In real life, his concerns were of a different order. The year he came down from Yale (where he could have been Bones but wouldn’t), he was worried about Foster and Ford and the Bonus Marchers and the Scottsboro Boys. He had also just taken a big gulp of Das Kapital and was going around telling people about how he felt afterwards. He would buttonhole a classmate after a few sets of tennis down at the old Fourteenth Street Armory. “You know, Al,” he would say, twisting his head upwards and to one side in the characteristic American gesture of a man who is giving a problem serious thought (the old salt or the grizzled Yankee farmer scanning the sky for weather indications), “you know, Al, I never thought so at college, but the Communists have something. Their methods over here are a little operatic, but you can’t get around their analysis of capitalism. I think the system is finished, and it’s up to us to be ready for the new thing when it comes.” And Al, or whoever it was, would be doubtful but impressed. He might even go home with a copy of the Communist Manifesto in his pocket—in that period, the little socialist classic enjoyed something of the popularity of the Reader’s Digest: it put the whole thing in a nutshell, let a fellow like Al know just what he was up against. Later that evening Al might remark to his wife that maybe it would be a good idea (didn’t she think?) to lay in a stock of durable consumers’ goods—in case, oh, in case of inflation, or revolution, or anything like that. His wife would interpret this in terms of cans and leave a big order for Heinz’s baked beans, Campbell’s tomato soup, and somebody else’s chicken à la king with the grocer the next day. This was the phenomenon known as the dissemination of ideas.