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Who Goes Nazi PDF
Who Goes Nazi PDF
BY DOROTHY THOMPSbN
Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his seldom invited him-or his wife-to
own class, graduate of the same prepara- dinner.
tory school and university, rich, a sports- He is a snob, loathing his own snob-
man, owner of a famous racing stable, bery. He despises the men about him-
vice-president of a bank, married to a he despises, for instance, Mr. B-because
well-known society belle. He is a good he knows that what he has had to achieve
fellow and extremely popular. But if by relentless work men like B have won
America were going Nazi he would by knowing the right people. But his
certainly join up, and early. contempt is inextricably mingled with
Why? . . . Why the one and not the envy. Even more than he hates the
other? class into which he has insecurely risen,
Mr. A has a life that is established ac- does he hate the people from whom he
cording to a certain form of personal be- came. He hates his mother and his
havior. Although he has no money, father for being his parents. He loathes
his unostentatious distinction and educa- everything that reminds him of his
tion have always assured him a position. origins and his humiliations. He is bit-
He has never been engaged in sharp com- terly anti-Semitic because tlle social in-
petition. He is a free man. I doubt security of the Jews reminds him of his
whether ever in his life he has done any- own psychological insecurity.
thing he did not want to do or anything Pity he has utterly erased from his
that was against his code. Nazism nature, and joy he has never known. He
wouldn't fit in with his standards and he has an ambition, bitter and burning.
has never become accustomed to making It is to rise to such an eminence that no
concessions. one can ever again humiliate him. Not
Mr. B has risen beyond his real abili- to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling
ties by virtue of health, good looks, and the strings of puppets created by his
being a good mixer. He married for brains. Already some of them are talk-
money and he has done lots of other ing his language-though they have
things for money. His code is not his never met him.
own; it is that of his class-no worse, no There he sits: he talks awkwardly
better, He fits easily into whatever pat- rather than glibly; he is courteous. He
tern is successful. That is his sole meas- commands a distant and cold respect.
ure of value-success. Nazism as a But he is a very dangerous man. Were
minority movement would not attract he primitive and brutal he would be a
him. As a movement likely to attain criminal-a murderer. But he is subtle
power, it would. and cruel. He would rise high in a
The saturnine man over there talking Nazi regime. It would need men just
with a lovely French emigree is already like him-intellectual and ruthless.
a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and em- But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is
bittered intellectual. He was a poor the product of a democracy hypocriti-
white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship cally preaching social equality and prac-
student at two universities where he took ticing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He
all the scholastic honors but was never is a sensitive, gifted man who has been
invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant humiliated into nihilism. He would
gifts won for him successively government laugh to see heads roll.
positions, partnership in a prominent I think young D over there is the only
law firm, and eventually a highly paid born Nazi in the room. Young D is the
job as a Wall Street adviser. He has spoiled only son of a doting mother.
always moved among important people He has never been crossed in his life.
and always been socially on the periph- He spends his time at the game of seeing
ery. His colleagues have admired his what he can get away with. He is con-
brains and exploited them, but they have stantly arrested for: speeding and his
WHO GOES NAZI? 239
.,
f,
to explain and apologize for Nazism if ican citizen. He is a young German
:,
,. it ever comes along. But Mr. G is al- emigre, whom I brought along to the
ways a "deviationist." When he played party. The people in the room look at
with communism he was a Trotskyist; him rather askance because he is so
when he talked of Keynes it was to Germanic, so very blond-haired, so very
suggest improvement; Chesterton's eco- blue-eyed, so tanned that somehow you
nomic ideas were all right but he was too expect him to be wearing shorts. He
bound to Catholic philosophy. So we looks like the model of a Nazi. -His
may be sure that Mr. G would be a English is flawed-he learned it only five
Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. years ago. He comes from an old East
He would certainly be purged. Prussian family; he was a member of the
H is an historian and biographer. post-war Youth Movement and after-
He is American of Dutch ancestry born ward of the Republican "Reichsbanner."
and reared in the Middle West. He has All his German friends went Nazi-with-
been in love with America all his life. out exception. He hiked to Switzerland
He can recite whole chapters of Thoreau penniless, there pursued his studies in
and volumes of American poetry, from New Testament Greek, sat under the
Emerson to Steve Benet. He knows great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth,
Jefferson's letters, Hamilton's papers, came to America through the assistance
Lincoln's speeches. He is a collector of of an American friend whom he had met
early American furniture, lives in New in a university, got a job teaching the
England, runs a farm for a hobby and classics in a fashionable private school;
doesn't lose much money on it, and quit, and is working now in an airplane
loathes parties like this one. He has a factory-working on the night shift to
ribald and manly sense of humor, is un- make planes to send to Britain to defeat
"' conventional and lost a college professor- Germany. He has devoured volumes of
ship because of a love affair. Afterward American history, knows Whitman by
he married the lady and has lived happily heart, wonders whyso few Americans have
ever afterward as the wages of sin. ever really read the Federalist papers, be-
H has never doubted his own authentic lieves in the United States of Europe, the
Americanism for one instant. This is Union of the English-speaking world, and
his country, and he knows it from Acadia the coming democratic revolution all over
to Zenith. His ancestors fought in the the earth. He believes that America is
Revolutionary War and in all the wars the country of Creative Evolution once
since. He is certainly an intellectual, it shakes off its middle-class complacency,
but an intellectual smelling slightly of its bureaucratized industry, its tentacle-
cow barns and damp tweeds. He is the like and spreading government, and sets
most good-natured and genial man alive, itself innerly free.
but if anyone ever tries to make this The people in the room think he is not
country over into an imitation of Hitler's, an American, but he is more American
Mussolini's, or Petain's systems H will than almost any of them. He has dis-
grab a gun and fight. Though H's covered America and his spirit is the
liberalism will not permit him to say it, spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with
it is his secret conviction that nobody America because it does not realize its
whose ancestors have not been in this strength and beauty and power. He
country since before the Civil War really talks about the workmen in the factory
understands America or would really where he is employed. . . . He took
fight for it against Nazism or any other the job "in order to understand the real
foreign ism in a showdown. America." He thinks the men are won-
But H is wrong. There is one other derful. "Why don't you American in-
person in the room who would fight tellectuals ever get to them; talk to
alongside H and he is not even an Amer- them?"
WHO GOES NAZI? 241
business that he had built up from B regards him with contempt tempered
scratch. He sold it for a handsome by hatred. Mr. B will use him. L is
~
" ,
I~
price, settled his indigent relatives in already parroting B's speeches. He has
business, and now enjoys an income for the brains of Neanderthal man, but he
himself of about fifty dollars a week. At has an infallible instinct for power. In
forty he began to write articles about private conversation he denounces the
odd and out-of-the-way places in Amer- Jews as "parasites." No one has ever
ican life. A bachelor, and a sad man asked him what are the creative func-
who makes everybody laugh, he travels .tions of a highly paid agent, who takes a
continually, knows America from a percentage off the labor of millions of
thousand different facets, and loves it in men, and distributes it where and as it
a quiet, deep, unostentatious way. He may add to his own political power.
242 HARPER'S MAGAZINE
FLUSHING SUMMER
BY J. P. CHAMBERLAIN