It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis Page A

a Professional
Common Man.
    Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of
every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and
therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated
maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric
refrigerator,in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the
oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at
all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became
President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to
supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who
possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks,
caviar, titles, tea-drinking,poetry not daily syndicated in
newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as
degenerate.
    But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so
that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose,
which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering
among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.
----
    In the greatest of all native Americanarts (next to the talkies,
and those Spirituals in which Negroes express their desire to go to
heaven, to St. Louis, or almost any place distant from the romantic
old plantations), namely, in the art of Publicity, Lee Sarason was
in no way inferior even to such acknowledged masters as Edward
Bernays, the late Theodore Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey, and Upton
Sinclair.
    Sarason had, as it was scientificallycalled, been “building up”
Senator Windrip for seven years before his nomination as President.
Where other Senators were encouraged by their secretaries and wives
(no potential dictator ought ever to have a visible wife, and none
ever has had, except Napoleon) to expand from village back-slapping
to noble, rotund, Ciceronian gestures, Sarason had encouraged
Windrip to keep up in the Great Worldall of the clownishness which
(along with considerable legal shrewdness and the endurance to make
ten speeches a day) had endeared him to his simple-hearted
constituents in his native state.
    Windrip danced a hornpipe before an alarmed academic audience when
he got his first honorary degree; he kissed Miss Flandreau at the
South Dakota beauty contest; he entertained the Senate, or at least
theSenate galleries, with detailed accounts of how to catch
catfish—from the bait-digging to the ultimate effects of the jug
of corn whisky; he challenged the venerable Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court to a duel with sling-shots.
    Though she was not visible, Windrip did have a wife—Sarason had
none, nor was likely to; and Walt Trowbridge was a widower. Buzz’s
lady stayed back home, raising spinachand chickens and telling the
neighbors that she expected to go to Washington
next
year, the
while Windrip was informing the press that his “Frau” was so
edifyingly devoted to their two small children and to Bible study
that she simply could not be coaxed to come East.
    But when it came to assembling a political machine, Windrip had no
need of counsel from Lee Sarason.
    Where Buzz was, there werethe vultures also. His hotel suite, in
the capital city of his home state, in Washington, in New York, or
in Kansas City, was like—well, Frank Sullivan once suggested that
it resembled the office of a tabloid newspaper upon the impossible
occasion of Bishop Cannon’s setting fire to St. Patrick’s
Cathedral, kidnaping the Dionne quintuplets, and eloping with Greta
Garbo in a stolen tank.
    In the“parlor” of any of these suites, Buzz Windrip sat in the
middle of the room, a telephone on the floor beside him, and for
hours he shrieked at the instrument, “Hello—yuh—speaking,” or at
the door, “Come in—come in!” and “Sit down ‘n’ take a load off
your feet!” All day, all night till dawn, he would be bellowing,
“Tell him he can take his bill and go climb a tree,” or “Why
certainly, old man—tickledto death to support it—utility
corporations cer’nly