Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  It certainly was, and it was in no mood for serious words. Indeed, the only appropriate gesture would have been a soft shoe dance, but he was there to discuss business and taxes, so that is what he discussed. The crowd, which had hoped for something more in the line of a good master of ceremonies, like, say, Bob Hope, with well-timed gags and perhaps some heart-warming oratory, began to sneak away. It wasn’t like an Academy Award dinner at all. And that’s what a President was for, wasn’t it? A master of ceremonies. Someone had to preside over Congress as though it were an old-fashioned minstrel show.

  Tom began to get the hang of it. They were children. One had only to give them things, and they behaved quite well. The big problem in California in those days was that the elderly moved out there to die and then didn’t, which completely threw off the balance of the voting age. They were feeble but numerous, and a Dr. Townsend had made quite a good thing out of promising them things. Characteristically, since most of them had come from the Middle West, his improvisation had been dignified by the appellation, “Ham and Eggs Plan”, which at least was somewhat more nourishing, and much easier to run up, if you were living alone and couldn’t cook well, than President Hoover’s “Chicken in every pot”.

  So he promised them an increase in old-age pensions. As soon as he did that the audiences got better, and stayed longer. It was the Roosevelt technique.

  He was depressed. Living in a fool’s paradise is perhaps excusable. Deliberately to misuse quite good materials for the construction of one is not. Did they really believe all this bankrupt hokum?

  “You are paying money into social security as into a bankrupt insurance company,” he told them. It is a wonder they didn’t throw stones, but it happened to be true. If they had known of the existence of Lord Keynes, they would have known that. But they had never heard of him, so it would have taken several hours to explain to them why, given even that they could have followed the figures.

  He could not have upset his advisers more if he had deliberately kicked one of Sideboard’s sacred cows. Indeed, he had kicked a sacred cow, or at any rate, a milch aphid.

  “I can’t get my ideas across if I go into all the ramifications of what I mean,” he said. They would much rather he had gone into them, for then the ideas would have been lost on his audience, and so have done no damage. Social security was the new religion. Didn’t he know that? Had he never realized the absolute necessity of the bread and circuses principle?

  No he hadn’t. He had not the guile. But then, good intentions, unaccompanied by guile, will destroy the world. Even Wilson had found that out, the hard way, by miserably dying campaigning, or trying to, on a train much like this, with a shawl across his knees.

  Claremont

  One conversation impressed him forcibly.

  He had been dragged off to Claremont, he forgot why, a small college town, but a California small college town, and the California small college was unique, not framed so much after the Athenian Academy, as after the Baths of Diocletian. The excitement was as physical, the steam enervating, and the actual culture applied no more than the same kind of chit-chat. In Los Angeles they learn just enough surface sophistication to be able not to look blank when somebody from the outside world comes through, and that’s all. Still, you could sometimes pay a little attention to the curriculum, while being rubbed down after some form of healthy exercise like, say, petting. In those days, in Claremont, you had Redlands, Pomona, Scripps-Howard, and Whittier, that mother of vice-Presidents, to choose from. It was an interesting form of philanthropy. Every time the widow of some tin manufacturer found herself at a loose end, with her looks gone, and too old to remarry, she founded another college. It kept life from getting dull. Those few widowers left in the United States usually collected art instead. At the very best, culture in such places attained to the dignity of breast feeding, but even so, the breast pump was coming into vogue, for whatever happens, the most important thing is to keep one’s figure.

  It was a small party. They were talking about the Civil War and its ambiguities, or rather, he was. It was not an edifying conversation. The Civil War, it appeared, came to them with all the immediacy of tomorrow morning’s headline. Without the UP, the AP, and Dorothy Thompson, they would never have heard of it.

  Someone asked who had actually been guilty, among those hanged at the Booth trial, for conspiring to murder Lincoln.

  The Civil War was one of his hobbies. “It wasn’t a matter of guilt,” he said. “It was a matter of conscience. At least, as far as they were concerned.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” said one young woman there, the wife of an English instructor with a tradition of diehard Republicanism stretching back to 1832, which is when his family first managed to acquire a little property. She was a red-haired woman with the face of a mummified fox, very perky, very modern, very brave, and quite ruthless, by the looks of her. “Who has time for conscience any more?”

  It stuck in his head. The reason why it stuck in his head, was that it had been said in such a tone of impatience, the tone used to rebuke an old-fashioned child, or a daughter who wouldn’t have her teeth straightened, and would be hard to marry off as a result. Why ruin your whole life with this nonsense? That was the sort of remark it was.

  He remembered it often, during that trip across America. It was the cry of those who had so little time, who had a dinner to go to, a movie to attend, a new sport to take up, a TV programme to watch, anything, anything at all, just so they need never be left alone in a room with themselves for more than five minutes.

  How could one wake such people up? When they heard the planes roar overhead, they took another sleeping pill, or switched on the clock radio at the head of the bed, and that was all they did. They wanted to be taken care of, and they didn’t care by whom. They wanted to get ahead, and they didn’t care over whom. They wanted something out of life, and they didn’t care what.

  Rootless. War to them would mean only that it would be harder to get their favourite brand of coffee, though they would get it; that their husbands would become liaison officers in Saigon or Washington, D.C., with a really serious concern about the world situation and the difficulty of getting a hotel reservation; and that a great deal of strategy would have to be expended on keeping the wrong people out of the car pool. Nothing more. These things were taken care of by other people, not by us. We have our own lives to lead.

  Fresno

  On September 21st, the train began to move up the centre of the state, towards San Francisco. There was a stop at San Bernardino, to see that shrewd old reactionary, Senator Hiram Johnson, a man Tom took to at once, because at least he had guts. Then the train went on to Fresno, a capital of the farming district, with a pile of twenty-story skyscrapers set down in the middle of nothing, to prove it. He spoke there in the park, from the bandstand. The temperature was 104 in the shade, and there wasn’t any shade. He couldn’t help noticing the itinerant workers, shabby and scrawny, sprawled out under the willows, in the middle distance, too tired to know he was there talking to them, rather than to the crowd in front of him. The crowd didn’t notice them, either. They were just itinerant workers, Mexican mostly. They didn’t count.

  Was there, then, a class in America in economic and political and social exile?

  He was coming to believe it likely, to believe that there were probably dozens. He belonged, through wealth and position, to one himself. The whole damn country was in exile, for and from something.

  In Fresno he spoke about aid to Britain and China, which did him no good. To these people, except of course for the Yellow Peril, China was a brand of poultry, and Britain a name they preferred not to hear.

  San Francisco

  San Francisco, on the other hand, was cool. In those days, before its own folk patterns were swamped by white-collar immigration and fugitives from the Fire Island shore, San Francisco usually was. A compact little city, withering, but one of two or three in America with any real claim to be called cities at all,
and very proud of the fact, in its own spritely, fog-bound, provincial, French culture and cosmopolitan way. It had character, it had a history, and so Tom felt at home at once. It was a welcome relief. But enjoy it now. It wouldn’t last long. Twenty years, and it would be a commercial slum, like the rest of America’s cities, a row of shops and nothing more. And though Rome in the old days was just as materialistic, still, the buildings you noticed first in any Roman city were the Forum and the Temples, not the Drive-in and the Supermart.

  Unless business could be constrained to give at least some value for money, unless the mark up could be limited to at the most 100 per cent, unless the merit of the product is at least detectable under the demerits of the advertising, unless the cost estimate includes a qualitative x factor which cannot be computed in dollars and cents, the culture will collapse with the economy. But you cannot make anyone realize that. So all you can do is to try to stave off the collapse.

  Well, he was trying. But no matter what the statisticians have to say, no matter what the weight of sheer numbers, it is only the exceptional man who can pull a culture through. It cannot pull itself through. Inertia has not that value. It never has had. It never will. That was the real danger here, not the conservatism of wisdom, which does well enough, but the conservatism of ignorance, which means ruin. It was the fault of the matriarchy. Women are incapable of quick decisions and some quick decisions do have to be made in this world. You cannot run a state on the profitable eccentricities of a Hetty Green. That’s why we call conservatives, old women.

  A vision of Taft, in one of Colonel McCormick’s hated head scarves (the Russian word was babushka, which is what McCormick hated, that, and that they were an eyesore), snapped before his eyes. He found it amusing.

  Individuality and quality are to society pineal glands. Remove them, and the body dies, though nobody quite knows why. It was all very well for the President to give his fireside chats, but he was not a great man, he only wished to be taken for one by posterity. When it came to fame, and his own hunger for it, the President had a boarding-house reach and always wanted a second helping. And besides, it was a dummy fireplace.

  The whole damn country was turning into an imitation of itself, like an invalid pretending to be well. Except in the backwoods. Except in the refractory areas. Except out on the land. Which is why he had wanted to go out there.

  The wave of the future was only a slight oily swell of mediocrity, but it would be enough to engulf places like San Francisco, which had petty demagogues and realtors in plenty, to break the dikes and let the water in, in order to force each other out of business: a word whose derivation it would do the world well to remember. The Devil makes work for idle hands. How true. He keeps them busy. It was what decorators called a room they had not themselves been commissioned to tat up.

  And the tragedy of it was, it was almost all made work. Surely, at least, businessmen would realize the dangers of too much overhead?

  In Rushville, earlier that month, he had said: “Whether you or others like it or not, I never, during the course of the campaign, will state anything in which I do not believe, I will not talk in quibbling language, I will talk in simple, direct, Indiana speech.”

  So he did. The President, in particular, had ridiculed in private, which in his case meant in public, his use of the Indiana “r”. The President, who had summoned voice coaches and radio specialists to the White House almost as soon as he first took office, spoke an American equivalent of Stage English, with just a hint of the padroon squire, the tackroom, and Groton. Tom preferred his own voice. He was not, and had no wish to be, an actor.

  But he agreed, it was true, he was being too outspoken. The Gallup poll, in those days not yet doubted as the statistical farce polls sometimes are, recorded a slump in the number of his supporters. The Pattersons were upset.

  So was Sideboard.

  So was he. But he attributed the result more to the guff they wrote out for him and forced him to speak, than to his own voiced opinions. He did no more than speak the truth, once the Pattersons had been laid. And if he could just get the truth to enough and the right people, everything would be okay.

  Yes, he was naïve.

  Portland

  At one in the morning, with an extra engine attached to the train, they passed the round house at Dunsmuir, on the California–Oregon border. Oregon was McNary’s territory. It was mostly a forest, as extensive as the Hercynian, and much the same, Tom thought, but with a wild, careless, giant’s toy box of a coast, cold, invigorating, sometimes damp, but with all its people well dug in and relatively content. That’s because they’d come out there only because it was where they wanted to be.

  An odd man, McNary, the wrong man in this race, but still a man of parts and somebody to be reckoned with. Not a senatorial carpetbagger, anyhow. Given to fishing, which is not a habit indulged in by fools, and very fond of his family and a mongrel dog he’d picked up somewhere, didn’t see often, but liked to hear about, who was in turn, though it didn’t worry about it much, fond of him.

  You can tell a lot about people from their animals, particularly if they have any. If they don’t, you can sometimes tell more. There are people, after all, whom a dog avoids. There’s usually something to be said for any place a stray mongrel settles down, though you may not light on what it is at once. They are, of course, inaesthetic, but they are also forgiving, they don’t have any time for the irrelevant, unless it’s important, and they are past masters at evoking virtue.

  That granted, Tom was upset by the Gallup poll returns, so in Portland he began to promise things with both hands. Portland’s a narrow city, built up backward from the Columbia River, along a draw whose upper floor is a town park, rather an elegant, leafy, attractive, northern sort of park, like something in Sweden.

  There he told his audience he promised to expand social security, combine soil conservation and commodity loans, extend farm credit and crop insurance, and give them all the public power they could use, since that’s what they wanted. The lower Columbia, as Rogers and Clark discovered in Jefferson’s day, is one of the loveliest rivers in the world, it beats the Hudson, which it’s very like, and they could scarcely wait to dam it up.

  They listened. They were polite. But they weren’t impressed. The Pattersons told him what was wrong.

  “You’re using the Santa Claus principle,” they said learnedly. “You can’t do that. You can’t out-Santa Santa, and Roosevelt’s been at the toy box now for eight years.”

  The trouble was, he was really coming to believe in all those social benefits. For in the extension of social benefits lay the fulcrum of social control, and something had to be done to control the country.

  Seattle

  If they were cool to him in Portland, in Tacoma and Seattle they were downright hostile. Seattle has a maritime economy. So the sociologists and statisticians aboard the train informed him, anyhow. Unfortunately, despite our modern Lagado sciences, people are not ciphers, and no amount of hiding behind statistics, like a terrified Calvinistic puppetmaster, will make them behave as though they are. Promised a good audience, he got the worst he had encountered since Chicago.

  Seattle and Vancouver are magnificently sited cities, if only the weather would clear, so you could see them. There is something about the climate up there, along the Juan de Fuca and down Puget Sound, facing the sub-alpine north, with the Olympics glittering on one side and the Rockies on the other, that wakes people up. The forests are full of watching. They are also rain forests which drip with damp.

  Still, in late September, the weather was not bad.

  He wasn’t there to admire the beauties of nature, he was there to speak to the Unions; and in America these days, whatever their past legitimate grievances, and they are many, if you want to speak to the unions, you walk softly and usually get stuck.

  It started off well enough. Girls with cold knees, like majorettes from a frisky high school, met him at the station, carrying torches for him, long on
es, with burning kerosene in a concealed reservoir. Then they booed him.

  “Boos don’t hurt me. I can take a million boos and be just as happy as I am now,” he told them. It was a Sunday. He had a big crowd. As one of the analysts on the train said, a candidate touring on a Sunday always gets a bigger crowd than a candidate touring on a Monday. It is a simple natural law.

  He went down to the docks and promised them that he stood for every one of the social gains that labour had made. That lost him quite a few Republican votes. He even said such gains should be extended. That lost him quite a few more. The Pattersons didn’t care by now. He was out there cooking himself, and there wasn’t a thing they didn’t know about the cooking of a candidate. They had other fish to fry.

  They might believe him on his stand on labour in Seattle, he seemed a sincere guy, but Roosevelt came on the radio about then, to cite the voting record of the GOP in Congress, which was squarely against every improvement, every social security, and every attempt to end a ruinous isolation, and so in direct contradiction, ballot for ballot, to everything Tom was trying to make voters believe he would give them after the election in November.

  The President was a conjuror. You had to keep up a patter, while you prepared your rabbits and your hats. “I repeat again,” said Mr. Roosevelt, while Tom was pointing out just what the hazards of the immediate future were, to an audience still living in the past, “that I stand on the platform of our party: We will not participate in foreign wars and will not send our Army, Naval, or Air Forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas except in case of attack.”