3A and Bernard Baruch

Bernard Baruch with JFK

The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny is so damned slippery. “It is slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly.

There will probably never be a consensus about it—how it works, what it does, what it says. The book overloads the mind. It arrests thought. It does so deliberately, aggressively. That is why serious Lafferty readers should think hard about it rather than settle for confusion as an endpoint. Aggressive Lafferty is interesting Lafferty. Most of Lafferty’s best contemporary readers recognize the novella’s strange power; no one has done much with it. Read a lot of Lafferty, and you know it is important.

Moreover, what has been done has been wrong. Frequently, is a hard thing to know that an interpretation is wrong (that is, in error) rather than being unsound or in bad taste. Most interpretation doesn’t work on the right-wrong track. Most people who opine on books are poisoners, not throat cutters. But it can be wrong about 3A in the way Coleridge was wrong that Shakespeare never revised his plays; wrong in the way Tory critics were wrong who thought Keats just had bad grammar. Thinking 3A is politically innocent is wrong. A few people now seem to recognize this. Maybe only a little. There are progressive ideas in it about race. In that sense, Lafferty’s book about the dangers of consensus reality succeeded: there has been little consensus about 3A, and almost no one says anything insightful about it.

So, where to start? Probably by spending some time with the book’s alternate-history timeline. I think we should consider the role Bernard Baruch plays in Lafferty’s alternative 20th-century. The timeline is a grad course on what Lafferty loves and hates, and I have been thinking about the timeline on and off for a few months. It brazenly omits the Jewish Holocaust and then does something odd: it patches over those Jewish Holocaust years with an image of Bernard Baruch. After mentioning Baruch briefly in an online comment this week, it seems worth laying out why Baruch matters. To see how 3A plays its cards like Bob Hamman, look at how Lafferty sets up the first black president, Harold Standpipe, early in the novella and then uses the goodwill earned to insulate what it does with Baruch. Several people have approved of Lafferty and Standpioe. No one has mentioned Baruch, probably because they have not noticed. That is what the old ladies at the bridge table call a good play. The last American president mentioned in the book is a native American.

A minimal test for an adequate interpretation of 3A will be to explain why the American president during the Holocaust-that-never-happened affair was Jewish; more importantly, why he was one Jew in particular. It will then need to connect those facts to the reparations satire that becomes so important late in the novella. I believe that Lafferty is being exceptionally pissy here, implying that Baruch was a corrupting influence behind both the Democrats and the Republicans.

Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870–1965) was an influential American financier and statesman who served for decades as an informal but powerful advisor to multiple U.S. presidents. He is exactly the kind of figure for whom the term éminence grise exists. After making a killing on the New York Stock Exchange, he left Wall Street during World War I to help direct the nation’s economic mobilization as chairman of the War Industries Board. He later advised Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, contributing to the acceleration of war production and to policy formation both at home and abroad. After the war, Baruch remained at the center of geopolitics, representing the United States on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. The Cold War? Baruch coined the term in 1947.

Baruch had a nickname: “the Park Bench Statesman.” He got it because he often conducted his consultations not in offices or formal meetings, but seated on a bench in Lafayette Park across from the White House. There he met informally with officials, politicians, and presidents, turning the park bench itself into a symbol of his role as a trusted elder counselor operating outside the machinery of formal power. More than one commemorative bench has been dedicated in his honor, and he is the Baruch in Baruch College.

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