hinted of Indian blood. In the Senate he
preferred clothes that suggested the competent insurance salesman,
but when farmer constituents were in Washington he appeared in an
historic ten-gallon hat with a mussy gray “cutaway” which somehow
you erroneously remembered as a black “PrinceAlbert.”
In that costume, he looked like a sawed-off museum model of a
medicine-show “doctor,” and indeed it was rumored that during one
law-school vacation Buzz Windrip had played the banjo and done card
tricks and handed down medicine bottles and managed the shell game
for no less scientific an expedition than Old Dr. Alagash’s
Traveling Laboratory, which specialized in the Choctaw Cancer Cure,the Chinook Consumption Soother, and the Oriental Remedy for Piles
and Rheumatism Prepared from a World-old Secret Formula by the
Gipsy Princess, Queen Peshawara. The company, ardently assisted by
Buzz, killed off quite a number of persons who, but for their
confidence in Dr. Alagash’s bottles of water, coloring matter,
tobacco juice, and raw corn whisky, might have gone early enough to
doctors.But since then, Windrip had redeemed himself, no doubt,
by ascending from the vulgar fraud of selling bogus medicine,
standing in front of a megaphone, to the dignity of selling bogus
economics, standing on an indoor platform under mercury-vapor
lights in front of a microphone.
He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were
Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederickthe
Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany
as “Wotan’s Mickey Mouse.”
----
Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator
Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of
bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost
illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas”
almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety wasthat of a traveling
salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor
the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his
speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political
platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his
present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder,
Rocco,and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back
home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef
stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal
machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews,
law partners, and creditors.
Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of
oratory, but he had been told by political reporters thatunder the
spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you
could not remember anything he had said.
There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this
prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more
overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even
in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad
eyes, vomit Biblicalwrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also
coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in
between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his
crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were
inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely
incorrect.
But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability
to be authentically excitedby and with his audience, and they by
and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither
a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and
costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against
barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own
warm-hearted Democratic inventions,every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.
Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was
preferred clothes that suggested the competent insurance salesman,
but when farmer constituents were in Washington he appeared in an
historic ten-gallon hat with a mussy gray “cutaway” which somehow
you erroneously remembered as a black “PrinceAlbert.”
In that costume, he looked like a sawed-off museum model of a
medicine-show “doctor,” and indeed it was rumored that during one
law-school vacation Buzz Windrip had played the banjo and done card
tricks and handed down medicine bottles and managed the shell game
for no less scientific an expedition than Old Dr. Alagash’s
Traveling Laboratory, which specialized in the Choctaw Cancer Cure,the Chinook Consumption Soother, and the Oriental Remedy for Piles
and Rheumatism Prepared from a World-old Secret Formula by the
Gipsy Princess, Queen Peshawara. The company, ardently assisted by
Buzz, killed off quite a number of persons who, but for their
confidence in Dr. Alagash’s bottles of water, coloring matter,
tobacco juice, and raw corn whisky, might have gone early enough to
doctors.But since then, Windrip had redeemed himself, no doubt,
by ascending from the vulgar fraud of selling bogus medicine,
standing in front of a megaphone, to the dignity of selling bogus
economics, standing on an indoor platform under mercury-vapor
lights in front of a microphone.
He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were
Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederickthe
Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany
as “Wotan’s Mickey Mouse.”
----
Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator
Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of
bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost
illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas”
almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety wasthat of a traveling
salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor
the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his
speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political
platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his
present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder,
Rocco,and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back
home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef
stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal
machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews,
law partners, and creditors.
Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of
oratory, but he had been told by political reporters thatunder the
spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you
could not remember anything he had said.
There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this
prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more
overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even
in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad
eyes, vomit Biblicalwrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also
coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in
between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his
crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were
inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely
incorrect.
But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability
to be authentically excitedby and with his audience, and they by
and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither
a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and
costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against
barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own
warm-hearted Democratic inventions,every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.
Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was
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