The Burning of the Reading Public
Levine, Arthur
The Burning of the Reading Public by Arthur Levine Last year Robert Coover followed in the distinguished footsteps of E. L. Doctrow by writing a novel, The Public Burning, that was about...
...they ask with slackjawed wonder as they rattle down that old lonesome highway...
...Fonda sleeps on his back, Guthrie on his stomach, and Steinbeck on his side, his legs curled up...
...Polls show support for peace, but FDR, holed up in the White House, labels it “isolationism” (he should talk...
...Guthrie looks dejected...
...Our overseas investments, he learns, are imperiled by radical changes in the governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan, once the lands, respectively, of happy-golucky beer-drinkers, pasta-eaters, and geisha girls...
...These bums are ruining our country,” he mutters to himself, hurling a bundle of newspapers (the Times, the Tribune, the Post, the Item, the Sentinel, the Eagle) straight across the room...
...Nurse, give this man an injection of welfare,” the Doctor screams...
...Speaking of heat,” Fonda says, “you could fry an egg on this pavement...
...In Tokyo, an Americanfunded sky-writing plane flies over the beaches with the slogan: COME TO PEARL HARBOR...
...What fun...
...FDR gets his wish: the next day Congress declares war on Japan...
...comes the answer from Mae West, one of his many paramours...
...He does an Eve1 Knievel-style “wheelie” in his wheelchair to show his approval...
...There’ll be nothing left...
...Flying shrapnel, dead boys shipped back in coffins, broken familiesthey’ve learned their lesson from World War 1, when, it is said, old tycoons sent young men to die for no reason...
...Ojher countries struggling for independence, such as Italy and Japan, have the hopes of the world with them as they seek to liberate their countrymen, whether it’s in nearby Et hi o pia or faraway Manchuria...
...We’re ready when you are...
...And in 1938, fueled by centuries of outrages, insults, and cruelties, Hitler’s plucky guerillas free Austria and the Sudetenland...
...What about those U.S...
...En‘core...
...Federal agents are soon on the scene, and a plausible cover story is concocted: a lone assassin, Dr...
...When the busty starlet first meets FDR at a Hollywood party, she rolls her eyes and says, “Is that a pistol in your pocket, Governor, or are you just glad to see me...
...Flowers are strewn at their feet and the natives weep openly at the sight of the Nazi good-luck symbol, the swastika...
...A few fringe critics try to point out some continuing mysteries: What about that strange black man, “Raul,” who traveled around the state buying guns...
...The day before, the police and U.S...
...Carl Weiss, did the dastardly deed...
...You’re right, boys,” FDR answers...
...For a few hurly-burly hours, there’s music and booze and laughs and maybe a few extra babes for the Prez himself...
...Planning begins at once...
...The glamorous parties are a time for serious talk, too, and it is at one of them that FDR learns of the gravest threat yet to his plans to save the economy...
...Here’s the scoop: One night over drinks, Elihu Root, a Wall Street lawyer, and the ubiquitous Andy Mellon tell FDR about a dark new menace growing overseas, worse than tariffs, worse than gift taxes, worse even than the diplomats who don’t speak English properly...
...As one popular song puts it: You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they area-changin...
...Army have attacked thousands of starving veterans camped in Washington, who’ve merely been begging for a “bonus” for their military service...
...Shall I prepare the bed...
...The signs are bad...
...So who’s Depressed...
...Guthrie asks his companions...
...Or will you stay on your barren island as your women lose all respect for you...
...Blimps float overhead with huge neon arrows blinking on and off...
...He looks up hopefully...
...Back at the London School of Economics, they’ll finally stop laughing at him-the funny walk, the monocle, the awkward manners...
...Nazi Big Shot, it’s your move...
...His mechanical voice sings: “Happy Days are here again...
...It’s not our policy to declare war unless attacked...
...The Burning of the Reading Public by Arthur Levine Last year Robert Coover followed in the distinguished footsteps of E. L. Doctrow by writing a novel, The Public Burning, that was about real historical people and events, mixed with made-up people and events, mixed with made-up events happening to real people, in such a way that it was impossible to tell what was fact and what was fiction...
...But on this summer afternoon, July 29, 1932, the Guv is waiting for Lucy...
...FDR is more than match for any challenge...
...Bravo, Adolf...
...in Lincoln, Nebraska, 4,000 people take over the statehouse...
...But he won’t, because he’s chicken...
...Here on this sweltering July day in 1932, stuck in a dreary governor’s mansion in Albany, with the country teetering on the brink of revolution-threatened by Commies, Jews, Negroes, perverts, hobos, eggheads, agitators, dope fiends-well, Arthur Levine is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Typically, a visiting celeb, like Jack Benny or Clark Gable (no stud in real life, incidentally), is the guest of honor at the swank estate of a Washington socialite...
...Absolutely nothing...
...three girls are shot in the back, all of them under ten years of age...
...But their affair will be very secret, and FDR will never suspect a thing...
...his cigarette holder bounces up and down between his teeth...
...So, naturally, the question resounds from one end of the continent to another, from families huddled near the radio to flinty barons of Wall Street, from the poorest sharecropper to the wealthiest magnate, “HOW DOES HE DO IT...
...An entire nation converted into his own personal economic laboratory...
...I will not be the first American President to be humiliated by some two-bit foreigners...
...FDR is outraged...
...On the day after his election, his campaign manager, Jim Farley, calls a secret meeting to map his bold economic strategy...
...There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them,” he announces one day to his cowed aides...
...There’s stars galore, from show-biz, Lit, politics, and the halls of Ivy, not to mention other spheres of achievement...
...We might never again”his voice chokes with emotion-“be able to enjoy the sanctuary of exclusive private clubs like this...
...Nearly 30 per cent of the population doesn’t have any income whatsoever...
...But,” they ask themselves, as do millions of other curious Americans, “how”-their faces turn red, they start to stammer-“does he”-this is just an awful thing to ask-“do IT...
...Take the Drought, whipping through the Great Plains in the mid-l930s, turning the whole place into one big overheated sandbox with enough sandstorms to make Lawrence of Arabia blanch...
...The critics loved it...
...How’s this sound, folks...
...He’s as happy as Dr...
...Widely known as the George Washington of his country, Hitler has rebuilt German national pride after his country’s defeat in World War I. Over the years, the once proud Holy Roman Empire has been carved up by a succession of occupying countries until the German people find themselves reduced to a small morsel of land-while their brethren languish under the heels of neighboring tyrants...
...As a member of the upper class, he’s naturally repelled by these unshaven drifters, what with their whining and bad table manners...
...Boys,” she whispers to the Japanese, “are you true Samurai...
...But to FDR, these assertions of national independence-no more dangerous than our own Revolutionary War-are part of some grand conspiracy to take over the world...
...For people like these, their final hopes are extinguished, snuffed out like some last flickering flame-POOF!-when the Kingfish, populist Huey Long of Louisiana, gets pumped with lead inside the Baton Rouge statehouse...
...Five thousand banks have failed, and General Motors, for example, has only 14 part-time employees on its payroll...
...Best of all, his upper-class world will be preserved: all the parties, private schools, elite universities, fancy estates, hunting trips, pliant secretaries, European summers, yachts, furs, motor cars, jewels gold moolah Old Boy Network...
...And with a prig like Eleanor for a wife-whose Russky leanings he secretly despises-who could blame a red-blooded American like FDR for taking advantage of a secretary or two...
...Nothing happens...
...Then they take out their sleeping bags and go to sleep...
...The country is in an uproar...
...Before leaving the next morning, they each brush their teeth, shave, go to the bathroom and tie their shoelaces...
...The melody’s not bad, but the words aren’t so hot...
...Very carefully...
...Mellon had been allied with Hoover, but now he’s going with the winner...
...He’s still breathing hard...
...Then Jim Farley, that savvy pol, realizes that the Japs might be tempted to attack our Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor if conditions are right...
...A few days later, Germany and Italy declare war on the U.S...
...For our corporations, a cheap labor force is in danger of being capriciously placed “off-limits” because of stubborn national pride...
...At your service, Mr...
...Slums, sweatshops, leper colonies-his homely wife loves to wallow in other people’s misery, outlet perhaps for the years without sex (16, to be exact), comfort for the chill between them...
...And when FDR makes one of his few public attacks on Adolf Hitler, Germany’s National Socialist leader, he’s roundly criticized for it...
...By now, most of them are too fearful to explain that his simplistic notions ignore the political and cultural differences between the countries...
...That’s what greatness is all about...
...As one hit songsays, “War, what is it good for...
...Now, as he waits for Lucy, he scans the day’s papers, and he’s starting to get ANGRY...
...Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria-all these client states would fall of their own weight if not for Allied support...
...Otherwise, it’s open to anyone...
...But what really angers him is the clumsy response of Hoover to their protests...
...The question also intrigues reporters who note his aristocratic good looks, wide teeth, high forehead, jaunty cigarette holder, flowing black navy cape, broad shoulders, height (six feet two inches), bulk (1 90 pounds), huge freckled hands, and the aforementioned twinkling blue eyes set close together over dark shadows...
...A ‘Fantasy: It’s almost like Uncle Sam’s there with a shaved skull, strapped down to a table, and all these electrodes and tubes are pumping optimism into the brain and green cash into the blood stream...
...She rolls him slowly towards the bedroom and opens up the door...
...Seeing this, we thought, if Coover can do it, why can’t we...
...Prime the pump...
...Do you have the courage to fight the United States...
...And at one deyrted gas station, outside of California, three exhausted hobos share a bottle of whiskey as they wait for the cool darkness to come...
...Frankenstein with a new patient...
...She’s supposed to return from dropping Eleanor off at a local orphanage, one of the many institutions of suffering that his wife visits...
...The German embassy sends a strong letter of protest, but no further action is taken...
...No more blackboards and dusty archives for him, no sir...
...Finally, the Japanese can take no more and launch a “surprise attack” on our fleet, while much of the base personnel is on shore leave...
...They ask: what real threat does the German leader pose...
...Hot enough for you...
...Now all that’s changing under some uppity new leaders, with some wild ideas about national independence...
...How come he isn’t married...
...Yeah, Hank...
...America’s common folk have no choice but to head West in their jalopies, piled high with guitars, scantily-clad teenage daughters, old tires, and rusty auto parts...
...After all, to the President of the United States (!), he’s more than some absent-minded professor...
...It must be 103 degrees in the shade,” Steinbeck points out...
...Roosevelt,” Lucy whispers demurely, her head cast downwards...
...And for good reason, say the peaceniks...
...Well, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” Guthrie adds...
...Here she is, ample proof of the benefits of the American Way of Life...
...Talk about poverty...
...He nearly jumps out of his seat when Lucy Mercer walks in...
...By God, there’s still a chance, then,” FDR exults...
...every last delicious ounce of it, all his...
...FDR and his corporate pals say, “What’s good for the munitions factories is good for America,” but the people turn a deaf ear to his pleas...
...The irony of his comments go unnoticed at the time...
...And no wonder...
...The Doctor is pleased with his handiwork...
...Let a thousand agencies bloom...
...Woody Guthrie, Henry Fonda, and John Steinbeck are all escaping their wretched pasts in Oklahoma to seek a better life in California-if they can sneak past the border guards...
...FDR is sweating with anticipation as he thinks of it, his face beaming with pleasure...
...At night, floodlights display the ships in a “Son et Lumiere” spectacle...
...He’s impatient...
...At the parties, FDR gets a chance to unwind...
...Millions wander around aimlessly looking for work, and teenage girls riding the rails sell themselves for a dime...
...Otherwise, he may take along his personal secretary, Missy LeHand...
...FDR sets the tone...
...Hoover is just a plain fool, FDR thinks, and his ham-handed brutalities only make things worse...
...Think of it...
...Forty per cent of college students say they won’t fight in any war, even if their mothers begged them or their girl-friends teased them or their coaches called them sissies...
...Worse, these countries are the nation’s main source of copper, electronics equipment, rice, and beer...
...A few more PR fiascos like this one, he knows, and it’ll be Guillotine City for FDR and his fellow aristocrats...
...It’s like a Joe Louis roundhouse right to FDR’s famous jutting jaw...
...Weiss in May 1935...
...What do we do now...
...But FDR’s faced with one stubborn problem: The American people don’t want war...
...Goddamn...
...December 7, 1941 is a day that shall live in infamy,” FDR tells the American people in his dramatic, stirring voice...
...Va-va-va-voom ! The Honorable Governor of New York, the Democratic Nominee for President, the Paralyzed Patrician from Hyde Park, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is more than ready for his afternoon tumble with his wife’s social secretary, the very luscious Miss Lucy Mercer...
...What to do...
...Frank,” Mellon tells the President, “we either take a stand here, or they’ll be coming up the shores of San Francisco...
...What’s that, Mister...
...Ninetyfour ships are steamed into the port in broad daylight...
...And his advisors are equally embarrassed by his ignorance of global subtleties...
...Federal relief funds...
...By the time FDR is elected, the country is going down the tubes...
...In desperation, he calls in his aides...
...Stocks on the Big Board are down to eleven per cent of their 1929 value...
...These so-called “countries” are little more than puppet states propped up by Western powers seeking to preserve their spheres of influence...
...What a mess...
...For God’s sake, is this any way to handle a revolution...
...Boy, am I glad to see you” he says...
...Later, of course, she will take up with Paul Robeson as outsiders puzzle over her vehement devotion to the Negro cause...
...Fonda asks Guthrie, who is composing a song on his guitar...
...If it weren’t for the glittering parties that FDR attends every night, his mood near the end of the decade would be a lot worse...
...He’s in the action now...
...For Keynes, this is the big chance he’s been waiting for...
...Later, after they become casual lovers, he tells her, “Mae, baby, the people of this country need more movie stars like you to keep their minds off of the Depression...
...FDR’s baffled by the spontaneous national support for the courageous little countries-Italian and Japanese restaurants are flooded with customers, boxes of American candies are sent to Tokyo and Rome, newborn babies are named “Benito...
...Before we know it, we won’t even be able to recognize our own companies, with all those funny-looking foreigners sashaying around our executive suites, chomping cigars (swiped from us, no doubt) and barking out orders in strange tongues...
...Farley is a tall, amiable Long Island politician with an uncanny ability to remember first names...
...Flag-waving workers battle with mounted policemen while singing “L’Internationale.’’ In Chicago, penniless teachers storm the city’s banks...
...Seventeen million men are out of work-most of them with families-and that’s in a country with only 123 million people anyway...
...But FDR has other things on his mind as he zips around the country in private rail cars and trimotor airplanes...
...He’s been arguing for deficit spending for years, but now he’s got the rare opportunity to put his schemes into practice...
...No, no, a thousand times no...
...Then, we begin our nightly broadcasts by a sensuous lady known as Hawaii Rose...
...Two members of the rag-tag Bonus Army were killed, and the rest were driven from the city...
...It seems like every day in Washington some new alphabet-soup agency is set up to solve yet another arcane problem, but it doesn’t seem to have much impact on the lives of the struggling, surging, heaving masses (quite a sick and exhausted bunch they are, too...
...To Frank, as he calls himself, the marchers should have been given donuts, coffee, and promises of government action-and then sent on their way...
...Worse yet is the threat of revolution...
...As the sun sinks over the horizon, the three vagabonds prepare for the evening...
...Otherwise, they’ll be fodder for the Communist cause...
...His jaunty smile fades faster than you can say, “multinational corporation...
...He is the creation of the New Deal...
...Later, in consulting with Keynes, FDR also learns that a war would have a wonderfully healthy effect on the economy...
...The public bought it...
...Well, Mr...
...Besides, the Depression gives everybody more than enough to worry about...
...And what about our pride...
...They sing around the fire and cook marshmallows...
...Her specialty,” he jokes, “is LeHand job...
...Prime the pump,” he says...
...FDR responds with a booming laugh...
...The names he remembers for this meeting are industrialist Andrew Mellon, a former treasury secretary, advisor Harold Ickes, and John Maynard Keynes, the British economist...
...Zilch...
...Big business is on the ropes...
...Gentlemen,” he says, “our world is threatened by insurrection...
...And how...
...answers Miss West...
...Subsidize everything...
...Then they make a dinner of cube steak and beans...
...His mission: saving corporate America...
...No matter how unimportant the person, he always remembers his name: George, David, Melvin, Jane, Fred, and countless others...
...When the monster awakes, his rebel spirit will have been killed, drained, lobotomized...
...The Public Burning was full of sexual innuendo and left-wing conspiratorial thinking, all told in a breathless tone--Richard Nixoh’s romance with Uncle Sam, the Rosenberg case, and other important events from our recent past...
...I don’t know, Woody,” Steinbeck says, “it needs some work...
...He’s not the only guy who can produce tasteless, fictionalized, debunking versions of American history, we thought...
...who wouldn’t want a respite from all that...
...A little scaredy-cat...
...They break into a rest room and wash up...
...So we decided to try it ourselves, by revealing the real story of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...The only passport you need is to be internationally famous and incredibly rich...
...He goes on radio imitating Japanese accents and calling Tojo “a very short and ugly person with a real dog for a wife...
...But even after FDR’s inaugurated, the damnable ole Depression just won’t quit...
...It raised Coover from obscurity to fame...
...If he was a REAL MAN, he’d declare war against us...
...Well, those kooks can holler all they want, because the FBI says there’s no conspiracy, and that’s final...
...tax refund checks (total: $325.89) cashed by Dr...
...World opinion, as expressed at the Munich summit, applauds...
...In a special nationwide broadcast on the Nazi peril, he says, “Adolf Hitler is nothing but a little faggot...
...No response...
...He sings in a reedy twang: “This land is your land/this land is his land/from San Diego/to Yosemite National Park /this land was made for all Americans...
...And in one notorious incident in Kincaid, Illinois, hired thugs gun down handicapped youngsters protesting 18-hour workdays...
...To me, Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo are all the same...
...If we give Hitler Czechoslovakia,” he raves to stunned intimates, “then he’ll socialize all of Europe...
...One, two, three, four,” they chant, “we don’t want your silly war...
...Hey, you fat Wop,” he shouts at Mussolini on a trans-Atlantic broadcast, “you got spaghetti for brains...
...If we make it easy for them, I think they’ll do it,” Farley says...
...The danger is clear...
...That’s what they’re there for,” the irrepressible Prexy-to-be quips to friends, his blue eyes twinkling...
...He begins a wild series of provocations...
...The Gross National Product is worth little more than the value of a medium-size steak...
...People are going crazy with hunger, eating shrubs off the ground, fighting with dogs for scraps of meat, breaking into grocery stores...
...When he’s President, by God, the mobs will be kept off the streets with meaningless make-work jobs and the promise of social security benefits...
...But with a small group of trusted advisors, among them Harry Hopkins and Jim Farley, FDR tries desperately to lure the country into war...
...They start in with some brainstorming, each idea another plank in the Great Barricade they’re constructing against the rising tide of unwashed masses...
Vol. 10 • March 1978 • No. 1
