Read Online America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw - Free Book Online

Heils of his millions. Also we listened with horror to the mincing sneers of Father Coughlin. One night we got Madison Square Garden, a Nazi meeting echoing with shrill hatred and the drilled litany of the brown-shirted audience. Then a dissenter’s voice broke through and we could hear the crunch of fists on flesh as he was beaten to the floor and flung from the stage. America First came through our speaker and it sounded to us very like the Nazi approach. Lindbergh was proposed to ride the White Horse, which must have saddened him. We had also heard the trial of the man who had stolen and murdered his baby.
    Prosperity had returned, leaving behind the warm and friendly associations of the dark days. Fierce strikes and retaliations raged in Detroit, race riots in Chicago: tear gas and night sticks and jeering picket lines and overturned automobiles. The ferocity showed how frightened both sides were, for men are invariably cruel when they are scared.
    The Spanish War split America’s emotions. The people we knew favored the Republic. We could not see how justice could be on the side armed and supplied by Hitler and Mussolini. We watched with dismay while our Government cut off supplies to the Loyalists and forced them to turn to the Russians for help. It was a crazy time that came to us through that great episcopal radio.
    Shirley Temple, then a little girl, was denounced by the Dies Committee for sending money for medical aid to Loyalist Spain. And I had one hilarious experience because I also had contributed toward an ambulance. Everyone knows at least one telephone joker. Ours was a woman who loved to call the zoo and ask for Mr. Bear. One day I answered the phone (oh! yes, we had a telephone by now). I thought it was our joker because the voice said: “This is the Monterey Herald. You were denounced before the Dies Committee today. Would you care to comment?”
    And I, still thinking it was the joker, replied: “What’s good enough for Shirley Temple is good enough for me.”
    But it was true. I had been denounced for giving money for medical aid to Spain. My reply got printed all over and apparently the committee didn’t think it as funny as many others did. They wouldn’t even answer my wire asking to be heard. But from then on I was a Communist as far as the Dies Committee was concerned. It was at this time that everyone was a Communist or a Fascist depending on where you stood.
    My books were beginning to sell better than I had ever hoped or expected and while this was pleasing it also frightened me. I knew it couldn’t last and I was afraid my standard of living would go up and leave me stranded when the next collapse came. We were much more accustomed to collapse than to prosperity. Also I had an archaic angry-gods feeling that made me give a great lot of my earnings away. I was a pushover for anyone or any organization asking for money. I guess it was a kind of propitiation. It didn’t make sense that a book, a humble, hat-in-hand, rejected book, was now eagerly bought—even begged for. I didn’t trust it. But I did begin to get around more.
    I met Mr. Roosevelt and for some reason made him laugh. To the end of his life, when occasionally he felt sad and burdened, he used to ask me to come in. We would talk for half an hour and I remember how he would rock back in his chair behind his littered desk and I can still hear his roars of laughter.
    One night at John Gunther’s apartment in New York I met Wendell Willkie, who was running for the Presidency. I liked him very much, although I was opposed to him politically. He seemed a warm and open man. Very late at night after a number of whiskies I brought up something that had always interested me. I asked him why he wanted to be President. It seemed the loneliest and most punishing job in the world. He rolled his highball glass slowly between his palms and stared into it. And finally he said: “You know—I