The
gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass
of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one
of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue
Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns
his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound
and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a
touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a
lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted
twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not
particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys
the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is
dead, and he will never remarry.
He has never attracted any
attention because of outstanding bravery. But I will put my hand in the
fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi. He would greatly
dislike fighting them, but they could never convert him…. Why not?
Beside
him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same
preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous
racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known
society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular. But if
America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early. Why?…
Why the one and not the other?
Mr. A has a life that is
established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although
he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have
always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp
competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has
done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his
code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become
accustomed to making concessions.
Mr. B has risen beyond his
real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer.
He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money.
His code is not his own; it is that of his class–no worse, no better,
He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole
measure of value–success. Nazism as a minority movement would not
attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.
The
saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is
already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He
was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two
universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never
invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him
successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm,
and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has
always moved among important people and always been socially on the
periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them,
but they have seldom invited him–or his wife–to dinner.
He is
a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him–he
despises, for instance, Mr. B–because he knows that what he has had to
achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right
people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more
than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he
hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father
for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his
origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the
social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological
insecurity.
Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and
joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is
to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him.
Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets
created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his
language–though they have never met him.
There he sits: he
talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a
distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he
primitive and brutal he would be a criminal–a murderer. But he is
subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need
men just like him–intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born
Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social
equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a
sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would
laugh to see heads roll.
I think young D over there is the
only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting
mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at
the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested
for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward
two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in
sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of
everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and
inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that
gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.
Mrs. E
would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you?
Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a
masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her,
to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does
his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very
young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is
something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her
doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or
insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death
with her. He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone
else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will
titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who
proclaims the basic subordination of women.
On the other hand,
Mrs. F would never go Nazi. She is the most popular woman in the room,
handsome, gay, witty, and full of the warmest emotion. She was a
popular actress ten years ago; married very happily; promptly had four
children in a row; has a charming house, is not rich but has no money
cares, has never cut herself off from her own happy-go-lucky
profession, and is full of sound health and sound common sense. All men
try to make love to her; she laughs at them all, and her husband is
amused. She has stood on her own feet since she was a child, she has
enormously helped her husband’s career (he is a lawyer), she would
ornament any drawing-room in any capital, and she is as American as ice
cream and cake.
II
How about the butler who is passing
the drinks? I look at James with amused eyes. James is safe. James has
been butler to the ‘ighest aristocracy, considers all Nazis parvenus
and communists, and has a very good sense for “people of quality.” He
serves the quiet editor with that friendly air of equality which good
servants always show toward those they consider good enough to serve,
and he serves the horsy gent stiffly and coldly.
Bill, the
grandson of the chauffeur, is helping serve to-night. He is a product
of a Bronx public school and high school, and works at night like this
to help himself through City College, where he is studying engineering.
He is a “proletarian,” though you’d never guess it if you saw him
without that white coat. He plays a crack game of tennis–has been a
tennis tutor in summer resorts–swims superbly, gets straight A’s in his
classes, and thinks America is okay and don’t let anybody say it isn’t.
He had a brief period of Youth Congress communism, but it was like the
measles. He was not taken in the draft because his eyes are not good
enough, but he wants to design airplanes, “like Sikorsky.” He thinks
Lindbergh is “just another pilot with a build-up and a rich wife” and
that he is “always talking down America, like how we couldn’t lick
Hitler if we wanted to.” At this point Bill snorts.
Mr. G is a
very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been
concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those
minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him
for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain
Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian
distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be
a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite
apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able,
however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes
along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with
communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to
suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he
was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G
would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be
purged.
H is an historian and biographer. He is American of
Dutch ancestry born and reared in the Middle West. He has been in love
with America all his life. He can recite whole chapters of Thoreau and
volumes of American poetry, from Emerson to Steve Benet. He knows
Jefferson’s letters, Hamilton’s papers, Lincoln’s speeches. He is a
collector of early American furniture, lives in New England, runs a
farm for a hobby and doesn’t lose much money on it, and loathes parties
like this one. He has a ribald and manly sense of humor, is
unconventional and lost a college professorship because of a love
affair. Afterward he married the lady and has lived happily ever
afterward as the wages of sin.
H has never doubted his own
authentic Americanism for one instant. This is his country, and he
knows it from Acadia to Zenith. His ancestors fought in the
Revolutionary War and in all the wars since. He is certainly an
intellectual, but an intellectual smelling slightly of cow barns and
damp tweeds. He is the most good-natured and genial man alive, but if
anyone ever tries to make this country over into an imitation of
Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, or Petain’s systems H will grab a gun and fight.
Though H’s liberalism will not permit him to say it, it is his secret
conviction that nobody whose ancestors have not been in this country
since before the Civil War really understands America or would really
fight for it against Nazism or any other foreign ism in a showdown.
But
H is wrong. There is one other person in the room who would fight
alongside H and he is not even an American citizen. He is a young
German emigre, whom I brought along to the party. The people in the
room look at him rather askance because he is so Germanic, so very
blond-haired, so very blue-eyed, so tanned that somehow you expect him
to be wearing shorts. He looks like the model of a Nazi. His English is
flawed–he learned it only five years ago. He comes from an old East
Prussian family; he was a member of the post-war Youth Movement and
afterward of the Republican “Reichsbanner.” All his German friends went
Nazi–without exception. He hiked to Switzerland penniless, there
pursued his studies in New Testament Greek, sat under the great
Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, came to America through the
assistance of an American friend whom he had met in a university, got a
job teaching the classics in a fashionable private school; quit, and is
working now in an airplane factory–working on the night shift to make
planes to send to Britain to defeat Germany. He has devoured volumes of
American history, knows Whitman by heart, wonders why so few Americans
have ever really read the Federalist papers, believes in the United
States of Europe, the Union of the English-speaking world, and the
coming democratic revolution all over the earth. He believes that
America is the country of Creative Evolution once it shakes off its
middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its
tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free.
The
people in the room think he is not an American, but he is more American
than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is
the spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with America because it does
not realize its strength and beauty and power. He talks about the
workmen in the factory where he is employed…. He took the job “in order
to understand the real America.” He thinks the men are wonderful. “Why
don’t you American in- tellectuals ever get to them; talk to them?”
I
grin bitterly to myself, thinking that if we ever got into war with the
Nazis he would probably be interned, while Mr. B and Mr. G and Mrs. E
would be spreading defeatism at all such parties as this one. “Of
course I don’t like Hitler but…”
Mr. J over there is a Jew.
Mr. J is a very important man. He is immensely rich–he has made a
fortune through a dozen directorates in various companies, through a
fabulous marriage, through a speculative flair, and through a native
gift for money and a native love of power. He is intelligent and
arrogant. He seldom associates with Jews. He deplores any mention of
the “Jewish question.” He believes that Hitler “should not be judged
from the standpoint of anti-Semitism.” He thinks that “the Jews should
be reserved on all political questions.” He considers Roosevelt “an
enemy of business.” He thinks “It was a serious blow to the Jews that
Frankfurter should have been appointed to the Supreme Court.”
The
saturnine Mr. C–the real Nazi in the room–engages him in a flatteringly
attentive conversation. Mr. J agrees with Mr. C wholly. Mr. J is
definitely attracted by Mr. C. He goes out of his way to ask his
name–they have never met before. “A very intelligent man.”
Mr.
K contemplates the scene with a sad humor in his expressive eyes. Mr. K
is also a Jew. Mr. K is a Jew from the South. He speaks with a Southern
drawl. He tells inimitable stories. Ten years ago he owned a very
successful business that he had built up from scratch. He sold it for a
handsome price, settled his indigent relatives in business, and now
enjoys an income for himself of about fifty dollars a week. At forty he
began to write articles about odd and out-of-the-way places in American
life. A bachelor, and a sad man who makes everybody laugh, he travels
continually, knows America from a thousand different facets, and loves
it in a quiet, deep, unostentatious way. He is a great friend of H, the
biographer. Like H, his ancestors have been in this country since long
before the Civil War. He is attracted to the young German. By and by
they are together in the drawing-room. The impeccable gentleman of New
England, the country-man–intellectual of the Middle West, the happy
woman whom the gods love, the young German, the quiet, poised Jew from
the South. And over on the other side are the others.
Mr. L
has just come in. Mr. L is a lion these days. My hostess was all of a
dither when she told me on the telephone, “…and L is coming. You know
it’s dreadfully hard to get him.” L is a very powerful labor leader.
“My dear, he is a man of the people, but really fascinating.” L is a
man of the people and just exactly as fascinating as my horsy, bank
vice-president, on-the-make acquaintance over there, and for the same
reasons and in the same way. L makes speeches about the “third of the
nation,” and L has made a darned good thing for himself out of
championing the oppressed. He has the best car of anyone in this room;
salary means nothing to him because he lives on an expense account. He
agrees with the very largest and most powerful industrialists in the
country that it is the business of the strong to boss the weak, and he
has made collective bargaining into a legal compulsion to appoint him
or his henchmen as “labor’s” agents, with the power to tax pay
envelopes and do what they please with the money. L is the strongest
natural-born Nazi in this room. Mr. B regards him with contempt
tempered by hatred. Mr. B will use him. L is already parroting B’s
speeches. He has the brains of Neanderthal man, but he has an
infallible instinct for power. In private conversation he denounces the
Jews as “parasites.” No one has ever asked him what are the creative
functions of a highly paid agent, who takes a percentage off the labor
of millions of men, and distributes it where and as it may add to his
own political power.
III
It’s fun–a macabre sort of
fun–this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies
things–asking the question in regard to specific personalities.
Kind,
good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the
gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City
College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes–you’ll
never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated
intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the
labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the
wind of success–they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Believe
me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social
condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Those
who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they
don’t-whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code,
however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game.
Try it at the next big party you go to.
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