I turned to Oliver. “Oliver,” I said, “you have been shielded by your wife. Now Willys is apologizing for you. Really, you know, this won’t do. You will have to come into the open and speak for yourself. When I go home, my friends will expect me to give them some intelligent account of what is going on here beneath the surface of things. We sit out there among the cornfields with our radio sets and listen to Washington uttering austere words about enforcing the law, and the next morning we read in the papers that there has been a party under the shadow of the Capitol, and that there is no one to see that the law is enforced, because all the responsible people are busy putting away their private stocks. Slanderous, no doubt. But in the ethical sense, how—actually—do you get away with it? Janus, explain yourself.”
“Oh, very well, Calpurnia,” said Oliver, “yours to command, remembering only that, as Judge Black informs me, what a man entrusts to the wife of his bosom ‘in the sweet confidences of the midnight hour’ she is not permitted to bring into court against him. But shall I explain myself as a friend of the government, or as the master of my private life? As an ornamental pillar of the administration, or as the captain of my own soul? Which shall it be?”
“Both, by all means!” Willys exclaimed. “First one and then the other. First the marble bust and then the man. First the friend of the aspiring people and then the friend of the downtrodden artist. Discuss your public betrayal of your own class and then your private loyalty to the good old cause. But tell us first why you passed the Eighteenth Amendment. I can’t write my next chapter of Senator Jones till I have an authentic hunch, the vraie vérité, about the fashion in which you and the Professor and the Puritans and the Mid-West and the Anti-Saloon League—in short the Anglo-Saxon minority—downed the great hearty Teutonic, Celtic, Italic, Slavic, Hebraic majority, the glad, gay, sinful, eating-and-drinking majority, and put it over on us.”
“My dear man,” said His Excellency in his quietly impressive diplomatic manner, “don’t tell me that you accept that fable. You call yourself a realist! Neither the Anti-Saloon League nor the Puritans nor the Professor nor I had any more to do with passing the Eighteenth Amendment than a butterfly on a steam-roller has to do with building the Lincoln highway, or than a catfish in the Mississippi has to do with irrigating the rice-fields of Louisiana.”
His Excellency held the point by pausing to light a cigarette.
“Well, we are waiting,” someone prompted, after duly respecting his technique.
“Mes enfants,” he continued, and then blew a ring of white smoke spinning towards the tip of one of the candles, where it hung for a moment like a nimbus and then dissolved upward. “My children, let me disclose to you the fundamental axiom of political philosophy—not the orthodox but the esoteric philosophy. Distrust the press and ignore the palaver of the man in the street. The press tells you what it thinks will be popular. The last man in the street tells you what he has heard said by the next to the last man in the street. I tell you this: You may scold yourself red in the face; you may bleed yourself white; you may shout yourself blue with pietistic, reformatory, and patriotic fervor; nothing of any importance, of any public consequence, is ever accomplished in this world except by Necessity—by a succession of linked necessities.”
“The theory isn’t entirely novel, Excellency,” I said. “And now the application.”
“The necessity which put through the Volstead Act was the war; the necessity behind that was the sky-vaulting of wages; the necessity behind that was maximum production; the necessity behind that was a workman sober seven days in the week; the necessity behind that I could make concrete to you by naming the hundred leading corporations of the country that were in the belly of the wooden horse, making his feet track, when the Anti-Saloon League rode on his back into Jerusalem—or, if the figure offends you, into Washington.”
“The figure seems a little mixed at the best,” said Willys, “but call it Jerusalem—whither the tribesmen go up to liquidate the burden of laying taxes on us. As for your chain of necessities, now that the war is over, that chain is falling apart. The workingman sees the Big Brother in the wooden horse, who bullied him into working six days in the week and into doing, according to Union standards, two days’ work in one. He doesn’t like that. Besides, he knows that his Big Brother’s own throat isn’t dry, hasn’t been dry. The injustice rasps him. He wants his beer again. He wants the ‘poor man’s club’ again. And he has a jolly good right to have them. What do you say to that?”