The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  To Lanny, looking down upon the scene as it were from heaven, this presented a complex set of problems. There was Fritz with his three psychologies—the Social Democrat pretending to be a Nazi pretending to be a Communist. There was the ‘deaf French girl’, pretending to have no political psychology—or was she pretending? For the purpose of her work she would presumably be a Nazi pretending to be a Communist, and she would be meeting Fritz on that basis; they would be two spies, neither of them knowing that the other was a spy. Would they discover each other, or would one discover the other without telling the other—and which would do the discovering, and which would be discovered? And what would be the result of this combination? It was like a chemist pouring two unknown chemicals into a test tube. They might lie together inertly, or they might blow up the laboratory.

  Also, Lanny was concerned about the human aspect of this situation. He had adopted that ardent German lad, to make up for the lad’s lost father; and now what was this girl going to do to him? Lanny couldn’t be sure, because he didn’t know the girl well enough. The fact that she had tried to attach herself to Lanny didn’t mean as much as it would have meant in America, for Germany was a war-torn land and its women, especially the young, were frantic. For them the command had been given in an old German song: ‘Rejoice in life while yet the little lamp glows; pluck the rose before it fades away’.

  II

  After the end of World War I the young Lanny Budd, disgusted with the results of the Paris Peace Conference, had announced that he was going to the Riviera and lie on the sand and watch the world come to an end. In those days he had been independent and fancy free and could say such things. Now, twenty-seven years later, he had watched another and still more calamitous world war, and again had suffered disillusionment and been tempted to despair. But he was no longer fancy free; he had a programme and an organisation and some thirty people dependent upon him and his decisions. He had to meet issues, he had to keep appointments, he had to wear a cheerful aspect and be dependable and confident and prompt. He took to taking long walks, to wrestle things out with himself and be sure of what he really believed and really wanted to do.

  Thirty years ago the Russian Revolution had come, and, like most of the ardent young spirits of the time, Lanny had hailed it with hope. As Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven’. Lincoln Steffens had travelled to what was then Petrograd and talked to Lenin, and had come back to Paris and told Lanny, ‘I have seen the future and it works’. But now poor old Stef was no more; he had died disillusioned and brokenhearted, as Lanny well knew. But Lanny wasn’t ready to die, and he couldn’t afford to show weakness; he had to think things out and meet the emergencies of his time.

  The true Russian Revolution, the Socialist Revolution of the spring of 1917, was no more; it had become just another despotism, old-style with a new-style camouflage. The Soviets were no more; they were just a pretence, a propaganda device. The constitution was fine on paper and wholly imaginary so far as practice was concerned. Its liberal phrases meant nothing, and all the wonderful dreams were gone with the wind. There was cruelty and terror beyond any imagining of the Western world; there was deadly hate, animal cunning—and age-long patience.

  With the help of the Western world Stalin had conquered all the states along his western border, beginning with Esthonia and all the way down to Bulgaria. He had blandly promised free, independent, democratic governments for all those states, and then had proceeded, no less blandly, to make them over in his own image by his tools of terror and fraud. This process Lanny watched in his daily newspapers. The chancelleries of the Allied states watched it also and made their periodic protests, which came to nothing.

  Thus on the eleventh of June, 1947, the State Department disclosed that it had sent a note to the Soviet authorities in Budapest, charging that the Russians had taken unilateral action ‘in most flagrant interference in Hungarian affairs’. Three days later President Truman, signing peace treaties with Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania, rebuked those states for their oppressive measures. Eleven days after that the United States sent a note to Rumania, charging that the arrest of opposition members of the parliament was a deliberate effort to suppress democratic elements by ‘terroristic intimidation’. Two days after that the United States delegate to the U.N. Security Council urged the Council to permit the use of force to prevent Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria from aiding armed bands that were violating Greek territory. So it went day after day, week after week, and all the protests were spitting against the wind.

  At the beginning of June Secretary of State Marshall put forward his plan for American financial aid to European states, provided that they would adopt a uniform plan for recovery. There was nothing in that proposal to threaten the Soviet Union, unless the U.S.S.R. was bent upon conquest of the other states. But the Reds chose to take it as a hostile action and broke up a conference with France and Britain on the subject. Czechoslovakia had eagerly accepted the offer of Marshall aid, but Masaryk was peremptorily summoned to Moscow and commanded to reverse this decision. He went back to Prague and obeyed the order.

  III

  So it was that the director of the Peace Programme changed his mind and decided to keep it changed in spite of all the protests of the fellow travellers and the sleepers who wrote him letters. Lanny Budd became a militarist. When President Truman called for universal military training to prepare American youth for resistance, Lanny was for it; the Republicans were against it because Truman proposed it. There was warm discussion inside the Peace Group, and they compromised on the open-forum formula. They would get some supporter of the President to defend U.M.T., and they would get some genuine pacifist—if they could find one—to oppose it.

  In August the British set India free, and that was one of history’s great acts of statesmanship. It was the action of the British Labour party and the Socialist intellectuals who had been for two generations its leaders and guides. If the Soviet Union had been a real Socialist state, with a real belief in democracy and freedom, this action would have met with thunderous applause; but instead there was thunderous silence. The Reds hated Ernie Bevin even more than they hated Churchill; for Churchill was a foe they felt they could beat in the end, but Bevin was the man they really feared, the man who could win the workers of the world away from Stalinism.

  Early in the month of August the State Department issued the charge that the Rumanian government had violated the peace treaty with the United States by suppressing the National Peasant party and arresting its leader. A week or so later the United States introduced into the U.N. Security Council a resolution ordering the governments of the Balkan satellites of the Soviet Union to cease sending military aid to Greek Communist guerrillas; and this resolution was denounced by Soviet delegate Gromyko as ‘the crudest interference’ in the internal affairs of Greece. Next the United States denounced the death sentence passed on the Bulgarian opposition leader Petkof as ‘a gross miscarriage of justice’. The State Department revealed that it had made another protest to the U.S.S.R. against the continued occupation of the Chinese port of Dairen in violation of the treaty agreement to vacate it.

  Still more significant was the statement by the American general who headed the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission in Korea, that the Soviet delegation was attempting to ‘usurp the functions’ of the Joint Commission. It seemed strange to listeners of the Peace Programme that Lanny Budd should trouble to mention what was going on in far-off Korea; and when he explained its significance he discovered that there were letter writers who thought it was imperialistic of the United States to try to keep the Soviets from seizing a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan, but didn’t find it at all imperialistic that the Soviets should be trying to seize that dagger. Both sides had solemnly agreed to permit the oppressed people of Korea to choose their own government in free and secret elections. But as usual the Reds were determined that the new government should b
e set up by the small Communist minority.

  IV

  Professor Samuel Goudsmit came to speak on the programme. He was a Jewish physicist, born in Holland, who had come to America when he was young. Toward the end of the war he had been appointed head of the Alsos Mission, a team of physicists sent out with a military escort to find out what German scientists had achieved, and incidentally to persuade them to come to America. Either the Americans would get them, or the British, or the French, or the Russians, and there was eager rivalry in this hunt. Lanny Budd had joined Alsos and had had some adventures; now they delighted to talk these over, for Sam Goudsmit was a genial soul, full of fun and stories.

  But there wasn’t much fun on the subject of the A-bomb. It was the biggest of all the bones of contention being fought over in the U.N. sessions. To every project or suggestion of disarmament the Soviets would reply with one demand: the first step must be the outlawing and destruction of those A-bombs. The meaning, of course, was obvious to everyone with brains in his head. Once the United States ceased to hold that ‘sword of Damocles’ over the head of the Reds, the balance of power would be shifted, because the Reds had huge armies and a flock of warplanes, whereas the United States had disbanded most of its Army and had put its planes in mothballs. The Reds would have Western Germany at their mercy; they would stage an uprising there and send in arms to enable the oppressed workers to defend themselves; then indeed Berlin would be an ‘island’. There were millions of Communists in Italy and France, willing and eager to repeat the same performance. And once the Reds had got the Ruhr and set up the installations for bigger and better V-2 rockets on the Channel coast, what chance would there be of survival for Britain?

  Lanny asked what chance there was of the Reds getting the all-important secret, and Goudsmit said they were certain to get it in the end; they had some very good German scientists and also a few good ones of their own. These men were being well treated and given every facility. No doubt they understood that the continuance of their lives depended upon just one thing: the achievement of an atomic chain reaction and its control for use in warfare. Lanny asked how soon this was apt to happen, and Goudsmit said he didn’t know, and wouldn’t be free to tell if he did know; the estimates of physicists ran from eight to fifteen years. Lanny, who was spy-conscious, pointed to the Soviet spy ring which had been getting atomic secrets in Canada and wondered if that same thing was happening in the U.S.A. Goudsmit, who was employed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the new atomic plant the government had under construction on Long Island, said that he felt sure there were no traitors or spies in his organisation. It would be an awful thing indeed if there were.

  V

  Lanny was glad to introduce this learned gentleman to the radio audience; he was the accredited co-discoverer of the so-called “spin of the nucleus’. Lanny said there were so many marvels being revealed in this ultramicroscopic universe that it was hard for a layman to keep track of them—especially when he wasn’t allowed even to hear about them.

  Goudsmit took that as the text for his address. He said it was the tragedy of scientific life today that every group of specialists was walled off from all other groups. The tremendous discovery of atomic fission had been due to one single fact, the free circulation of ideas throughout the world. There had been little groups of learned people called theoretical physicists, men and a few women who dealt almost entirely with elaborate and complicated mathematical equations. There were others who tested these formulas in the laboratory, and if the tests succeeded the discovery would go out in scientific papers and often by telegraph to the other groups in all the lands. Each new idea was eagerly taken up, and hundreds of other minds worked over it day and night. But now the atomic physicists of every land were walled off as if they had been criminals, and their discoveries were jealously guarded as essential to national safety. No group knew what any other group was working on or what progress it had made.

  In his previous broadcast the physicist had warned against permitting Germany to become a pawn to be fought over between East and West. Now he was more than a year wiser and could say that it had happened. Germany was divided into two halves, and the Soviets were setting out to make the eastern half over in their image, while the other three Allies did the same with their half. Goudsmit was sure the Germans would never give up their demand for national unity; but Lanny in the question period ventured to express doubt of this. He said that the modern techniques of propaganda constituted a new and revolutionary force and would do many things that had never been done in the world before. Each side would give its half of Germany what information it wished that half to possess. The newspapers, the radio, the books, and above all the schools, were being made over, and if that process was allowed to continue there would be two new generations of Germans, as different from each other as Germans were from Frenchmen or Poles. There had been a Thirty Years’ War in which Germans had fought Germans, and why might not the same thing happen again? The professor agreed that it was important for the Western nations to get Western ideas into the Soviet zone of Germany by radio and any other means that could be devised.

  VI

  Monck wrote, ‘Things are coming to a head. You should be here to see it’. He added incidentally, ‘Ferdinand and the deaf French girl are watching each other carefully and making reports on each other; they are accurate, but not exactly what we wanted’. An odd situation indeed! These two young people, falling in love with each other and at the same time religiously keeping the great secret; each believing that the other was a secret member of the Nazi underground—or could it be that each believed the other to be a Red sympathiser? It made Lanny think of the situation described to him as prevailing in the cafés on the Kurfürstendamm, which were full of spies peering over one another’s shoulders and trying to sell one another their secrets.

  Boris Shub wrote, ‘You should see R.I.A.S. now; you would hardly know the place. We are running twenty-two hours and really going places. I think the cold war will really be on soon. The Reds have called a German Writers’ Congress, to be held mostly in their sector. Some of us are going to attend, and there may be fun. Why don’t you come and help us?—you being a radio writer. The scripts you have sent are very much to the point, and we have translated and used them all. Two of them have been repeated by request’.

  As it happened, one of Lanny’s wealthy art clients was planning to will his collection to the town in which he lived and make it an art centre bearing his name. He had called Lanny’s attention to a gap in this collection; he wanted a good and genuine Rembrandt, and could Lanny find it for him? It was a good time to be picking up such treasures, because the American Army had collected and returned to their former owners some two hundred thousand works of art which had been stolen and put into the collections of Göring, von Ribbentrop, and Rosenberg. Many of the former owners no longer had money to buy themselves food, to say nothing of paying taxes on their homes, and an offer of real American dollars would present them with a sore temptation.

  Lanny Budd had been for a quarter of a century what the Germans called a Kunstsachverständiger, which means literally ‘an art-affairs understander’; he understood how to find such temptable persons and how to tempt them. He knew of two Rembrandts in Europe that he had once tried to buy, and now he wrote letters and learned that changed circumstances had made them available. He submitted photographs and their histories to his client and was told that either or both would be acceptable, and the price to be offered was left to his judgment. Lanny himself proved to be temptable. He thought, If those great masterpieces were in America he could take Laurel to see them!

  All he had to do was to telephone Turner of the Secret Service and his credentials would be mailed to him the same day. He could telephone the airport and a reservation would be made for his seat on the plane. For money he could go to the bank and make out a counter cheque. After that he had only to put his belongings into two light plastic suitcases and ask Freddi Robin to dr
ive him to the airport. So easy had civilisation made everything for its favoured sons!

  By now it had come about that a man could step into a plane on a Tuesday morning and pass his time comfortably reading, eating, and sleeping, and step out on to the Tempelhoferfeld on Wednesday afternoon. It was as if in the course of a hundred years the world had shrunk to the twentieth part of its former size. A great many people had been unable to adjust their minds to the fact of that shrinking. In the great marble building on a slight rise of ground in Washington, D. C., were more than five hundred legislators charged with protecting the safety of the country, and a large percentage of these had apparently remained oblivious to the change. Now and then a group would vote themselves funds to take a trip to Europe or Japan, and this would be contemptuously described as a ‘junket’; but to Lanny it seemed a worthwhile expenditure of public funds, if only to make these gentlemen realise how quickly an enemy could come the other way.

  Settled back in a comfortable seat a mile or two above the earth, Lanny read in one of the highbrow magazines a sentence spoken by an English statesman, Edmund Burke, something like a hundred and fifty years ago: ‘The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful’. Lanny stowed that sentence away in his memory, thinking that it might come in handy at a German Writers’ Congress to be held mostly in the Soviet sector of Berlin. And it did.

  VII

  The Congress was an elaborate propaganda stunt, carefully planned in Moscow and controlled by its military authorities. They were going to assemble the well-known German writers from all the four zones, indoctrinate them with the dogmas of Soviet communism, and convince them that it was destined to dominate the rest of the world. By a propaganda trick the enterprise was taking place under the official patronage of all the Four Powers. The sponsor bore the sober name of ‘The Association of German Authors’, a respected body founded before World War I, abolished by Hitler, and now brought to life again. The chairman was the honoured woman novelist Ricarda Huch, now eighty-one years of age, and the honorary president was Heinrich Mann. The main sessions were held in the Kammerspiele, in the Russian sector just around the corner from the headquarters of the Security Police on the Luisenstrasse; they were being run by an Army colonel called the cultural commissar. The Americans had no such official and were paying no attention whatever to the enterprise. No American writers had been invited.