I was just listening to a bit more of Jon Meacham's The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, and I was brought up short by a quotation from Nathanael West's A Cool Million, a novel I think that I shall need to read in the near future. Since I didn't own a copy of that book...and since no e-version of it seems to be available for sale or steal, I Googled about a bit until I found what I was looking for online. The online version had a bit more than was quoted in Jon Meacham's book, but I decided to go full frontal on it. The punctuation may be off (my first source was not attentive to paragraph breaks), and I don't have 100% confidence in the fidelity of this to West's work, but it will definitely get the point across, so enough prevaricating. May I introduce to you the one and only Shagpoke Whipple...and his Peppery Band of Lonelyhearted Trumpsters.
“I’m a simple man,” he said with great simplicity, “and I want to talk to you about simple things. You’ll get no highfalutin talk from me.
“First of all, you people want jobs. Isn’t that so?”
An ominous rumble of assent came from the throats of the poorly dressed gathering.
“Well, that’s the only and prime purpose of the National Revolutionary Party–to get jobs for everyone. There was enough work to go around in 1927, why isn’t there enough now? I’ll tell you; because of the Jewish international bankers and the Bolshevik labor unions, that’s why. It was those two agents that did the most to hinder American business and to destroy its glorious expansion. The former because of their hatred of America and love for Europe and the latter because of their greed for higher and still higher wages.
“This is our country and we must fight to keep it so. If America is ever again to be great, it can only be through the triumph of the revolutionary middle class.
“We must drive the Jewish international bankers out of Wall Street! We must destroy the Bolshevik labor unions! We must purge our country of all the alien elements and ideas that now infest her! “America for Americans! Back to the principles of Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln!”
Oh, my. Good thing that it's just a work of fiction, isn't it?
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