2

One might write a very intricate history of the idea of Rud in the world. Always there has been fantasy and falsification in the picture. To begin with, the circulation of his actual portrait was restricted. Instead of a confusing spray of photographs, two friendly studies of him in the pose of a thoughtful Beethoven established a visible personality for him. Later, when snapshots became frequent, these sketches dominated their interpretation. He would never allow himself to be photographed speaking. He had studied the self–exposures of Hitler and Mussolini very carefully, and there survives no portrait of him with his mouth open. Neither was there any legend of his early upbringing in circulation in those early years. "Never mind what I am or where I come from," was his response to the enquiring journalist. "It's what you are, and what you think, and whether what I say is right for you."

Millions of people did not know whether this Rud Whitlow they spoke of was English or American. Millions thought of him as a wise, secluded old gentleman. His white face had been noted and commented upon. In America there was a whispered legend that he was dying slowly of consumption. Another story gave him an unspecified disease in the marrow of his bones that inflicted the most frightful suffering upon him. Sometime, it was said, the surgeons had to saw open the marrow of a bone to relieve him. That gave him the support of many who otherwise might not have suffered his dominance. It was hard to envy a man who moved with pain and harsh to resist one who might be dead to–morrow. There were countless allusions to his tragic loneliness, and a number of religious ministers everywhere believed in and expatiated upon his intense "love of mankind". He hated cruelty, oppression, needless want and war, they said, and he not only hated them but he worked out the way of relief from all these things.

Men liked his radio voice. He had studied the best models. From Tierra del Fuego to Spitzbergen and from China to Peru, there was an expectation that the time for a not very clearly imagined world–wide crisis was drawing near, and that when Rud said "Go", the great day of the Common Man would dawn.

He knew how to arrest this otherwise unstanchable flow of informal warfare, more obviously aimless every year, that still distressed the world. He held the secret of World Peace and a Common Law. So they believed. The Common–sense of Things; the Common Law, the World in Common; these phrases had an effect of limitless release and enfranchisement from pole to pole.