It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis Page B

been getting a raw deal,” and “You tell the
Governor I want Kippy elected sheriff and I want the indictment
against him quashed and I want it damn quick!” Usually, squatted
there cross-legged, he would be wearing a smart belted camel’s-hair
coat with an atrocious checked cap.
    In a fury, as he was at least every quarter hour, he would leap up,peel off the overcoat (showing either a white boiled shirt and
clerical black bow, or a canary-yellow silk shirt with a scarlet
tie), fling it on the floor, and put it on again with slow dignity,
while he bellowed his anger like Jeremiah cursing Jerusalem, or
like a sick cow mourning its kidnaped young.
    There came to him stockbrokers, labor leaders, distillers, anti-vivisectionists, vegetarians,disbarred shyster lawyers,
missionaries to China, lobbyists for oil and electricity, advocates
of war and of war against war. “Gaw! Every guy in the country
with a bad case of the gimmes comes to see me!” he growled to
Sarason. He promised to further their causes, to get an
appointment to West Point for the nephew who had just lost his job
in the creamery. He promised fellow politicians tosupport their
bills if they would support his. He gave interviews upon
subsistence farming, backless bathing suits, and the secret
strategy of the Ethiopian army. He grinned and knee-patted and
back-slapped; and few of his visitors, once they had talked with
him, failed to look upon him as their Little Father and to support
him forever… . The few who did fail, most of them newspapermen,
dislikedthe smell of him more than before they had met him… .
Even they, by the unusual spiritedness and color of their attacks
upon him, kept his name alive in every column… . By the time he
had been a Senator for one year, his machine was as complete and
smooth-running—and as hidden away from ordinary passengers—as the
engines of a liner.
    On the beds in any of his suites there would, at the same time,repose three top-hats, two clerical hats, a green object with a
feather, a brown derby, a taxi-driver’s cap, and nine ordinary,
Christian brown felts.
    Once, within twenty-seven minutes, he talked on the telephone from
Chicago to Palo Alto, Washington, Buenos Aires, Wilmette, and
Oklahoma City. Once, in half a day, he received sixteen calls from
clergymen asking him to condemn the dirty burlesqueshow, and seven
from theatrical promoters and real-estate owners asking him to
praise it. He called the clergymen “Doctor” or “Brother” or both;
he called the promoters “Buddy” and “Pal”; he gave equally ringing
promises to both; and for both he loyally did nothing whatever.
    Normally, he would not have thought of cultivating foreign
alliances, though he never doubted that some day, as President,he
would be leader of the world orchestra. Lee Sarason insisted that
Buzz look into a few international fundamentals, such as the
relationship of sterling to the lira, the proper way in which to
address a baronet, the chances of the Archduke Otto, the London
oyster bars and the brothels near the Boulevard de Sebastopol best
to recommend to junketing Representatives.
    But the actual cultivationof foreign diplomats resident in
Washington he left to Sarason, who entertained them on terrapin and
canvasback duck with black-currant jelly, in his apartment that was
considerably more tapestried than Buzz’s own ostentatiously simple
Washington quarters… . However, in Sarason’s place, a room
with a large silk-hung Empire double bed was reserved for Buzz.
    It was Sarason who had persuaded Windripto let him write Zero Hour ,
based on Windrip’s own dictated notes, and who had beguiled
millions into reading—and even thousands into buying—that Bible
of Economic Justice; Sarason who had perceived there was now such a
spate of private political weeklies and monthlies that it was a
distinction not to publish one; Sarason who had the inspiration for
Buzz’s emergency radio address at 3 A.M. uponthe occasion of