Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So their (his uncle’s and Ratliff’s little forlorn cell of unreconstructed purists) shock at the rumor that Clarence had contemplated for a moment taking over the American Legion in Mississippi was nothing to the one when they learned three years ago (Charles himself was not present; he had already departed from Yoknapatawpha County to begin training for his ten months in the German RO.W. camp) that the most potent political faction in the state, the faction which was sure to bring their man in as governor, had offered to run Clarence for lieutenant governor, and Clarence had declined. He gave no reason but then he didn’t need to because now all the county—not just Charles’s uncle’s little cell, but everybody—knew what Clarence’s aim, ambition was and had been all the time: Washington, Congress. Which was horror only among the catacombs behind the bestiarium; with everyone else it was triumph and exultation: who had already ridden Clarence’s coattails to the (comparatively) minor-league hog trough at Jackson and who saw now the clear path to that vast and limitless one in Washington.

And not just shock and horror, but dread and fear too of the man who had used the Ku Klux Klan while he needed it and then used their innocence to wreck the Klan when he no longer did, who was using the Bast Church as long as he believed it would serve him; who had used W.P.A. and N.R.A. and A.A.A. and C.C.C, and all the other agencies created in the dream or hope that people should not suffer or, if they must, at least suffer equally in times of crisis and fear; being either for them or against them as the political breeze indicated, since in the late thirties he turned against the party which had fathered them, ringing the halls which at least occasionally had echoed the voices of statesmen and humanitarians, with his own voice full of racial and religious and economic intolerance (once the strongest plank in his political creed had been soaking the rich; now the loudest one was the menace of organised labor), with nothing to intervene between him and Congress but that handful of innocents still capable of believing that evil could be destroyed simply because it was evil, whom Clarence didn’t even fear enough to stop sending them the cheap Christmas cards.

“Which wont be enough,” Charles’s uncle said, “as it never has been enough in the country, even if they could multiply themselves by the ten-thousand. Because he would only fool them again.”

“Maybe,” Ratliff said. (This was Charles’s Uncle Gavin telling him what had happened when he got back home in September after it was all over and whatever it was had licked Clarence, caused him to withdraw from the race, at old Will Varner’s annual picnic in July; this was back in April when his uncle and Ratliff were talking.) “What you need is to have the young folks back for at least a day or two between now and the seventeenth of next August. What a shame the folks that started this war and drafted all the young voters away never had sense enough to hold off at least long enough to keep Clarence Snopes outen Congress, aint it?”

“You need?” Charles’s uncle said. “What do you mean, you?”

“I thought you jest said how the old folks like you and me cant do nothing about Clarence but jest fold our hands and feel sorry,” Ratliff said.

“No more we can,” his uncle said. “Oh, there are enough of us. It was the ones of your and my age and generation who carried on the good work of getting things into the shape they’re in now. But it’s too late for us now. We cant now; maybe we’re just afraid to stick our necks out again. Or if not afraid, at least ashamed. No: not afraid: we are just too old. Call it just tired, too tired to be afraid any longer of losing. Just to hate evil is not enough. You—somebody—has got to do something about it. Only now it will have to be somebody else, and even if the Japs should quit too before the August primary, there still wont be enough somebody elses here. Because it wont be us.”

“Maybe,” Ratliff said. And his uncle was right. And then, maybe Ratliff was right too. One of the first to announce for the race to challenge Clarence from the district was a member of his uncle’s somebody elses—a man from the opposite end of the district, who was no older than Charles: only—as Charles put it—braver. He announced for Congress even before Clarence did. The election for Congress wouldn’t be until next year, 1946, so there was plenty of time. But then, Clarence always did it this way: waited until the other candidate or candidates had announced and committed or anyway indicated what their platforms would be. And Clarence had taught Yoknapatawpha County to know why: that by waiting to be the last, he didn’t even need to invent a platform because by that time his chief, most dangerous opponent had supplied him with one. As happened now, Clarence using this one in his turn, using his valor as an instrument to defeat him with.