Laurel said to Rick, “You can be the quiet persuasive voice.” He answered, “It mustn’t be a voice with a foreign accent. You be it, Lanny.” And when Lanny reminded them of the plan that he was to keep in the background, Rick said, “Be Mr. Bienvenu.” It was the name Lanny had been using for camouflage with some of his friends in Europe, and he had told these three about it.
Nina said, “It mustn’t be a foreign name. It has to be one that people know how to spell and that they can remember. Be Billy Budd.” They all laughed, and the name stuck; thereafter when they talked about the radio idea the announcer bore that name. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Billy Budd!” It was the name of a book by Herman Melville, but the radio public wouldn’t know that.
IX
It was their practice to invite somebody to dine with them and spend the evening: somebody who had been recommended as likely to have ideas. There came a dignified grandfatherly gentleman, tall, and holding himself erect in spite of his years. Ben Huebsch was the son of a rabbi, and for thirty years had been a pillar of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was editorial head of a publishing house and knew hundreds of persons who had to do with the writing game in the great metropolis.
He gave it as his opinion that American periodicals were floundering about; as he said, “partly because of uncertain policy, partly because of weak financial support, but mostly because there is no great editor. You can’t make a great editor, you can’t go into the market and buy one. But there are good men writing, and if the market for their work were enlarged the supply might increase.”
Rick put in, “Don’t you think, Mr. Huebsch, that the reason there are no great editors is because there are no editors? Policy is determined by publishers and owners, and the editors take orders.”
“It may be,” admitted this man of authority, and went on to explain that the magazine of opinion was fighting a losing game. Under present business techniques only those periodicals which circulated by millions and had the support of the big advertisers could survive. “Writing for other magazines, you write for a small number of scholars and experts, and if you devote your capital to that, you can become effective only after the work of the scholars has seeped through a generation of students who have sat at the scholars’ feet.”
“And by that time we may not have any civilization to write for,” said Laurel.
The publisher nodded assent. “In my youth,” he continued, “the North American Review, the Forum, the Arena, the Outlook, the Independent, McClure’s, the early American Magazine, Everybody’s and Collier’s under Norman Hapgood—all influenced the public. Everybody’s, also, as a muckraker, helped people to recognize corruption that called for remedy. But now all that is gone. Unless a magazine represents Big Business, and is conducted on the scale of the Curtis-Crowell-Luce publications or the Reader’s Digest, it is out of the running.”
Mr. Huebsch went on to the book field, which he knew even better. An occasional good book met with success, but it was always a gamble, a matter of luck; an equally worthy book, with identical promotion methods, might fail. The book-club world had the same ideas and ideals as the big magazines, and therefore was out of consideration. “The twenty-five-cent books which you see on every stand and stall do not pay dividends unless they are reprints of best-sellers. There are a few exceptions, and you might find one of the amiable gentlemen who run these concerns and would be willing to co-operate with you on some particular title; but you will have to look elsewhere to spend your million.”
“We have canvassed that field,” Lanny ventured; “we seem to find red lights on every highway.”
“I know of one road that may still be open to traffic,” said the publisher.
They wondered, was he going to suggest prize essays or debates, scholarships, lecture courses—any of the things they had considered and rejected as too small in scale? But it wasn’t those; Mr. Huebsch wanted to tell them about newspaper syndicates, which were highly competitive and were free because it didn’t take such a great amount of capital to start one. These syndicates sold material to newspapers, all kinds and sizes of papers, daily and weekly, and they sold all kinds of material: articles, stories, interviews, popularizations of anything historical, biographical, medical, scientific. It could be in any form, even comic strips and cartoons; the only requirements were, it had to be brief, well written or drawn, and not highbrow; in a word, good newspaper stuff.
Said this observant publisher, “If Paine had written Common Sense in the twentieth century it wouldn’t have been a pamphlet but a newspaper article or series of them. If you want to get something over quick and big, you put it in a daily and get it read by millions before the ink is dry. All you need is the Tom Paines; and if there aren’t any you do the best you can with fellows who can write and who believe as you do. Set them to work on all the different kinds of stuff I have named, and then have it submitted to one or two thousand newspaper editors.”
“But will the syndicates handle material of our sort?” asked Rick, who wasn’t familiar with this aspect of journalism.
“The syndicates will handle anything the newspapers will buy; and don’t forget that thirty per cent of our newspapers supported Roosevelt all the way through. Thirty per cent of American newspapers is an awful lot of both papers and money. They want variety, they want things that will hold the interest of their readers; there is always a market for live stuff. I don’t mean that you can feed them straight propaganda for your cause or any other, but you can feed them stuff that is shaded that way. What you have to get is a staff of working journalists with a soul above shoe leather. You can find them in the offices of the most conservative papers in the country, men of scholarship and ideals who would welcome the emancipation which a job with you would constitute.”
“Those are the most hopeful words we have heard yet,” exclaimed Laurel.
“They are true. You can find writers among those who have names, and you can discover and develop others by letting your plans become known through your staff and through certain college professors. If you take my advice, don’t mention your million dollars; that might have a demoralizing effect. Just set out as a business concern with ideas. You can’t expect to succeed with a rush; material which a syndicate can sell to hard-boiled editors doesn’t spring ready-made from the brow of Jove. You and your board of editors will have to plot out the big scheme, work it out in sections, interest your first squad of writers, and learn by trial and error. If you find the right syndicate you can get a lot of guidance from it; they know what will go and what won’t, and they will tell you because they want their share of the money.”
“Tell us about the business side,” said Rick.
“The syndicate will put a price on the articles, as high as they think they can get. They will keep a percentage, about forty, and you will get the rest; you probably won’t make a profit, because you will need a large staff; but if you meet expenses you can keep going indefinitely. If after you have learned the business you think you can do better, you are free to start a syndicate of your own. All sorts of material would come to you, and you could sell it, even though it had nothing to do with your propaganda. You might find yourselves making money. If my scheme is good you will be feeding articles, stories, poems, essays, and cartoons to millions daily. It will be neatly camouflaged, but not dishonestly. There is nothing dishonest about Anna Karenina, or ‘Ozymandias of Egypt,’ yet they are camouflaged moral tales from which publishers have made money. The same is true of Aesop’s fables and the parables of Jesus.”
“This sounds quite wonderful,” said Nina. “We visitors find it hard to realize how big America is.”
“The field is enormous,” replied the publisher, “and the old maxim applies, the room is at the top.”
“That is what frightens me,” said the fastidious Laurel. “Can we get good enough material?”
“Your standards mustn’t be too high, Miss Morrow. Good means good from the popular point
of view: things that will touch the public’s heart or its conscience, or that will answer questions that are in the public’s mind. It has been my business to know writers for some forty years, and I can start you off with a dozen good men whose names mean something to newspaper readers and who sympathize with what you’re after. They would find it quite marvelous to write what they believe in—and get money for it. It means a risk, of course; that would be the proper use for your capital, to carry the risk while you are experimenting and getting an education in the business.”
X
All four of them agreed that this was the solution to their problem. They would set up a staff of editors and writers and feed material to the insatiable American press. Mr. Huebsch agreed that they could have their homes and offices in a near-by suburb. In its earlier idealistic days the Cosmopolitan had been conducted from Irvington-on-Hudson, and Doubleday had built up an immense business at Garden City, Long Island. “The writers will come to you if you have a better mousetrap.”
Nina hated to see her radio idea go glimmering, and Lanny the same for his little paper. Each told his idea briefly, and the publisher responded, “There is no reason why three such plans might not be dovetailed. Your writers may bring you material that is entirely too propagandistic for the syndicate to handle, and you could put that into a paper or make it into a radio program. Certainly it’s a good idea to have a radio program to promote a paper, and a paper to promote a program. If you begin on a small scale, both these experiments could help you, and either might grow of its own impulse. Why not have three departments and let each of you run the one he likes best?”
“Me for radio!” exclaimed Lady Nielson. She had begun her career as an Army nurse in World War I. For almost thirty years she had run a household, raised a family, and been the severest critic of a playwright and Labour journalist. She possessed an observant mind and had got her education on the run, as it were. Lanny, who had seen her during almost every year since her marriage, had acquired respect for her judgment and was pleased by this autumnal flowering. A woman’s reach must exceed her grasp!
Lanny didn’t say much about his own plan in the presence of any visitor; but he had his quiet intention. He called himself an old fashioned person, used to getting ideas from the printed word, and he knew from experience what papers could do to young and new minds. He was determined to have one, and Laurel had tactfully dropped her idea of a dignified and highbrow magazine; after all, it was to Lanny that Emily had entrusted the funds and not to any of the others. If all Rick’s time was to be taken up with the syndicate idea, let Mr. Huebsch suggest an editor to carry out Lanny’s plan under Lanny’s direction.
So there they had their set-up; they would be an organism with one body and three heads. Rick would run a writers’ bureau, feeding material to a syndicate; his wife would run a radio program; Lanny and Laurel would run a small weekly paper, hoping to break through the barriers and achieve mass circulation. Three in one and one in three, holy, blessed Trinity! Laurel, who had been brought up as a devout Episcopalian, said, “Don’t be sacrilegious.”
To which the reverent Lanny replied, “By no means! We may be calling for Divine assistance before we get through.”
22
The Laborers Are Few
I
The sun of peace had risen and was shining upon a new America. Everybody had been rationed and restricted, everybody had been making sacrifices, or at any rate telling others to make them—and now all that was over. Everybody was free and could do what he pleased. Anybody could drive into a filling station and say “Fill ’er up”—provided only that he had the price, and practically all had it. There had never been so much money in circulation since the beginning of the world—real money, dollars! Everybody wanted to buy everything he had been doing without; everybody wanted to make more money to buy more things; everybody wanted to go to Florida for the winter, or perhaps load up the old jalopy and move to Southern California for good.
And of course everybody who was abroad wanted to get back to God’s country; nobody wanted to stay and teach democracy to Germans or Japanese. The humiliating truth was that many Americans had but an imperfect idea of democracy; many were Republicans and thought of democracy as the opposition party; it meant Roosevelt, whom they had been fighting and would go on fighting long after he was no more. Army officers, and Navy officers even more so, believe in giving orders and having them obeyed. How to reconcile American Military Government with notions about the rights of man was not so simple as it sounded to political orators at home.
Captain Jerry Pendleton wrote his friend Lanny about this. Jerry himself was well content, he reported; they had sent him to Mondorf-les-Bains, near Luxembourg, to help watch over the higher-ups among the war criminals—this on account of his knowledge of French and German and of European ways in general. The Army had taken over Jerry’s boarding-house in Cannes, and his wife had come to join him. They had a comfortable apartment, and Jerry had a car—what more could an American want?
In course of the years Jerry had become slightly infected with his ex-pupil’s notions—more than he would have admitted, and perhaps more than he realized. He wasn’t so well pleased with the way things were going in the captured lands; the denazification program just wasn’t working out. The big bugs were going to get it in the neck all right, but their underlings were getting by with excuses and evasions, and many of them were back in their old positions of authority. Here indeed was a problem, for it was hard to find anybody who would admit that he had really been a Nazi, and it was hard to find anybody with any experience in administration or management who hadn’t really been a Nazi. The Army couldn’t manage Germany without the help of Germans, and the tendency was to say “Oh, to hell with it!” and turn the job over to anybody who could and would do it properly.
Said Jerry: “The people we ought to be working with are your kind—the Social Democrats. But the average Army officer is accustomed to thinking of any kind of Socialist as a nut. He looks down upon such fellows at home and can’t understand why he should bother with them abroad. The people he looks up to at home are the Big Business crowd, the executives, those who have good manners and the right sort of homes to invite him to. The same sort of people are here, and he can’t understand that they are the people who put the Nazis in power and would bring them back tomorrow if they could.”
Interesting to Lanny was his ex-tutor’s account of the way the Nazi big shots were living. Their home was the former Palace Hotel, seven stories high and once a resort of fashion, but no more. Its windows were all barred and the glass had been replaced with unbreakable material. The elegant furniture had been taken away. “This is a jail,” said Jerry. “We have rules, and they are obeyed. Our fellows call it the ‘Big House,’ and the Germans have learned that much of the American language. They do not have newspapers and not one of them has sent or received a letter since he came. ‘Ashcan’ is our code name.”
Here fifty-two of the top Nazi officials and military officers were being held until their fate should be decided by the War Crimes Commission. Here were Reichsmarschall Göring, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, Grand Admiral Doenitz, Field Marshal von Kesselring, Field Marshal von Keitel, Finance Minister Count von Krosigk, and so on down the line. Few of them whom the son of Budd-Erling had not met at one time or another through two decades, and now he read with interest the account of their behavior.
Göring, that huge bulk of vanity, half emperor and half clown, had imagined that he was going to be taken in state to call upon General Eisenhower; now he was living in a room furnished with a cot, a straw mattress, a chair, a toothbrush, and an aluminum drinking cup. He was having hospital care to break him of his drug habit; he had been taking twenty times the normal dose of paracodeine, and now he complained bitterly that the Americans were cheating him. When he had sat down in his chair it had broken down, and they had got him a bigger one. Today he was in the dumps and tomorrow he would be haughty, appealing to po
sterity in his thoughts.
Ribbentrop, that egregious wine salesman who had displayed his insolent manners in so many of the council chambers of Europe, was now wearing a loose-fitting lumberman’s shirt without a tie and his gray hair was shaggy. He was careless about making his own bed and had to be reprimanded frequently. He was greatly concerned about his fate and had fired volleys of questions at Jerry: when would the trials start, where would they be held, what would the charges be and who was preparing them? Jerry had answered nothing, because that was orders.
The prisoners were permitted to see movies, but only of one kind, those taken of scenes in the concentration camps. Doenitz had viewed some of them and had written a letter, blaming Allied air raids for the emaciated condition of the inmates. The American commander had replied that no doubt the Allied air raids were also responsible for the fat and sleek condition of the SS guards who had watched over the concentration-camp inmates.
Another curious detail was the class feeling which manifested itself among the prisoners. The ranking officers played cards with one another, but never with the low-caste civilians. Everybody disliked Ribbentrop and ignored him. When Julius Streicher, vile anti-Jewish propagandist, was brought to the place, Admiral von Doenitz had refused to eat at the table with him. He had been given the choice of eating there or not eating at all.
Streicher was cut by everyone, as was Dr. Robert Ley, Nazi Minister of Labor. That drunken beast was the one who had grabbed Johannes Robin, just after the Nazis took power, intending to plunder him of his fortune; but Göring had heard about it and taken the wealthy Jew for himself. Jerry knew about this and understood that Lanny would be interested in hearing how the beast was living now. Ley and Streicher were inseparable; the GIs called them the “Gold Dust twins.” Ley had got a pair of GI trousers, Class X, meaning that they had been discarded by the Army; they were freshly pressed, whereas Streicher’s were knee-sprung. Streicher had made a fuss, but Jerry had told him to be glad he had any trousers at all.