Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

Singing and speech-making went on for an hour or so; then came a roll of drums and a blast of trumpets in the main entrance, and all the men and women in the huge place leaped to their feet. Der Führer kommt! A regiment of Stormtroopers in solemn march, carrying flags with spearpoints or bayonets at the tips of the poles. The bands playing the magnificent open chords to which the gods march across the rainbow bridge into Valhalla at the close of Das Rheingold. Then the party leaders, military and magnificent, marching in the form of a hollow square, protecting their one and only leader. Someone with a sense of drama has planned all this; someone who has learned from Wagner how to combine music, scenery, and action so as to symbolize the fundamental aspirations of the human soul, to make real to the common man his own inmost longing.

Who was that genius? Everyone in the hall, with the possible exception of a few Lanny Budds, believed that it was the little man who marched in the center of that guard of honor; the simple man with the old tan raincoat, the one whom honors could not spoil, the one consecrated to the service of the Fatherland; one born of the common people, son of an obscure Austrian customs official; a corporal of the World War wounded and gassed; an obscure workingman, a dreamer of a mighty dream, of Germany freed and restored to her place among the nations, or perhaps above them.

He wore no hat, and his dark hair, long and brushed to one side, fell now and then across his pale forehead and had to be swept away. No fashion here, a plain man, just like you and me; one whose hand you can shake, who smiles in a friendly way at those who greet him. A storm of cheering arises, the Heils become like raindrops falling in a cloudburst—so many that you cannot hear the individual ones, the sounds become a union like the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party.

Lanny has never attended an old-fashioned American revival meeting, but his friend Jerry Pendleton from Kansas has told him about one, and here is another. Has someone from the American South or Middle West come over and taught these arts of stirring the souls of primitive people, of letting them take part in what is being done to them? Or is it something that rises out of the primitive soul in every part of the world? The speakers on this platform ask questions, and twenty thousand throats shout the answers. Only they do not shout: "Glory Hallelujah!" and "Bless the Lord!"; theirs are secular cries: "Down with Versailles!" "Juda verrecke!" and "Deutschland erwache!"

Seven years since Lanny watched Charlie Chaplin come out upon the stage of a great beerhall in Munich; and here he is again, the same foolish little dark mustache, the same shy manner, humble, deprecating. But now he is stouter, he gets better food. Now, also, there are a score of spotlights centered upon him, telling everybody that appearances are deceptive, and that this is a special One. Banners and symbols, slogans and rituals, hopes and resolves, all have come out of his soul; he is the Messiah, the One appointed and sent to save the Fatherland in its hour of greatest trial.

He begins to speak, and Lanny knows every tone. Quiet at first, and the vast hall as still as the universe must have been before God created it. But soon the man of visions begins to warm up to his theme. The slogans which he has taught to all Germany work upon himself as upon others; they dominate his entire being; they are sparks from a white-hot flame which burns day and night within him. The flame of "Adi’s" hatred of his miserable and thwarted life! Hatred of his father, the dumb petty bureaucrat who wanted to make his son like himself and wouldn’t let him become an artist; hatred of the critics and dealers who wouldn’t recognize his pitiful attempts at painting; hatred of the bums and wastrels in the flophouses who wouldn’t listen to his inspired ravings; hatred of the Russians and the French and the British and the Americans who wouldn’t let an obscure corporal win his war; hatred of Marxists who betrayed Germany by a stab in the back; hatred of the Jews who made money out of her misery; hatred of all who now stood in the way of her destiny, who opposed Adi’s party which was to save her from humiliation. All these hatreds had flamed forth from one thwarted soul and had set fire to the tinder-box which Germany had become—and here it was, blazing, blazing!

The Führer possessed no gleam of humor, no trace of charm. He was an uneducated man, and spoke with an Austrian country accent, not always grammatically. His voice was hoarse from a thousand speeches, but he forced it without mercy. He raved and shrieked; he waved his arms, he shook his clenched fists in the face of Germany’s enemies. Perspiration poured from his pasty and rather lumpy countenance; his heavy hair fell down over his eyes and had to be flung back.

Lanny knew every gesture, every word. Adi hadn’t learned a thing, hadn’t changed a thing in seven years; he had merely said the same things a million times. His two-part book which Lanny had read with mingled dismay and laughter had become the bible of a new religion. Millions of copies had been sold, and extracts from it and reiterations of it had been printed in who could guess how many pamphlets, leaflets, and newspapers? Certainly well up in the billions; for some of the Nazi newspapers had circulations of hundreds of thousands every day, and in the course of years that mounts up. Heinrich told Lanny that they had held nearly thirty-five thousand meetings in Germany during the present campaign and quantities of literature had been sold at every one of them. Lanny, listening and watching the frenzied throng, remembered some lines from his poetry anthology, lines which had sounded melodious and exciting, but which he hadn’t understood when he had read them as a boy:

One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song’s measure Can trample an empire down.

There had been an election to the Reichstag less than two and a half years before, and at that election the Social-Democrats had polled more than nine million votes, the Communists more than three million, and the Nazis less than one million. The two last-named parties had been active since then, and everyone agreed that conditions favored the extremists. The business collapse in America had made farm products unsalable there, and this had caused an immediate reaction in Germany; the peasants had their year’s harvest to sell at a heavy loss. As for the workers, there were four million unemployed, and fear in the hearts of all the rest. These groups were sure to vote for a change—but of what sort?

Impossible to spend a week in a nation so wrought up and not come to share the excitement. It became a sort of sporting proposition; you chose sides and made bets to back yourself. After the fashion of humans, you believed what you hoped. Lanny became sure that the cautious, phlegmatic German people would prefer the carefully thought-out program of the Socialists and give them an actual majority so that they could put it into effect. But Johannes Robin, who thrived on pessimism, expected the worst—by which he meant that the Communists would come out on top. Red Berlin would become scarlet, or crimson, or whatever is the most glaring of shades.

The results astounded them all—save possibly Hejnrich Jung and his party comrades. The Social-Democrats lost more than half a million votes; the Communists gained more than a million and a quarter; while the Nazis increased their vote from eight hundred thousand to nearly six and a half million: a gain of seven hundred per cent in twenty-eight months! The score in millions stood roughly, Social-Democrats eight and a half, Nazis six and a half, and Communists four and a half.