American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (43 page)

  And now, here stood Flora Blackford under that great statue with the gleaming sword. By the way she stood there, she said Remembrance—and the Democrats—spoke to yesterday’s worries, yesterday’s needs.
I’m going to talk about what you need to hear today—and tomorrow,
 she said without words, merely by standing there.

  “We’ve come a long way the past eight years,” she said, “but we’ve still got a long way to go. When President Sinclair was elected, you risked losing your job if you went out on strike. Some of you
had
lost your jobs. That can’t happen any more, thanks to the laws we’ve passed.” Chester Martin pounded his palms together. He’d fought company goons, and he’d fought the police who served as the big capitalists’ watchdogs and hunting hounds. Next to what he’d been through in the trenches, those brawls hadn’t been anything much. And if you weren’t willing to fight for what you wanted, did you really deserve to get it? He believed in the class struggle. He believed in it all the way down to his toes.

  When the applause died down a little, Vice President Blackford’s wife went on, “You know the Democrats never would have passed a bill like that, or like the one that gives workers the right to take leave without pay if there’s a baby in the family or someone takes sick and then get their jobs back. They were in power from 1884 to 1920, and they still behave as though it’s 1884.” That drew not only applause but whoops of laughter. It also fit in very well with what Chester had been thinking not long before. Flora Blackford continued, “And we tried to give you old-age insurance, too.

  We tried hard. But we couldn’t quite manage that, because the Democrats had enough men in the Senate to tie up the bill with a filibuster. We’ve got to elect more Socialists. Friends, comrades, the presidency is important, but it’s not enough, not by itself. We have to fight the forces of reaction wherever we find them. That’s what the class struggle is all about.”

  It wasn’t how Martin imagined the class struggle. He took the phrase literally. He’d broken enough heads in his time to have reason to take it literally. He’d taken his lumps, too; the real problem with the class struggle was that the capitalists and their lackeys fought back hard. But the idea of carrying the struggle even to the halls of Congress held a powerful appeal for him.

  “We don’t need the enormous Army and Navy we had before the Great War, the Army and Navy that ate up so much money and so much of our industry,” Flora said. “We’ve won the war. Now we can enjoy what we won. Factories can make goods for people, not for killing. We can spend our wealth on what
we
need, not on battleships and machine guns and barrels. We’ve fought our neighbors too many times. We can work toward living at peace with them now.” That drew more loud cheers. Chester joined in them, but more than a little halfheartedly. This was the part of the Socialist platform that still graveled him. Still, Flora Blackford expressed it well. Maybe the 1920s were so prosperous because less money was going into weapons and fortifications and more into people’s pockets. Maybe.

  “Hosea Blackford will take us on toward the middle of the twentieth century,” Flora declared. “Calvin Coolidge will drag us back into the nineteenth century. Which way do you want to go? The choice is yours—it’s in the people’s hands. I ask you not to turn your back on the future! I ask you to vote Socialist, to vote for Hosea Blackford for president and Hiram Johnson for vice president. Let Dakota and California show the rest of the country the way! Thank you!” More applause—thunderous applause. Rita said, “I can’t
wait
for November.”

  “Neither can I,” Chester agreed. That was how a good stump speech was supposed to work. It made the faithful eager. Men and women pushed forward, trying to get a word with Flora Blackford now that she’d come down off the platform. “Come on,” Martin told his wife, and did some pushing himself, wondering if the vice president’s wife would remember him.

  He didn’t really expect her to, and she didn’t, not when she looked at him. But when he shouted his name at her, she nodded. “You were David’s sergeant,” she said.

  “That’s right, ma’am.” Chester grinned and nodded. “And this is my wife, Rita.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Flora clasped Rita’s hand. “Will you vote for my husband on Election Day?”

  “I sure will,” Rita answered. “I was going to even before I heard you talk. But even if I’d been thinking about voting for the Democrats before, you would have made me change my mind.”

  “Thank you very much,” Flora Blackford said. “He needs all the votes he can get, believe me. We can’t take anything for granted. If we do, we’re liable to lose.”

  “We’d better not,” Chester Martin said. Before Vice President Blackford’s wife could answer, a fresh surge of people from behind pushed Rita and him away from her. Again, that was no surprise; he felt lucky to have talked with her at all. Turning to Rita, he asked, “What do you think?”

  “She’s honest,” Rita said at once. “If she is, it’s a good bet her husband is, too. And she knew who you were as soon as you told her your name. That was something.” She proudly took his arm. “You know important people.”

  He laughed. “Stick with me, kiddo, and I’ll take you to the top.” Rita laughed, too, but only for a moment. Then she sobered. “You really do know important people, Chester. That might turn out to be important one of these days. You never can tell.”

  “Maybe.” But Chester didn’t believe it, not down deep. “I don’t think Flora Blackford’s the sort of person you can use to pull strings. She was in Congress, remember, when her brother got conscripted, and she didn’t pull any for him. He could have had some soft, safe job behind the lines—typist or driver or something like that. He could have, but he didn’t. He went into the fighting, and he got shot. If she didn’t help David Hamburger, she’s not likely to help me.”

  “That depends on what you’d need to ask her,” Rita answered. “Like I said a minute ago, you never can tell.”

  Somebody stepped on Chester’s foot, hard. “Ow!” he said. In the crowd, he couldn’t even tell who’d done it. He pointed toward the trolley stop. “Let’s get out of here and go home before we get trampled.”

  “Suits me,” his wife said. “I’m glad we came, though. She made a good speech—and I found out what a special fellow I married.”

  Martin started to tell her he was just an ordinary guy. He started to, but he didn’t. If Rita wanted to think he was a special fellow, he didn’t mind a bit.

 
F
lora Blackford had waited out six elections to the House of Representatives. She’d been nervous every single time, though her New York City district was solidly Socialist and she’d had easy races after the first one. Now, for the first time since 1914, she wasn’t running for Congress—but she was more nervous than ever.

  Worrying about her husband’s race proved more wearing than worrying about her own ever had. She hadn’t been this anxious in 1924; she was sure of that. In 1924, Hosea Blackford hadn’t headed the ticket. It probably hadn’t won or lost because of anything he did.

  Things were different now. If they went as she hoped, her husband would become president of the United States next March. If they didn’t . . . No, she wouldn’t think about that.

  Telegraph sets clicked in their apartments. Phones jangled. Off in one corner, an announcer on a wireless set spewed out results. Flora and Hosea got any news that came in as fast as they would have at Socialist Party headquarters in Philadelphia. But the same longstanding tradition that kept a presidential nominee away from the convention till he’d been declared the candidate bound a presidential hopeful to find out whether he’d won or lost away from the people who’d done the most to help him.

  When Flora complained about that, her husband only shrugged. “It’s one of the rules of the game,” he said.

  “One of the rules of the game used to be that the Democrats won every four years,” Flora answered.

  “We’ve changed that. Why not the other?”

  Hosea Blackford looked surprised. “I just hadn’t thought about it. I did this in 1920. The two of us did it in ‘24. Maybe we will change things . . . four years from now.” She gave him a kiss. “I like that. You’re already starting to think about your second term, are you?”

  “I’d better worry about the first one, don’t you think?” he said.

  The wireless announcer said, “In Massachusetts, Governor Coolidge continues to pull away. He also leads comfortably in Vermont and Tennessee, and early returns from Kentucky show him with a strong lead there.”

 
  “Oy!”
 Flora said in dismay.

  Her husband took the news much more in stride than she did. “Massachusetts is Coolidge’s home state,” he said. “We’ve never done well anywhere in New England. And Kentucky is full of reactionaries.

  How could it be anything else, when it belonged to the Confederate States till the middle of the war?

  Wait till we start getting returns from the places where working people live, where they make things.” She nodded. She knew that as well as he did. Even so . . . “I don’t like losing anywhere,” she said.

  Hosea Blackford smiled. “That’s one of the reasons I’m so glad you’re on my side.” A man at one of the telephones called out, “Your lead in New York City just went up another twenty thousand votes, Mr. Vice President!” Flora smiled too—then. She finally had something to smile about.

  “Vice President Blackford’s large lead in New York City looks likely to carry the state for him, in spite of Governor Coolidge’s popularity in the upstate regions,” the commentator on the wireless declared.

  “Pennsylvania will probably be a closer race. The Socialists are strong in Pittsburgh, but Philadelphia is still a Democratic bastion.”

  “We have to have New York,” Flora murmured. “We have to.” The state had the biggest bloc of electoral votes in the USA: one out of every seven. Pennsylvania came next, but far behind. The Democrats could count as well as the Socialists. They’d campaigned hard in New York.
Let them
fall
short.
 In Flora’s mind, it was more than half a prayer.

  “New returns from Ohio,” a telegrapher said. “You’re up in Toledo, up in Cleveland, holding your own in Columbus, not doing so well in Cincinnati.”

  “About what we expected,” Blackford said. “What do the overall figures in the state look like?”

  “You’re up by . . . let me see . . . seventeen thousand,” the man answered after some quick work with pencil and paper.

  “Not bad for this early in the night,” Flora said.

  “No, not bad,” Hosea Blackford agreed. “Can’t say much more than that without knowing just where all those votes are coming from. But I’d rather be ahead than behind.” Flora nodded.

  Little by little, returns began trickling in from farther west. Indiana had long been a Socialist stronghold; Senator Debs had twice lost to Teddy Roosevelt as the Socialist Party’s standard-bearer. Hosea Blackford was well ahead there. Republicans remained strong in Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa—those three-cornered races wouldn’t be settled till the wee small hours. Like Indiana, Wisconsin was solidly in the Socialist camp.

  “We’re doing fine,” Flora said, and tried to make herself believe it.

  “Maybe I’m glad I’m here after all,” her husband said. “Looks like it’s going to be a long night. This way, I can just go back into the bedroom and sleep whenever I feel like it. And there aren’t any reporters yelling at me, either. I wouldn’t be able to hear myself think over at Party headquarters.”

  “I wish it didn’t look like a long night,” Flora said. “I wish we were sweeping the country, and we could declare victory as soon as the polls closed.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind that myself.” Hosea laughed. “The Democrats did it for one election after another. Maybe we will, too, somewhere down the line But we haven’t got there yet. This one’s going to be close.”

  Flora’s fists tightened till her nails bit into the palms of her hands. It wasn’t just that she wanted the Socialists to win Powel House and as many seats in the House and Senate as they could, though she did.

  She’d always wanted that, ever since becoming a Party activist before the Great War. But it felt secondary now. With her husband in the race, she wanted his triumph with an intensity that amazed her.

  A win tonight would cap a lifetime of service to the Socialist cause and to the country. Losing . . .

  Again, she refused to think about losing.

  Hosea Blackford didn’t. “If I win, we stay in Philadelphia,” he said. “If I lose, we go home. How would you like living way out West for a while?”

  “It’s beautiful country,” Flora answered, and then said the best thing she could for it: “Joshua would like growing up there.” Having said that, she went on, “It seems so . . . empty, though, to somebody who’s used to New York City or Philadelphia.”

  She’d enjoyed spending holidays in Dakota with her husband. The wide open spaces awed her, for a while. But towns and trains and civilization in general seemed a distinct afterthought there. She didn’t like that, not at all. To someone who’d grown up on the preposterously overcrowded Lower East Side, so many empty miles of prairie, relieved—if at all—only by a long line of telegraph poles shrinking toward an unbelievably distant horizon, felt more alarming than inspiring.

  Someone slammed down a telephone and let out a string of curses that ignored her presence in the room. “Kansas is going for Coolidge, God damn it,” he said.

  That made Flora want to curse, too. Hosea Blackford took it in stride. “Confederate raiders hit Kansas hard during the war,” he said. “They don’t love Socialists there; they’ve been Democrats since the Second Mexican War.”

  “Well, they can
geh kak afen yam
,” Flora said.

  Her husband chuckled; he knew what that Yiddish unpleasantry meant. “There’s no
yam
anywhere close to Kansas for them to
geh kak afen
,” he pointed out.