The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "Maybe it won't be so bad," Flora said. "People aren't stupid. The Democrats can't mystify everybody. What's happened the past year and a half isn't our fault, isn't your fault. It would have happened if Coolidge were president, too. It would be worse then-you said so yourself."

  "That's logical. That's rational," Hosea Blackford said. "Politics, unfortunately, is neither. People won't think about what might have been. They'll think about what really happened. And they'll say, 'You were there. It damn well is your fault, and you've got to pay for it.' " He pointed to himself.

  Flora wanted to tell him he was worrying about nothing. She couldn't. He was worrying about something all too real, and she knew it. She did walk over and give him a hug. "There," she said. "And Joshua loves you, too."

  "That's all good," Blackford said. "That's all wonderful, as a matter of fact. In my personal life, I'm as happy and lucky as a man could be. But none of it will buy the Socialists a single extra vote when voting day rolls around."

  He was right. Flora wished she could tell him he was wrong. He would only have laughed had she tried, though. He knew better. So did she.

  Waiting for the election was like waiting for an old, sick loved one to die. Day followed day without much apparent change, but then, suddenly and somehow unexpectedly, the moment came at last. People went to the polls. Blackford's name wasn't on the ballot, but the election would be a judgment on him even so. He couldn't even vote for his party, nor could Flora; neither of them officially resided in Philadelphia.

  Hosea Blackford could have gone over to Socialist Party headquarters to learn of voters' decision-or rather, decisions, for every race here, unlike in a presidential election, was individual, unique to its area. But he stayed in Powel House instead. Once more, custom triumphed.

  Plenty of wireless sets and telegraph clickers brought in the news. And, from the very beginning, it was as bad as Flora and he had feared it would be. If anything, it was worse. Socialist after Socialist went down to defeat. Even the fellow who'd followed Flora to Congress in the Eleventh Ward in New York City found himself in deep trouble against a Democratic candidate of no particular luster.

  "What are we going to do?" Flora wailed as the magnitude of the Socialist disaster grew plain.

  "No. The question is, what will the new Congress do?" her husband said glumly. He answered his own question: "Odds are, the Democrats won't do much, and they won't let us do much, either. They think we've done too much already, and that we're part of the problem."

  "They don't know what they're talking about," Flora snapped.

  "Well, I happen to agree with you, you know," Hosea Blackford said. "The voters, unfortunately, look to have other ideas."

  "How can they do this to us?" Flora didn't try to hide her bitterness.

  "I'm sure the Democrats felt the same way ten years ago, when we first came to power," her husband said.

  That struck her as cold consolation. "But we're right," she said. "They were wrong."

  He managed another of those wry smiles. "Remember your dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Now the antithesis gets its turn for a while, and we see what comes of that."

  "Nothing good," Flora predicted darkly. The irony was that she'd always been a much more ideological Socialist than Hosea. His chiding her on basic Party doctrine stung, as he'd no doubt meant it to. She went on, "We have to keep them from doing nothing, the way you say they want to-and of course you're dead right about that. We have to. Maybe we can get a halfway worthwhile synthesis out of that."

  "We're going to lose the House," Hosea said. "I don't think there's any doubt about it. The Senate… well, that depends on how some of the races in the Far West go. If we're lucky, there may be enough Socialists and Republicans to go with a handful of progressive Democrats and let us do some useful things. We'll see, that's all."

  He sounded as if he looked forward to the challenge. That wasn't how Flora felt about it. As far as she was concerned, the faithless people had betrayed the Party. She'd always been on the barricades, throwing stones at the oppressors. Now, by their votes, the people thought the Socialists were among the oppressors. That hurt. It hurt a lot, and she knew she would be a long time getting over it.

  C larence Potter tried to remember the name of the Englishman who'd written a novel about a man who'd invented a machine that let him travel through time. He hadn't altogether liked the book-parts of it struck him as a Socialist tract about the divisions between capital and labor-but he couldn't deny that it had more than its share of arresting images. The mere idea of a time-traveling machine was one.

  On New Year's Eve, 1930, as the year was poised to pass away and usher in 1931, Potter felt as if not just he but all of Charleston were caught in the grip of a time-traveling machine and hurled back almost a decade into the past. The Freedom Party had laid on an enormous rally to mark the changing of the year, and had succeeded, he feared, beyond its wildest dreams.

  A strident sea of humanity filled Hampton Park to hear Jake Featherston, who'd come down from Richmond to speak. Dozens of searchlights stabbed up into the sky, creating columns of silvery radiance that seemed to transform the park into an enormous public building. Blocks of Freedom Party bully boys in their white shirts and butternut trousers, along with veterans from the Tin Hats-who wore uniforms even more closely resembling those of the Confederate Army-stood out amid the swarms of ordinary Charlestonians who'd come to the outskirts of the city.

  More bully boys in white and butternut, these carrying long truncheons, formed a perimeter around the crowd. The searchlights spread just enough light around to let Potter see how very ready for a brawl they looked.

  He touched Braxton Donovan's arm. "We can't try to break this up, not with the men we've got here," he said urgently. "They'll slaughter us."

  Donovan grimaced, but then reluctantly nodded. "Just our luck," he said. "We try to take a leaf out of the Freedom Party's book, and it doesn't work." They'd brought along seventy-five, maybe even a hundred, stalwart young Whigs armed with a motley assortment of street-fighting weapons. The force would have been plenty to disrupt any ordinary Freedom Party gathering. Attacking this one… Potter shook his head. He would sooner have sent infantrymen charging uphill against machine-gun nests and massed artillery.

  Disgust in his voice, he said, "Featherston even has the luck of the weather." A December night in Charleston could easily have been rainy, could have been freezing, could even have seen snow-though that was unlikely. But the thermometer stood in the upper forties, with a million stars in the sky trying to fight their way through the searchlight beams. The moon and, even lower in the east, Jupiter blazed bright.

  "So what do we do now?" Donovan asked. "Just send the boys home? Go on home ourselves? That stinks, you want to know what I think."

  "Getting massacred stinks worse," Potter answered. "You can go or stay, whichever you want. They can go or stay, whichever they want. Me, I'll hang around and hear what that Featherston bastard has to say."

  "You thinking of going over to the Freedom Party?" Donovan asked. "You blocked me when I tried to read Anne Colleton out of the Whigs, and now she's back in bed with dear old Jake. Fat lot of good you did us."

  "I was wrong," Potter said with a scowl. "You're lucky-you've never been wrong in all your born days, have you?" He still missed Anne. His mind kept exploring how things between them had soured, as a man's tongue will explore the empty socket that recently held a tooth.

  Admitting he was wrong disconcerted Donovan. The lawyer probably didn't hear it happen often enough to know what to do when it did. "All right, all right," he said gruffly. "Let's forget about it, then."

  "I wish I could," Potter said. The other Whig didn't know what to make of that, either. Too bad, Potter thought.

  A white-shirted Freedom Party man came up to them. "You fellas want to move along now," he said, almost indulgently-he knew he had strength on his side.

  Potter looked at him. "What we want to do is kick your damn
teeth down your throat," he growled.

  "Watch your mouth," the Freedom Party man said, indulgent no more. "We can squash y'all flat like a cockroach-and just what you deserve. If I give a yell-"

  "If you give a yell, you're a dead man," Clarence Potter promised. "Your side might win the fight afterwards, but you won't be around to enjoy it. I promise."

  The man in white shirt and butternut trousers scowled at him. He stared back, no expression at all on his face. The Freedom Party hooligan was the first to look away. A moment later, he spun and stalked off. "You told him," Braxton Donovan said, as if Potter and the Whigs had won some sort of victory.

  "He's going to come back with enough men to squash us flat," Potter said. "Go on home, and take the boys with you. We'll get other chances. I'm going to hang around."

  "You're crazy," Braxton Donovan declared.

  "No, it's just that I was in intelligence during the war. I want to know what the enemy is up to," Potter replied with a shrug. "Or maybe I am crazy. You never can tell."

  As the Whigs' outnumbered toughs headed away from Hampton Park and back toward downtown Charleston, Potter mingled with the Freedom Party men and women still streaming in to hear Featherston speak. That mingling came just in time, too. The fellow he'd faced down returned with a lot of men at his back. He looked around and laughed when he didn't see Potter or any of the other Whigs.

  They were leaving anyway, you son of a bitch, Potter thought, and now I've found my way inside.

  By their clothes, most of the men who wanted to hear Jake Featherston were farmers and laborers-most, but far from all. Potter saw druggists and shopkeepers and businessmen and even a few who looked like professional men. Not all the men were Great War veterans, either. More than Potter had expected looked too young to have fought in the war. That surprised and dismayed him. The women coming in-perhaps a third of the audience-likewise came from all social groups, with the emphasis on the lower middle class.

  Potter pushed forward as far as he could. Even so, the rostrum from which Featherston would speak remained halfway across the park from him, and seemed tiny as a toy. Everyone exclaimed as searchlights, swinging toward the podium, picked out a face behind it. But that wasn't Jake Featherston's lean visage, which Potter knew all too well. Whoever that was, pinned in the glow of the bright lights, he'd never missed a meal and was nobody Potter recognized. Some of the people around Potter grumbled, too.

  Then the plump stranger introduced himself as one of the new Freedom Party Congressmen South Carolina had sent up to Richmond in the election of 1929. That was plenty to win him a round of applause from the Party faithful. Clarence Potter had to join it to keep something dreadful from happening to him. He felt like washing his hands the first chance he got.

  "And now," the Congressman boomed, "it gives me tremendous pleasure to have the privilege of presenting to you all the leader of our great Freedom Party, Mr. Jaaake Featherston!"

  The roar of applause and cheers that went up stunned Potter's ears. He opened his mouth, but silently. He didn't have to shout, and keeping his mouth open helped protect his ears. Featherston, an old artilleryman, likely knew that trick himself.

  Through the shouts and clapping from the crowd came disciplined yells from the men in white shirts and butternut trousers: "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" Little by little, more and more people joined that chant, so it began to drown out the noise all around: "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" The two-syllable word felt as heavy and regular as a heartbeat.

  Jake Featherston let the chant build to a deafening crescendo, then raised both hands above his head. Still disciplined, the blocks of goons fell silent at once. Without their steadying influence, the cries faded away after perhaps fifteen seconds.

  Into the ringing quiet that followed, Featherston said, "It's always good to come to Charleston, on account of this here is where the Confederate States of America were born." He couldn't miss getting applause with that line. He couldn't-and he didn't. Again, Clarence Potter had to clap along with everybody else to keep from standing out. He hated that, but saw no way around it.

  Featherston went on, "They say showing's better than telling, and I guess they're right. We've been telling people what's wrong with the Confederate States for more than ten years now, and not enough folks wanted to listen. Now the Whigs have gone and shown we were right all along, and all of a sudden everybody's paying attention to us. I wish to heaven it didn't have to happen like this, I truly do, but here we are just the same."

  To Clarence Potter, staunch Whig, it wasn't much of a joke, but people around him laughed. Featherston said, "I'm warning people right now, it's not a good idea to think about the Freedom Party like we're just another bunch of politicians."

  Cries of, "No!" and, "Hell, no!" and, "Better not!" rang from the crowd. Featherston let them spread through Hampton Park, then raised his hands again. This time, silence fell at once.

  Into it, he said, "We are the Confederacy's destiny. We are the Confederacy's future. We're giving our dear country a faith and a will again. We have to concentrate all our strength on action, revolutionary action. Because we're going that way, we're gathering into our ranks every last member of the Confederate people who still has energy and nerve-that's you, folks, and I'm glad of it!"

  People were even more eager to applaud themselves than they were to applaud Jake Featherston. Again, Potter had to clap, too. As he did, he reluctantly nodded. He's shrewder than he used to be, he thought. He doesn't just think of himself any more. But that wasn't right. No, he lets people think he's thinking about them. Inside, he's still the same cold-blooded snake he always was.

  "Burton Mitchel wants to cozy up to the United States. The USA saved his bacon once," Featherston shouted. "But the United States can't save his bacon this time around, on account of they haven't got any bacon of their own. And even if they did, do y'all want to be the USA's tagalong little brother from now till the end of time?"

  Some people shouted, "No!" Others shouted things a good deal more incendiary. Potter would never have said anything like that where ladies might hear. But then, not ten feet away from him, a woman who looked like a schoolteacher yelled something that would have made a sergeant, a twenty-year veteran, blush.

  "We've got us a duty: a duty to be strong," Jake Featherston declared. "We've got us a duty to stand up to the United States just as soon as we can. And to do that, we've got us a duty to put our own house in order. We've got us a duty to put people back to work. We've got us a duty to make sure they don't go hungry. We've got us a duty to keep the niggers in their place, and not to let them steal work from white folks. And we've got us a duty to remember what the Confederate States of America are all about. And folks, what we're about is-"

  "Freedom!" The great roar staggered Potter.

  "Y'all remember that," Featherston said. "Remember it every single day. When you see the liars and the cheats getting together, don't let 'em get away with it. Smash 'em up! How can you have freedom when the rich folks want to take it away from you?"

  Does he see the irony there? Potter wondered. Does he see it and not care, or does it go right by him? As the crowd roared, as Jake Featherston wished them a happy New Year and exhorted them to vote for the Party in November, Potter wondered which of those possibilities frightened him worse.

  W hen Jake Featherston came through South Carolina on his speaking tour, Anne Colleton tried to see him. She tried, and she failed. Featherston wouldn't talk to her; a flunky told her he wasn't available.

  She fumed for days afterwards. She wasn't used to getting brushed off. Her habit, in fact, was to brush off others. Featherston annoyed her enough to make her wonder if she shouldn't stay a Whig after all. In the end, what made her decide she had to swallow her pride was the thought that staying a Whig meant admitting Clarence Potter had been right all along. If he had, why had she broken up with him over their political differences? Staying a Whig would mean swallowing her pride, too, and swallowing it in front of an old
lover. She preferred making up with Jake Featherston to that.

  After the papers announced Featherston's return to Richmond, she sent a telegram to Freedom Party headquarters: SHALL I COME NORTH TO TALK THINGS OVER?

  The answer, at least, returned promptly: COME AHEAD. CONVINCE FERD KOENIG. THEN WE'LL SEE. FEATHERSTON.

  Anne said something extremely unladylike as she crumpled up the telegram and threw it in the trash. Having to talk with anyone except Jake Featherston himself was galling. But Ferdinand Koenig wasn't a flunky, or not precisely a flunky. He'd been in the Freedom Party even longer than Featherston had, and had twice been his running mate on the Party ticket. The main difference between him and Jake was that he wasn't colorful.

  And so, swallowing her pride again, Anne wired, ARRIVE NEXT TUESDAY. LOOKING FORWARD TO MEETING MR. KOENIG.

  As she usually did when coming up to Richmond, she booked a room in Ford's Hotel, just north of Capitol Square. The room she got gave her a fine view of the square. In happier times, it would have been a peaceful, restful, patriotic view. She could have looked out on the grass and on the splendid statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston.

  She could still see the statues. Tents and shanties swallowed almost all the winter-brown grass. Men walked aimlessly from one to another, some smoking, some sipping from whiskey bottles. Here and there, women hung out laundry on lines that ran from tents to trees. Children ran this way and that.

  Columbia and Charleston had shantytowns, too. Even St. Matthews had a little one. But Anne had never seen any to match Richmond's. The capital of the Confederate States was a great city. When things went wrong, they went wrong more visibly here than anywhere else.

  She asked the house detective, "How bad are things? Will my clothes and suitcases still be in my room when I get back?"

  "Likely so, ma'am," he answered. "We work hard at keeping the trash out of the hotel. We had some trouble with that when things first went sour, but we don't let it happen any more. It's just a matter of taking pains."