Also Lanny must say something about Dachau so that his listeners might not become sentimental about the mighty fallen. He must say something definite about the confusion of mind in the State Department and in American policy for Europe. Were we going to denazify or were we going to get efficiency at any cost? Was our Army going to prepare for the next war, or were our statesmen going to work for peace in spite of all obstacles? At present our official policy was the breaking up of the German cartels, those great industrial combines which had dominated the life of Europe, upsetting governments and determining peace or war for more than half a century. But General Clay was improvising a policy, he was following his own theory, or that of Wall Street, that German industrial power must be restored and built into a bulwark against Soviet Communism.
Great statesmanship was needed here, and care in every word that one spoke over the radio; not giving in to Russia, yet not challenging her, but trying to abate her fears and persuade her to a settlement that would leave her to work out her own problems in her own way, and leave the free peoples of the West to find their own methods of social change. That couldn’t be done by the Army, nor yet by Wall Street; it had to be done by civilians who understood the real heart of America, the sweet land of liberty, and America’s dream of the common man.
VIII
During Lanny’s absence Gerald de Groot had been doing the introducing, and he now introduced Mr. Lanning Prescott Budd. Gerald had prepared his script, and the rest of the group had edited it. They didn’t want it to sound like a radio commercial; they didn’t want to say that Mr. Budd’s experience had been extraordinary, for so many things had been extraordinary in this war. Hundreds of secret agents had gone into the enemy lands, and no doubt some of them had fooled the higher-ups. As for presidential agents, there were supposed to have been at least a hundred and three, though Lanny had his doubts and wondered if the figures might have begun at one hundred. Anyhow, don’t brag; leave out the adjectives and say that he is the son of Robert Budd of Budd-Erling and was President Roosevelt’s agent and managed to fool Hitler, Göring, and Hess. Also, that this was his first appearance on the radio since his return from the Nürnberg trial.
Lanny wasn’t nervous, for this had been his life for many years and he knew it by heart. He told how he had first met the Führer of the Nazis, and how, using his father’s prestige—be sure to listen, Robbie!—he had won the favor of the Führer’s most capable assistant, that gross and greedy person whom the Germans had called “Unser Hermann.” He told a few of the terrible sights he had witnessed in Naziland, and the dismay that had seized him as he watched it proceeding step by step to take over the continent of Europe.
The speaker proceeded to preach his brief sermon. He didn’t have to pull the tremolo stop, for his feelings were intense and revealed themselves without effort. He said that this generation had to decide whether civilization was to go on to new heights or to destroy itself in a series of blind and furious wars. He said that the decision was being made day by day, by the opinions the people held and expressed, by the votes they cast, by the actions they permitted their government to take. He identified himself with his friends of this Peace Group, who were convinced that, modern communications and modern weapons being what they were, there could be no permanent peace on this earth so long as competitive commercialism continued to dominate the lives of men. Free, democratic co-operation, plus birth control for all the races of mankind—these were the conditions upon which the progress of civilization could go on; the alternative being the swift destruction of all the treasures, material, moral, and intellectual, mankind had so far accumulated.
That was the peroration and led up to the announcer’s closing remarks that hereafter the Peace Program was to be extended to a full half-hour, the first quarter-hour being given to a narration by Mr. Budd of one of his adventures in Europe or elsewhere. The second half would be a talk on the subject of world peace by a new guest speaker each week, the wisest and best they could find. Mr. Budd’s remarks of this evening had been taken down by a stenographer and would go to press tomorrow morning in the little four-page paper called Peace, which was mailed to subscribers at the price of fifty cents a year.
Finally came the usual collection talk, to persuade people to send in money for subscriptions to their friends and others who might profit from the paper and the broadcast. Gerald read the honor roll—every week there were several new towns from which somebody had sent in a telephone book, with money to pay for sending the paper to everyone listed. Labor unions and lodges and other groups had subscribed for their members—and so on. “Remember the address, Box One Thousand, Edgemere, New Jersey.”
IX
Laurel, the storyteller, had been right; people liked a story. They liked to imagine a hero, elegant, well dressed, suave, and able to travel over the earth and see the interesting places which so few of them would ever visit; someone who had access to the great ones of the earth, those whose pictures were printed everywhere but whom few would ever see in person. This favorite of fortune satisfied them, and people by the tens of thousands decided that they wanted to hear his adventures and to have their friends hear. The flood of mail swelled to a torrent, and it became necessary to hire more girls, and to rent a room in the parish house of the Methodist Church, and set up a double row of tables at which the girls could sit and open envelopes and take out money and mark the amounts on the letters.
Also, a team of union carpenters—time and a half for overtime—went to work building a new long room at the back of the onetime fuse factory. Sam de Witt had to find another stencil-cutting machine. The machine that stamped the labels on the papers had to be worked twenty-four hours a day—more time and a half. The same thing applied to the printing press; they had found that they could get the job done more cheaply in the great metropolis, but they desired to keep the favor of their fellow townsmen by patronizing home industry. It saved telephone bills and time running back and forth with proofs; more important yet, they would have the whole thing under their own control. They gave their printer a guarantee, and he started adding a workroom and a larger storeroom in back of his place; all in a tremendous rush, otherwise the wrappers of bundles would have been working out in the backyard.
More important yet. Lady Nielson got to work on the telephone. She, the Mother Superior of this radio project, had leaped to the decision that Lanny Budd’s adventures offered the opportunity for getting the nation-wide circulation she craved. There are agencies which will arrange such things for you, and they are ready to go into action at the drop of a hat. Nina put that hat on her head, and the rest of the insignia of worldly importance on her person, and went into town and signed a contract for the expansion of the Peace Program to include stations covering the entire country. It would cost something like ten thousand dollars a shot—but was there any way of spending Emily Chattersworth’s money that would have pleased the donor more?
Even that wasn’t the limit of Nina’s ambition. There were agencies that had the magic power to cause advertisements to appear on a certain morning or evening on the radio page of hundreds of different newspapers all over the three million square miles of the U.S.A. All you had to do was to present the agency with proper credentials, or, better still, a check on account, duly certified by a bank. This wins you respect and will provide the services of a psychological wizard who has spent half a lifetime studying the mentality of the American public and can tell you exactly what words to use in order to have them rush to the radio and afterward sit down and write a check, or go to the post office next day and get a money order, or take a chance and stick a one- or five- or ten-dollar bill in an envelope and mail it. When you go in for something on that scale you have to forget that you are a member of the British aristocracy and have spent a lifetime learning dignity and restraint; you have to use circus-poster words, motion-picture words—stunning, gripping, sensational, epoch-making, unprecedented, even supercolossal.
X
Get
ready for the earthquake, the avalanche, the supercolossal cyclone! This time you will learn that America really is a big country; this time you will learn that it really has the oddly named places you’ve heard of, Podunk and Hoboken, Kalamazoo and Kissimmee and Tallahassee, Dead Man’s Gulch and Deaf Smith County, not to mention two Faiths, fourteen Hopes, and one Charity. You will discover that there are even more queer people than there are queerly named towns; and also that there are, all over the land, tens of thousands of earnest, devoted people ready to respond to a call of idealism and get into motion the moment they are shown a goal. You will find that you have to sit up most of the night if you wish even to glance over their letters, and that you will need a corps of typists if you wish to answer. You will find that you have to have an expert receptionist to deal with the many who will wear a path to your door—including the gentlemen who want to propose to Miss Mary Morrow and the ladies with soulful eyes who just want to gaze into the brown eyes of Mr. Lanny Budd.
The ex-P.A. would never fail to go over with his friends every detail of what he expected to say; he would have headings on a little typewritten list, but would not write out his talk. When the next Thursday came round, the first of their double programs, he told in a quiet voice how as a boy he had spent Christmas at the home of a German friend named Kurt Meissner, who had grown up to be a famous pianist and composer. Said Lanny, “I never had any special talent myself, but I had the good fortune to have several friends who did.” He told how through this boyhood friend he had come to know about a German political movement called National Socialism, and had been taken to meet its leader. Thus he had followed its growth year after year and understood how cleverly it had been contrived to play upon the weaknesses of the thwarted and embittered German people.
Lanny’s story of Johannes and Freddi Robin had been told at Nürnberg, but the accounts that had got into the American papers were sketchy; so now he repeated it, not shrinking from the horror he had witnessed in the torture dungeon of the Berlin prison or the anguish he had felt when the broken body of a young Jewish idealist had been turned over to him by the Nazi gangsters on the bridge across the Rhine at Strasbourg. “You can imagine,” he said, “how I swore a vow of resistance to that hateful system, and was moved to use my acquaintance with Göring and Hitler to gain their secrets, and pass them on to friends in Britain and America who would help awaken the public to the danger which Nazi-Fascism represented.”
Then, through Professor Charles T. Alston, he had met President Roosevelt and become his secret agent. This had been in the summer of 1937 while the Spanish civil war was raging, a model of all the other wars that would rage if the three dictators, German, Italian, and Spanish, could have their way. The visitor had sought to persuade the Governor that they meant war and could mean nothing else; and in this he had been tragically vindicated.
XI
Such was the first half of the program, and immediately afterward the voice of Gerald de Groot informed the audience that next week they would hear the first of Mr. Budd’s adventures in the service of our late great President. He hoped they would advise their friends to listen and would not fail to put their names on the subscription list of the little peace paper, in which they would find the printed text of the broadcast they had just heard. Then he introduced the second speaker, Professor Alston, who had been one of President Roosevelt’s closest advisers, first while he was Governor of New York State and then while he was President of the United States, a period of sixteen years. They were bringing Alston on for a second time in order that he might vouch for the truth of Lanny’s story.
The mild-voiced little gentleman, now in his seventies, possessed no oratorical arts; but as a geographer he had learned to know the physical world, and as an adviser to President Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference he had learned to know political Europe. He had helped to shape Roosevelt’s plans for that unhappy war-torn continent; what Americans could and should do to help it back to sanity and health—always provided that the European peoples would do their part. There must be political unity and, no less important, economic unity; thereafter the whole world must unite to make certain that no more dictators arose to impose their will upon free peoples.
That led to the subject of the Soviet Union, now locked in a duel with the Western world in the Security Council of the United Nations. Alston told what Roosevelt’s mind had been on the subject of this emerging force of proletarian revolt; the President had hoped it might be guided into channels of co-operation and peace. He had said playfully that he had a Fifty-Year Plan for making friends with the Soviet Union. He was determined to trust Stalin, in the hope of winning Stalin’s trust in return. In any case, it was a choice of the lesser of two evils, for Hitler had given abundant proof that nobody could trust him; and one or the other of these two had to win the war.
Yalta had been the last of Roosevelt’s conferences with the Soviet chief; just two months later Roosevelt was dead. And what had happened in those sixty days? Enough to convince Roosevelt that the agreements were not going to be kept; the war was almost won, and friendship was no longer needed. The anxiety over this must have helped to break his heart.
And what was to be done now? What would Roosevelt himself have done if he had still been here? Surely he would have used the weapon of pitiless publicity; he would have brought the recalcitrant government before the bar of public opinion and kept it there. Mr. Gromyko might walk out of the Security Council as often as he pleased and stay out as long as he pleased, but he could not keep the world from being reminded, over and over again, of agreements that had been signed and published and then disregarded. Both the United Nations and the United States must go in for an educational campaign—propaganda, if you chose so to call it—on a scale never known so far; they must beat the Russians at their favorite game.
At the same time, said Alston, the American people must never for a moment fail to push their economic reforms, in order to avoid the next panic; they must remove their many social abuses, in order to deprive the Communists of their talking points. Said this onetime New Deal “fixer,” “All our efforts will be vain unless we can show that our democratic system works, and that its end product is justice and opportunity for the common man.”
XII
When that program was over they had supper and a long talk. It was an anxious time, and none of these amateur publicists tried to minimize the danger. The UN appeared to be going on the rocks. The world was splitting into two hostile parts, East versus West, one half behind the iron curtain and the other in front. It looked like an inevitable drift toward war; and did Russia mean war or was she just trying a bluff, getting everything that she could without war? Most of the Peace Group preferred the latter guess, but it was only a guess, and very trying on the nerves.
Alston said, “Something must have put Foreign Minister Molotov into a bad frame of mind, for he went out to San Francisco and almost kept the UN from getting started because he wouldn’t agree to a voting procedure. That made it necessary for Harry Hopkins to fly to Moscow to try to patch things up with Stalin; it just about used up the last ounce of strength that poor fellow had.”
“And yet you were foolish enough to disband your Army and Air Force!” exclaimed Rick.
“We so ardently wanted peace,” replied the “fixer.” “Truman went to Potsdam and met Stalin and I suppose believed what he was told. Truman himself is a rigidly honest man, and it was hard for him to realize that statesmen would pledge their country’s good faith and mean to keep it only so long as it suited their purposes.”
They talked about Vyacheslav Molotov, that strange person with the dead-pan face; his name meant “the Hammer”—but he was more like the anvil, Alston said, for you could pound upon him until you were exhausted and never make the slightest impression. Apparently Stalin used him as a sort of pillbox, a fortification into which he could retire. Stalin would come out, all geniality and obligingness, and tell you what you wanted to hear; then he would retir
e behind the pillbox, and you would find yourself confronting its blank face. Molotov, the Foreign Minister, the diplomatic agent, was the one you had to complain to when Stalin’s agreements were not kept; and Molotov was the one who was capable of looking straight into your eyes and telling you things which he not merely knew were not true, but which he knew that you knew were not true. A bitter lesson you had to learn, soon or late, that truth had no meaning to any Communist; the only question that concerned him was the advancement of his cause.
“If you have any doubt of that,” put in Rick, “all you have to do is to go to the writings of Lenin, and you will find it plainly stated.”
“Just as plainly as in Mein Kampf,” added Rick’s wife.
XIII
Such was the state of the world in which the Peace Group had to operate; and what were they going to do about it? Much as they hated the idea, it was impossible to disarm in the face of Communist imperialism. America had to be able at all times to convince the Soviet leaders that they could not win a war. Molotov had discussed that with bitterness, saying that we were dangling an atomic bomb over his head. That at least was a truth that he recognized; nobody had ever heard him say that the bomb wasn’t there.
But how would it be when he too had this deadliest of weapons? His foreign slaves were working day and night getting out the ore in Czechoslovakia—that was the reason that unhappy democratic land had been seized. Somewhere deep in Russia the scientists and the technicians, many of them German, were working to solve the problems of the bomb. Someday he would announce that he had it—and you wouldn’t have the least idea whether to believe him or not.