Bishop Prang spoke, as he usually did, with a grave kindliness, a virile resonance, which made his self, magically coming to them on the unseen aerial pathway, at once dominating and touched with charm; and whatever his purposes might be, his words were on the side of the Angels:
"My friends of the radio audience, I shall have but six more weekly petitions to make you before the national conventions, which will decide the fate of this distraught nation, and the time has come now to act—to act! Enough of words! Let me put together certain separated phrases out of the sixth chapter of Jeremiah, which seem to have been prophetically written for this hour of desperate crisis in America:
"'Oh ye children of Benjamin, gather yourselves together to flee out of the midst of Jerusalem. . . . Prepare ye war . . . arise and let us go up at noon. Woe unto us! for the day goeth away, for the shadows of the evening are stretched out. Arise, and let us go by night and let us destroy her palaces. . . . I am full of the fury of the Lord; I am weary with holding it in; I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men together; for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days. . . . I will stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of this land, saith the Lord. For from the least of them even unto the greatest, every one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest, every one dealeth falsely . . . saying Peace, Peace, when there is no Peace!'
"So spake the Book, of old. . . . But it was spoken also to America, of 1936!
"There is no Peace! For more than a year now, the League of Forgotten Men has warned the politicians, the whole government, that we are sick unto death of being the Dispossessed—and that, at last, we are more than fifty million strong; no whimpering horde, but with the will, the voices, the votes to enforce our sovereignty! We have in no uncertain way informed every politician that we demand—that we demand—certain measures, and that we will brook no delay. Again and again we have demanded that both the control of credit and the power to issue money be unqualifiedly taken away from the private banks; that the soldiers not only receive the bonus they with their blood and anguish so richly earned in '17 and '18, but that the amount agreed upon be now doubled; that all swollen incomes be severely limited and inheritances cut to such small sums as may support the heirs only in youth and in old age; that labor and farmers' unions be not merely recognized as instruments for joint bargaining but be made, like the syndicates in Italy, official parts of the government, representing the toilers; and that International Jewish Finance and, equally, International Jewish Communism and Anarchism and Atheism be, with all the stern solemnity and rigid inflexibility this great nation can show, barred from all activity. Those of you who have listened to me before will understand that I—or rather that the League of Forgotten Men—has no quarrel with individual Jews; that we are proud to have Rabbis among our directors; but those subversive international organizations which, unfortunately, are so largely Jewish, must be driven with whips and scorpions from off the face of the earth.
"These demands we have made, and how long now, O Lord, how long, have the politicians and the smirking representatives of Big Business pretended to listen, to obey? 'Yes—yes—my masters of the League of Forgotten Men—yes, we understand—just give us time!'
"There is no more time! Their time is over and all their unholy power!
"The conservative Senators—the United States Chamber of Commerce—the giant bankers—the monarchs of steel and motors and electricity and coal—the brokers and the holding-companies—they are all of them like the Bourbon kings, of whom it was said that 'they forgot nothing and they learned nothing.'
"But they died upon the guillotine!
"Perhaps we can be more merciful to our Bourbons. Perhaps—perhaps—we can save them from the guillotine—the gallows—the swift firing-squad. Perhaps we shall, in our new régime, under our new Constitution, with our 'New Deal' that really will be a New Deal and not an arrogant experiment—perhaps we shall merely make these big bugs of finance and politics sit on hard chairs, in dingy offices, toiling unending hours with pen and typewriter as so many white-collar slaves for so many years have toiled for them!
"It is, as Senator Berzelius Windrip puts it, 'the zero hour,' now, this second. We have stopped bombarding the heedless ears of these false masters. We're 'going over the top.' At last, after months and months of taking counsel together, the directors of the League of Forgotten Men, and I myself, announce that in the coming Democratic national convention we shall, without one smallest reservation—"
"Listen! Listen! History being made!" Doremus cried at his heedless family.
"—use the tremendous strength of the millions of League members to secure the Democratic presidential nomination for Senator—Berzelius—Windrip—which means, flatly, that he will be elected—and that we of the League shall elect him—as President of these United States!
"His program and that of the League do not in all details agree. But he has implicitly pledged himself to take our advice, and, at least until election, we shall back him, absolutely—with our money, with our loyalty, with our votes . . . with our prayers. And may the Lord guide him and us across the desert of iniquitous politics and swinishly grasping finance into the golden glory of the Promised Land! God bless you!"
Mrs. Jessup said cheerily, "Why, Dormouse, that bishop isn't a Fascist at all—he's a regular Red Radical. But does this announcement of his mean anything, really?"
Oh, well, Doremus reflected, he had lived with Emma for thirty-four years, and not oftener than once or twice a year had he wanted to murder her. Blandly he said, "Why, nothing much except that in a couple of years now, on the ground of protecting us, the Buzz Windrip dictatorship will be regimenting everything, from where we may pray to what detective stories we may read."
"Sure he will! Sometimes I'm tempted to turn Communist! Funny—me with my fat-headed old Hudson-River-Valley Dutch ancestors!" marveled Julian Falck.
"Fine idea! Out of the frying pan of Windrip and Hitler into the fire of the New York Daily Worker and Stalin and automatics! And the Five-Year Plan—I suppose they'd tell me that it's been decided by the Commissar that each of my mares is to bear six colts a year now!" snorted Buck Titus; while Dr. Fowler Greenhill jeered:
"Aw, shoot, Dad—and you too, Julian, you young paranoiac—you're monomaniacs! Dictatorship? Better come into the office and let me examine your heads! Why, America's the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country's too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn't happen here!"
6
I'd rather follow a wild-eyed anarchist like Em Goldman, if they'd bring more johnnycake and beans and spuds into the humble cabin of the Common Man, than a twenty-four-carat, college-graduate, ex-cabinet-member statesman that was just interested in our turning out more limousines. Call me a socialist or any blame thing you want to, as long as you grab hold of the other end of the cross-cut saw with me and help slash the big logs of Poverty and Intolerance to pieces.
Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.
His family—at least his wife and the cook, Mrs. Candy, and Sissy and Mary, Mrs. Fowler Greenhill—believed that Doremus was of fickle health; that any cold would surely turn into pneumonia; that he must wear his rubbers, and eat his porridge, and smoke fewer cigarettes, and never "overdo." He raged at them; he knew that though he did get staggeringly tired after a crisis in the office, a night's sleep made him a little dynamo again, and he could "turn out copy" faster than his spryest young reporter.
He concealed his dissipations from them like any small boy from his elders; lied unscrupulously about how many cigarettes