Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  Which was both his out, and was to make Pearl Harbour necessary, but nobody noticed that then.

  That was the day, September 23rd, when the Japanese entered French Indo-China, which upset the French badly enough, but really did for the Chinese merchants, who had had a strangle-hold on trade in that part of the world since the Khmer Empire fell, and who, since they buried their money, could only watch a tank crash through the garden compound wall to obliterate every sign to show where the cash was hid, before they turned and ran.

  In Tacoma, Tom spoke to an indifferent audience, stony cold in a local millyard, and then got the hell out of there. Something was failing. The public barometer was going down. He was losing ground. He almost wanted to throw the whole thing away.

  He got back on the train and the party headed east.

  Montana

  He went out on the observation platform, alone. It was dawn. The train pulled him away from what he was looking at, which made him feel like a toy at the end of a piece of string. He was in the Rockies, he didn’t know exactly where, passing a small lake. The sky was blue. The water was blue. The trees were a rusty shade of green, which is to say, blue that has gotten mixed up. His favourite colour was blue. Something was happening to him. He didn’t know what. But he was damned if he was going along with it. He’d started out believing in certain things. Now he knew he was ranting and lying. But that didn’t seem to change the things he believed in. If anything, it made them clearer.

  That was what would save him, he supposed: that somehow the ranting, instead of clouding him up, made him firmer and clearer inside. But he saw very well how demogogues were made, against their own will, sometimes. All this certainly brought out the monster in you, unless you were careful, and unless, he supposed, you weren’t a monster. For a while there he’d almost lost his grip. But he thought it would be all right now.

  The wind blew his hair over his face. It compressed the flesh against his bones. And very seriously, he watched the blue-green lake until it vanished, and the only thing left to look at was the sky.

  It didn’t matter about the election really. He’d come through. He wished Edna would wear blue more often. It was agreeable to be alone, before the world was up, and to have a little chat with your conscience.

  It didn’t even occur to him that it was the serene vulnerability of that little lake which had reassured him, but he was sorry it was gone, and not at all eager to go back inside and close the vestibule door on all that dawn magnificence.

  It was the trees perhaps. A shade of blue that has gotten mixed up. And then suddenly you saw a Norway spruce, blue in the bough, that towered above all that, cast off green, and showed its natural colours against the sky.

  The moments a gregarious man spends alone are, after all, the best ones, the most informative ones. The wind flapped his robe. He had been eighteen once. And was not sorry now to be a little older.

  He went back inside.

  But somewhere out there, as the dawn of every night, lay all the cities and villages of America, in those days still diverse and separate, the fragments of a dream, the dream of the last frontier. For it was only a dream. Does a plague of locusts have a frontier? What we mean by the frontier, is the men who moved ahead of it because they couldn’t stand it, the mavericks, the mountain men.

  America was not one country. It was at least five, despite all that mass communications could do to level it. Sometimes his advisers forgot that.

  Missoula

  Montana rears up under you and over you like an imperturbable chunk of eternity, surfacing in the universal sea. The mountains sit like judges in their curule chairs, say nothing, but watch. The air is so thin, so bracing, and so clear, that it makes you realize while you breathe it that reality at sea-level is only a damp and overcast illusion, even on the clearest day. One is on the Zauberberg, in Montana, all day. Your breath is palpable before your mouth, to prove you are alive. The halation gives everything and everyone an aura.

  Sideboard was standing on the station platform. A young woman came up to him. She had a penetrating, clear, scornful voice, she knew exactly who she was and where she was, and Sideboard had his campaign button on his coat lapel.

  “You can go on wearing that if you want to,” she said, “but it isn’t going to do you any good.”

  She gave him a bleak smile, stepped around him, and went into the waiting-room, to buy a ticket to wherever she was going.

  Tom didn’t even hear about it. He liked this place, where he had harvested wheat, one summer, due south, when he was a boy. That was almost thirty years ago.

  But there were anomalies. The outside world didn’t mean a thing here. You had only to look at the local newspapers to realize that.

  “In my judgment a man who thinks that the results in Europe will be of no consequence to him is a blind, foolish, and silly man,” he said.

  They didn’t listen. The President had promised them isolation. They were shrewd, but they were also childlike, and they had forgotten to watch the conjuror’s hands.

  North Dakota

  North Dakota was at its best in the autumn, which was the pheasant-shooting season. The Dakotas were famous for their pheasant. Nothing is more American, if you can afford it, than to go pheasant shooting in North Dakota. If you could not afford it, you could always watch it in the liquor ads, instead.

  Unfortunately the pheasants themselves had been imported from Mongolia about fifty years before.

  So much for isolationism.

  Madison, Wisconsin

  They were heading back into America’s heartland, as it’s called, or at any rate, for this was Minnesota passing into Wisconsin, the old North-west territories.

  Back in Elwood, as a boy, he’d known an old man who’d been born in the old North-west Territories, and always had to explain that meant Minnesota, not Washington and Oregon. It must have been a lonely life in those days. It had been a cavalry post, in Indian territory. Once a week the old man’s mother, a girl then, had rowed across the lake at Fort Francis, with a basket of game and some jellies, to visit a small colony of Catholic nuns on the Canadian shore, the only women, even if they weren’t Presbyterians, for a hundred miles. It was just after the Civil War, when the cavalry wore those slick blue britches with the yellow stripes, the sort of thing you only saw in movies now, dressed up. Back then they called them yellow-legs.

  On the trip back, as like as not, she’d bring home a covered pie, or plain, coarse, painstakingly, beautifully sewn cambric small clothes for the child.

  A long time ago.

  At Madison he was to speak at the University. He wasn’t worried about that. He’d always been better with the young, who weren’t hiding their grudges yet, than with the defensive animosities of men of his own age.

  There was almost a riot, but it didn’t mean anything. It had no real harm in it. So when the students started to heckle him it didn’t faze him a bit. He felt right at home.

  “The Democratic Party,” he told them, “has said that I split my infinitives and that Katherine Hepburn is against me.” A grave charge. “Well, I plead guilty to the charge of splitting infinitives. I have also had occasional trouble with the accusative case. As for the charge that Miss Hepburn is against me, I can only say that Mary Pickford, Robert Montgomery, Walter O’Keefe, Harold Lloyd, Joan Blondell, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney, Hedda Hopper, Lionel Barrymore (but not, so far as he knew, John or Edith), Adolph Menjou, Ann Sheridan, and Gary Cooper are for me.” As though it mattered.

  After that, he got a big cheer, and they were on his side all the way. They had only wanted to see if he was a stuffed shirt, and he wasn’t.

  On the other hand, the liberal press, as soon as it found out that he had some ideas of his own, had turned against him. The liberal press lives off lost causes, and cannot afford to be smirched with the taint of possible success. Then, too, it has its own absurdities. It is all part of apache culture, the attitude of the liberal press. Its members long to be savaged by
a truck-driver, and this leads them into some odd mimicry of simplicities. A group of mildly leftist (they are, after all, the worst reactionaries of all) writers had taken a full-page ad to explain that he wasn’t really intellectual, and why they were for him, winding up with the statement, “and furthermore, he can add and subtract”.

  Alas, he could also multiply and divide, and though he kept it under his hat, was no slouch at finding a square root either. He wasn’t taken in by that kind of delusory nonsense. It was too much like the faint post-mortem slush and slop of the Ballad for Americans, at the Convention.

  Later the Same Afternoon

  He gave a mid-Western audience a brief historical summary: Cleveland did not believe in a centralized state, and had refused to run for a third term. So had Jefferson and Jackson. Woodrow Wilson held that the function of the state was to assure that men did not prey upon each other any more than was necessary.

  This was east of what had once been called the Middle Border country. Hamlin Garland had once written a book about it, not too readable these days, called A Son of the Middle Border, before taking himself off (he was in the forefront of a trend) to California, that Iowan version of Paradise, to spend his mornings going to a kidney specialist and his evenings to a spiritualist in North Hollywood. Ed Howe, who wrote the American classic about the state two states over, The Story of a Country Town, which is just as readable as it ever was, spent his old age better, writing enthusiastically grumpy books about the world tours his wife dragged him away from home on. He’d seen a lot of the world, had Ed Howe, and what impressed him most, apart from a healthy hatred of shuffle-board and all those who say we must play it, was the extraordinarily high incidence of false teeth in Australia. A good man to have around, Mr. Howe, and always amiable, even when safely aboard his favourite hobby-horse.

  These people weren’t.

  Omaha

  The 26th found him in Nebraska, a state that has been underpopulated ever since Willa Cather left; and in those days one which was taking dramatic ads in all the national magazines, to advertise itself as America’s White Spot, the home, or at least the foster-home, of Henry George’s single tax. There was some truth in those ads. There wasn’t anything wrong with Nebraska that a little sense of reality wouldn’t cure.

  It was all pretty sad really. The Industrial Revolution didn’t suit them. They bought a lot of their farm equipment and refrigeration machinery from Allis-Chalmers. So the publicity department of Allis-Chalmers ran full-page colour ads of a cowboy riding a sixteen cylinder tractor engine, as though it had been a bucking bronc. Which, in a way, it was. But only out here. Not back East, where those engines were financed and really made, and where the things these people needed but didn’t really want all came from.

  It was the end of his Western tour, the end of the exhilarating part of the campaign. In Rushville, at the beginning of it, he had told them he was a purely conversational farmer, but he had worked on farms elsewhere, in his youth. At whistle stops he had been greeted by men who claimed to have known him during those long lost summers. He had never lost touch with the land, he said, even if he did live twenty floors above it, in a New York apartment house. But being in touch with the farm is not the same thing as being in touch with the farmers. In Nebraska they didn’t cotton to him much. The economy might contract, but the more it did, the higher their subsidies, and they were not prepared to be reasonable. They remembered the Depression better than they feared war or dictatorship; the Republicans had a bad name when it came to a handout; and it didn’t matter how he sounded, he was on a Republican ticket, wasn’t he?

  Besides, Roosevelt had just said that more people were working than ever before. So what was Tom talking about? What did he mean the country was going to be wrecked, if industrial recovery was to be based on armaments? There was new money floating round. The price of grain stocks was going up. That is what counted. Who cared whether the country had to fight a war of containment every ten years, to keep the economy afloat, or not? There wasn’t going to be any war.

  The next day, September 27th, Japan joined the Axis, Dr. Rosenberg explaining that, whatever appearances might show to the contrary, the Japanese were all right, they were the Aryans of the East. The really big news was that the Cincinnati Reds had beaten the Philadelphia Phillies, and so clinched the National League Championship. Our last World Series in peacetime, but alas, the world is not a series.

  As one of the reporters said, Tom seemed to be speaking in a moment of pause between two worlds, a moment of deliberate hesitation between one world and another. But he was sorry to leave the West. He had seen the light of spiritual hunger, he said, in the thousands of faces turned up to him, as he spoke from the rear platform of the train. And so he had, but it was spiritual hunger produced by malnutrition, not deprivation or exertion; and back East, when he took the plane to make a speech in Yonkers on the 28th, it was just plain hunger, or perhaps greed, and nothing spiritual about it.

  Yonkers

  He was allowed to speak at the Empire Race-track, there not being any horse races just then. He felt discouraged. It was like trying to tell the people in the valley that the dam had broken and the flood was coming. The roar was already in his ears. Why couldn’t they hear it?

  “After having seen millions of Americans, I want to say to you that if we do not prevail this fall, this way of life will pass,” he said.

  The welfare state would see to that. People were worried that he had been chairman of a large holding company. Didn’t they realize that the welfare state was nothing but one vast holding company, pyramided through a thousand government agencies, with no more sense of responsibility than it took to squeeze your partners out and seize power for yourself, as Chairman of the Board? Half the people in it didn’t even know what the company made. They didn’t care. All they wanted was their salaries and hand-outs. Nobody seemed to realize that one day the hand-out was going to dribble away and change into something as limp and pathetic as the groundsel you feed a caged canary, the kind you took down into the mines from which there was little chance you would ever come up again.

  He was losing. Those on his own Republican National Committee had taken to watching him the way big cats watch a failing trainer. Well, he wasn’t going to lose. He’d rally.

  It was the machine. The machine was too much for him. He had been tactless. Telling these men the truth was like pouring sugar into the fuel tank, and it was their machine he was sitting in. He couldn’t win without it. He was beginning to realize that now.

  They were not to be lured. Very well. It was his duty then to fight harder than ever. Perhaps by one of those soaring somersaults which his mind managed to turn at unexpected moments, being its own trampolin, he could win out over them yet.

  He almost did, had he not made that disastrous deal with John L. Lewis, the leader of the miners. But then, that was not entirely his own fault, that deal. There was backstage work there, about which he was not told. He did not know that support from Lewis, on any terms, would mean the opposition of everybody else.

  And he had not been told the terms.

  Michigan

  There was a motorcade through Pontiac, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids, with the train sent on ahead. These were all heavily industrialized towns, towns where the workers, though better paid than the office staffs above them, were sullen with class hatred. He had never seen class hatred before. Contempt, yes; hatred, no. It was something new in America, it had grown up during the Depression. Workers leaned out of factory windows to boo their defiance at him, as he was driven by. There were reasons for that attitude, of course, sound reasons, but it did no good to tell them that he wanted to change all that. As a matter of fact, even if he did, his party didn’t, and everyone knew that by now.

  These were not agreeable towns. Even their trees seemed to be rusted, they were ugly and soot-smeared, and given to the worst Gothic manifestations of nineteenth-century factory brick.

  In Pontiac they heard him out
, but when he had finished and was turning to leave, a rotten egg hit him in the face. It had happened before. He was used to it. But getting into the car, as he held the door open for Edna, he saw one bloom all over the front of her dress. That was going too far. He turned to swing on the crowd, while the reporters tried to close around Edna, to fend off the expected attack.

  There was nearly a riot.

  “I went around this country twelve years ago,” said Alfred E. Smith, who had been defeated in one of the dirtiest political campaigns of the century. “The Lord knows I met an awful lot of people that hated me, but outside of burning some crosses along the line of the railroad tracks, they treated me courteously. Tell me what has happened in this country, that a lovely American lady like this can’t accompany her husband in a crusade to save this country without being spattered with eggs?”

  He was vulgar, but it didn’t matter. He was also a gentleman. He meant well.

  So did Edna. She was carrying a large bouquet of American Beauty roses. She took one look at her husband’s face, and then began to hand them out, one by one, to the crowd of small boys that was always hovering round the car in these do-nothing towns. That got them over that moment. They got out of there.

  Edna drew a deep breath.

  But it wasn’t just eggs. It was everything they could think to throw, plus a good deal of stuff they were paid to heave at him, in Chicago, Inglewood, Dorchester (Dorchester was genteel: in Dorchester it was nothing worse than an ice-cream stick), Portland, New York, Hammond, Boston, Cleveland, and Detroit.