Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

The declaration was issued soon after the young couple had returned to Shore Acres, and the French were furious, but the Germans were not much helped. In the middle of July the great Danat Bank failed in Berlin, and there was terror such as Lanny had witnessed in New York. Chancellor Briining went to Paris to beg for help, and Premier Laval refused it; France was now the strongest European power financially, and was sitting on her heap of gold, lending it only for the arming of Poland and her other eastern allies —which were blackmailing her without mercy. Britain had made the mistake of trying to buttress German finances, and now her own were shaky as a result. "We’re not that sort of fools," wrote young Denis de Bruyne to Lanny, who replied: "If you let the German Republic fall and you get Hitler, will that help you?" Young Denis did not reply.

Such were the problems faced by the statesmen while two darlings of fortune were having fun all over the northeastern states. Invitations would come, and they would order their bags packed, step into their car in the morning, drive several hours or perhaps all day, and step out onto an estate in Bar Harbor or Newport, the Berkshires or the Ramapo Hills, the Adirondacks or the Thousand Islands. Wherever it was, there would be a palace—even though it was called a "cottage" or a "camp." The way you knew a "camp" was that it was built of "slabs," and you wore sport clothes and didn’t dress for dinner; but the meal would be just as elaborate, for nobody stayed anywhere without sending a staff of servants ahead and having all modern conveniences, including a dependable bootlegger. Radios and phonographs provided music for dancing, and if you didn’t have the right number for games, you called people on the long-distance telephone and they motored a hundred miles or more, and when they arrived they bragged about their speed. Once more Lanny thought of the English poet Clough, and his song attributed to the devil in one of his many incarnations: "How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! How pleasant it is to have money!"

These young people still had it, though the streams were drying up. The worst of the embarrassments of a depression, as it presented itself to the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes, was that so many of her friends kept getting into trouble and telling her about it. A truly excruciating situation: in the midst of a bridge game at Tuxedo Park the hostess received a telephone call from her broker in New York, and came in white-faced, saying that unless she could raise fifty thousand dollars in cash by next morning she was "sunk." Not everybody had that much money in the bank, and especially not in times when rumors were spreading about this bank and that. Irma saw the eyes of the hostess fixed upon her, and was most uncomfortable, because she couldn’t remedy the depression all by herself and had to draw the line somewhere.

Yes, it wasn’t all fun having so much money. You didn’t want to shut yourself up in yourself and become hard-hearted and indifferent to others' suffering; but you found yourself surrounded by people who wanted what you had and didn’t always deserve it, people who had never learned to do anything useful and who found themselves helpless as children in a crisis. Of course they ought to go to work, but what could they do? All the jobs appeared to be filled by persons who knew how to do them; right now there were said to be six, or eight, or ten million people looking for jobs and not finding any. Moreover, Lanny and Irma didn’t seem to be exactly the right persons to be giving that sort of advice!

The first of July was a time for dividends, and many of the biggest and most important corporations "passed" them. This gave a shock to Wall Street, and to those who lived by it; Irma’s income was cut still more, and the shrinkage seemed likely to continue. The news from abroad was as bad as possible. Rick, who knew what was going on behind the scenes, wrote it to his friend. The German Chancellor was in London, begging for funds, but nobody dared help him any further; France was obdurate, because the Germans had committed the crime of attempting to set up a customs union with Austria. But how could either of these countries survive if they couldn’t trade?

All Lanny’s life it had been his habit to sit and listen to older people talking about the state of the world. Now he knew more about it than most of the people he met, even the older ones. While Irma played bridge, or table tennis with her young friends who had acquired amazing skill at that fast game, Lanny would be telling the president of one of the great Wall Street banks just why he had blundered in advising his clients to purchase the bonds of Fascist Italy, or trying to convince one of the richest old ladies of America that she wasn’t really helping to fight Bolshevism when she gave money for the activities of the Nazis in the United States. Such a charming, cultivated young German had been introduced to her, and had explained this holy crusade to preserve Western civilization from the menace of Asiatic barbarism!

It was a highly complicated world for a devout Episcopalian and member of the D.A.R. to be groping about in. A great banking fortune gave her enormous power, and she desired earnestly to use it wisely. Lanny told her the various radical planks of the Nazi program, and the old lady was struck with dismay. He told her how Hitler had been dropping these planks one by one, and she took heart again. But he assured her that Hitler didn’t mean the dropping any more than he had meant the planks; what he wanted was to get power, and then he would do whatever was necessary to keep it and increase it. Lanny found it impossible to make this attitude real to gentle, well-bred, conscientious American ladies; it was just too awful. When you persisted in talking about it, you only succeeded in persuading them that there must be something wrong with your cynical self.

Lanny just couldn’t live with these overstuffed classes all the time; he became homesick for his Reds and Pinks, and went into the hot, teeming city and paid another visit to the Rand School of Social Science. He told them what he had been doing for workers' education on the Riviera, and made a contribution to their expenses. The word spread quickly that here was the bearer of a Fortunatus purse, and everybody who had a cause—there appeared to be hundreds of them—began writing him letters or sending him mimeographed or printed appeals for funds. The world was so full of troubles, and there were so few who cared!

Also he sent in a subscription to the New Leader, and got a weekly dose of the horrors of the capitalist system, which had developed such marvelous powers of production and was unable to use them; which left millions to starve while a few parasites fattened themselves in luxury. This paper would lie on the table in his room, and Irma would see the prominent headlines and say: "Oh, dear! Are you still reading that stuff?" It irritated her to be referred to as a parasite and to have Lanny say: "But that’s what we are," and go on to prove it.

Several of the workers' groups and labor unions had summer camps where their members could spend a vacation. Lanny went to have a look at one of them, having the idea that he ought to know the workers at first hand. But he made the mistake of taking his wife along, which spoiled matters. Irma did her best, but she didn’t know how to unbend. The place was crowded, and mostly they were Jews; their dress was informal and their manners hearty; they were having a good time in their own way, and didn’t mind if it was different from her way; they didn’t look up to royalty, and didn’t enjoy being looked at as a zoo. In short, as an effort to bridge the social chasm the visit was a flop.