“Sweet and rather pathetic,” replied the subtle expert. “I’ll send you a photograph, and you can decide whether you’d like to have the lady in your home.”
So it was that Lanny made money for the underground movement against the Nazis in Germany. So also it was that Adella made sure of receiving visits from a charming man who lightened the smoke-laden atmosphere of that city where she had been born and had raised herself from far down in the social heap to the very top.
III
Set down at the Washington airport on Monday morning, Lanny got busy on the telephone and gave the password. “Gus” told him to call again at noon, and when he did so the order was to be at a certain street corner at a quarter to ten that evening. It happened to be raining, and Lanny with overshoes and umbrella stood watching the speeding traffic, standing back far enough from the curb so as not to be too badly spattered. A car drew up, and the President’s bodyguard looked out and nodded.
“Not a very good night,” Lanny remarked, as he stepped in. The other replied: “I’ll say!”—and that was all the conversation. They rolled up Pennsylvania Avenue, and into the “social door” of the hundred-and-forty-year-old building which had housed all the Presidents of the United States but the first. At the gate there was apparently no guard; at the door, which is the main front door under the white pillars, the guard looked at Gus and said: “Hello.” Avoiding the elevator, they went up a flight and a half by a rather narrow, red-carpeted staircase. An aged Negro servitor passed them, saying: “Evenin’, Mista Gus.” They stopped at one of the doors which was ajar; Gus tapped gently, and that warm voice which all the world had learned to know over the radio called: “Come in.”
The President was lying in bed, wearing pajamas of blue pongee, covered by a knitted blue sweater, crew-neck style. His head was propped up, with a reading lamp at his left shoulder and a “whodunit” lying on the sheet which covered him. “Good evening,” he said to his visitor, not naming him; then, to the other man: “Thank you, Gus.” As the man started to retire, the President added: “Close the door, please.”
So the two conspirators were alone. Lanny took the chair by the bedside, and the other coughed slightly and reached for his handkerchief. “I am supposed to have a cold,” he said. “I am growing suspicious of my subconscious mechanism, for I notice that I develop the sniffles whenever I have a tiresome schedule like today.”
“I hope I am no part of the cause,” replied Lanny, grinning.
“You are what I wanted to be free for. Have you had time to think about the subject of our talks?”
“I have been motoring most of the time, and I’ve thought about it constantly.”
“Needless to say, Lanny, I haven’t had that much time: but I have made notes of several things I want to ask about.”
“Shoot!” replied the other; and without further preliminaries they got down to business.
Said F.D.R.: “There has grown up a practice on the part of our leading American industrialists to make secret deals with the big European cartels, whereby they share one another’s processes and inventions upon a strict monopoly basis. It appears from the social point of view a highly undesirable practice. I am not sure what I can or should do, but it seems clear that with wars threatening as they are, the government ought to get all possible information on the subject. Do you happen to know about it?”
“I have heard my father discussing it with his friends and associates. I know that such deals have been made with I. G. Farben Industrie and with A.E.G., the great electrical trust of Germany. I have been told that the du Ponts have such arrangements, also a prominent lead company and Standard Oil of New Jersey, I believe having to do with artificial rubber.”
“I am not proposing that you should do detective work,” explained the President. “That is the business of our Intelligence, and usually they get what they go after. But often we can save a lot of time and wasted effort if we know where the big booty is hidden and where to start digging. A casual remark dropped by one of the insiders may be worth more than tons of documents.”
“Quite so,” replied the other. “I have heard such remarks, and could easily make note of them. My father talks to me freely and tells me what this or that one has told him. I could be present on such occasions; the only reason I haven’t is that I am bored by talks about making money, even in the biggest amounts.”
“Do you intend to tell your father about these meetings with me?”
“I plan not to tell anyone, even my wife. It wouldn’t do any good, and the wisest and most loyal person might drop some hint by accident. In the case of my father, he is very bitter against your policies: income taxes in the higher brackets, and what he called ‘doles,’ and your ‘court-packing’—a long list. Just now the C.I.O. has got into his plant and is threatening a sit-down strike, and that makes him sore as the devil. If I told him I had met you, it would be the occasion of a long discourse, every word of which I already know by heart. My father is a kind and generous man, and has a sense of humor; you, Governor, would find him very good company, if only it weren’t for politics and your threatening his control over what he considers his private affairs.”
“It is something I have often observed,” remarked the “Governor,” with a sad smile; “the conservatives have the best manners and are the easiest to get along with.”
“I have speculated about it. They have everything they want, whereas the advocates of social change are apt to be fanatical and narrow, and sometimes motivated by jealousy, one of the meanest of qualities. The conservative has a whole community behind him and he obeys its rules; that makes for serenity and pleasant feelings. The radical, on the other hand, has to make his own rules; he makes many mistakes, and tries his own temper as well as other people’s.”
IV
It was as Alston had said; these two were “made for each other.” Both had grown up in comfort and near-luxury, never knowing deprivation; both were generous by nature and dreamed of a kindlier world; both had met with disappointments and disillusionments, but were stubborn and did not easily give up their dreams; now both were fighting-mad in their hearts, but kept a smile on their lips because that was good form, that was “sporting.” Also, they both liked to talk, and were tempted to ramble into the fields of philosophy and literature and what not. But the time was short, and they would jack themselves up and come back to business.
Lanny told about his Paris friends, the de Bruynes, to whom he was related in a peculiar French way. Denis was a leading financier, growing always richer; his cousin had been chosen one of the governing board of the almighty Banque de France—and then Léon Blum had broken the private control of that institution. Lanny could hear all the secrets of France talked in Denis’s drawing-room; he could meet Laval, Bonnet, Tardieu—any of the other scamps.
He told about his friend Kurt Meissner, who had become one of the top Nazi agents in Paris. A distinguished German musician and composer, Kurt had access to the highest circles, and everywhere he went he talked persuasively about the problems of the two countries. Why should Frenchmen let themselves be used as pawns by the English in their policy of keeping the Continent divided? Was it not easier to shake hands across the Rhine than across the Channel? France and Germany represented the two highest cultures in the world, and why should they not unite? And why should Frenchmen of breeding and social position permit themselves to be ruled by demagogues and Jews, the dregs heaved up from the bubbling kettle of social hates? Hitler was the man who had solved the problem of labor unionism, and his solution was good for all countries. Hitler was the one enemy of Bolshevism who really meant business; what greater crime against the true interests of French culture than to let the Jew demagogues draw them into alliance with Russia, the arch-enemy of all culture and indeed of all civilization?
So thought Frenchmen, especially rich young Frenchmen, the jeunesse dorée, after they had talked with Kurt Meissner in drawing-rooms. Lanny said: “I can never be sure how much Kurt tru
sts me now. He is secretive, but I watch him through the minds of his victims, and I know that he will be worth an army corps to the Nazis when their invasion starts.”
“When will it start, Lanny?”
“The day they are ready. Powder deteriorates, planes get out of date, so why wait an hour after your machinery is set to go?”
“You are certain that Hitler means war?”
“Many of my friends cannot believe it, and I put it to them this way: A man who is poor starves himself and spends all his time and labor to build a bicycle. What are you to assume about his purposes? Do you assume that he is intending to sail on the sea? Or to play music? Or to give his friends a banquet? No, because you cannot sail on a bicycle, nor play tunes on it, nor eat it. A bicycle is good for only one thing, to ride a bicycle; every part of it is made for that, and no part of it is good for anything else whatever.”
Lanny told of conversations with his client and host, the head of the Luftwaffe. Hermann Göring was a man of many pleasures but of only one business, which was preparing to make war from the air. Lanny described the huge new office building of the Air Force in Berlin, with three thousand rooms; he told about the airports with hangars hidden underground—Robbie Budd had visited one at Kladow, and had been staggered by the completeness of it. Said the son: “Robbie thinks the fat general is making a grave mistake by building short-range fighter planes when he should have bombers to bring England to her knees. But Hermann only laughs and winks. What he means, of course, is to put troops ashore in England and fly those planes from English fields.”
“How can he do it while the English control the seas?”
“He expects to do it by parachutes, and by submarines and dive-bombers sinking the British fleet. He figures that it won’t take long to ferry troops across twenty miles of water, and they will be specialists, with weapons the like of which has never been seen in the world before.”
“The reports I get differ widely, Lanny. I’d like very much to know the real numbers of the German Air Force; I mean actual first-line planes of the different types.”
“I think my father comes pretty near to knowing those figures. But you must bear this in mind, Governor—what counts at this stage is not so much the number of planes as the machine tools, the jigs and dies, the stocks of aluminum and rubber and so on. Hitler isn’t ready for war yet, and won’t be for two or three years. Meantime he tries one bluff after another, but is ready to back down before any strong move of Britain or France.”
“The British tell me they daren’t move, because they’re not prepared.”
“That is the statement of public men who have lost the habit of action. Military expenditure in Germany now is two and a half times that of Britain. What good does it do to delay when you’re falling behind at that rate?”
V
Twice Lanny offered to leave, but the President wouldn’t let him. “I’ll sleep late,” he said; then, grinning like a schoolboy playing hooky: “I have a cold and won’t be able to keep appointments.” He lighted one cigarette after another in the long thin holder—certainly not a therapeutic procedure—and went on asking questions about the old continent which was managing its affairs so badly and might again be calling upon America for help. F.D. had discovered here another self, a self that had lived abroad and knew all the people who were in the headlines there. It was as if the morning newspaper had come suddenly to life, and the persons in it stepped out and started talking.
“Tell me about Hitler,” said the President; so Lanny described that strange portent, half-genius, half-madman, who had managed to infect with his mental sickness a whole generation of German youth.
“Years ago I made a remark in a woman friend’s hearing: ‘There will be nothing to do but kill them.’ The remark horrified her so that I promised never to make it again. But it is literally true; they are a set of blind fanatics, marching, singing, screaming about their desire to conquer other peoples; it is their God-given destiny, and they have no room for any other idea in their heads. They have a song: ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.’ The German word for belongs is gehört, while the word hört means hears; so in Germany they sing ‘belongs to us’ and abroad they sing ‘hears us,’ which sounds less alarming. That is typical of the Nazi technique. Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”
Lanny described the Führer in the early days of his movement, coming onto the platform of a crowded beer cellar in Munich, the living image of Charlie Chaplin with his tiny dark mustache and ill-fitting pants. In those days he always wore a rusty brown raincoat; he was the proletarian leader, the rabble-rouser, the friend of the common man. “People here make a grave mistake,” Lanny said. “They think of Nazism as a reactionary movement, an effort of the capitalist class to put down labor and the Communists; but Nazism was a revolutionary movement—that is the only way any movement can get power nowadays. Hitler promised the redistribution of landed estates without compensation, the abolition of what he called ‘interest slavery,’ the whole program of populist revolt.”
“We had such a man in this country—Huey Long.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t meet him.”
“Believe me, I did! He was all set to be my successor. He once had me waked up at one in the morning to give me hell over the telephone from Baton Rouge for some appointment he didn’t like. I refused to cancel it and he was my mortal enemy forever after.”
“There will be others like him,” replied Lanny, “unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.”
That aspect of the movement had few secrets for Lanny, because his father, a steel man himself in those days, had heard the German steel men talking about the sums they were turning over to their new political boss. “Thyssen alone put up five million marks.”
“And now he’s very unhappy, I am told,” remarked the President.
“Don’t let that fool you. Hitler is a wild horse and has taken the bit in his teeth—but he’s galloping in the direction the big industrialists want him to go. They are finding it a wild ride, but they expect to arrive at their destination, which is the integration of the industry of the Continent and its control from Berlin.”
“Control by the Hitler gang?”
“But under the rules of the big business game. A big industrialist wants to turn out unlimited quantities of goods, and have an unlimited market for them at what he calls ‘fair’ prices, that is, prices which allow him a profit. He wants to take these profits and reinvest them in his plants and turn out more goods, and so on, over and over—he calls it the ‘turnover,’ and as long as he can make it he’s happy. That is the situation in Germany for every man who can produce war goods; also for every worker who has any sort of skill. Naturally, they all think it is herrlich, and that the Führer who has brought this about is some sort of magician, or an emissary from on high.”
“It is really Hitler who is directing it?”
“It is the technical men of German industry, and the officers of the general staff of the Wehrmacht. They are probably the most highly trained military men in the world, and of course it is herrlich for them, because for the first time all German industry, both capital and labor, does exactly what they, the members of the Herrenklub, direct. Emil Meissner, Kurt’s brother, is a member of that club. He was doubtful of Schicklgruber, the demagogue, but now he worships Hitler, the inspired master of the German destiny. I have seen Emil rise from lieutenant to general in l
ess than twenty-five years, and today he is probably the happiest man I know; he has everything exactly the way he wants it. The Communists, the Socialists, the democrats and pacifists are all dead or in concentration camps; every good German is hard at work, living frugally and investing his savings in government bonds; and all the money the wizard Schacht can create is going into the building of that bicycle I was telling you about a while ago, the machine on which the German Army is going to ride to world mastery.”
“It is a terrible picture you paint, Lanny.”
“I assure you, Governor, I am no painter. I am only a transporter of paintings. When I come on one that seems to me worth while, I bring it to this country and show it to my friends. The most important one for you to look at is the picture of this German war machine being tried out in Spain. Hitler is sending his tankmen, his artillerymen, and above all his airmen there in relays; nobody stays more than three or four months, just long enough to learn the new techniques of swift and deadly mechanized war; then he goes back to Germany, and tells it to his superior officers, and on the training fields in the Fatherland he teaches it to hundreds of others. The Italians are doing the same, but they’re not so good; they don’t really like war and nobody can make them. But the Nazis like nothing else, and the result is going to be that they will have a large army of trained and eager professionals, while all the other peoples, except perhaps the Japanese, will be bungling amateurs. The Nazis are training some of their stormtroopers right here in America; I have seen them in New York, and they may be doing it even in Washington. You tell me you can’t prevent what is happening in Spain, Governor, but surely you ought to be able to do something in America.”
Said the President: “I think I can assure you we’re not entirely overlooking that part of our duty.”
VI