PRESIDENT
FU MANCHU, the eighth work in the Fu Manchu series, shows author Sax
Rohmer continuing his project to make the doctor’s schemes more
global in nature—and you don’t get much more global than the
villain trying to become the de facto President of the United States.
Naturally, this goal can only be accomplished through a political
pawn. Still, throughout the novel Fu’s subordinates call him “president,” and since they did not use that title in earlier
novels, the clear implication that Fu Manchu’s candidate will
reshape the world according to the doctor’s will, by harnessing the resources of the most powerful country on the planet.
As
BRIDE takes place entirely in France, all of PRESIDENT’s action
takes place in the U.S., though it takes Rohmer about thirty pages to
establish that the specific locale is New York. Smith is the only
native of Great Britain involved, as he’s given some special
dispensation to command various American agents. Most of the novel is
told through the POV of young agent Mark Hepburn, though some scenes
are told from the viewpoints of Fu’s agents. These include Moya
Adair, a young Irish widow (and the novel’s obligatory romantic
interest for the leading man), and a mysterious genius known as “the
Memory Man.” Neither character has been subjected to the
irreversible brainwashing chemicals seen in BRIDE, though Fu does
make use of more limited mind-wiping techniques. Fu and his
subordinates acknowledge that their resources are limited, in part
because of Nayland Smith’s dogged pursuit. At some point, however,
Fu must have managed to set up a gold-making operation like the one
destroyed in TRAIL, for he’s got enough money to fund a populist
organization, “the League of Good Americans,” to the end of
creating a political puppet to assume the Presidency.
The
apparent candidate of the League is an uncouth but charismatic
speaker named Harvey “Bluebeard” Bragg. The name by itself bears
slight resemblance to real-life populist demagogue Huey Long, and
it’s not impossible that Rohmer may have read another fictional
treatment of Long in Sinclair Lewis’s IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE,
published the year before PRESIDENT. Rohmer, however, does not devote
much time to Bragg’s character, for Fu’s long con involves using
the quasi-fascist demagogue to promote a different candidate, one
Salvaletti. This means that PRESIDENT beat out the main plot of
Richard Condon’s MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE by over twenty years. And in
addition to sorting out Fu’s primary plot, Nayland Snith must also
figure out why the doctor seeks to silence a priest, the Abbott
Donegal, who poses some obscure threat to the League of Good
Americans.
But
though PRESIDENT fully reporesents Rohmer’s commitment to more
extensive ploys, in one sense it feels more like the first three
novels, with their trope of “there’s a yellow or brown boogieman
under every English bed.” Rohmer’s novels of the 1930s ease off
this trope somewhat, and even allowed a couple of (very minor)
characters of color who didn’t turn out to be minions of the
Si-Fan. But early in the novel Smith meets one of Donegal’s
functionaries, James Richet, and later makes the following
extraordinary (even for 1936) pronouncement:
There’s color somewhere. I can’t place its exact shade.
And,
as it happens, Smith’s instincts are correct, for Rohmer tells the
reader that one of Richet’s ancestors was a “Kanaka” (i.e.,
Hawaiian-derived), as well as mentioning that Richet’s racial
heritage barred him from success in white society, leading him to
work for both criminal societies and eventually for the Si-Fan.
Rohmer wastes little time on this minor pawn, whom the devil-doctor
exterminates in the course of things. However, it wouldn’t be hard
to read the novel as a racist diatribe. The first three novels often
excoriated Asians by calling them “yellow,” but rarely used
epithets (with the exception ot the word “dago” in RETURN). I
counted six uses of the word “chink” in PRESIDENT, though I note
that all of these epithets are spoken by white Americans. This may
signify that Rohmer simply believed that Americans were more openly
impolite than his own people.
There
are, to be sure, some moments in which Rohmer seeks to stress that Fu
Manchu and his people do not represent all Asians, as when one
monologue asserts that “the Chinaman is a law-abiding citizen.”
And then there’s PRESIDENT’s “shady lady” Lola Dumas, who’s
attached to the retinues of both Bragg and Salvaletti. Lola is
apparently a major player in New York society, together with her
father Emmanuel, who “claimed… to be descended from the brilliant
quadroon who created the Three Musketeers” (i..e., Alexandre
Dumas). Unacceptable though the word “quadroon” may be today,
Rohmer seems to mean it only as a descriptive term, not least because
he’s extolling the writer’s genius. Later, Fu Manchu himself
seemingly confirms the legacy of these latter-day Dumas descendants,
when he meditates on Lola’s fitness to serve him:
She is amorous and she is compassionate—it is the Negroid strain…
Again,
these will sound like left-handed compliments to a modern ear, as
does Moya’s curious opinion that Lola reminds her of “a
beautiful, evil priestess of voodoo.” As it happens, it’s not
clear whether or not either Lola’s amorousness or compassion
renders her unfit for service to Fu Manchu, but he does choose to
replace her for a time with Moya Adair. Lola doesn’t play a big
role in the story. Her ultimate destiny is that she’s intended to
be First Lady to the puppet-President. One wonders if Rohmer may have
given American culture too much credit, to assume that voters of the
thirties would be okay with a First Lady who acknowledged Negroid
heritage.
Fu
has a more complicated relationship with Moya Adair. He suborns her
by kidnapping her young son Robbie and returning him to his mother on
the condition of her continued service. Yet when he visits Moya’s
home to give her orders, he’s friendly enough to the boy that the
child calls him “Yellow Uncle.” (Fu’s opinion of the name is
not recorded.) Yet, despite having every reason to despise the
doctor, she tells Hepburn that Fu Manchu “thinks on a plane which
we simply can’t understand.”
Because
Moya discharges her duties to the doctor without turning on him as do many of his other female pawns, Fu Manchu actually confesses a
certain human failing on his part, as well as taking her into his
confidence in a minor way:
I do not trust you—no woman is to be trusted in a world of men. Yet because I am a man too, and very lonely in this my last battle to crush what the West calls civilization—I will advance you one step further into my plans.
This
scene mirrors an earlier one in which Fu confers with his aged
comrade Sam Pak, who serves the doctor implicitly, but declines the
master’s invitation to join Fu in the state of agelessness. Without
overestimating Fu’s relationship with either Sam Pak or Moya, both
scenes depict Fu Manchu with a tragic air, a Tamerlane born in an era
that regards him as only a common felon. This may well explain why he
does not seek to impose brainwashing upon either his rebellious
daughter Fah Lo Suee or his runaway bride Fleurette: he wants willing
companions in his quest for a new world order. He knows that Moya is
not such a companion; that she only serves him under coercion. Yet,
in the novel’s most extraordinary scene, he personally utilizes his
great medical skills to save Moya’s young son from a diphtheria
infection, even though this deed of noblesse oblige places him in
danger of capture. Of course, being Fu Manchu, he escapes the law
with ridiculous ease, though in the final chapter he suffers yet
another equivocal death, this time being swept over Niagara Falls
while under attack by his more rebellious servant, the Memory Man.
As
for Fu’s master plan to co-opr the U.S. Presidency, the Abbot
Donegal, who disappears for most of the book, re-appears at the end
to reveal to the multitudes the true backer of the League of Good
Americans. Yet Donegal’s most telling strike may be his sabotage of
the celebrity marriage of Lola and Salvaletti, for in his big speech
the Abbot reveals that Salvaletti is both a de-frocked priest and a
man with a previous wife. Salvaletti then commits suicide, leaving
this reader with the impression that he’s the one who should’ve
been nicknamed “Bluebeard.”
PRESIDENT
FU MANCHU, though not one of Rohmer’s more engrossing thrillers,
may well be the closest he ever came to elaborating his beliefs about
race and culture. I don’t think it would have occurred to the
author to ameliorate readers hostile to his character via tokenism:
say, by giving Nayland Smith a brilliant young Chinese aide. Rather,
Rohmer’s overall view seems to be that of a later author’s idea
of an inevitable “clash of civilizations,” if one may extrapolate
from a passage in the next-to-last chapter:
…[the
sound] rose weirdly on the night, as though long-dead gods of the red
man, returning, lamented the conquest of the white.”
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