Hitler wanted two things: to get the mastery of Germany, and to be let alone by the outside world while he was doing it. When the Reichstag began its regular sessions, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, he delivered a carefully prepared address in which he declared that it was the Communists who had fired the Reichstag building, and that their treason was to be "blotted out with barbaric ruthlessness." He told the rich that "capital serves business, and business the people"; that there was to be "strongest support of private initiative and the recognition of property." The rich could have asked no more. To the German peasants he promised "rescue," and to the army of the unemployed "restoration to the productive process."
To enable him to carry out this program he asked for a grant of power in a trickily worded measure which he called a "law for the lifting of want from the people and empire." The purpose of the law was to permit the present Cabinet, and the present Cabinet alone, to make laws and spend money without consulting the Reichstag; but it didn’t say that; it merely repealed by number those articles in the Constitution which reserved these crucial powers to the Reichstag. The new grant was to come to an end in four years, and sooner if any other Cabinet came into office. Nobody but Adolf was ever to be the Führer of Germany!
This device was in accord with the new Chancellor’s "legality complex"; he would get the tools of power into his hands by what the great mass of the people would accept as due process of law. His speech in support of the measure was shrewdly contrived to meet the prejudices of all the different parties, except the Communists, who had been barred from their seats, and the Socialists, who were soon to share that fate. A mob of armed Nazis stood outside the building, shouting their demands that the act be passed, and it carried by a vote of 441 to 94, the dissenters being Socialists. Then Goring, President of the Reichstag, declared the session adjourned, and so a great people lost their liberties while rejoicing over gaining them.
V
During this period there were excitements in the United States as well as in Germany. Crises and failures became epidemic; in one state after another it was necessary for the governor to decree a closing of all the banks. Robbie Budd wrote that it was because the people of the country couldn’t contemplate the prospect of having their affairs managed by a Democrat. When the new President was inaugurated—which fell upon the day before the Hitler elections— his first action was to order the closing of all the banks in the United States—which to Robbie was about the same thing as the ending of the world. His letter on the subject was so pessimistic that his son was moved to send him a cablegram: "Cheer up you will still eat."
Really it wasn’t as bad as everybody had expected. People took it as a joke; the richest man in the country might happen to have only a few dimes in his pocket, and that was all he had, and his friends thought it was funny, and he had to laugh, too. But everybody trusted him, and took his checks, so he could have whatever he wanted, the same as before. Robbie didn’t miss a meal, nor did any other Budd. Meanwhile they listened to a magnificent radio voice telling them with calm confidence that the new government was going to act, and act quickly, and that all the problems of the country were going to be solved. The New Deal was getting under way.
The first step was to join Britain and the other nations off the gold standard. To Robbie it meant inflation, and that his country was going to see what Germany had seen. The next thing was to sort out the banks, and decide which were sound and in position to open with government backing. The effect of that was to move Wall Street to Washington; the government became the center of power, and the bankers came hurrying with their lawyers and their brief-cases. A harum-scarum sort of affair, in which all sorts of blunders were made; America was going to be a land of absurdities for many years, and the Robbie Budds would have endless opportunities to ridicule and denounce. But business would begin to pick up and people would begin to eat again—and not just the Budds.
Lanny didn’t have any trouble, for the French banks weren’t closed, and he had money to spare for his refugees. If Irma’s income stayed in hock they could go back to Bienvenu—the cyclone cellar, she called it. She had never had to earn any money in her life, so it was easy for her to take her husband’s debonair attitude to it. If she lost hers, everybody else would lose theirs, and you wouldn’t have any sense of inferiority. Really, it was rather exciting, and the younger generation took it as a sporting proposition. Irma would swing between that attitude and her dream of an august and distinguished salon; when Lanny pointed out to her the inconsistency of the two attitudes she was content to laugh.
VI
Rick came over to spend a few days with them; he was no longer so poor that he had to worry about a trip to Paris, and it was his business to meet all sorts of people and watch what was going on. A lame ex-aviator who would some day become a baronet, and who meanwhile had made a hit as a playwright, was a romantic figure, even though he was extreme in his talk. The ladies were pleased with him, and Irma discovered that she had what she might call a home-made lion; she would tell the smartest people how Lanny had been Rick’s boyhood chum, had taken him to conferences all over Europe and helped to plan and even revise his plays; also how she, Irma, had helped to finance The Dress-Suit Bribe, and was not merely getting her money back but a considerable profit. It was the first investment that had been her very own, and she could be excused for being proud of it, and for boasting about it to her mother and her several uncles.
Irma decided more and more that she liked the English attitude to life. Englishmen felt intensely, as you soon found out, but they were content to state their position quietly, and even to understate it; they didn’t raise their voices like so many Americans, or gesticulate like the French, or bluster like the Germans. They had been in the business of governing for a long time, and rather took it for granted; but at the same time they were willing to consider the other fellow’s point of view, and to work out some sort of compromise. Especially did that seem to be the case with continental affairs, where they were trying so hard to mediate between the French and the Germans. Denis de Bruyne said: "Vraiment, how generous they can be when they are disposing of French interests!"
The Conference on Arms Limitation was still in session at Geneva, still wrangling, exposing the unwillingness of any nation to trust any other, or to concede what might be to a rival nation’s advantage. Rick, the Socialist, said: "There isn’t enough trade to go round, and they can’t agree how to divide it." Jesse Blackless, the Communist, said: "They are castaways on a raft, and the food is giving out; they know that somebody has to be eaten, and who will consent to be the first?"
There was a lot of private conferring between the British and the French, and British officials were continually coming and going in Paris. Rick brought several of them to the palace for tea and for dancing, and this was the sort of thing for which Irma had wanted the palace; she felt that she was getting her money’s worth—though of course she didn’t use any such crude phrase. Among those who came was that Lord Wickthorpe whom she had met in Geneva last year. He had a post of some responsibility, and talked among insiders, as he counted Rick and the Budds. Irma listened attentively, because, as a hostess, she had to say something and wanted it to be right. Afterward she talked with Lanny, getting him to explain what she hadn’t understood. Incidentally she remarked: "I wish you could take a balanced view of things, the way Wickthorpe does."