My Dear Cornelia/Book 4/Chapter 3
I turned to Oliver. "Oliver," I said, "you have been shielded by your wife. Now Willys is apologizing for you. Really, you know, this won't do. You will have to come into the open and speak for yourself. When I go home, my friends will expect me to give them some intelligent account of what is going on here beneath the surface of things. We sit out there among the cornfields with our radio sets and listen to Washington uttering austere words about enforcing the law, and the next morning we read in the papers that there has been a party under the shadow of the Capitol, and that there is no one to see that the law is enforced, because all the responsible people are busy putting away their private stocks. Slanderous, no doubt. But in the ethical sense, how—actually—do you get away with it? Janus, explain yourself."
"Oh, very well, Calpurnia," said Oliver, "yours to command, remembering only that, as Judge Black informs me, what a man entrusts to the wife of his bosom 'in the sweet confidences of the midnight hour' she is not permitted to bring into court against him. But shall I explain myself as a friend of the government, or as the master of my private life? As an ornamental pillar of the administration, or as the captain of my own soul? Which shall it be?"
"Both, by all means!" Willys exclaimed. "First one and then the other. First the marble bust and then the man. First the friend of the aspiring people and then the friend of the downtrodden artist. Discuss your public betrayal of your own class and then your private loyalty to the good old cause. But tell us first why you passed the Eighteenth Amendment. I can't write my next chapter of Senator Jones till I have an authentic hunch, the vraie vérité, about the fashion in which you and the Professor and the Puritans and the Mid-West and the Anti-Saloon League—in short the Anglo-Saxon minority—downed the great hearty Teutonic, Celtic, Italic, Slavic, Hebraic majority, the glad, gay, sinful, eating-and-drinking majority, and put it over on us."
"My dear man," said His Excellency in his quietly impressive diplomatic manner, "don't tell me that you accept that fable. You call yourself a realist! Neither the Anti-Saloon League nor the Puritans nor the Professor nor I had any more to do with passing the Eighteenth Amendment than a butterfly on a steam-roller has to do with building the Lincoln highway, or than a catfish in the Mississippi has to do with irrigating the rice-fields of Louisiana."
His Excellency held the point by pausing to light a cigarette.
"Well, we are waiting," someone prompted, after duly respecting his technique.
"Mes enfants," he continued, and then blew a ring of white smoke spinning towards the tip of one of the candles, where it hung for a moment like a nimbus and then dissolved upward. "My children, let me disclose to you the fundamental axiom of political philosophy—not the orthodox but the esoteric philosophy. Distrust the press and ignore the palaver of the man in the street. The press tells you what it thinks will be popular. The last man in the street tells you what he has heard said by the next to the last man in the street. I tell you this: You may scold yourself red in the face; you may bleed yourself white; you may shout yourself blue with pietistic, reformatory, and patriotic fervor; nothing of any importance, of any public consequence, is ever accomplished in this world except by Necessity—by a succession of linked necessities."
"The theory isn't entirely novel, Excellency," I said. "And now the application."
"The necessity which put through the Volstead Act was the war; the necessity behind that was the sky-vaulting of wages; the necessity behind that was maximum production; the necessity behind that was a workman sober seven days in the week; the necessity behind that I could make concrete to you by naming the hundred leading corporations of the country that were in the belly of the wooden horse, making his feet track, when the Anti-Saloon League rode on his back into Jerusalem—or, if the figure offends you, into Washington."
"The figure seems a little mixed at the best," said Willys, "but call it Jerusalem—whither the tribesmen go up to liquidate the burden of laying taxes on us. As for your chain of necessities, now that the war is over, that chain is falling apart. The workingman sees the Big Brother in the wooden horse, who bullied him into working six days in the week and into doing, according to Union standards, two days' work in one. He doesn't like that. Besides, he knows that his Big Brother's own throat isn't dry, hasn't been dry. The injustice rasps him. He wants his beer again. He wants the 'poor man's club' again. And he has a jolly good right to have them. What do you say to that?"
"Oh, he has rights enough," Oliver assented; "but the poor man's club has passed into the hands of a receiver—a mighty capable one. The poor man's club is now in the hands of his wife. She is in charge now of the Saturday afternoons and evenings. Do you think, when her vote is as good as his, she will let him pour his wages into the sink? Rather not. She has spent them, spent them in advance, for a generation to come."
"Yes," said Cornelia. "Isn't it a pity! Workwomen are the most wasteful creatures. Why, when Margaret—"
"You don't quite get the idea, my dear," Oliver resumed. "As I was saying—in war time, while her old man was sober, with money bulging his pockets and nowhere to go, she made him buy her a house and a Ford and a Victrola and savings stamps and baby bonds. Now she's buying a municipal playground along the line of the old grog-shops and a new schoolhouse and a hospital and a couple of movie theatres and a municipal stadium and a municipal swimming-pool and God Himself alone knows how many hundred thousand miles of the finest and most expensive roads in the world."
"Why, Oliver dear," cried Cornelia, "what do you mean?" I don't know anything more painful than to report the occasional fatuity of a woman whom one almost unreservedly admires. But dear Cornelia has not meditated very deeply on the problems of the working classes. And returning to her point, she insisted: "I'm sure Margaret hasn't bought any swimming pools or hospitals."
"No, my dear," said Oliver calmly, "I doubt if she has. But as I was saying, she has her own ideas of a club—that woman. She is a Progressive. As a big employer in Pittsburgh said to me yesterday, 'She has tasted blood.' She has dug in, and is going to extend her works. Wages won't go down; they'll be higher to-morrow morning. Why? Do you suppose that new outfit of hers is paid for? Rather not. Do you suppose that the business men are going to continue in business and collect their bills? Do you suppose they know what kind of plain people pay their bills and have money to spend? I fancy they do. Well! The Big Brother is still in the wooden horse. Maximum production and high wages till the Judgment Day. And Prohibition! The only ticket on which any party will hold office. That's my forecast—as a servant of the government and a friend of the workingman."
"Heaven help the poor workingman," cried Willys, "and spare us a few noble specimens of the idle rich. But now, Excellency, you must cheer our fainting spirits by explaining your point of view as the master of your private life."
"As the master of my private life," said Oliver promptly, "I deny that I am any such Janus as the Professor here tries to make me out. As a private citizen, I still believe that prohibition cannot be repealed. Within this belief I merely include, as a private citizen, my philosophic certainty that it will never be enforced, except where it is economically necessary. In my case it is not necessary; therefore, it will not be enforced. Its enforcement helps the business of the plain people; it would hinder mine. It adds, on the whole, very greatly to the comfort of their lives. It would detract from mine. The whole case against liquor grew out of the plain people's abuse of it. The whole case of liquor will be improved by my right use of it. There is no 'rasping injustice,' but a beautiful poetic justice in their losing theirs and in my keeping mine. That doesn't express adequately my generosity in lending my hand to riveting the workingman's benefits firmly upon him. Many of the most decorative and not the least substantial pillars of prohibition are men of excellent and experienced palate. The most sincere and the most competent advocates of the cause are the nonconforming prohibitionists. I simply cannot understand the Senator who refers to the Volstead Act as an idiotic measure and a failure. It was absolutely necessary: nothing which is necessary is idiotic. And every economist will tell you that it has been a marvelous economic success. It wonderfully accomplishes what had to be done, and it leaves undone what it ought not to do. And there you are."
"And there you are!" retorted Willys, "you and your economic argument. But where are the rest of us? I'm sorry to say that, for economic reasons, I can't follow you. My bootlegger is devouring my royalties. Therefore, as you would say, I have strong conscientious objections to illicit liquor."
"I had rather overlooked that possibility," said Oliver. "But lean on me—at least till you have finished Senator Jones."
"Thank you," said Willys, "I'll do so. But seriously speaking—"
"Forgive me!" Cornelia interposed, with a delightful wave of her hand flagging the onrush of the novelist's volubility. "Before Mr. Willys begins to speak seriously, suppose we adjourn to the library. You remember that Oliver is likely to lose his temper if I keep him too long at the table fiddling with cigarettes."