In the movie The Lady Vanishes, a young woman meets and befriends an older woman aboard a train. When the young woman later seeks out her new-found friend after receiving a bump on her head, suddenly the old woman is nowhere to be found. Worse, no one on the train admits to having seen such a woman at all. People the young woman knew had seen her friend suddenly say she must have imagined it all.
It turns out each of the people on the train has a reason for not admitting to having seen the old woman: a pair of sports fans are anxious to get to a football match, another man is having an affair and doesn’t want to involve himself in a police investigation, etc. The bottom line is, a group of people are willing to permit a woman to simply vanish without looking for her for purely individual and selfish reasons.
In the chapter, Jackson’s Arm, from The Iron Heel, a woman named Avis goes in search of the truth regarding the case of a worker who lost his arm in an industrial accident without receiving any compensation from the company he worked for. Avis is quite ensconced and comfortable in society and has no desire to discover a company her father has stock in is capable of treating a worker so unjustly. Surely there must have been something Jackson did wrong to not only be deprived of compensation for his lost arm but also fired from his job. Before she begins her investigation, she is told by the young revolutionary who has challenged her to seek the truth that those people who have helped prevent Jackson receive justice are all tied to the machine that profits from depriving him his due.
The lawyer who took Jackson’s case admitted that, had he won, he would have taken Jackson for all he was worth in order to escape his situation. But as it was, he never had any chance against the high-powered lawyers aligned against him. But, you see, he was tied to the machine by his children who were not prospering in the filthy neighborhood in which they lived.
The foreman was willing to speak in confidence to Avis that he thought Jackson should have won his case, though in court he testified against him. He too blamed his actions on his love for his family, saying “it wouldn't a-ben healthy," to speak the truth. He had worked at the mills since he was a child, gradually working his way up to a foreman position. To go against the company would be to surrender everything he had worked so hard for. Asked about how he was able to go against his own conscience and lie to keep Jackson from his rightful settlement, he says “"I'd let me soul an' body burn in everlastin' hell for them children of mine."
A further meeting with the supervisor at the mill says the same things as the foreman, adding that “It won't do you any good to repeat anything I've said. I'll deny it, and there are no witnesses. I'll deny every word of it; and if I have to, I'll do it under oath on the witness stand."
Returning to her revolutionary, she tells him, "He seems to have been badly treated. I—I—think some of his blood is dripping from our roof-beams."
And here she hits on a very important point. Of the people she has spoken to so far, they have each acted unjustly but for reasonable causes: the wellbeing of their families. Avis is the daughter of a college professor. Though far from being wealthy himself, he is nonetheless in a position to acquire a degree of wealth from the labor of others (i.e. he owns stock in the mill where Jackson worked). Whereas those further down the class system than he have no delusions about the wrongness of what they are forced to do, Avis and her father are detached from the reality of it enough that they can deny the wrongness of a system that abandons a worker who has lost his arm while reaching into a machine to try to save it from being wrecked.
When one does not directly see the ugliness of a system but instead sits in comfort because of it, it is far easier to justify it and even sanctify such a system. That is the role of those who sit between the upper class and the lower. This is where Avis and her father sit, and it is not easy for her to rip herself away from the illusions that have permitted her thus far to have a privileged life. As she sees how others are tied to the machine, she realizes too that she and her father are tied to it as well, and that if she pushes too far into unpleasant truths that it will harm their family as it would those who serve the machine below.
Avis finds herself in the position of Oedipus, determined to find the truth while sensing the pursuit will only bring about her ruin. Still, she presses on. She speaks with Colonel Ingram, the lawyer for the corporation, whose work prevented a payment to the injured party. He admits that Jackson was due compensation but that his professional duty was to argue on the side of the company. She asks him:
"Tell me," I said, "when one surrenders his personal feelings to his professional feelings, may not the action be defined as a sort of spiritual mayhem?" I did not get an answer. Colonel Ingram had ingloriously bolted, overturning a palm in his flight.
She next speaks to a young reporter for one of the papers that did not report on Jackson’s case. He is full of excuses for why the paper did not cover it, saying first of all that it was an editorial decision that did not involve him. He says, “I, myself, do not write untruthful things.” Implicit in the statement is that he is okay with staying silent on issues that might be important. Still more implied is the notion that one who is able to stay silent on important issues is not far from lying about them. Or rationalizing about them.
Lastly she interviews two of the major stockholders in the mill that has deprived Jackson of his due compensation. Of them, her revolutionary friend says “They were convinced that they were the saviours of society, and that it was they who made happiness for the many. And they drew pathetic pictures of what would be the sufferings of the working class were it not for the employment that they, and they alone, by their wisdom, provided for it…Like all the rest of humanity, (they) are tied to the machine, but they are so tied that they sit on top of it."
Avis describes them thus: “They talked in large ways of policy, and they identified policy and right. And to me they talked in fatherly ways, patronizing my youth and inexperience. They were the most hopeless of all I had encountered in my quest. They believed absolutely that their conduct was right. There was no question about it, no discussion.”
Wherever you are positioned in the machine, it is difficult to speak against it. Because whether your life is one of unceasing struggle or pampered ease, the machine is quick to discard the cog that is not serving it. And while those at the bottom recognize that their service is due to necessity, those tied to the top view it as beneficent. While those at the bottom see the injustice done to the many, those who sit on top see only the fineness of the machine, and can only imagine the suffering that occurs at the bottom of the machine to be due to the moral failings of those upon which the entire machinery rests. Too often, their attitudes trickle down to those who uphold them.
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