UNDER THE DESK WITH FALA
Coleman, Mcalister
Upton Sinclair's 5th Lanny Budd Under The Desk With Fala PRESIDENTIAL AGENT, by Upton Sinclair. The [Viking Press. $3. Reviewed by McAlister Coleman IN 1934 when he had carried the Democratic...
...When the rotten reactionaries of the West Coast began putting on the heat in the vicious "beat Sinclair" campaign, Roosevelt, Farley, Hopkins, & Company, ran out on their own party's nominee and repudiated him in a statement issued by the ineffable George Creel, the Administration's stooge on the Coast...
...He has, to change the figure, the profundity and depth of a mirror, but what a mirror, holding up to us all the outward events and the surface reflections of the men and women who are responsible for the mess we're in, c&rief among them, by the way, "the great man" himself, though Sinclair will never discover it...
...Marsh's tongue was in his cheek when he wrote that, but I am in complete agreement...
...to go through the shifty shenanigans that the ex-social worker Harry Hopkins, let us say, has gone through since he was taken into the charmed circle...
...He wrote a pamphlet blaming everyone but the New Deal managers for his defeat...
...Reviewed by McAlister Coleman IN 1934 when he had carried the Democratic primaries for the nomination for Governor of California, Upton Sinclair came East to persuade the President that the "Epic Plan" with which the ex-Socialist was raising such political hell on the Pacific Coast was no more than a popularization and extension of some of the relief features of the New Deal...
...It would be impossible for this disarming combination of Robert Owen and Horatio Alger, Jr...
...Roosevelt, invariably referred to by the author as "the great man...
...Lanny, as you all know by this time, is the wealthy son of a munitions and aeroplane maker, who has the time and the money to get around to everything of importance which has happened since the Armistice, under the guidance of Upton's hard-worked typewriter...
...At the age of 66 he is still the adolescent Quiz Kid mentally and emotionally...
...was with him and all was well with the world...
...At that, Sinclair received the thumping vote of 879,000 to the Republican Merriam's one million...
...In this installment of 655 pages, Lanny becomes the confidential agent to Mr...
...I don't know how much of Mr...
...Between "That iMan" and "the great man" there is very little to choose...
...Bronzed with the rays of the human sun-lamp at the Hyde Park desk, Upton happily informed his devoted followers that F.D.R...
...Roosevelt, for example, explains that he let down he Spanish Loyalists in the shabby way he did because he was afraid of the Catholic vote, over here...
...Lanny's Perils of Pauline adventures among the naughty Nazis are something you don't want to miss...
...is no more realistic than the blind hate of the most reactionary Republican...
...Upton Sinclair, you see, has what Catherine Beecher used to call "an inherent goodness...
...He had had a glad hand from Jim Farley, and a clammy one from Harry Hopkins...
...The blind adulation which Upton smears all over F.D.R...
...Upton made the mistake, as have more sophisticated men than the deadly sincere, eminently honest, and amazingly prolific writer, of taking the smiling promise for the serious performance...
...Sinclair, though he admits that he hasn't seen the President since that fateful interview of 10 years back, writes as though he were sitting under the desk with Fala while Lanny and the President talk in direct quotation marks...
...He tells Lanny, who has seen good working men and women smashed to death by Franco's and Hitler's bombs, that it was more important to get through the plan to pack the Supreme Court without Catholic opposition...
...Now Lanny bids fair to become the radical-liberal rival to Frank Merriwell...
...But like so many others who have gone forth from The Presence, assured that they had the imprimatur of The Infallible One on their plans in the brief bag, Upton was soon to discover that what, in the foreword to this new book he describes as "the pleasure of a two-hour conference with President Roosevelt," was a snare and a delusion...
...He is the boy who never grows older...
...Whenever Sinclair and Lanny get up from their knees and back away from The Presence, however, the book goes at a breath-taking pace...
...as writing: "There has never been anything like it under the sun...
...worshipping Sinclair's main thesis in this fifth of his Lanny Budd, the world between two wars novels...
...Sin-flair went back to the Coast confident of the backing of the Administration...
...The President turned all the noted charm onto the naive little man, suggested certain modifications of "Epic," and left Sinclair, after a long, chatty Hyde Park run-around, "spouting praises of the wonders of F.D.R.," as a Washington correspondent had it...
...THE author's political background would have little place in a review of a book, even one which dwelt so exclusively on the subject of national and international politics, were it not for F.D.R...
...The advertisements of Presidential Agent quote the usually level-headed Fred Marsh, of the New York Herald-Tribune...
...I will go further and say that there has never been anyone under the sun like Upton Sinclair...
...Such a raw deal might well have soured the most trusting of souls, but not Upton...
Vol. 8 • December 1944 • No. 51
