dwellers.

Each election saw another party in power, the sole demand of the voters
being for an administration capable of stopping the Grass. Since none
was successful, the dissatisfaction and anger grew together with the
panic and dislocation. Messiahs and fuehrers sprang up thickly. Riots in
all cities were daily occurrences, rating no more than obscure
paragraphs, while in many areas gangs of hoodlums actually maintained
themselves in power for weeks at a time, ruling their possessions like
feudal baronies and exacting tribute from all travelers through their
domain.

Immigration had long ago been stopped, but now the government, in order
to preserve what space was left for genuine Americans, canceled the
naturalization of all foreignborn and ordered them immediately deported.
All Jews who had been in the country less than three generations were
shipped to Palestine and the others deprived of political rights in
order to encourage them to leave also. The Negroes, who except for a
period less than a decade in length had never had any political or civil
rights, planned a mass migration to Africa, a project enthusiastically
spurred by such elder statesmen as the learned Maybank and the judicious
Rankin. This movement proved abortive when statisticians showed there
were not enough liquid assets among the colored population to pay a
profit on their transportation.

An attempt to oust all Catholics failed also, for the rather odd reason
that many of the minor Protestant sects joined in a body to oppose it.
The Latterday Saints--now busy building New Deseret in Central
Australia--and the Church of Christ, Scientist, as well as the
Episcopalians, Doweyites, Shakers, Christadelphians, and the
congregation of the Chapel of the Former and Latter Rains presented a
united front for tolerance and equity.

An astonishing byproduct of the national despair and turmoil was the
feverish activity in all fields of creative endeavor. Novels streamed
from the presses, volumes of poetry became substantial items on
publishers' lists and those which failed to find a publisher were
mimeographed and peddled to a receptive public, while painters working
with Renascence enthusiasm turned out great canvases as fast as their
brushes could spread the oils. We had suddenly become a nation madly
devoted to the arts. When Orpheus Crisodd's Devilgrass Symphony was
first played in Carnegie Hall an audience three times as great as that
admitted had