The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
tightly closed than the biggest, oldest bank in New York. On that day the Eureka Bank was no more of a failure than any of the others with their good and bad mortgages and other kinds of good and bad paper.
The President’s inaugural address came over Herman’s radio in the forenoon, and the store was filled with men who had come to hear it. Some of the men had radios at home, but they came to Herman’s store anyway, so as to have company while they listened. Even George was there, standing far back against the shelves, not joining the men around the stove or the ones who leaned on the counter, hovering over the radio, so possessed by the voice in it that they forgot themselves and let their hopefulness and their anxiety show in their faces. George, standing apart from them all, ground his teeth and wondered how they could be so taken in. He didn’t like the phony accent and he didn’t like the highfalutin language and it was just too much when the President said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” By God, what rich man was going to accuse him of being afraid and get away with it, anyhow? He hardly heard any of the rest of the speech, he was so angry at being called afraid.
When the speech was over and the first murmurs began, he said loudly, “I’d like to get that hothouse pansy out on a farm for just one hour. I’d like to watch him pitch bundles into a thrashing machine when it’s around a hundred and ten in the shade—or wrastle a bull calf that’s taken a notion he just don’t want to grow up to be a steer!”
Zack Hoefener began to laugh, holding his goiter with his hand, as though he must not lose track of the upsetting vibrations of his laughter and his heart beating there. Otto Wilkes laughed too, and so did Wally Esskew and Lester Zimmerman. Even the Koslovs began to laugh, though George doubted that any of them could understand what was funny about giving a man with that accent the chore of emasculating a calf.
Clarence Egger, whose arm had been gobbled up by a threshing machine, waited for them all to stop. “Don’t you sheep brains know that the guy can’t even walk? He had infantile paralysis, for Christ’s sake!”
George was not going to be made a fool of by Clarence Egger. “Well, he got a great big infantile silver spoon, too, didn’t he?”
“I’ll take walking any day,” Clarence said. He was the only man in the room who dared, because his right arm was gone, to stand up to George. At times when he was drunk enough, Zack would do it, but nobody else ever did.
Nevertheless, George felt that they were displeased with him for making them laugh at a crippled man. God-damn them—they were so dumb and ignorant—always confusing the issue. The issue was that a rich man was telling them all not to worry even if they had just lost their last red cent to a little Jew banker. A rich man who couldn’t possibly imagine what it was like to work sixteen hours a day for six months of the year and to sit in a dark house smothering in snow for the other six months, wondering where the money for coal was going to come from. That was the man who was telling them not to worry, and that man’s coddled, polished ignorance was the issue—not whether or not the man could walk.
George considered himself a well-spoken man, but he had no words to substitute for the obscenities he wanted to say to these silly bleating sheep. Clarence Egger calling him a sheep brain. He put his hands on his hips and lifted his shoulders as though he would sashay into a wrathful jig and he roared the chorus of a bitter song —
Oh, Lady, would you be kind enough to give me a bite to eat —
A piece of bread and butter and a ten-foot slice of meat?
A cake, a pie, a pudding, to tickle my appetite —
Let them see, if they could, that this was their song unless things were radically changed. He shoved his way past them as he sang, and stamped out the door. He went on singing as he took the blankets off the horses and climbed on to the seat in the wagon box —
Come all ye jolly jokers, and listen while I hum.
A story I’ll relate to you of the Great American Bum.
From North to East, from South to West,
Like a swarm of bees they come.
They wear a shirt that’s dirty
And full of fleas and crumbs.
I’ve met with all the toughest cops—as tough as they can be.
And I’ve been in every calaboose in this land of liberty.
Sunday, March 12
By the time the President got around to making a speech on the radio about the banks, a good many of them had already reopened. He called his talk a “fireside chat,” and the image was not reassuring to George. “Chat” was an effete word, used either by women putting on airs or by wealthy people of either sex who had the time to waste in small talk while they sat around in parlors that bulged with bay windows hung in velvet and lace. A fireplace was an expensive luxury which added to the cost of heating a house by inviting down the chimney every prowling wind. The fireplace that came to George’s mind was accoutered with hundreds of dollars’ worth of brass, polished by some ill-paid servant. And over the mantel was an oil portrait of the Wall Street grandfather who made the fortune by speculating in Western land or by other questionable means.
“It is safer to keep your money in the reopened bank than under the mattress,” the President said.
“What money?” George cried to Rachel. “Another rich man in the White House. Oh, how they love to tell us how they know all about being poor. ‘You ah fahmahs. I am a fahmah, too!’ Oh, yes, he’s a farmer too! What a nice little farmhouse he has there at Hyde Park!”
George sat at his own fireside, a bearable distance from the plump round stove that blistered the air in a six-foot radius, and helplessly cursed Harry Goodman while the President urged the people to bring their money back to the banks. But George predicted that putting the bankers back in control of the country might not go so smoothly as the President thought it would, and sure enough, there was quite a piece in the paper just a few days later. He read it aloud to Rachel after supper, yelling out into the kitchen over the noise she made doing the dishes.
“Look here what happened down in Oklahoma,” he said. “I told you there was going to be bloodshed. Unless I miss my guess this is just the beginning. Fellow here—a state bank examiner—W. C. Ernest, his name was, was looking over the Citizens’ State Bank. Paper says he telephoned the State Bank Commissioner to come and take over the bank. Then it says, ‘As Mr. Ernest replaced the receiver of the instrument and turned to speak to the bank president, he was shot in the head and died instantly.’ Well, I tell you, it’ll get so the government don’t dare send out anybody on jobs like that any more. Or anyhow they won’t be able to find anybody that’ll go! You know how that fellow from Bismarck roared in and out of here when he came to clean out Harry’s bank. He knew his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel around here! Who cares? Might as well hang as starve. You wait. It can’t help but start pretty soon.”
Most of the time Rachel believed he was only relieving his feelings by talking this way. But once in a while he worried her. “Who do you think is going to start it?” she called in.
“How should I know?” he said irritably. “Who ever knows who starts a revolution? It just starts, that’s all. Maybe the coal miners. Maybe the veterans … Hah! How do you like this? Right on the same page with this other story. President said he got ten thousand telegrams ‘applauding his bank policy.’ Well, that’s a little late for W. C. Ernest, isn’t it? I wonder if Roosevelt has heard about him yet.”
Thursday, March 23
The newly elected German parliament organized, held its first meeting, handed all its power over