It Can't Happen Here [antikvár]

IThe handsome dining-room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.Here in Vermont the affair was not so picturesque as it might have been on the Western prairies. Oh, it had its points: there was a skit in which Medary Cole (grist mill and feed store) and Louis Rotenstern (custom tailoring pressing and cleaning) announced that they were those historic Vermonters, Brigham Young and Joseph Smith, and with their jokes about imaginary plural wives they got in ever so many funny digs at the ladies present. But the occasion was essentially serious. All of America was serious now, after the seven years of depression since 1929. It was just long enough after the War of 1914-18 for the young people who had been born in 1917 to be ready to go to college or to another war, almost any old war that might be handy.The features of this night among the Rotarians were nothing funny, at least not obviously funny, for they were the patriotic addresses of Brigadier-General Herbert Y. Edgeways, u.s.a. (ret.), who dealt angrily with the topic 'Peace through Defence Millions for Arms but Not One Cent for Tribute', and of Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch she who was no more renowned for her gallant anti-suffrage campaigning way back in 1919 than she was for having, during the Great War, kept the American soldiers entirely out of French cafés by the clever trick of sending them ten thousand sets of dominoes.Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent somewhat unappreciated effort to maintain the purity of the American Home by barring from the motion-picture9