American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (74 page)

  And, when he set the coins and bills in front of his wife, she was delighted, too. “Will there be more tomorrow?” she asked hopefully.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “But you can bet I’m going to go back and find out.” He made sure he got to the construction site early. He didn’t get there early enough, though. By the time he came up, a couple of hundred men already clamored for work. Toledo cops did their best to keep order. Chester had played football against one of the policemen. “How about a break, pal?” he said.

  “Let me slide up toward the front? I could really use the job.” The cop shook his head. “Can’t do it,” he said. “Everybody else here is hungry, too. Playing favorites’d be worth my neck.”

  He was probably right. That made Martin no less bitter. Knowing he had no chance for work there, he went off to look for it somewhere else. He had no luck, not even when he offered to help a truck driver bring crates of vegetables into a store for a quarter.

  “No, thanks. I’ll do it myself,” the driver said. “If I give you a quarter, I lose money on the haulage.” He stacked more crates—all of them with fancy labels glued to one side—on a dolly and wheeled them into the grocery. When he came out again, he said, “You that hungry?”

  “Hell, yes,” Martin said without hesitation. “I’d do damn near anything for a real job again.”

  “You ought to go to California, then,” the driver said. “That’s where this stuff comes from, and they grow so goddamn much out there, they’re always looking for pickers and such. Weather’s a damn sight better than it is here, too.”

  “Probably doesn’t pay anything,” Chester said. “If it sounds so good, why aren’t you on your way yourself?”

  “Believe me, buddy, I’m thinking about it,” the truck driver said. “There are times when I don’t want to see another snowflake as long as I live, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Martin admitted. “I do. But California? It’s a hell of a long way, and who knows what things are really like out there?”

  “Only one way to find out.” The driver set more crates on the dolly. The spicy odors of oranges and lemons filled the air. They were, in their own way, better arguments than anything he could have said.

  “California,” Chester muttered as he went off to see what else he could scrounge in Toledo. Pickings were slim. Pickings, in fact, couldn’t have been any slimmer. Would they be any better on the far side of the country? He shrugged. Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe the right question was, how could they be worse?

 
U
p till now, Flora Blackford had never been to the West Coast. When she got off the train in Los Angeles, she was surprised to find it was ninety degrees in the second week of October. She was even more surprised to discover that ninety-degree weather could be pleasant, not the humid hell it would have been in New York City or Philadelphia or Washington—or Dakota, for that matter.

  She joined her husband on the platform at the station. President Blackford was smiling and shaking hands with well-wishers. “Four more years!” people chanted. Patriotic red-white-and-blue bunting was draped everywhere Socialist red bunting wasn’t.

  Vice President Hiram Johnson said, “Welcome to the Golden State, Mr. President. We’re doing everything we can to make sure we deliver the goods three weeks from now.”

  “Thanks very much, Hiram,” Hosea Blackford replied with a gracious smile. The two Socialist stalwarts stood side by side as photographers snapped pictures. Flora wondered what the captions to those pictures would say; the
Los Angeles Times
didn’t love the Socialist Party.

  “Your limousine is waiting, Mr. President—Mrs. Blackford.” Johnson suddenly seemed to remember that Flora existed.

  Escorted by police cars with wailing sirens, the limousine made its slow way from Remembrance Station to the Custer Hotel. The bright sunshine, the clear blue sky, and the palm trees made everything seem wonderful at first glance. The grinding despair of the business downturn might have been on the other side of the world, or at least on the other side of the United States.

  It might have been, but it wasn’t. Even in the couple of miles from the station to the hotel, Flora saw a soup kitchen, a bread line, and a lot of men in worn clothes aimlessly wandering the streets. Thanks to the mild weather, getting by without a roof over their heads was far easier in Los Angeles than in, say, Chicago.

  Recognizing the president in the open motorcar, one of those men who looked to have nowhere to go shouted, “Coolidge!”

  “Ignore him,” Vice President Johnson said quickly.

  “It’s a free country,” Blackford said with a smile. “He can speak up for whichever candidate he pleases. Certainly is a pretty day. I can see why so many people are coming here. We don’t have Octobers like this in Dakota, believe you me we don’t.”

  Another man, this one wearing a tweed jacket out at the elbows, pointed at the limousine and yelled, “Shame!”

  This time, Hiram Johnson tried to pass off the heckling with an uneasy chuckle. Hosea Blackford said, “I have nothing to feel ashamed about. I’ve done everything I could from the moment this crisis began to try to repair it. I defy any citizen of either major party—or any Republican, either, for that matter—to show me anything I might have done and have not.”

  Flora reached out and set her hand on top of her husband’s. She knew he was telling the truth. She also knew the toll the business collapse had taken on him. He’d aged cruelly in the three and a half years since taking the oath of office. She sometimes wished Coolidge had won the election in 1928. Then all of this would have come down on his head, and Hosea would have been spared the torment of fighting a disaster plainly too big for any one man to overcome.

  At the Custer Hotel, a woman reporter called, “Why aren’t we doing more in the war against the Japanese?”

  “We’re doing everything we can, Miss Clemens, I assure you,” Blackford answered. “This is a war of maneuver, you must understand. It isn’t a matter of huge masses slamming together, as the Great War was.”

  “Why weren’t we ready to fight a war like that?” Ophelia Clemens persisted.

  “We’ll win it,” he said. “That’s what counts.”

  He and Flora managed to get to their suite without too many more questions. She tipped the swarthy porter—he spoke with a Spanish accent, and might have been born in the Empire of Mexico. As soon as the fellow left, Hosea Blackford collapsed on the bed. “For the love of God, fix me a drink,” he said.

  “As soon as I find where they’re hiding the liquor, I will,” she said. “And I’m going to make myself one, too.” She held up the whiskey bottle in triumph when she pulled it out of a cabinet. Her husband clapped his hands. The ice bucket was right out in plain sight. So were glasses. Whiskey over ice didn’t take long.

  “Thank you, dear.” Hosea sat up and downed half his drink at a gulp. He let out a long, weary sigh, then spoke two words: “We’re screwed.”

  “What?” Flora choked on her whiskey. She hoped she’d heard wrong. She hoped so, but she didn’t think so. “What did you say?” she asked, on the off chance she really had been wrong.

  “I said, we’re screwed,” the president of the United States replied. “Calvin Coolidge is going to mop the floor with me. Calvin goddamn Coolidge.” He spoke in sour, disgusted wonder. “Half the time, no one’s even sure if he has a pulse, and he’s going to clean my clock. Isn’t this a swell old world?” He finished the drink and held out the glass. “Make me another one, will you?”

  “You’ve got a speech in a couple of hours, you know,” Flora warned.

  “Yes, and I’ll be all right,” her husband said. “Not that it would make a dime’s worth of difference if I strode in there drunk as a lord. How could things be any worse than they are already?” He’d never shown despair till that moment. He hadn’t had much hope, but he’d always put the best face he could on it. No more. As Flora poured whiskey into the glass, she said, “You can still turn things around.”

  “Fat chance,” he said. “I couldn’t win this one if they caught Coolidge
in flagrante delicto
with a chorus girl. Probably not even if they caught him
in flagrante
with a chorus
boy
, for heaven’s sake. Blackfordburghs.” He spat the name out in disgust. “How can I win when my name’s gone into the dictionary as the definition for everything that’s wrong with the whole country?”

  “It’s not fair,” Flora insisted. “It’s not right.” She sipped her own drink. The whiskey burned on the way down, but not nearly so much as her husband’s acceptance of defeat.

  When she was a little girl, she’d watched her grandmother die. Everyone had known the old woman was going to go, but nobody’d said a word. Up till now, the Socialists’ presidential campaign had been like that. In public, she supposed it still would be. But she could see her husband had told the truth, no matter how little she liked it.

  Hosea Blackford said, “We knew it was going to happen if I couldn’t turn things around. I did everything I knew how to do—everything Congress would let me do—and none of it worked. Now they’re going to give the Democrats a chance.” He took a big swig from the new drink. “Hell, if I’d lost my job and my house, I wouldn’t vote Socialist, either.”

  “It’ll only be worse under the Democrats,” Flora said.

  “But people don’t know that. They don’t believe it. They don’t see how it
could
be worse. They only see that it’s bad now, and that there was a Socialist administration while it got this way. I’m the scapegoat.”

  “You did everything you could do. You did everything anybody could do,” Flora said. “If they don’t see that, they’re fools.”

  “It wasn’t enough,” her husband answered. “They don’t have any trouble seeing that. And so—” He finished the drink at a gulp. “And so, sweetheart, I’m going to be a one-term president.” He laughed. “In a way, it’s liberating, you know what I mean? For the rest of the campaign I can say whatever I please. It won’t make any difference anyhow.”

  Before very long, an aide knocked on the door and said, “We’re ready to take you to your speaking engagement, Mr. President, ma’am.”

  “We’re ready,” Blackford declared. Flora anxiously studied him, but he looked and sounded fine as he went to the door. More than a little relieved, she followed him out to the limousine.

  He spoke at the University of Southern California, just north of Agricultural Park. The USA had touted the park and the football stadium there as a venue for the 1928 Olympic Games, but had lost out to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Berlin. People were talking about another bid in 1936, but the Confederates were also trumpeting the possibility of holding the Games in Richmond that year. The international decision would come in 1933.

  President Blackford got a warm welcome on the university campus. The Socialist Party still attracted plenty of students, though Flora wondered how many of them were twenty-one. A handful of signs saying COOLIDGE! waved as the limousine went by. “Reactionaries,” Flora muttered.

  Friendly applause greeted the president when he strode into the lecture hall where he would speak. A young man did shout Coolidge’s name, but guards hustled him from the hall. The Democrats didn’t try in any organized way to disrupt Blackford’s address.
They probably don’t think they need to bother,
Flora thought bitterly.
They’re probably right, too. My own husband doesn’t think they need to
bother, either.

  Behind the podium, Hosea Blackford waited for the applause to die away. “We’ve done a lot for the country the past twelve years,” he said. “The Democrats will say we’ve done a lot
to
the country the past twelve years, but that’s because they’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. If they hadn’t played obstructionist games in Congress, we’ve have an old-age pension in place today. We’d have stronger minimum-wage laws. We’d have stronger legal support for the proletariat against their fat-cat capitalist oppressors. We would, but we don’t. The Democrats are glad we don’t. We Socialists wish we did. That’s the difference between the two parties, right there. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. If you want the proletariat to advance, vote Socialist. If you don’t, vote for Calvin Coolidge. It’s really just as simple as that, friends.”

  He got another round of applause. Sitting in the front row, Flora clapped till her palms were sore. Not all the Coolidge backers had left the hall, though. Two or three of them raised a chant: “Bread lines!

  Blackfordburghs! Bread lines! Blackfordburghs!”

  Hosea Blackford met that head on. “Yes, times are hard,” he said. “You know it, I know it, the whole country knows it. But answer me this: if my opponent had been elected in 1928, wouldn’t we be talking about Coolidgevilles today? The Democrats would not have made things better. In my considered opinion, they would have made things worse.”

  “That’s right!” Flora shouted. People in the hall gave her husband a warm hand. The only trouble was, making political speeches to an already friendly crowd was like preaching to the choir. These people (except for that handful of noisy Democrats) hadn’t turned out to disagree with the president. And his words weren’t likely to sway anybody who’d already decided to vote against him. Nothing was. Flora knew as much, even if she hated the knowledge.

  Her husband pounded away at the Democrats, at Coolidge, at Coolidge’s engineer of a running mate.

  He got round after round of applause. By the noise in the hall, he would have been swept back into office.

  But then, just as Flora’s spirits rose and even Hosea Blackford, buoyed by the reception, looked as if he too felt he wasn’t just going through the motions, distant explosions made people sit up and look around and ask one another what the noise was. Then, suddenly, some of the explosions weren’t so distant.

  They rattled the windows in the hall. Through them, Flora thought she heard aeroplane engines overhead.