Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

These orders were followed pretty well in the fashionable districts, but in poorer neighborhoods and the smaller towns the ardent Stormtroopers pasted signs on the foreheads of shoppers in Jewish stores, and they stripped and beat a woman who insisted on entering. That evening there was a giant meeting in the Tempelhof Airdrome, and Goebbels exulted in the demonstration which had been given to the world. The insolent foreigners would be awed and brought to their knees, he declared; and since most of the newspapers had by now been confiscated, the people could either believe that or believe nothing. The foreigners, of course, laughed; they knew that they weren’t awed, and the mass meetings and distribution of boycott leaflets went on. But the Nazi leaders chose to declare otherwise, and next day there was a washing of windows throughout Germany, and "business as usual" became the motto for both Aryans and non-Aryans.

There were curious outgrowths of this anti-Semitic frenzy. An "Association of German National Jews" was formed, and issued a manifesto saying that the Jews were being fairly treated and there was no truth in the stories of atrocities; some leading Jews signed this, and the name of Johannes Robin was among them. Perhaps he really believed it, who could say? He had to read German newspapers, like everybody else; those foreign papers which reported the atrocities were banned. Perhaps he considered that the outside boycotts would really do more harm than good, and that the six hundred thousand native Jews in the Fatherland were not in position to offer resistance to a hundred times as many Germans. The Jews had survived through the centuries by bending like the willow instead of standing like the oak. Johannes didn’t mention the subject in his letters, either signed or unsigned. Was he a little ashamed of what he did?

It seemed to an American that a man could hardly be happy living under such conditions. Lanny wrote a carefully guarded letter to the effect that Hansi was giving important concerts and Irma various social events; they would be delighted to have the family present. Johannes replied that some business matters kept him from leaving just now; he bade them not to worry about the new decrees forbidding anyone to leave Germany without special passports, for he could get them for himself and family whenever he wished. He added that Germany was their home and they all loved the German people. That was the right sort of letter for a Jew, and maybe the statements were true, with a few qualifications.

The Nazis had learned a lesson from the boycott, even though they would never admit it. The brass band stage of persecution was at an end, and they set to work to achieve their purpose quietly. The weeding out of Jews, and of those married to Jews, went on rapidly. No Jew could teach in any school or university in Germany; no Jewish lawyer could practice; no Jew could hold any official post, down to the smallest clerkship. This meant tens of thousands of positions for the rank and file Nazis, and was a way of keeping promises to them, much easier than socializing industry or breaking up the great landed estates.

The unemployed intellectuals found work carrying on genealogical researches for the millions of persons who desired to establish their ancestry. An extraordinary development—there were persons who had an Aryan mother and a Jewish father, or an Aryan grandmother and a Jewish grandfather, who instituted researches as to the morals of their female ancestors, and established themselves as Aryans by proving themselves to be bastards! Before long the Nazis discovered that there were some Jews who were useful, so there was officially established a caste of "honorary Aryans." Truly it seemed that a great people had gone mad; but it is a fact well known to alienists that you cannot convince a madman of his own condition, and only make him madder by trying.

By one means or another it was conveyed to leading Jews that they had better resign from directorships of corporations, and from executive positions which were desired by the nephews or cousins of some Nazi official. Frequently the methods used were such that the Jew committed suicide; and while these events were not reported in the press, word about them spread by underground channels. That was the way with the terror; people disappeared, and rumors started, and sometimes the rumors became worse than the reality. Old prisons and state institutions, old army barracks which had stood empty since the Versailles treaty, were turned into concentration camps and rapidly filled with men and women; motor trucks brought new loads daily, until the total came near to a hundred thousand.

Lanny wrote again to say what a mistake his friends were making not to come and witness Hansi’s musical and Irma’s social triumphs. This time Johannes’s reply was that his business cares were beginning to wear on him, and that his physicians advised a sea trip. He was getting the Bessie Budd ready for another cruise, this time a real one; he wanted Hansi and Bess to meet him at one of the northern French ports, and he hoped that the Budds would come along— the whole family, Lanny and Irma, Mr. and Mrs. Dingle, Marceline and Baby Frances, with as many governesses and nurses as they pleased. As before, the cruise would be to whatever part of the world the Budd family preferred; Johannes suggested crossing the Atlantic again and visiting Newcastle and Long Island; then, in the autumn, they might go down to the West Indies, and perhaps through the Panama Canal to California, and if they wished, to Honolulu and Japan, Bali, Java, India, Persia—all the romantic and scenic and historic places they could think of. A university under Diesel power!

This made it necessary for Irma to come to a decision which she had postponed to the last moment. Was she going to take the palace for another year? She had got used to it, and had a competent staff well trained; also she was established as a hostess, and it seemed a shame to lose all this momentum. But, on the other hand, money was growing scarcer and scarcer. The dreadful depression—Lanny had shown her the calculations of an economist that it had cost the United States half a dozen times the cost of the World War. Thanks to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, interest payments on industrial bonds were being met, but many of Irma’s "blue chip" stocks were paying no dividends, and she was telling her friends that she was living on chocolate, biscuits, and Coca-Cola—meaning not that these were her diet, but her dividends.

She had Shore Acres on her hands with its enormous overhead; she had had to cut down on her mother, and the mother in turn had notified all the help that they might stay on and work for their keep, but there would be no more salaries. Even so, the food bill was large, and the taxes exorbitant—when were taxes not? Mrs. Barnes’s letters conveyed to her daughter a sense of near destitution.

"You don’t really care very much for this palace, do you, Lanny?" So asked the distressed one, lying in the pink satin splendor of the bed in which Madame de Maintenon was reputed to have entertained the Sun King.

"You know, dear, I don’t undertake to tell you how to spend your money."

"But I’m asking you."

"You know without asking. If you spend more money than you have, you’re poor, no matter what the amount is."

"Do you think if we come back to Paris after the depression, I’ll be able to start as a hostess again?"

"It depends entirely upon how much of your money you have managed to hold on to."

"Oh, Lanny, you’re horrid!" exclaimed the hostess.

"You asked for it," he chuckled.

Nearly a year had passed since the Queen Mother had seen her grandchild, and that was something to be taken into consideration. Her satisfaction would be boundless; and it would be a pleasure to meet all those New York friends and hear the gossip. Lanny could stand it if it wasn’t for too long. And what a relief to Uncle Joseph Barnes, trustee and manager of the Barnes estate, to know that his charge wouldn’t be drawing any checks for a year!