Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [54]
In Jersey City the next morning the reporters’ theme song, “Hey, Bill, what do you estimate the crowd?” was brought into full play as we drove through the incredible demonstration staged by Mayor Hague, who was making show of his loyalty to the man he called a “weakling” when he led the “Stop Roosevelt” movement in Chicago in 1932. As we crawled through the three miles of shrieking, flag-waving schoolchildren (half of Hague’s turnout was below voting age), we were heckled with such remarks as “Aw, it’s oney de press … say, ya got it pretty soft … gimme a lift, mister? … hey, mister, take my pitcha … ooh, lookit, a woman repawter, hiya, toots.”
Back in New York no machine organization turned out the crowds which sprang up impromptu to cheer the President. Except on Park Avenue. There the sidewalks were no more crowded than usual, and the only heads peering out the windows were the servants’. It called to mind the story, which no one would swear was not apocryphal, of Knox in San Francisco. As he was driving through the streets, someone in the crowd yelled, “Hurrah for Roosevelt!” The cry was taken up and Knox began to get red in the face until a Republican committeewoman driving with him leaned over and said, “Never mind, Colonel, they’re only working people.”
The Nation, October 10, 1936.
What Madrid Reads
“And so Puss-in-Boots made the miller’s son into a marquis and he married the Princess Violet Ink, the daughter of the king of that country who was called Saxofon XIII. Soon afterward the king died from having eaten a rice pudding made of pearls instead of rice and the miller’s son inherited the crown. But he kept his promise to Puss-in-Boots and published a royal decree handing over the country to the workers. Then the workers of all classes formed a council and elected a president of the republic. And they gave the crown to the dentists to make gold fillings for the poor people who had lost their teeth.”
So runs the Madrid, 1937, version of the old fairy tale. Little Red Riding Hood, too, has suffered a war change. She has become a worker in a chocolate factory. After her tragic end her fellow workers get together and kill the wolf and chase all his rich and powerful friends out of the country forever. But Madrid’s literature has become Marxist only in spots. The Army, which through the efforts of the Cultural Militia is learning to read as fast as it is learning to fight, has an extraordinarily eclectic literary taste. At the Escorial, where the 3rd Division is in training, the soldiers’ library contains a collection of works ranging from Homer to Elinor Glyn, the latter, it should be added, represented by La Filosofía del Amor. Among the authors in between are Plato, Sophocles, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Kant, Victor Hugo, Dostoevski, Marx, Henry George, Freud, Jules Verne, Lenin, Galsworthy, Ortega y Gasset, Dos Passos, Garcia Lorca, and Sinclair Lewis.
At the rear, the effect of the war on the printed word is apparent everywhere. It is dark inside the big bookstore on the Gran Via because all the windows have been blocked up with sandbags. But it is not too dark to see the blaze of civil-war literature spread out on the front tables. Because prices must meet hard times, most of it is in the form of paperbacks and pamphlets with covers that are vivid and striking: raised fists, broken chains, and bombs bursting. Guernica in flames proclaims “the torch of fascism”; Marx’s beard flows over innumerable volumes; the sandaled foot of the Spanish worker crushes the swastika; Stalin’s profile is uplifted to a fleet of conquering airplanes; Lenin’s fist pounds the table; Durutti, the fallen Anarchist hero, summons Spanish comrades to victory. Soldiers, for the most part, are buying these books, for the trenches have been fertile soil for the growth of political curiosity.
But behind the front