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"Folks, I ain't askin' you to elect me to the United States Senate. I ain't got the high-toned eddication for the job to tell the truth. You all know me I'm jess a small town salesman with a smatterin' of law. All I know's how to keep my hands outa the other feller's pockets. . . ."
Statesman at Play & Work. In a graphically described roadhouse ("Around a corner an arch of stout knotty pine opened into a big living room lit from skulls of longhorn cattle with electric bulbs in them set in a row round the varnished log walls"), Crawford is seen at play in blue-striped pajamas with a statuesque torch singer. In time he acquires a semi-Fascist radio station, is surrounded by more & more sinister henchmen. It becomes Tyler's business to take the rap for Crawford before a Federal grand jury and to be publicly repudiated by the demagogue : "Ah, there was the unkindest cut of all, the stab in the back from a friend. . . ."
A belated letter from Brother Glenn, already dead in Spain, almost makes Tyler turn state's evidence. Caught between treachery to himself, to his boss and to the people at large, Tyler jumps wildly off the water wagon. He faces the rap, crying: "We can't sell out on the people, but the trouble is that me, I'm just as much the people as you are or any other son of a bitch. If we want to straighten the people out we've got to start with number one, not that big wind. . . . You know what I mean. I got to straighten myself out first, see. . . . Thinking hurts. . . ."
"The people," the book ends, "are you."
If Author Dos Passes had given clearer reasons why men of Tyler's intelligence work for the world's Chuck Crawfords; if he had shown behind his sharply observed surfaces more of the intricate counterpoint of political machinery in action; if he had made the danger implicit in Chuck's kind—and Tyler's—more edged and more explicit; if he had not skidded into regrettable Sandburg-&-ketchup prose poetry this could have been a much better book. Even as it stands, it is a clear, vivid warning and bracer to that man-in-the-street who makes or breaks democracies, seldom reads books, and is this book's ideal reader.
-Sample stanza: And every farmer in the land Up on his hind legs will stand And the laborer at his job And the soldier and the gob.