Carrion Comfort

The story’s blurb has Reynolds telling us he knows a guy whose “gobbledygook” has proven useful for writing sf stories editors “can’t resist”. The narrator is Larry Marshall, a journalist on the outs with his editor. 

He goes to a bar and meets Brown. Brown has just gotten a check from the Associated Towel Manufacturers of America to suppress his “dry water” discovery. Brown then goes on about various types of water as he does in the fixup. The narrator says he wishes he could get out of journalism, but he’s not really suited for anything else. 

Brown asks if he’s heard about his super-cerebrograph – which, incidentally, he can’t really take credit for since he found out about it after he invented his time machine. The latter was suppressed by the International Historian’s Guild. We then get a joke about how Columbus didn’t discover America. A Greek named Popadopolous did, and he later founded a restaurant in Cuba. Via hypnosis (to heighten the receptivity of the subconscious), pineal gland stimulation to increase extra-sensory perception, and high-speed phonograph with automated changer, Brown says the device can teach anyone to be an expert in any subject in one night. 

The two get very drunk, and the narrator wakes up the next morning to a recording describing the performance of a third stage rocket booster. It seems, both drunk, they agreed Brown would use the super-cerebrograph on Larry. However, Brown accidentally breaks the records. They’re not labelled, and he can’t remember what profession they were for. 

Knowing a new profession doesn’t provide any immediate benefit to Larry, so he’ll have to remain a reporter. However, Brown neglected to tell him that the super-cerebrograph wipes out a person’s previous area of expertise. Larry can’t even type anymore. 

They try various tests to determine Larry’s new expertise. He’s not an artist, plumber, carpenter, or bartender. The story ends, somewhat cryptically, with Brown mentioning his time machine and Larry saying he wanted “some unique profession”. The joke continues with a concluding author’s note in which Reynolds says he hopes he can keep his guy “under wraps” so Willy Ley or Arthur C. Clarke don’t find out about him. 

And then, at the end, we get the punchline. Larry’s new profession is repairing an “intergalactic hyperdrive”.

There’s a good reason this one hasn’t been reprinted in 70 years.

We start with that symbol of the totalitarian state: the police knocking on a door in the middle of the night. 

The days of the police state were over, so they told you. The cult of the personality was a thing of the past. The long series of five-year plans and seven-year plans were over and all the goals had been achieved. The new constitution guaranteed personal liberties. No longer were you subject to police brutality at the merest whim. So they told you.

Josip Pekic gets that nocturnal knock on the door – just like his father did 20 years ago before being tried and executed as a “rightist deviationist”. Eventually he was posthumously rehabilitated with a Hero of the People’s Democratic Dictatorship medal. Obviously, this story reflects the USSR post-Stalin.

Three policemen, “zombis”, hustle Pekic off for a ride through the streets of Moscow. He expects to be taken to the Kalemegdan Prison but isn’t. Instead, he ends up at the Ministry of Internal Affairs where the MVD is headquartered. (The MVD was one of the many names the organization best known as the KGB had at various times.) 

Inside, he is greeted by a well-dressed man sporting a cigarette holder in the style of Marshal Tito. Surprisingly, he effusively greets Pekic and introduces himself as Aleksander Kardelji, and tells Pekic they’ve been waiting for him. Kardelji asks Pekic if he was mistreated by “these hoodlums”. Pekic says no but Kardelji suspects one of them was acting like a “present day Transbalkanian G-Man”. 

Pekic knows who Kardelji is: the Number Two of the USSR next to President Zoran Jankez. Pekic insists there has been a mistake. No, there hasn’t, says Kardelji. He’s studied Pekic’s dossier. 

Pekic is taken to meet Jankez who looks ten years older than he does on tv and is a rather porkish fellow a la Khruschev. Jankez notes that he, after becoming General Secretary of the Party, was responsible for rehabilitating Pekic’s father’s.

Alcohol is served, and the piggish Jankez devours some caviar. Jankez then goes into the idea of an expediter – which Kardelji came across in a history of America during World War Two. Expediters were “competent efficiency experts” given extraordinary powers to eliminate bottlenecks in production of war materials. Specific examples of their deeds were chartering a plane from England to America to bring a single part that was holding up aircraft production or taking skilled chemists off their priority jobs “for a certain project in Tennessee” (enriching heavy water for an A-bomb). They had unlimited expense accounts. I have not been able to confirm the existence of these expediters much less the incidents Reynolds cites, but the idea seems credible.    

Pekic (hearkening back to a very different deployment of the idea in Reynolds’ “The Common Man”  from the January 1963 issue of Analog) has been chosen because he is the “average man of all Transbalkania” and, therefore, has a sensible perspective. He’s average in everything: IQ, physical features, education, tastes, and desires. 

Jankez brings up an embarrassing newspaper story about how Soviet women face a shortage of eyebrow pencils. Jankez isn’t sure what an eyebrow pencil is, but Pekic does from his few foreign travels. Jankez goes to more serious examples of Soviet economic dysfunction.  A truck driver just dumped his load of frozen meat at a place with no refrigeration – because that was what he was hired to do and had no initiative. 

As an expediter, Pekic will find bottlenecks, shortages, ferret out mistakes, and bring notice of them to officials. There will be a public announcement that Pekic’s word is law, only countermanded by Kardelji and Jankez. Kardelji says they can no longer rely on “cold statistics”.  If the expediter experiment works out, Pekic will just be the first. 

Pekic doesn’t really want the job, but how do you say no to Numbers One and Two? But what if he angers one of them, asks Pekic? They have accounted for that. Fifty thousand Common Europe francs have been deposited in a Swiss bank account for him. Whenever Pekic feels in danger, he can flee the country and have that money. 

The next scene has an angry Jankez yelling at Kardelji. Pekic removed Velimir Cvrenkovski, Secretary of Agriculture in Bosnatia – a loyal supporter of Jankez. Cvrenkovski had a rather Mao like idea of boosting agriculture production by killing all the birds. Naturally, the insect population exploded and destroyed crops. Kardelji defends Pekic’s actions. Now, I have no idea if the Soviets attempted such a thing which sounds more Mao-like. However, I can tell you that one of the reasons for the Sino-Soviet split around 1958 is that Khruschev did warn Mao about some failed Soviet agricultural policies and not to try them. Warnings which, famously, Mao ignored.

The next scene is Pekic going to see Commissar Broz in Transbalkania. He is rudely greeted by the Commissar’s bodyguards. Pekic fires them stating that the day of commissars automatically having bodyguards is gone. Broz is one of those stereotypical Soviet men happy about steel production (a frequent motif in Reynolds’ Soviet Union stories). Following an idea of Jankez’s – they were comrades in the pre-revolution days — all methods have been used to increase steel production. Well, says Pekic, Number One has a habit of disavowing ideas of his that didn’t work out. 

Pekic orders Broz’s steel program “scraped”. Again, in a rather Maoesque touch, we learn it included backyard smelters. Pekic details the problems with buying up every piece of scrap metal to feed those smelters. Children skipped school to bring in scrap metal. Kitchen utensils and railroads were melted down and farm hand tools too. And those will probably all have to be re-manufactured. And, in talking with engineers, Pekic has learned it’s poor steel anyway. Pekic fires Broz and submits his report to Numbers One and Two. 

The next scene is another knock on the door in the middle of the night which Aleksander Kardelji always expected would eventually happen. In this case, Kardelji knew it was imminent because he just had a phone call with a very angry Jankez. We learn that Kardelji has spent the last ten years trying to placate his boss. 

We hear a familiar scenario that shows up in other Reynolds’ stories. The Soviet industrial methods necessary to manufacture rifles and grenades in huge numbers are obsolete. Illiterate peasants could do that. But modern industry requires highly educated scientists and technicians.  Increasing automation requires more skilled workers. The Soviet Union no longer has simple problems. Jankez doesn’t understand that. 

In that phone call, Jankez said he always knew Pekic was a traitor – just like his father – a foe of the revolution. He’s a Trokysite wrecker, and he and Kardelji will answer for this before the Executive Committee. 

It seems Pekic’s latest outrage was in Macedonian. There a program, another idea of Jankez, was screwing the land up by putting it under massive cultivation to provide “vast herds of cattle and swine”. Pekic talked some nonsense about watersheds and contour plowing and tree planting to prevent an emerging dustbowl. We learn that Jankez doesn’t, as an ex-miner, have a clue about farming. 

The next scene is Jankez demanding Pekic be found and arrested. 

Then he gets a phone call. It’s Pekic. He understands Jankez has been looking for him. He ultimately decided the USSR’s problem wasn’t just waitresses and truckdrivers. 

He started to research Western alternative forms of government. He was somewhat skeptical of Western propaganda. And here we get Reynolds’ critiques of capitalism:  countries paying farmers not to grow crops, South American countries paying for militaries when they haven’t fought a war in over a century, running steel mills at half production while there is still unmet consumer demand, recessions which close down perfectly good factories and cause unemployment.

 He decides that both the West and the USSR have the same problem: politicians. They don’t understand industrial production and distribution. He proposes an idea quite similar to Technocracy (which, of course, was heavily featured in The Five Way Secret Agent). 

Industry should be run by trained, competent technicians, scientists, industrialists—and to some extent, maybe, by the consumers, but not by politicians. By definition, politicians know about politics, not industry. But somehow, in the modern world, governments seem to be taking over the running of industry and even agriculture. 

Jankez demands to know where Pekic is calling from and tells him he’s under arrest. Pekic responds that he was chosen because he was an “average Transbalkanian citizen”, but he’s responded in a way not available to most citizens: he’s fled to Switzerland. He’s accomplished about as much as he thinks he can. He has talked to “engineers, technicians, professionals, all the more trained, competent people in Transbalkania.” He just thought it was fair to call Jankez and give him a final report. 

But he didn’t start the burgeoning revolution. Jankez and Kardelji gave him a chance, but Pekic just “expedited things”. 

The story ends: “It was the middle of the night when the knock came at the door. But then, Zoran Jankez had always thought it would…finally.”

It’s interesting to contrast this story with Reynolds’ earlier “Revolution” which portrays a more efficient Soviet economy which its citizens still want to reform and is plagued by bureaucratic central planning. Likewise with “Combat” which develops Pekic’s point about capitalist and communist politicians being unfit to govern complex industrial societies.

Reynolds is clearly aware, in 1963, of the deficiencies of communist central planning.

This story is about a bunch of ex-conmen creating a fad – explicitly along the lines of the 1950s Davy Crockett fad.

We start out with Warren Dempsey Witherson who feeds a counterfeit slug of iron into the slot of an autocab. He’s a rather lanky, somewhat absent-minded figure on his way to visit, without appointment, Professor Doolittle. He waits a bit, but surprisingly, gets shown in by Doolittle’s secretary Walthers — who immediately gets kicked out of an important meeting with Doolittle and told not to disturb the two.

The Professor calls Witherson the “Funked Out Kid”. It turns that these two men are old acquaintances in their sixties, conmen who have run various scams. The Professor tells Witherson he almost kicked him out until he remembered the name on Witherson’s card as an old alias. The card announces Witherson as a “Ph.D., D.D., LL.D., Litt.D.”. All legitimate, says Witherson, and purchased from diploma mills in Tennessee. (Of course, a skepticism of educational credentials was a major element of his “Status Quo”.) 

The Professor suggests they go out on the town for old time sake and asks “how the taw” is (evidently conman slang for money). Witherson laughs at the idea he’s hitting up a fellow grifter for money. No, he’s come with a business proposal for the Professor, one that will make them a lot of money. 

What does the Professor think Witherson has been doing with himself for 15 years? Well, once a grifter always a grifter is the response. Witherson, looking at Dolittle’s very nice and large office, says that doesn’t seem to apply to the Professor. Sure, it does, says Doolittle. He’s

at the top of the heap in the biggest con since some long departed grifter dreamed up religion and put ninety five per cent of the human race on the sucker list. Motivational Research the double-domes call it.

He does advertising research for some of the biggest companies around. Witherson knows that.  That’s why he’s there. What’s Witherson’s con these days? Public relations. Then Dolittle recognizes the name. He’s the Witherson of Moppett, Hastings, and Witherson – the top PR firm on the East Coast. Besides the Professor’s company and Witherson’s is a coalition of a “Tri-D studio”, some ad agencies, a TV network, toy manufacturers, and a few other con men. They want to create a Davy Crockett-like fad but with a market bigger than just children. They want a fad for adults. 

The next scene has the Professor, Walthers, and the Professor’s three man “brain trust”.  assistants and Walthers and the three men who are the “brain trust”, all psychologists. Ted Biemiller has just returned from a vacation he didn’t enjoy in Afghanistan, the result of a deal the company did for United Travel and Ted’s wife threatened to leave him if they didn’t spend six weeks in Kabul. The uclerous Jimmy Leath tells him his interviews have revealed that snobbery is a major factor in “travel today”, so the ultimate “travel status symbol” is going to a place no one has been to before. The Professor asks about Les Frankle’s wife Irene who will be a key player in the story.  Has she convinced him to resign from Doolittle Research for a position “worthy of your scholarly abilities”? Not yet. 

We learn that Irene is a “do-gooder” who (somewhat echoing Reynolds’ “Combat”) thinks too much of America’s intellectual talent is siphoned off for “advertising, sales promotion, motivational research”. (Some would add law and finance these days.) The Professor just says “indeed” and asks where people like Les would be if he didn’t hire them straight out of college.

Les repeats what Irene told him. Firms like Doolittle Research take the freshest talents schooled in the latest techniques and use them for a few years before getting someone “younger and fresher”. (Now, the same criticism is leveled at Silicon Valley.)

Jimmy says that an adult hero suitable for a fad has to, on the rational level, be someone like a president or top businessman. Jimmy says that, on the level of the preconscious and subconscious, tv star who has been around a long time and has played strong, masculine roles like Alexander or Custer can be a focus too. At the “deepest levels of consciousness” people like “Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Nero, the Marquis de Sade, Hitler” serve to focus the attention of people who identify with someone who “exercised absolute power”. (Hickok hardly fits here.) The Professor says they are hardly going to base a fad around a “gunman or great sadist of the past”. 

Various other historical figures are proposed and rejected for various reasons: Wyatt Earp, Daniel Boone, and J.E.B. Stuart. Doolittle asks Jimmy if he has any of those good ideas his wife Irene claims Doolittle Research is “milking”. Well, Irene actually has an idea. The Professor tells Jimmy he’s supposed to keep this project secret. The public must think this fad is spontaneous.  Jimmy says he discusses all his work with Irene. She’s a psychologist too and a very good one. She suggests Joan of Arc. 

The idea is kicked around. It has merits. Joan of Arc is a military figure. She would appeal to women who “spend eighty per cent of the average family income”. She was a martyr and virgin so free from scandal. Toy swords could be sold and another movie made about her. Maybe it could feature an ahistorical love affair with the Dauphin. (One of the constant jokes of the story is how the young psychologists drop historical references neither Witherson, the Professor, or other ad men get.)

The next scene has the scheme proceeding. There will be various Joan of Arc games pitched at various levels of income, intellect, and age. (The most expensive will be called Jeanne d’Arc.) Travel packages to sites associated with Joan will be created. Toy swords will be sold. 

A representative from United Travel brings up the first sign of trouble. It was thought their tours would just hit a few high spots associated with Joan of Arc and then shuffle tourists off to Paris for shopping. However, people have expressed the desire to really dig into the details of Joan’s life and go to several sites associated with her and attend lectures about her in the Sorbonne. Dr. Irene Frankle is now head of the Jeanne d’Arc Clubs. Irene, incidentally, thinks organizations like this “syndicate” are destroying the country. They

manipulate human motivations and desires and develop a need for products with which the public has previously been unfamiliar, perhaps even undesirous of purchasing. She thinks that’s ultimately turning the country into a nation of idiots, besides wasting natural resources. 

The businessmen at the meeting are not amused, and the Professor placates them by saying Les is a highly trained man who draws from Durkhim (sociology), Korzybski (semanitics), and Whitehead (symbolic logic). (Another running joke through the story is how the Professor and Witherson habitually drop into conman jargon and then try to cover it up.) 

Biographies of Joan have been written and are best-sellers. Men have taken to wearing (because their wives bought them) doublets and hose. Corselet-like garments have started to be worn by women, reversing the trend toward more and more revealing women’s clothing. 

At the next meeting we learn that a French Vintner who sells “Jeanne d’Arc Lorraine wines”, champagne, and cognac. It turns out that many women in the Jeanne d’Arc Clubs work on magazine staffs and won’t take ads from companies that sell products throwing Joan of Arc in a bad light. We also learn that the women of Jeanne d’Arc Clubs have been breaking stuff in bars and liquor stores a la Carrie Nation. That was part of the attack on that vintner. United Consumers magazine (rather like Consumer Reports) gave the vinter bad ratings, and Irene requires all club members to subscribe to it. We learn Irene has been fixated on Joan the reformer since she was five. 

The fad booms with clothing and media sales. At the next full syndicate meeting, the Professor announces its time for the big score: taking over America’s biggest business. It’s here that AT&T is mentioned as a candidate, but the Professor means the government. They have to decide whom to sell the power and influence of the Joan of Arc fad to: the Republic Party or the Democratic Party. They’re going to auction off political influence like Didius auctioned off the Roman Empire says Jimmy. They’ll have to do deep interviews to determine what those “dizzy dames” in the Jeanne d’Arc Clubs want in a politician. The scene ends with Les ominiously saying Irene won’t like this. 

The next scene has Witherson showing up in a copter-cab at Doolittle Research which is surrounded by a mob of Jeanne d’Arc Club protestors with swords and corselets. They are even attacking the building. 

Inside, the Professor is yelling for the police to stop a mob trashing one of their tv stations. Well, says Ted, this mob isn’t just “juvenile delinquents”. There are some well-connected women in it. It turns out those swords, which were just supposed to be decorative, can be sharpened and are quite useful. When Les says Irene didn’t think decorative swords were practical, the Professor tells him he doesn’t want to hear about Irene ever again. Jimmy says the country is undergoing a revolution. Witherson, whom the Professor has always thought bad “in the clutch”, says the Professor hasn’t been “cooling off these marks the way we shoulda”. Les says it’s been almost a century since women had a mass movement they could get behind. The last one was the suffragette movement. 

Jimmy says women with a “cause complex” could always go into politics. But Irene says, according to Les, that they were never much of a fan about ordinary politics because they didn’t understand them very well. To which Ted says, “Neither have men.” Ted explains the Joan of Arc movement appealed to them because they could understand how they were manipulated into spending money on items they didn’t really need and were sold a lot of unnecessary status symbols. Joan of Arc was a reformer and noncomformist who rebelled against her own society.  Women could emulate her. The crowd gets bigger outside. 

The Professor roars that his three assistants sold him out. They should have seen this all coming eight months ago. Well, says Les, they kind of did. As for being fired, the Saint Joan Democratic-Republican Party has already hired them. How could they do this, asks the Professor? They were part of his team. Not really, says Ted. The Professor just hired their brains, not their loyalty. They figured out what a Joan of Arc fad would lead to. They didn’t tell the Professor because the whole thing fascinated them. They just took a job with Doolittle because they found “the working mechanics of your organization” fascinating. Now it’s coming apart. 

When asked how the they got rid of the original Joan of Arc, Doolittle is told she was burned at the stake – which probably isn’t going to work to end the movement this time. Seeing the game is up, Witherson follows the Professor to his customary bolt hole. It’s time to go on the lam.  Again. The Professor has money stashed and a hideout apartment. They’ll disguise themselves there, slip over to Canada, and take a flight to Spain or Switzerland. But that scheme is undone when Witherson, habitually dropping a slug into the auto-cab, doesn’t get away with it this time and is arrested. 

It’s an enjoyable story though perhaps less relevant today. The fragmentation of social media makes mass ad campaigns harder.  On the other hand, there are more “influencers” to use.  The story seems to get the whole idea of women participating in mass political movements wrong in the years since 1965. Of course, the waste of advertising, multiple versions of the same product, and the attendent malinvestments caused are old leftist critiques of capitalism. They are valid depictions of one side of the ledger, but, yet, the other side of the ledger and the historical record indicate that the economic system they are embedded in still manages to produce a higher standard of living than the alternative.

Essentially, before chaos theory, Reynolds imagines a capitalist economy becomes a chaotic system and the trivial incident of Marvin Sellers in Tucson, Arizona deciding to return his new deep freezer triggers a serious depression.

And, no, economists don’t really understand what causes a depression or recessions in capitalist economies. If they did, there wouldn’t be economic downturns catching investors and governments by surprise. You can go the idealogical route and complain about the role of fiat currencies, government intervention and spending, and central bankers. They don’t adequately explain, say, the Panic of 1873. If you really believe economics is a science (I don’t), why wouldn’t reversing the inputs and giving Sellers some money end a depression? (That money comes from the last few pounds of gold in Fort Knox – another unexpected contemporary resonance to this story are calls to physically audit the gold in Fort Knox.)

Weigand Dennis, Presidential Advisor, says depressions are the opposite of booms and describes a hypothetical boom. It starts with an uptick in business with more demand and more wealth.  That draws both investment and malinvestments (here people starting up businesses they really don’t know much about). No free market economist that I know of argues that capitalism can avoid recessions and depressions. Malinvestments and speculative fevers are inherent to capitalism, the inevitable product of human psychology – the same psychology we’re told makes capitalism the best system. Even libertarians argue that recessions and depressions should be allowed without government intervention, not that they aren’t inevitable. This story is dated not only in its reference to gold backed money but its lack of private credit markets which have developed since it was published. That would involve firms like Black Rock which just told its investors that the collateral and wealth it reported doesn’t really exist.

The character of Old Gramps here serves as Reynolds voice. Reynolds, born in 1917, would have been of age to observe to the Great Depression. He goes on about how people are less financially prudent (eating out more, buying more cars) than they should be and survival tips (like selling apples) he learned in the Depression. 

So what’s the story?

We open with Marvin Sellers, after reviewing the household budget, deciding to return the new pink deep freeze purchased on credit. (The old, white deep freezer still works, but Mrs. Phoebe Sellers wanted a more fashionable color which ties into “Fad”.) The Sellers are already making payments on their house, furniture, a swimming pool, and their last vacation.

The appliance company owned by Jim Withers takes the freezer back, but he’s already overstocked. He calls up his wholesaler and cancels orders for more applicances. Then he calls up Bill Waters and cancels his order for a new hovercraft. 

Waters calls up his Detroit supplier and reduces his monthly shipments. He also calls up and cancels the new house being built for him. We then see Marvin Sellers, a bricklayer, laid off from his job (presumably because Waters cancelled his house). When he announces it, Phoebe says they won’t be going to Periwinkle’s restaurant tonight. 

We next see June Periwinkle at her broker, Norman Foxbeater. She wants to withdraw her investments. Foxbeater tells her that it’s risky to withdraw her investments and put them in her business, but she is resolute.

Foxbeater talks to his older associate Mortimer Foder. Foxbeater thinks they should liquidate their business for Swiss gold. His intuition tells him things are going to get worse. Foder doesn’t agree. Foxbeater goes on and says he was talking to real estate developer Frank Wesley. He mentions the downturn in business after Waters cancelled the building of a big house. Foxbeater goes on about all the little shops in town that now have sale or rent signs. Foder asks if he’s afraid of inflation. No, says Foxbeater. He’s afraid of deflation. They can liquidate and buy back in at lower places. However, if they are going to liquidate, they should do it now. More people are going to be withdrawing their investments. 

Foder had planned to retire and turn things over to Foxbeater. Well, says the younger man, he can still do that. He could handle running the business. Foder thinks he still needs some supervision. Well, a quick decision is necessary. 

After Foxbeater leaves, Foder calls Seaforth Shipbuilders and cancels his yacht order. Peter Fielding, owner of Seaforth, shuts down production of yachts and lays his workers off. He also cancels his order for a new mini-jet. 

The President and Dennis enter the story here. The President asks Dennis about these reports from Cleveland about “soup kitchens”. He doesn’t know what they are. (He’s not very bright – just telegenic and possessing an eidetic memory for anyone he’s shaken hands with. Dennis will have to explain a lot of historical stuff just as Gramps does.) It seems that the demand for soup kitchens has gone up. Cleveland delivers meals to homes. There are complaints about the food offered. “Weight conscious” citizens are demanding “low-carbohydrate, high protein” food. The city is running out of money and wants federal aid.

 The President is upset. The U.S. is already spending a lot of money “liberating Mozambique, containing Finland, and considering a police action in the Antarctic”. The unemployed “drove” on the Cleveland City Hall because people don’t march on city hall any more. They drive their cars there. 

The President asks what’s going on. It’s a depression. What’s a depresison? Well, Dennis has been reading up. They used to be called a Panic or Bust but the less negative term of “Depression” was introduced. But, after the Great Depression, they were called “recessions” and then Readjustments or Rolling Readjustments. (I have seldome heard these last two.) Dennis then gives his explanation how they start. 

The President is upset that his “Far-Out Society” is threatened. He wants to know how to get out of the Depression, so Dennis goes into more history with the New Deal. 

He talks about the NRA which businessmen said didn’t stand for the National Recovery Act but Never Roosevelt Again. He then talks about some NRA policies like slaughtering hogs to drive the price up or dumping kerosene on potatoes. (My parents, alive during the Depression, have told me of personally seeing livestock slaughtered then and buried while people were hungry elsewhere.) “Juvenile delinquents” were put in the CCC and planted trees. (This rather undersells the Civilian Construction Corps’ accomplishments. In my part of the country, one can still find plenty of well-done CCC projects still in use.) Prohibition was ended for the tax revenue. 

The President says FDR sounds “drivel-happy”. Well, yes, but many people thought he was the greatest politician of all time, and he was elected four times. Ending a depression could be very popular. Dennis mentions FDR’s “brain trust” which the President decides he needs. 

We then swtich to Phoebe Sellers at the union hall. She’s been fired after working for an appliance company that manufactured consumer fripperies like the kind Withers sold. Phoebe suggests they sell their car. Marvin tells her the market for used cars is very depressed. 

We then switch Waters who has another cancelled car order because used cars are substantially cheaper now. We learn there’s a lot less chrome on new cars in order to lower the price. In fact, 5,000 people have been laid off in the “chrome industry”. Waters decides to close the dealership.  He’s going to take a job with his father-in-law as a delivery boy. 

We then see the brain trust meeting with Dennis and the President. An undetermined amount of time has passed. Here we get an illustration of the unintended effects of government intervention in the economy.  A program to improve roads has made trucking more efficient which resulted in laid off truckers. Building dams led to a temporary boost in employment. But then crop prices fell because of more arable land. More power generation decreased electricity prices which resulted in laid off “nuclear power workers”. As proof there’s no such as a bad economy for everyone, Bull Durham sales for loose tobacco have gone up. 

We learn that there has been a very large demobilization of the military (a Yale economist groans so there doesn’t seem much of a co-ordinated policy coming out of the brain trust) but that means a spike in unemployment. In fact, history is repeating with a veteran march on Washington D.C..  Increased tariffs led to a trade war with Common Europe which has hurt the balance of trade.  Also America is dependent on copper, oil, iron, and tin imports. The gold reserve at Fort Know is getting low.

We then go to the Sellers who are moving in with Phoebe’ parents, Gramps in tow. They’ll try to sell their house and go on relief “like everyone else”. Gramps gets out his old “apples for sale” sign – price updated.

After another meeting of the brain trust, the President talks alone to Dennis. He’s not happy with the brain trust’s advice. Half of all government workers have been fired. (Ten million more unemployed from that.) Reference is made to FDR having cotton fields plowed under. The brain trust wants to put oil back in the wells. Fort Knox is almost empty. The space program will be canceled. Too bad about those eight people on the moon. They’ll build a monument to them.  Foreshadowing Jimmy Carter, the thermostat is set low in the White House, and the President is wearing itchy underwear. Relations with Cuba will be normalized to placate the populace with cheap cigars. 

Dennis says he has an idea. He goes to a government office and asks them to collate some data for him. As an incentive, he reminds him they could be laid off like the Air Force was yesterday.

Dennis, with the information he gets, goes with two Secret Service agents for a very confidential meeting with just Marvin Sellers. He gives Sellers some money to use as a one-man stimulus program (secret so as to make it seem like the economy is recovering naturally – got to placate those “animal spirits”.) We learn Monaco, for sentimental sake (i.e. Princess Grace) is willing to lend the U.S. some money. 

Marvin buys back is car – paying $500 more than he sold it for – from the man he sold it for. That man, Bennington, orders (paying cash) from Waters. Marvin orders a new deep freeze from Withers and a “nuclear martini stirrer”. Foxbeater is surprised to see Periwinke’s restaurant is still opens. It seems business is better. Marvin Sellers is there along with Bennington and Waters.  Perriwinkle lies in saying business is always this good, but she also asks Foxbeater about investing some money. Foxbeater tells Foder it’s time to get their money out of Switzerland and open back up. Foder thinks now would be a good time to get a yacht built very cheaply. Phoebe Sellars says her company is hiring her back since business has picked up. Marvin has a job again.

Gramps groans

Back to the rat race. . . .They ain’t making them like they used to. In the old days, a depression was good to last for night onto ten years.

The final scene is with the President. Things are looking up. He can get back to the Far-Out Society and start that Antarctic police action going again and take the fleet out of mothballs and stop melting ships down. The final line is the President wondering how those people on the moon are doing.

Is ending a depression this way ludicrous? Sure. There’s a lot of play – for good and ill – in a free market economy and a pinpoint intervention like this being effective is pretty improbable. Then again, there’s not a lot of agreement among economic historians what does end a depression. I like this story because Reynolds’ makes the point that economic calamities are inevitable in a free market economy and that real government interventions, like the New Deal, can also be ludicrous.