Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

On the same South Shore of Long Island with the Barnes estate is the resort known as Coney Island. Lanny had heard about it but had never seen it, and Irma had only vague memories from a time in childhood when her father had taken her. On a hot Sunday afternoon the perverse idea occurred to one of their smart crowd: "Let’s go and see Coney!" It really was a spectacle, they insisted; the world’s premier slumming-tour—unless you went to Shanghai or Bombay on one of those de luxe cruises.

Two motor-carloads of them drove to the resort, which is a long spit of land. It was hard to find a place to park, and they had to walk a couple of miles; but they were young, and were out for fun. There must have been a million people at the resort, and most of them crowded onto the wide stretch of beach; it was barely possible to move about for the swarms of people lying or sitting in the sand, sweltering in the blazing sunshine. If you wanted to know the elementary facts about the human animal, here was the place to see exactly how fat they were, or how skinny, how hairy, how bow-legged, how stoop-shouldered, how generally different from the standards established by Praxiteles. You could discover also how they stank, what raucous noises they made, what a variety of ill— odored foods they ate, and how utterly graceless and superfluous they were.

To the fastidious Lanny Budd the worst thing of all was their emptiness of mind. They had come for a holiday, and wanted to be entertained, and there was a seemingly endless avenue of devices contrived for the purpose. For prices from a dime up you could be lifted on huge revolving wheels, or whirled around sitting on brightly painted giraffes and zebras; you could ride in tiny cars which bumped into one another, you could walk in dark tunnels which were a perpetual earthquake, or in bright ones where sudden breezes whipped up the women’s skirts and made them scream; you could be frightened by ghosts and monsters—in short, you could have a thousand fantastic things done to you, all expressive of the fact that you were an animal and not a being with a mind; you could be humiliated and made ridiculous, but rarely indeed on Coney Island could you be uplifted or inspired or taught any useful thing. Lanny took this nightmare place as an embodiment of all the degradations which capitalism inflicted upon the swarming millions of its victims. Anything to keep them from thinking.

Thus a young Pink; and he got himself into a red-hot argument with a carload of his young companions, who had drawn their own conclusions from this immersion in carnality. Irma, who monopolized a half-mile of ocean front, was disgusted that anyone should be content to squat upon ten or a dozen square feet of it. Her childhood playmate, Babs Lorimer, whose father had once had a "corner" in wheat, drew political conclusions from the spectacle and wondered how anybody could conceive of the masses' having anything to say about the running of government. "Noodles" Winthrop—his name was Newton—whose widowed mother collected a small fraction of a cent from everyone who rode to Coney Island on a street railway, looked at the problem biologically, and said he couldn’t imagine how such hordes of ugly creatures had survived, or why they desired to. Yet look at the babies they had!

With the members of Irma’s immediate family Lanny found that he was getting along surprisingly well. The domineering Fanny Barnes was set in her opinions, but for the most part these had to do with questions of manners and taste and family position; she didn’t give much thought to politics and economics. Pride was her leading motive; she lived in the faith that her Protestant Episcopal God had assigned to her family a specially precious strain of blood. She had the firm conviction that bearers of this blood couldn’t do anything seriously wrong, and she found ways to persuade herself that they hadn’t. She had made up her mind to make the best of this son-in-law whom fate had assigned to her, and presently she was finding excuses for him. Did someone call him a Socialist? Well, he had been reared in Europe, where such ideas didn’t mean what they did in America. Hadn’t some distinguished Englishman —Fanny couldn’t recall who it was—declared: "We are all Socialists now"?

For Lanny as a prince consort there was really quite a lot to be said. His manners were distinguished and his conversation even more so. He didn’t get drunk, and he had to be urged to spend his wife’s money. The uncertainty about his mother’s marriage ceremony hadn’t broken into the newspapers, and he was received by his father’s very old family. So the large and majestic Queen Mother of Shore Acres set out to butter him with flattery and get from him the two things she ardently desired: first, that he should help Irma to produce a grandson to be named Vandringham; and second, that they should leave Baby Frances at Shore Acres to be reared in the Vandringham tradition.

Uncle Horace, that pachyderm of a man who moved with such astonishing energy, proved to be an equally complaisant relative. He had a sense of humor, with more than a trace of mischief in it. He was amused to hear Lanny "razz" the American plutocracy, and especially those representatives of it who came to the Barnes estate. The fact that he himself had been knocked down and out had diminished his admiration for the system and increased his pleasure in seeing others "get theirs." He chuckled at Lanny’s Pinkish jokes, and took the role of an elderly courtier "playing up" to a newly crowned king. Did he hope that Lanny might some day persuade Irma to let him have another fling in the market? Or was he merely making sure of holding onto the comfortable pension which she allowed him? Anyhow, he was good company.

The echoes of calamity came rolling from Germany to England. Trade was falling off, factories closing, unemployment increasing; doubts were spreading as to the soundness of the pound sterling, for a century the standard of value for all the world; investors were taking refuge in the dollar, the Dutch florin, the Swiss franc. Rick told about the situation in his country; boldness was needed, he said—a capital levy, a move to socialize credit; but no political party had the courage or the vision. The Tories clamored to balance the budget at any cost, to cut the dole, and the pay of the schoolteachers, even of the navy. It was the same story as Hoover with his "rugged individualism." Anything to save the gold standard and the power of the creditor class.

At the beginning of September the labor government fell. An amazing series of events—the labor Prime Minister, Ramsay Mac-Donald, and several of his colleagues in the old Cabinet went over to the Tories and formed what he called a "National" government to carry out the anti-labor program. It had happened before in Socialist history, but never quite so dramatically, so openly; Rick, writing about it for one of the leftist papers, said that those who betrayed the hopes of the toiling masses usually managed to veil their sell-out with decorous phrases, they didn’t come out on the public highway to strip themselves of their old work-clothes and put on the livery of their masters.

Rick was a philosopher, and tried to understand the actions of men. He said that the ruling classes couldn’t supply their own quota of ability, but were forced continually to invade the other classes for brains. It had become the function of the Socialist movement to train and equip lightning-change artists of politics, men who understood the workers and how to fool them with glittering promises and then climb to power upon their shoulders. In Italy it had been Mussolini, who had learned his trade editing the principal Socialist paper of the country. In France no fewer than four premiers had begun their careers as ardent revolutionaries; the newest of them was Pierre Laval, an innkeeper’s son who had driven a one-horse omnibus for his father, and while driving had read Socialist literature and learned how to get himself elected mayor of his town.