7 Apr 2026 12:54 pm
This use of a rural imaginary to pursue fascist aims also recalls Nathanael West’s biting satire of the Horatio Alger myth, A Cool Million (1934), written some seventy years before Roth’s novel. In that story, an American fascist party emerges during the Great Depression under a former president named Shagpoke Whipple who reemerges from retirement, touting the genius of the self-help myth. Shagpoke is all self-making without any moral scruples. He raises himself up from fame/infamy, all the while screwing everyone over in his midst as he builds his National Revolutionary Party. (His name implies a double screwing: shagging and poking.)
As he explains to the hapless, Candide-like hero of the book, Lemuel Pitkin, “The time for a new party with the old American principles was, I realized, overripe. [Shag’s infelicity with language is wonderfully comical. It’s overripe all right.] I decided to form it; and so the National Revolutionary Party, popularly known as the “Leather Shirts,” was born. The uniform of our “Storm Troops” is a coonskin cap like the one I am wearing, a deerskin shirt and a pair of moccasins. Our weapon is the squirrel rifle” (110).
Addressing a large crowd from a soapbox Shagpoke rails:
“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?”…
“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 Bolshevik labor unions, that’s why. It was those two agents that did the most to hinder American business and 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…
“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 all Bolshevik labor unions! We must purge our country of all alien elements and ideas that now infest her!
“America for Americans! Back to the principles of Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln!” (111-12)
The grade school use of the adverb there is just too much: “‘I’m a simple man,’ he said with great simplicity.” West just misses the Trumpian syntax: “If America is ever again to be great.” This would be even more terrifying for contemporary ears, but West takes no prisoners. He leaves no offensive stereotype unmined. The satire goes all the way down. It’s very much a product of its times.
https://s-usih.org/2016/12/the-plot-aga ... art-three/
As he explains to the hapless, Candide-like hero of the book, Lemuel Pitkin, “The time for a new party with the old American principles was, I realized, overripe. [Shag’s infelicity with language is wonderfully comical. It’s overripe all right.] I decided to form it; and so the National Revolutionary Party, popularly known as the “Leather Shirts,” was born. The uniform of our “Storm Troops” is a coonskin cap like the one I am wearing, a deerskin shirt and a pair of moccasins. Our weapon is the squirrel rifle” (110).
Addressing a large crowd from a soapbox Shagpoke rails:
“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?”…
“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 Bolshevik labor unions, that’s why. It was those two agents that did the most to hinder American business and 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…
“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 all Bolshevik labor unions! We must purge our country of all alien elements and ideas that now infest her!
“America for Americans! Back to the principles of Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln!” (111-12)
The grade school use of the adverb there is just too much: “‘I’m a simple man,’ he said with great simplicity.” West just misses the Trumpian syntax: “If America is ever again to be great.” This would be even more terrifying for contemporary ears, but West takes no prisoners. He leaves no offensive stereotype unmined. The satire goes all the way down. It’s very much a product of its times.
https://s-usih.org/2016/12/the-plot-aga ... art-three/