The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny told him, ‘What you have to do is to get clear in your mind the cause of that unhappiness. Your father tied himself to an evil cause and that cause had been defeated; he wanted to have his own way and he can’t, so his pride is hurt. But ask yourself, What did his pride mean to the world? His friends and associates were utterly cynical men, seeking power for its own sake and regarding human beings as vermin to be exterminated whenever they got in the way. Hitler’s deal with Stalin was an utterly corrupt thing; they agreed to divide up Poland between them, just as if Poland were a hunk of meat instead of millions of human beings who had to be slaughtered in order to accomplish the purpose. And before two years had passed the Nazis set out to destroy the man with whom they had made that deal; they were going to take the whole of Russia, as if that too were a carcass instead of millions of people. When men take an attitude like that they proclaim themselves outcasts from modern society and its ethical codes’.

  ‘I know all that, Herr Budd. It is just that my heart aches when I see suffering and misery’.

  ‘Your heart can ache for everybody in the world, but when it comes to action you have to realize that you can’t help everybody, and you have to choose those who best deserve it. I had the same feelings for your father, and I went to see him with love in my heart, hoping that I might do something to put him on the path to peace of mind. But he wouldn’t accept any moral instruction from me, and I am sure he won’t accept any from you whom he considers to be a child’.

  III

  Lanny was the more touched by this youth’s problem because it was so close to his own. The arguments he was using were those he had presented to his own conscience and then to Hansi Robin. How many thousands of people must be using them in this old continent rent by civil strife! Fathers against sons, and brothers against sisters, and husbands against wives!

  Lanny went on, ‘You must ask yourself what chance of happiness your father has in the course he is following. He is absolutely in the hands of the Communists, and they will trust him no more than they trusted Hitler, or than Hitler trusted them. They will know perfectly well that he will never become a sincere Red. They will use him so long as he has something to give them—that is their technique. They intend to murder the political brains, the scientific and literary brains, of East Germany. They do that in every country, using whatever disrupting forces they find. You must surely know they aren’t going to be fooled by a former intimate and confidant of Adolf Hitler. They will be watching him—I have no doubt they have a spy among his group right now’.

  ‘They have, Herr Budd, I am sure they have’! exclaimed Fritz half involuntarily.

  ‘Well then, they know about your father. They will use him as a front, a bait for the Germans who are still resisting communism. Then, when they are firmly established and want a propaganda stroke, they arrest him and spread the story of a Hitler underground; they bring him to trial and make him confess, and they hang him or shoot him; if they think he is too popular for that they throw him out of a window and say he committed suicide’.

  ‘I know you are right, Herr Budd, and I am acting on it’.

  ‘You have to realise that you have been born into the time of Stalinism, and it is going to dominate the rest of your life. You must learn to understand its techniques, so that you can explain them to the world. The Commies are devotees of a new secular religion, which calls itself materialist but really is idealist in the strict sense; it is a fantasy cooked up in the brain of the philosopher Hegel and applied to economic affairs by Karl Marx. According to Marx’s schedule the great transformation was to come in the most advanced industrial countries. Instead of that it came in a backward peasant country, and its recent developments would have staggered Marx. He feared the Tsars as leaders of reaction; he wrote: “The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its manoeuvres may change, but the polar star of its policy—world domination—is a fixed star”. Marx lived and worked in England and wrote for the New York Tribune and looked to the Anglo-Saxon people to carry out his theories and set the world free from economic exploitation. Instead it is the men of the Kremlin, the men full of suspicion and fear, the teachers of intrigue and hatred, who are operating in his name and publishing official translations of his works from which most of his expressions concerning Russia and freedom have been cut out. Did you know those facts, Fritz?’

  ‘I didn’t know them all, Herr Budd’.

  ‘I could get you the books if it were safe for you to have them. What is really necessary for you is to observe and understand the devices of this new barbarian power. They are all things to all men—whatever will promote their intrigues. They have an elaborate technique, carefully worked out in every detail and highly flexible in its application. Let us say it is a colonial country, a subject colony of “Western capitalist imperialism”. The Communists are all for nationalism and patriotism in that country; they are sympathetic to the nationalist cravings of Arabs, Hindus, Chinese, Negroes, whatever race or tribe it may be. They send in highly trained agitators and propagandists—they have an Agitprop Department, provided with unlimited funds. They stir up strikes, they incite student revolts, they promote riots and sabotage, and ultimately that country gets its independence and sets up a government. Instantly the Communists shift: they are against that government; it is a government of landlords and moneylenders, and they point out how it is exploiting and robbing the masses. There are strikes, riots, and sabotage, with the Communist party in charge, openly or secretly, as the case may call for. So comes the second revolution, according to the pattern; the Communists seize power, they incite the peasants to murder the landlords and seize the lands, and the workers to seize the factories and operate them. Communists get into the Cabinet, they get control of the police and the troops, and the revolution is complete. And then what happens’?

  ‘You tell me, Herr Budd’. Fritz’s face was earnest, his concern intense, and Lanny repressed the impulse to smile.

  ‘The proletarian revolution is complete; the peasants have the land, the workers have the factories, and the Communists have the government. The peasants are invited into co-operatives so as to have the benefit of tractors and modern techniques. If they don’t want to come they are called kulaks and shipped off to Siberia. The enterprises are co-operatively run, perhaps for a few months, then a commissar is put over them and the government takes most of the produce, leaving enough to keep the peasants alive. The peasants are told that this is because the country is on the verge of starvation, caused by the former landlords and moneylenders, who deserved and received death for their crimes. The workers in the factories are told that they must work harder, and they get just enough of the peasants’ products to keep them alive. Strikes are forbidden and are punished by exile to slave labour in mines and lumber camps. Sabotage is punished with the death penalty. The commissars who enforce these laws ride around in Cadillacs and Lincolns purchased from the American capitalists. And that is your revolution’.

  ‘They tell us that is only a passing stage, Herr Budd’.

  ‘Yes, of course; and formerly I accepted the promise of Engels and of Lenin that the state would wither away, that freedom under the new order would develop automatically; but now I see that the methods of terror and deception which are used to bring about the revolution change the character of the men in control. The idealists and libertarians are killed off or driven into exile. The men who rise to the top and hold the power are the sort who have no idea of giving up their privileges. They are men obsessed with fears, who dare not give up the tiniest bit of their power; they have to use it to protect their lives, to keep themselves from the vengeance of those they have dispossessed—and I don’t mean their class enemies; I mean their former friends and associates, who know them too well and therefore have to be exterminated. “The revolution devours its children”—that was the saying a century and a half ago in France, and we have been watching it happen for thirty years in Russia, and we see it now in all the countr
ies where the Soviets have seized control’.

  IV

  This earnest German student had observed all that; his friends and associates had observed it, he said, and most of them shrank from it. But what could they do about it? They had been shut off from the rest of the world all their lives; and what was it like, what better did it hold out to the young? ‘Is America really a free world, Herr Budd, or is it an American imperialism, as we are told all the time’?

  ‘There has been imperialism in America in past times’, Lanny admitted. ‘I daresay we seemed very imperialistic to the Indians. I daresay we were imperialistic when we took Texas and California from Mexico. I daresay that we were imperialistic in our war with Spain; but you see what we did with the colonies we took. We educated those peoples in self-government, and we have set the Philippines free, and also Cuba, and we are close to doing it for Puerto Rico. Our nation was founded on the basis of government by popular consent—a government of the people by the people for the people, as Lincoln phrased it, and we have that passionate sentiment deeply ingrained in our hearts. We have our class struggles, but we settle them without wholesale killings; we settle them at the ballot box, and that is what we mean by freedom and self-government’.

  ‘You can’t imagine, Herr Budd, how we Germans yearn to believe all that’.

  Lanny did his best to reassure him. ‘I have lived long enough to see enormous economic changes in America’, he said. ‘The whole balance of power in the country has been shifted by the New Deal. There has been a great amount of scolding and blustering, but there has been no fighting; the shifting has been done by taxation, and there will be more of it. Enormous public enterprises have been developed, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has made over a large section of our country, and the Atomic Energy Commission, which made the atom bomb. We could socialise our big industries by the same methods and without any violence whatever. The only thing that holds us back is the threat of war; and, of course, if the Reds force us into rearming, that will keep our present system going much longer, and nobody can tell what the end may be. If we have another war it will be an appalling one, but it doesn’t lie in our power to decide; the Kremlin has seized the initiative. All I can tell them is that we are not going to sit by and let them take Europe and Asia and shut us off from raw materials and intercourse with the rest of the world as they would surely do’.

  ‘If the war comes, Herr Budd, it is going to mean the extinguishment of Germany. We shall be between two steamrollers’.

  Lanny answered, ‘When I first began to read German I came upon some verses about Andreas Hofer, a patriot who defended the freedom of the Tyrol. I remember what he said to his friends: “Wir sind all des Todes Eigen”—“We all belong to death”. We Americans have a story about a Marine sergeant in World War I, leading a charge at Belleau Woods and shouting, “Come on, you sonsabitches—do you want to live forever?” That is the way we have to learn to live in this modern world. We Americans have a heritage of freedom, and you Germans have a heritage of culture, both of which are priceless and must be defended. I don’t think either of us has to go to the Bolshies to be told how to solve our economic problems; and I don’t think that anything the Bolshies have done in the last thirty years entitles them to set themselves up as an authority on the subject. Certainly I don’t want any commissar to tell me how to live, or what to think about politics, or science, or music, or art, or literature, or anything else. I want to think what seems to me to be true, and I want to be able to say it to other men and to hear what they have to answer’.

  ‘Yes, Herr Budd’, said Fritz, ‘but the governments remain imperialistic’.

  ‘The moral sentiments of the more advanced people bring on a revolt against imperialism. It is recognised as enslavement and exploitation, and it is contrary to all the principles that are embodied and realised in democracy. The same people and the same forces which have brought to pass what Roosevelt called the New Deal and what Truman calls the Fair Deal make it impossible for us to deprive other peoples of their liberties. If you watch what we do with Japan, I am sure you will see that we have no idea but to set up an independent, free, and democratic regime in that country. You see the British now setting India free, and so on all over the world. I can assure you that so far as Germany is concerned the American people are a unit in desiring that it should be a free and united land, governed by the public opinion of its people. It is only the Communists who wish to keep East Germany separate, and that is because they have got it and mean to turn it into a Red dictatorship and a Soviet satellite.’

  V

  Thus spoke Lanny, striving to banish clouds from the mind of a young German Socialist. Presently Fritz smiled again and exclaimed, ‘How I wish you could say those things to my father’!

  ‘They wouldn’t impress your father at all’, declared the other. ‘Your father doesn’t believe in the people, in either their right or their ability to control the state. Your father belongs to a superior caste which knows best what is good for the people, and it is the duty of the people to obey him—or else they have to be forced’.

  ‘It’s a curious thing’, said Fritz. ‘I have to learn three different ideologies and keep them straight in my mind. My father has taken me into his confidence; he has explained to me that in order to live in our home it is necessary that we should take on a protective colouration; we are to make friends with the Reds and be sympathetic to their ideas, but at the same time we must hold our inner beings absolutely aloof and intact’.

  Lanny told him that the Russians had a phrase in the early days of the revolution, ‘political radishes’—red on the outside and white inside.

  Fritz explained, ‘I am supposed to be red outside and brown inside. I don’t know what that could be unless it is a rotten apple’.

  ‘The Nazi creed and the Communist creed are not so different, Fritz. There is a saying, “Extremes meet”’.

  ‘My father explained it to me, and he meant it seriously. He was trying to make it easier for me to pretend to be a Red. He explained that both nazism and sovietism are authoritarian governments; the difference is that one is a government by the best, and the other a government by the worst. The Germans are an orderly and systematic people while the Russians are the opposite. But so far as the abstract principles are concerned the two creeds are alike, and therefore it is possible for me to be sympathetic toward the Red theories and to keep my reservations to myself. The Reds are in power, and we have to submit to them and bide our time. That time may come when Stalin dies and they fall into factional strife and disorder. In the same way the West Germans may get their chance when the Allies fall to disputing among themselves’.

  ‘Has he ever mentioned me’? Lanny asked, and the answer was no. Lanny cautioned him, ‘Don’t ever make the mistake of speaking of me; and if he does, you have just a vague memory from childhood’.

  VI

  Lanny came away from that interview deeply moved in his soul. He marvelled at the ingenuity of mother nature, who had managed to fill her living creatures with such hunger for life and determination to hold on to it. No matter how little the creature has, it keeps on wanting more; it is lured by hope and fights against despair. Lanny himself felt guilty, because when he had been at the age of this tall German youth he had had such an easy life. Fritz had almost nothing, and was caught between two deadly warring powers, each having half the earth and determined to wrest the other half from its rival. Fritz was living in the cannon’s mouth; yet he was resolved not merely to live, but to live with courage and honour, and not merely for himself but for his people and his ideals.

  Lanny would never cease entirely to be troubled in his conscience for having set this gallant lad against his father—even though having the promise that the father would not be harmed. Lanny had gathered from the conversation of Monck that Fritz had been stealing his father’s papers, reading them, and transmitting their contents. That was either a very dutiful thing to do, or else a very ignoble
thing to do; it couldn’t be both, yet somehow it seemed both to Lanny. He had been doing the same kind of thing himself, but, thank God, he had never had to do it against his father. Would he have done it if he had had to, and how would he have felt while doing it? A strange world they had been born into; a world in which colossal forces seized upon human beings and whirled them about as in a cyclone. Sometimes it hurled them to their death, and again it set them down lightly, as on a haystack or a featherbed.

  Lanny talked with the older man about it. Bernhardt Monck was a practical man, doing a job and not confusing his mind with ethical complications. Monck said, Either you hate the dictators or you don’t; you mean to put them down or to let them put you down. ‘I fight them with whatever weapon comes handy’, he declared. Lanny told him of the jesting motto he had heard from Johannes Robin, who was living now in the commercial world in New York: ‘Do unto others as they would do unto you—but do it first’. But even to say it made Lanny feel like a Nazi-Commie himself!

  VII

  Monck, a man of many devices, came to his American friend and said, ‘I need a little help, and you can give it to me’.

  ‘At your service’, Lanny said with a smile.

  ‘A peculiar thing has happened at my office. A German girl came in and asked for a job. She says she’s eighteen, but she may be older—I can’t be sure. She’s very bright, has all her wits about her. She’s a refugee from the Soviet zone, and I asked where, and she said from a village called Wendefurth, in the Harz. That might be a piece of blind luck or it might be a plant, and I have to make up my mind which’.