paper.” Mr. Partridge was profuse in his apologies and promised to send in an order. “Nobody can say I am not a salesman,” said Mary Morrow to Billy Burns.

  Their minds were full of images of men and women for hundreds of miles around hastening to put folding money into envelopes and taking them out to the mailbox at the corner. A marvelous system in Megalopolis, the mail was collected every hour or so and taken to a substation, where it was put into a projectile and shot through a tube, reaching the main post office in a few seconds.
As it happened, that main post office was right across the street from the Pennsylvania Railroad Station, and it had words graven upon its front, telling the world that not rain nor snow nor hail should stay these carriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. This meant that letters for Box 1000, Edgemere, would come out on an early morning train. The postmaster of the town had been notified of the storm that was going to hit him and had promised to have a couple of assistants on hand. The peace lovers, for their part, had half a dozen girls pledged to welcome the expected mail, and others were awaiting a possible call; most of them were middle-aged women, but they would all be “the girls,” and no middle-aged woman had ever been known to object to that.

  VI

  Everything went according to schedule. Freddi went to the post office in the morning and came back exultant with two sacks full of mail. Yes, the American people didn’t want another war! The sacks were emptied onto the tables, and all the group would have liked to pick up a few letters and tear them open; but there were rules that must never be broken. No letter must be read until it had been through the mill! The girls must take them and slit them with a sharp paper cutter and arrange them in long rows, then open them one at a time, set the money in the center of the table, mark the amount on the letter with a blue pencil, then fasten letter and envelope together with a clip—for someone, especially a foreigner, might have put the address on the envelope and failed to put it on the letter.

  The bundles of letters must be taken to the stencil cutter, and only after that might even one of the “Big Four” be permitted to handle them. Every word had to be read by some qualified person, for in addition to an order it might contain advice, suggestions, questions, or further offers. Perhaps somebody might be offering to put up another million dollars—who could guess? The final authority, and the one to answer important questions, would be Lady Nielson, for the radio had been her idea, and it would remain her darling and her pet. It might run away with the whole show—again, who could guess?

  The letters were ample reward for a year’s thinking and planning. They were full of enthusiasm, and only a very few were hostile. People wanted to help—all kinds of people, old and young, rich and poor. There weren’t many business letters that first day, for they had been mailed at night, from people’s homes. There were letters on fashionable stationery, in the tall handwriting which is esteemed by the rich because it uses up a lot of paper; there were letters in the trembling handwriting of the aged, and others from working people who hadn’t mastered the problem of whether the “e” comes before the “i” or after it. People liked the program, and some of them liked the broadcasters; several marked their letters “personal,” but it had been agreed that all letters that came to Box 1000 would go through the mill. Even the letters from young ladies who wanted to meet Billy Burns and enclosed their photographs to show what nice-looking young ladies they were!

  VII

  The mill began to grind. It ground out stencils, and these were put in long rows in boxes and carried to the stamping machines. Meantime, at the printshop, the press was turning out papers, and a boy was bringing loads of them. Papers and stencils were fed into the stamping machine—Sam de Witt had also procured this machine, and had done it at cost. The machine stamped each paper in the corner which had been left blank for that purpose, and presently there was a bundle of them, to be tied up and dumped into the same mail pouches in which the letters had been brought from the post office.

  Four times that day sacks of letters were dumped out on the tables. Because papers were bigger than letters, more empty sacks had to be brought; presently the post office had no more, and the bundles had to be piled up in a car, and then the postmaster had to cry for mercy. He was going to need more help, more room, more everything; this business would mean that his office would acquire a higher classification and he would receive a higher salary, so it was a great day for him too.

  All Edgemere had listened to the broadcast, the first that had ever come from this town, and the first time it had been mentioned on the air since the big fire several years ago. All Edgemere liked what it had heard, or so the Tipton family reported. More girls were needed, and Mrs. Tipton produced them; before long the workroom of the Peace office might have been the sewing circle of the First Methodist Church. But one big difference, no conversation!

  A very strict rule, you had to have your mind on those letters and what they contained. You got a dollar and a half an hour out of it, and then when you got home you could tell family and friends all about it, and soon all the town would know that those people were taking in money by the basketful, so much that they had a hard time counting it. Two men went with it to the bank—one of them that tall, thin, young Jewish fellow, and he had a permit to carry the Luger pistol he had brought back from Germany. That was against the Army rules, but the way the GIs got round it, they took the thing apart and mailed each part separately to somebody at home.

  That is the sort of talk you hear in small towns. Everybody knows everybody else, and what everybody is doing and saying and thinking. Everybody keeps careful watch over the conduct of the others, especially if they belong to the churches—which is, in effect, asking for it. So the church girls all knew that Billy Burns’ real name was Budd, and that he was married to Mary Morrow, so it didn’t seem quite decent to go on calling her “Miss.” They had a little boy who was soon to be brought to The Willows. Miss Morrow must be the one who was putting up all the money, for she signed all the checks, but with another name. They had been spending money like water, and now they were taking it in as if it grew on trees.

  They had employed a bookkeeper from New York, and he was boarding with one of the church members, so it wouldn’t be long before the town knew whether it was true what they said, that they weren’t going to make any profit out of this business. Sir Eric and Lady Nielson were each being paid a salary of three hundred dollars a month, and surely anybody ought to be able to live like a lord and lady on that. Lawyer Pegram said they really were what they claimed to be, he had read about them in the papers; he said that a baronet wasn’t as high as a lord or a duke, but still he was pretty high, and it didn’t make any difference if they were Socialists, and if their son was a Labour member of Parliament. Socialists were not as bad as Communists, or so Mrs. Tipton insisted, and she believed in God.

  VIII

  All this the newcomers learned through their laundryman, who called once a week for the wash, and delivered it three days later. He would stop in the kitchen, the weather being cold, and unless Laurel was very busy she would come and chat with him. She found him what is called a “character,” and insiders know that to a novelist such a find may be as valuable as a gold mine. Nina, who lived on the ground floor, would stroll in too, because she wanted to understand America. They had agreed to live in this town for five years, and must keep on good terms with the population. Also, they were both women and liked to hear what was doing.

  Comrade Tipton—they didn’t learn his first name—had traveled widely and knew human nature from selling it patent medicines. He had read many books, and now he lived among people most of whom confined their reading to the sports pages and comic strips. He was a philosopher and looked with amused tolerance upon the delusions of his fellow townsmen. There were a few intellectuals in the place, he reported—an elderly lawyer, the young chap who kept the stationery shop, and an Italian refugee who blacked shoes at one of the barber shops. But mostly the townsmen were conventional people, against whom their laundryman carried on a secret, underground war, putting dangerous ideas into their heads without their realizing what was happening to them.

  He was ready to do the same thing with half a dozen innocents who had been dropped, as it were, by parachute into his neighborhood. He regarded them as innocents because they were not “libertarians” like himself; they believed in governments, and expected to achieve reforms through governments, not realizing that governments were themselves the evil. Governments were
the cause of wars; governments had authority to conscript men and order them to kill one another; therefore, trying to abolish war through governments was like trying to ward off the effects of arsenic by taking more of the same.

  This he told them casually, and with a smile; he never tried to convert anyone, he said, because people resent conversion. “I’m just sorry to see you waste your time,” he said. “If you believe in government, sooner or later you will be drawn into politics; you will help to elect somebody to an office, and then you will see him serving the little group that put up his campaign funds.”

  “What would you have us do?” inquired Laurel.

  “If you really want the people to acquire power, you must organize them for independent action.”

  “You mean for revolution?”

  “Oh, no, for that is just more government, more authority. What counts is economic power, and the way to it is by free associations, such as consumers’ co-operatives. When co-operators have reached the goal of producing and distributing all their necessities they are on the road, and the only road, to pure democracy.”

  “Yes, Comrade Tipton, but don’t they have to protect themselves politically? You must know that the people of Italy had a marvelous system of co-ops, but when Mussolini took power he wiped it all out overnight.”