American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (7 page)

  “That’s right, friends. This here was supposed to be a white man’s country, but do the Whigs care about that? Not likely! Thanks to them, we’ve got niggers who can vote, niggers who can serve on juries, niggers who don’t have to show passbooks to anybody. That’d be bad enough if they’d put the coons in the Army so we could win the war. But they put ’em in,
and we lost anyways
. And then the Whigs went out and won the next election even so. Maybe some of you all see the sense in that. I tell you frankly, I don’t.”

  He went on till the engineer signaled it was time to wind down, and ended as the man drew a finger across his throat. When he walked out of the studio, his shirt was as sweaty as if he’d spoken before a crowd of thousands. Saul Goldman came up and shook his hand. “Very good speech,” the Jew said.

  “Very good indeed.”

  “I will be damned,” Featherston said. “I think you really mean it. You’re not making fun of me.” Goldman nodded. Jake asked the obvious question: “How come?”

  “I’ll tell you.” Goldman had . . . not an accent, but the ghost of one, barely enough to suggest his parents would have spoken differently. “Anywhere else, when things go wrong, what do they do? They blame the Jews. Here, you blame the colored people. I am a Jew, a Jew in a country where things went wrong, and no one wants to kill me on account of it. Shouldn’t I be grateful?” Jake had never been much for seeing the other fellow’s point of view, but he did this time. “Well, well,” he said. “Isn’t that interesting?”

 
P
art of Colonel Irving Morrell—and the bigger part, at that—wanted to be back at Fort Leavenworth, making barrels larger and stronger and better. Part of him, but not all. The rest, the part that was a student of war rather than a combat soldier, found a lot to interest it back at the General Staff. Quite a few things crossed his desk that never made it into the newspapers.

  He showed one of them to Lieutenant Colonel John Abell, asking, “Is this true?”

  “Let me read through it first,” Abell said. General Liggett’s adjutant was thin and pale and almost sweatless, a pure student of war. Though probably brave enough, he would have been out of place on anything so untidy as a real battlefield. He and Morrell didn’t much like each other, but over the years they’d developed a wary respect for each other’s abilities. He took his own sweet time reading the report, then gave a judicious nod. “Yes, this ties in with some other things I’ve seen. I believe it’s credible.”

  “The Turks really are massacring every Armenian they can get their hands on?” Morrell asked. Abell nodded again. Morrell took back the typewritten report, saying, “That’s terrible! What can we do about it?”

  “We, as in the United States?” Abell asked, precise as usual. Morrell gave him an impatient nod. He said, “As best I can see, Colonel, nothing. What influence can we bring to bear in that part of the world?” Morrell grimaced and grunted. His colleague was all too likely to be right. He’d had to find Armenia on a map before fully understanding the report he’d received. How many Americans would even have known where to look? The distant land at the edge of the Caucasus might have been lost among the mountains of the moon, as far as most people were concerned. With the best will in the world, the Navy couldn’t do a thing. And as for sending soldiers across a Russia whose civil strife looked eternal . . . The idea was absurd, and he knew it.

  He tried a different tack: “Can Kaiser Bill do anything? When Germany spits, the Turks start swimming.

  And the Armenians are Christians, after all.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Abell started to say something, then let out his breath without a word. A moment later, after sending Morrell a thoughtful look, he said, “May I speak frankly, Colonel?”

  “When have I ever stopped you?” Morrell asked in turn.

  “A point,” Abell admitted. “All right, then. There are times when you give the impression of being a man whose only solution to a problem is to hit something, and to keep hitting it till it falls over.”

  “Teddy Roosevelt spent a lot of time talking about the big stick, Lieutenant Colonel,” Morrell said. “As far as I can see, he had a pretty good point.”

  John Abell looked distinctly pained. Sniffing, he said, “Our former president, however gifted, was
not
a General Staff officer, nor did he think like one. Which brings me back to what I was saying—you often give that same bull-moose impression, and then you turn around and come up with something not only clever but subtle. That might be worth pursuing. It would have to go through the State Department, of course.”

  Morrell grunted again. “And why should the boys in the cutaways and the striped trousers pay any attention to us green-gray types?”

  For once, Abell’s answering smile was sympathetic. The United States were one of the two most powerful countries in the world these days, sure enough. Very often, the American diplomatic corps behaved as if the U.S. Army had had nothing to do with that. Such a supercilious attitude infuriated Morrell. Of course, his fury mattered not at all; had people in the State Department known of it, it would more likely have amused them than anything else.

  Abell said, “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Please.”

  “If it were I,” the brainy lieutenant colonel said, flaunting his grammatical accuracy, “I would draft a memorandum on the subject, send it to General Liggett, and hope he could get it to the secretary of war or one of his assistants. Being civilians, they have a better chance than we of getting the diplomats to notice the paper.”

  “That’s . . . not bad, Lieutenant Colonel,” Morrell said. Abell hadn’t even tried to steal the idea for himself, and he had Liggett’s ear. Though it wasn’t obvious at first glance, he could be useful. Morrell chuckled.
He probably thinks the same about me.
 He went on, “I’ll take care of it right away. Thanks.”

  “Always glad to be of service, sir.” Now Abell sounded as coolly ironic as usual.

  When Morrell spoke that evening of what he’d done during the day, his wife nodded vigorous approval.

  “I hope something comes of it, Irv,” Agnes Morrell said. “Hasn’t this poor, sorry world seen enough killing these past few years?”

  “Well, I think so,” Morrell answered. “You won’t find many soldiers singing the praises of murder, you know.”

  “Of course I know that,” Agnes told him, more than a little indignantly. She was in her early thirties, not far from his own age, and had been another soldier’s widow before meeting him at a dance back in Leavenworth. She had brown eyes; her black hair, these days, was cut short in what the fashion magazines called a shingle bob. It was all the rage at the moment. Morrell didn’t think it quite suited his wife, but didn’t intend to tell her so. As far as he could see, such things were her business, not his. She went on, “Supper will be ready in a few minutes.”

  “Smells good.” Morrell’s nostrils flared. Compared to some of the things he’d eaten in Sonora and the Canadian Rockies and Kentucky and Tennessee, it smelled very good indeed. “What is it?” Back on the battlefield, there’d been plenty of times he hadn’t wanted to know. Horse? Donkey? Cat? Buzzard? He couldn’t prove it, which meant he didn’t have to think about it . . . too often.

  “Chicken stew with dumplings and carrots,” Agnes said. “That’s the way you like it, isn’t it?” Spit flooded his mouth as he nodded. “I knew I married you for a couple of reasons,” he said.

  “A couple of reasons?” Her eyebrows, plucked thin, flew up in mock surprise. “What on earth could the other one be?”

  He walked over to her and let his hand rest lightly on her belly for a moment. “We’ll find out if it’s a boy or a girl sooner than we think.”

  “It won’t be tomorrow,” Agnes reminded him. She’d been sure she was in a family way for only a few weeks. There wasn’t much doubt any more; not only had her time of the month twice failed to come, but she was perpetually sleepy. And she had trouble keeping food down. She gave Irving Morrell a much bigger helping than she took for herself, and she ate warily.

  When they undressed for bed that night, he used a forefinger to follow the new tracery of blue veins that had sprung out on Agnes’ breasts. She gave him a mischievous smile. “All those veins probably remind you of the rivers on a campaign map.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have thought of it just that way,” Morrell answered, cupping her breast in the palm of her hand. “What sort of campaign did you have in mind, honey?”

  “Oh, I expect you’ll think of something,” she answered. He squeezed, gently—but not quite gently enough. The corners of her mouth turned down. “They’re sore. People say you get over that, but I haven’t yet.”

  He tried to be more careful, and evidently succeeded, for things went on from there. When they’d progressed a good deal further, Agnes climbed on top of him. The idea had startled him when she first proposed it; he’d always thought a man belonged in the saddle. But she didn’t have his weight on her tender breasts this way—and, he’d discovered, it was fine no matter who went where.

  A couple of days later, he got called to General Hunter Liggett’s office. With General Liggett was a tall, long-faced man five or ten years older than Morrell. “Colonel, I’d like to introduce you to Mr. N. Mattoon Thomas, the assistant secretary of war.”

  “Pleased to meet you, sir.” Morrell lied without hesitation. Thomas was the man who’d gone up to Canada to put General Custer out to pasture. Morrell still didn’t know if Custer was a good general. He had his doubts, in fact. But Custer had turned a whole great assault column of barrels loose against the CSA, and Morrell had ridden a barrel at the head of that column. Without the breakthroughs they’d won, the Great War might still be going on.

  “Likewise, Colonel. I’m very glad to meet you.” N. Mattoon Thomas was probably lying, too. In the Army, it was an axiom of faith that the Socialists wanted to get rid of everything that had let the USA win the war. That Thomas had forced George Custer into retirement didn’t speak well for him, not in Morrell’s eyes.

  Hunter Liggett said, “Colonel, I passed your memorandum on the unfortunate situation in Armenia to the assistant secretary here, in the hope that he might send it on to the Department of State.”

  “A very perceptive document,” Thomas said. “I dare hope it will do some good, although one never knows. Very perceptive indeed.” He studied Morrell as an entomologist might study a new species of beetle. “I should hardly have expected such a thing from a soldier.” Morrell gave him a smile that was all sharp teeth. “Sorry, sir. We don’t gas grandmothers and burn babies all the time.”

  Silence slammed down in General Liggett’s office. The head of the General Staff broke it, saying, “What Colonel Morrell meant, sir, was—”

  “I know perfectly well what Colonel Morrell meant,” Thomas said, his voice cold as the middle of a meat locker. “He resents my party for telling him he may not play with big iron toys forever and tell the American people, ‘Hang the expense! We may need these one day.’ I wear his resentment as a badge of honor.” He gave Morrell a nod that was almost a bow. “And what have you got to say about that, Colonel? You seem in an outspoken mood today.”

  “I’ve never said, ‘Hang the expense,’ sir,” Morrell answered. “But we
may
need better barrels one day, and they
aren’t
toys. If your party thinks what we do is play, why not get rid of the Army altogether, and the Navy, too?”

  Before Thomas could reply, the telephone on General Liggett’s desk rang. He snatched it up.

  “Confound it, you know what sort of meeting I’m in,” he snapped, from which Morrell concluded he was talking to Lieutenant Colonel Abell in the outer office. But then Liggett said, “What? What’s that?” Color drained from his face, leaving it corpse-yellow. “Dear God in heaven,” he whispered, and hung up.

  “What is it?” Morrell and N. Mattoon Thomas said the same thing at the same time.

  General Liggett stared blindly from one of them to the other. Tears glistened in his eyes. All at once, he looked like an old, old man. “Teddy Roosevelt is dead,” he said, sounding as stunned and disbelieving as a shell-shocked soldier. “He was playing a round of golf outside Syracuse, and he fell over, and he didn’t get up. Cerebral hemorrhage, they think.”

  “Oh, my God.” Again, Morrell and Thomas spoke together. Thomas might be a Socialist, but Theodore Roosevelt had been a mighty force in the United States for more than forty years. No one, regardless of party, could be indifferent to that.

  So far Morrell thought, and no further. Then what he’d just heard really hit him. To his amazement and shame and dismay, he began to weep. A moment later, blurrily, he saw tears running down the faces of Hunter Liggett and N. Mattoon Thomas, too.

 
C
ongresswoman Flora Blackford should have been packing for the trip from Philadelphia to Chicago, for the Socialist Party’s nominating convention. President Upton Sinclair would surely get his party’s nod for a second term: the Socialists’ first president, elected almost forty years after the modern Socialist Party began in Chicago, when in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War Abraham Lincoln led the Republican left wing out of one organization and into another.

  Yes, the presidential nomination was a foregone conclusion. The vice presidency? Flora smiled to herself. The vice presidency was a forgone conclusion, too. Nothing in the world, as far as she could see, would keep Hosea Blackford, her husband, from getting the nomination again. And then, in 1928 . . .

  He’d once said he didn’t expect to get the nod for the top of the ticket then. Maybe, though, maybe he was wrong.

  Such things were what she should have been thinking about—what she had been thinking about up till a few days before. Now she put her most somber clothes into a suitcase. She wouldn’t be going to Chicago, not yet, and neither would her husband. She’d always wanted to visit the city where the modern Party was born, and she would—but not yet. Instead, she packed for the short trip down to Washington, D.C., for the funeral of Theodore Roosevelt.