Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

“He was supposed,” said Mr. Wilson acidly, “to be a Republican. The Republican party is the opposition party. Willkie’s thrown in with everything the Democrats are doing—every main thing.”

“The main thing they’re trying to do is beat Hitler. You think he should be against it?”

“I am sure of it.”

“F or Hitler?”

“Certainly not!”

“For what, then?”

“For America! A well-defended, independent, standing-alone America.”

“There you go!” Mr. Corinth shook his head. “Wendell Willkie decided—and Roosevelt decided, and about two thirds of the people of America have decided—that there’s no such thing. That there will be no such thing, until the last Nazi has been written off. We aren’t to blame for the Nazis, you say. I say we are, indirectly—but even that doesn’t matter. We aren’t to blame for microbes, but we fight ’em with the lives of our doctors and laboratory technicians. We aren’t to blame for hurricanes, but we get ready for ’em. We aren’t to blame for fires started by lightning, but we spend a lot on fire departments. If a gorilla was disemboweling the man next door and had his eye on me, I’d worry. I’d call the cops and get a hatchet, anyhow. I’d even set fire to my garage, if I thought it would drive the gorilla off. I think that Mr. Willkie is worried about the gorilla next door. As a matter of fact, from being very dubious about Mr. Willkie—due to some of the gentlemen in your political party, and not wishing to start here an argument about the gentlemen in my own—I have become a great admirer of Mr. Willkie. I like him. He warms me. I trust him. I believe he is bright. I doubt if Franklin Roosevelt runs for a fourth term, in spite of your little jokes, and I would like the opportunity to elect this Willkie fellow.”

“Politically,” said Mr. Wilson, “he has committed suicide.”

“Politically,” Mr. Corinth answered sharply, “ you have. You—and the professional ironheads you’ve carried around. The Republican party in these United Sates is a chain-jangling ghost, a crusty anachronism, a mold-worshiping luster after the grave. Willkie may find a new body for it. Me, I’m sick of inexpert management of business. I have as big a business as you have and I know what I’m talking about. I’m sick of loud-mouthed amateurs trying to regulate affairs they don’t understand. I don’t like the administration attitude toward labor. I don’t think the laboring men like it themselves. I don’t like John Lewis and I never did think Greene was worth the powder it would take to blow him away. I don’t believe great undemocratic organizations should be allowed to flourish within democratic countries. I think labor unions ought to have to turn in the same reports corporations do. I think churches should, too, for that matter. I think that the leaders of labor are mostly self-appointed, because the laws governing unions aren’t like the laws governing the rest of the affairs of the nation. I don’t like self-appointed leaders anywhere. As a matter of fact, I don’t even like men with too-bushy eyebrows. But I do like Willkie.”

“When this war is over,” Mr. Wilson answered, “you’ll see! You’ll see America turn once more against war and against Europe—”

“Damn it! There you are! Postulating the course of future events on the last World War! Can’t you numbskulls ever realize that this isn’t a repetition of the last war? It may be, in a sense, a continuation of that war. I think it is. But, as such, it’s continuing simply because it never was finished the last time. Roosevelt isn’t Wilson. You Republicans can’t count on this war ending in an armistice and an economically nude Germany and a virtually untouched, unharmed American public that is anxious to forget trouble and have fun. It won’t end that way. It can’t. You won’t be able to get up a national reaction that’ll slap a Harding into the White House and put the pork and the spoils in the hands of you, or anybody else. After Roosevelt’s third term there may be another war president. Willkie would be my reformed idea of a good one. After that president there might be still another war president. Might go on ten, fifteen years. Why don’t you fellows think of what might happen for once—instead of what you wish would happen? Instead of forcing yourself to believe that what’s coming will be a replica of events a quarter of a century ago? What’s going on, Wilson, is a world-wide attempt to shift those old events. The Germans are trying to go on to the win they barely missed then. The English are trying to lick a menace that came back stronger, after being knocked down once. The Americans are about to get into the same fracas. And it’s going to continue, this time, until somebody—us or them—gets whipped to zero. Zero. None of your business deal armistices. None of your negotiated truces. None of your international diplomatic maneuvers. You guys aren’t in the saddle any more—and you don’t know it. Wall Street isn’t running things. Money isn’t running things. The people are. Willkie’s got a lot of people for him—millions on millions—and, my friend, any man who has the millions he has is still in politics!”

“Suppose,” said Mr. Wilson, “you’re wrong? Suppose the war does peter out.

Suppose it has to end in a deal? I think it will.”

“No. As long as it was about money, living space, raw materials, empire-envy—things, in other words—it could end in a deal. It’s not, now. It’s about something you can’t make deals over. Something that’s a lot more forceful than political boundaries or money.”

“What?”

“It’s about—hate. Just hate, Wilson. The hate of millions upon millions for the eighty million who have undertaken to betray, kill, and enslave them. Every Pole who lost his woman, every Czech with a tortured relative or friend, every Italian whose Mussolini has brought him to shame and hunger, every red Russian, every tormented Dutchman, every bleeding Belgian, every indignant citizen inside the sickly failure that is France—every one of these millions hates, night and day, with a hatred that we in America don’t yet know anything about.

There are men by the million who have sworn on their lives that, when the time comes, they will take knives and firebrands and avenge the butchery they know with a butchery so appalling that the memory of it will instill centuries of dread for conquest in those who are left. These men mean this. They will not forget. They are living for this alone.

“The people of Germany can feel, burning all around them, the circle of fire which—if they lose—will close in upon them and scald even their children without mercy.

That is why they will carry on to inhuman length. Not to do so would be to face inhumanity. And the gravest part of this thing—this thing that had to come alive in men when the monster notion of force was expanded to its uttermost size—the most dire index of this cauterizing horror against horror is the hatred of the English.

“You can’t make deals with that thing, Wilson. It has to run its course, like an incurable disease. It isn’t good for mankind, but the thing that gave rise to it was worse, because it was wholly wanton. Hate is the natural reaction to wantonness, the ultimate distillation of the passions of responsible people for those who will be responsible for nothing. Now, lighting up in the world—in China for the mutilating laps, the yellow rapists, the sackers of Nanking, and elsewhere for the mud-faced Huns—like the yellow glow of a sun too hot to bear, is this hatred.