Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  So they did.

  They had only to look at him, to see he was an absurd person, but it was the endearing absurdity of nobility, of selflessness, of something like greatness. They liked that. He went everywhere. He saw everything. It was a matter of shaking hands and taking planes again. All sorts of hands. All sorts of planes.

  The air raids did not bother him. He looked at the ruins. So this is what the isolationists were afraid of. It was not so terrible, though it was bad enough. The sound of an air-raid siren is not agreeable. Neither is the sight of a burning city. But the blackouts did not impede his judgment or his nerves. After all, in order to see clearly, we must walk in the dark, with both eyes shut, so we are told, and he was beginning to see very clearly indeed.

  It was history the Germans were bombing, not a city. Somehow the ruins only made those buildings which still stood seem firmer. It was like that iceberg he dreamed about sometimes, righting itself after a fall into the sea. It melts. Everything melts. But the bigger part of it is under the surface, and that does not melt quite so fast or quite so easily, not, at least, until it is well on its way south, towards the equator of time, where all things melt, so there is no disgrace in that.

  The sight of London made all those signs on the coasts of America saying, Evacuation Route, look a little temporary and a little silly. The best evacuation route is to stay where one is. It is usually even safer, on the whole.

  He met everyone. Mr. Churchill beamed at him like a sceptical cherub. Tom smiled back like a well-bred boy of nine. That was a difference in cultures, merely. Their emotions may have stopped at those ages, but in different ways their minds and their abilities had marched right on. “I go right on until I am stopped,” said Shelley, “and I never am stopped.” A good remark. It was worth yards of his poetry.

  Meeting Mr. Bevan, Tom’s head cocked sideways, in a gesture habitual with him, but which reminded the English of somebody congratulating the dahlia winner at a garden show, somebody whose sincere hatred of dahlias, say, was matched only by a puckish enthusiasm for larkspur, but still, we must have fair play. The dahlia breeder was a Mrs. Hepworth, whose husband had been something, though not very much, in the Colonies. Dead now. She lived in that rather fine little house at the turn of the lane, opposite the church which, despite a Norman slate font, was, as is usual with churches which have a Norman slate font, infested by the death-watch beetle. Well, we all dream.

  None the less, they could see at once that he was a man who would have subscribed at once to the death-watch beetle fund, if he had known what death-watch beetles were, and had he chanced to be English. Since he was American, it was probably to something else.

  Yes, it was. His hobby was putting young people through college. He had shoved fifty through, so far, and had not been the least grateful to Miss Flanner for mentioning the matter in her article. It was nobody’s business but his own.

  Throwing darts in a pub, and losing, he said of his opponent: “He was a nice fellow, but he was too hot for me—and he knew the rules.”

  A graceful allusion. He may have lost the election, but in the process, somehow, he had both won back himself and won the country.

  On the way home he stopped off in Eire to try to persuade Mr. de Valera to agree to Lend-Lease bases. But whatever it happened to be called these days, Ireland was Ireland, Mr. de Valera was Mr. de Valera, and despite the fact that the country was largely financed by Boston and the ward-heelers of many an American town (the Potato Famine of the ’40’s is one of the chief sources of corruption in American politics), Mr. de Valera was not to be convinced. He would rather drown than help the British. And so he was quite content to remain neutral and do neither.

  There was also a battle at home about Lend-Lease. On Lincoln’s birthday Tom had asked the GOP members of Congress to abandon isolationism. So they knew what to expect, and when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Lend-Lease the senators were mad as hornets and all ready for him.

  He did not lose his temper. He no longer had a temper to lose. One cannot be angry with one’s own time, without damage to one’s self.

  “You would be more helpful”, an examining Senator had once told him, “if you were less partisan.” No doubt. But he was partisan. How could anybody in this present world not be?

  He was quite accustomed to the vituperative methods of American Congressional Committees. The chairman of this committee was Martin Dies. A simple case, Martin Dies. It seemed to Tom he had built his career on a sentence from Bolingbroke he had assuredly never read. It was a sentence about the House of Commons, not Congress, but it applied as well to one as to the other.

  “Men there grow like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game, and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged,” said Bolingbroke. As far as Tom was concerned, that explained Dies. But it was not the war they were frightened of. It was something much worse than that. They were afraid of the world. They were afraid of the grown-ups.

  Lend-Lease went through, though by the narrowest of margins, with all the isolationist Senators abstaining, as usual: 17 to 10 in the Senate; 143–21 in the House. “We are present”, said Senator Vandenburg to Speaker Martin, “at the suicide of the Republic.”

  “Look, if we go back, it will be so far back that neither you nor I, nor anyone in this room can be a part to it,” said Tom. “It will be way back. We can never let that happen.”

  The war was getting closer. It was almost in their present. And the present is what such men as Martin Dies fear. They snipe at it from the past in which they live, in individual pill-boxes of their own contrivance. A mushroom breed. Flyblown. All of a summer’s day. Alas, the world was long past summer. The Nazis had almost reached Moscow, Selective Service had passed the House, a close vote, 203 to 202. The U.S. Greer, the U.S. Kearny, and the U.S. Reuben James had all been attacked, the last two sunk, with 166 killed.

  All of which made no difference on the plans of Representative Martin Dies. That good man had discovered certain indications that Hollywood was a subversive force, dedicated to catapulting America into world conflict, for heinous reasons of its own. He was determined to investigate. As it turned out, not even the House UnAmerican Activities Committee would back that little waltz, but he had managed to corner the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce to oblige him.

  Hollywood was terrified. They offered Tom 100,000 to represent them, and he accepted. He had been wanting to slap Dies down for ages. Besides, as someone had said, the difference between Tom and those Republicans who applauded whenever he mentioned the Bill of Rights, was that he had read it.

  The hearings began on 9th September 1941. They were a three months’ wonder. Such Committees did not scare Tom. He had been through them before.

  “We are living once more in a period that is psychologically susceptible to witch-hanging and mob-baiting,” he had said, as long ago as the late ’30’s, “when everyone displays a tendency to find the cause of his own failures in some conspiracy of evil. The human mind requires contrary expressions against which to test itself.”

  The Hollywood executives proved timid and Tom did not blame them. There was a time when men of honour served their country out of duty. Those times were gone. When such positions of trust were offered to the responsible nowadays, they hesitated, and if they could, became evasive, for to take office now meant a smear campaign afterwards against which there was no defence and for which there was no redress. So they abstained.

  Tom had been through all that in 1939, when he was defending himself and his business against the Government, and had had to sweat it out in Washington, day after day. He knew the procedure at these Congressional Committees.

  “Men can be put upon the witness-stand”, he had said then, and it was worse now, “without the protection of counsel and without any adequate opportunity to answer. There is no more cruel way of destroying the reputation of a man than by publicity through inference and innuendo. It has been done to hundreds of business men and public
figures heretofore, and I can speak of it now because it is not my kind that is being investigated, and for the moment—once in six years—I have no investigator in my office.

  “There is no quicker method to destroy the rights of the individual, because my property is worth nothing to me, it is obvious, without my reputation; and reputation is so rapidly destroyed by the process of putting a man on the witness-stand and examining him very pleasantly until the eleven o’clock newspaper deadline for the afternoon newspapers, and then making a speech to him, and when he starts to answer, saying, ‘Well, I will take the rest of that up with you later.’ Screaming across the headlines of the country, his reputation is gone.”

  It was a technique which had started to spread over the country in 1935, with the first Federal Sedition law to be passed in time of peace since 1798. It did not finally become law until 1939, but fears of foreign attack as justification for it were not even mentioned. It was just anything, so that initiative should have a bit and bridle and integrity go hobbled. Everyone was so afraid of being outdistanced by the nightmare.

  “A nation which had successfully passed through six wars unprotected by teachers’ oaths and the compulsory flag salutes of schoolchildren, now found both sweeping state after state, like an epidemic, at least two years before anybody ever heard of a fifth column.”

  “If it is my baby that’s hurt now,” he’d said then, “it may be your baby later. From personal experience I know very well what happens to those individuals who defend their causes against government attack. You may, for example, have your income tax examined several times with a magnifying glass. You may be called an economic royalist. You may be chastised in official speeches. You may be called down to Washington to be questioned as to your personal affairs. You may have your name dragged into political investigations by legislative committees of this or that state. You may suffer by having your reputation smeared with the mud of false insinuation. All of that may happen to you, and I can assure you it is not pleasant.”

  Nor was it. Nor is it now.

  The man in the street, they say, is as quick to resent excesses on the part of the Government, as he is abuses in private enterprise. But that was before the welfare state.

  “It is not big business we have to fear,” Tom had said during the campaign, “but big government.”

  Was there any reason why one could not fear both?

  As for the Sedition Act, it was very much a matter of the Emperor’s new clothes. Nobody quite dared to laugh at them, except for the odd child, and Mr. Dies wore them well and had no truck with children.

  Not, at any rate, until he chose the movie industry as a good safe target for his own particular slings and arrows of self-advertisement. The movie industry is full of children, but tough-minded children, who have enough sense to send for a grown-up when the going gets rough. Hence Tom.

  A day or two before the hearings got under weigh, Colonel Lindbergh had spoken to a large audience in New York. “The three most important groups who have been pushing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration,” he said. He seemed to see Jews everywhere, the way other people see pink elephants. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”

  That was the beginning of Colonel Lindbergh’s quiet removal from public life. It seemed a long time since he had flown the Atlantic alone with a small kitten, to be received with an ovation at Le Bourget. However, his speech made an excellent opening for Senator Nye, who began the proceedings by reading a long list of Hollywood executives with non-Anglo-Saxon names.

  Tom, who could have pointed out that the proceedings were illegal anyway, since the Senate had not authorized the investigation, decided, instead, to treat the whole affair as a joke. The country must still have some sense of humour left, even if Nye and Dies did not.

  These self-advertising smear campaigns in Congress have two legal weapons on their side which make them immune from correction let alone reproof. Anything a Senator or Representative says on the floor of the Upper or Lower House or in Committee sessions is immune from legal action, even if quoted in the lay press. Witnesses so bullied, and their counsel, can be denied the right to cross-examine both members of the Committee and those witnesses the Committee may call. It is another of those in pace in which we brick up our democratic way of life.

  Tom did not care. If he was not to be allowed rebuttal in the committee-room, he had the press, as usual, on his side, and nobody likes to be laughed at in the press, not even Senator Nye or Representative Dies.

  Indeed both these members of Congress must have felt the footage devoted to the hearings to be disappointing. They were crowded out, it seemed, by other, more trivial news. The big news was that Congress, now that the Greer, Kearney, and Reuben James had been sunk, had repealed the Neutrality Act, though by the narrow margin of 212 to 194, 137 Republicans and 22 Democrats baulking at the last moment, against such an affront to their principles. Now the election was over, the Republicans had little interest either in constituting a loyal opposition or in pretending to be contemporary at all.

  The President had asked Tom to dedicate Mount Rushmore, near Rapid City, in South Dakota, where Guzman Borglum, for reasons intelligible only to himself, but perhaps he liked mountain air, had disfigured a perfectly adequate mountain with four perfectly inadequate busts of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. A landslide had carried away part of Washington’s nose, which had had to be shored up, but the work was now ready to be unveiled, though just how you unveil something as painfully plain as the nose on your face was hard to see.

  “I would be ingenuous”, the President told Tom, “if I did not also mention that, geographically, this region is sadly in need of the kind of speeches you have been making.”

  Tom did not go. The need of the movie colony was greater. The thing it needed most was some starch. The millionaires refused to stand up and be counted. The smaller men didn’t think they could stand up at all. They were all terrified. They had thought that the Catholic League of Decency and the Hays Office would protect them from anything like this, and they never read scripts anyway. What had they done?

  In Detroit, that first week of the hearings, Viscount Halifax who had read his Surtees on the subject of the dangers of the hustings, but had not expected to face them himself, had been pelted with eggs and tomatoes. A representative of the warmongers.

  Senator Nye went on reading his list of Jewish names.

  Senator Clark, chairman of the Committee, made a suggestion worthy of Solomon. This was a political matter, wasn’t it? he asked. Then give it a political solution, like on the radio, at election time. Present both sides. Give them each the same amount of air.

  “I presume this means that since Chaplin made a laughable caricature of Hitler, the industry should be forced to employ Charles Laughton to do the same on Winston Churchill,” said Tom. It was a farce. Why not show it up for one?

  Darryl F. Zanuck, one of Hollywood’s more thoughtful and far-seeing studio heads, a good Democrat, and therefore a man with a clean conscience, or perhaps he was a Republican, put on his spectacles, balanced his voice for maximum projection, and made a typical Hollywood defence. He was a man of integrity. Out of 1,100 features made recently, he reported, less than fifty, and he looked round him triumphantly, less than fifty had contained any ideas whatsoever of any kind. At any rate, only fifty had anything to do with the issues involved in the war or with ideological beliefs. The inference was clear. Hollywood was 95.45 per cent free of intellectual taint, a record rivalled only by the unsinkable soap people (Ivory: it floats).

  Nye and Dies were not to be defeated so easily. We lived in perilous times. And here was a group of men who threatened the security, the life’s blood, of their adopted country. Something had to be done.

  *

  Something was done. On Sunday, 7th December 1941, came
the news that Pearl Harbour had been bombed, the fleet scuttled, and all peace gone.

  Across the country, a good many people who had believed in Tom and lost, or voted for Roosevelt and won, stared blankly at their dinner, a meal they ate in the afternoon, a habit retained from their warmongering British ancestors. Even the President, who was not perhaps altogether surprised to hear of this convenient incident, went pale, when he discovered that apart from several battleships sunk, America’s best planes had been destroyed, together with some 3,000 men.

  There was something very like panic. Only Congress kept its head and knew what to do. Monday, Congress commandeered as much of the army as it could procure for its own defence, and the day was spent mounting anti-aircraft guns on the roof of the Capitol, presumably as a defence against planes roaring up the Potomac from carriers stationed somewhere off the Maryland or Delaware shore. The isolationist senators about-faced at once, many in mid-sentence, and felt (despite the racket attendant upon getting the anti-aircraft guns in place on the roof) that unless the President hurried up, they might well be forced to declare war in his absence. The number of military guards with fixed bayonets called up to defend the stairs, halls, corridors, and lavatories of the Capitol was so excessive, that a minor Senator from New York had considerable difficulty in proving his right to enter the men’s washroom, and once there, to get out again. Security cards had not yet been issued, but indubitably, he did not have one.

  There was also the matter of Miss Rankin, which unnerved everybody, including herself.

  Miss Ranken, a Representative from Montana, was the only member of Congress whose principles remained unshaken by crisis, and she proposed to end her career in 1941, as she had begun it in 1917, by casting her vote against the declaration of war. She was a pacifist, she did not believe that conviction hinged upon occasions, she had consulted her conscience, not her constituency, and she had had little or no sleep for twenty-four hours. She was not a cowardly woman, but the spectacle of middle-aged men begging her to change her vote, on the assumption that if she did not they would promptly be bombed in their beds, shook her more, perhaps, than her own inexorable conscience had done. She entered the House and sat there, on the verge of tears, quite patently ostracized by people who two days before had found her isolationist sentiments conveniently chiming to their own, determined that she was not going to cry.