American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  “Not for publication,” he answered at once. The pencil withdrew. He still didn’t say what he thought. Instead, he added, “Not even as ‘a highly placed source’ or anything like that.”

  The look she sent him this time was even more sour. “All right,” she said at last. “You don’t make things easy, do you?”

  “Ma’am, Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer are dead, but you won’t find a senior officer who doesn’t have strong views about both of them,” Dowling said.

  Ophelia Clemens nodded again. That did seem to make sense to her. “I promise,” she said solemnly. “And in case you’re wondering, I don’t break promises like that. If I did, no one would trust me when I made them.”

  Dowling believed her. She was, from everything he’d seen in Winnipeg and here on the train, a straight shooter. She probably had to be, to get ahead in a normally masculine business like reporting. He remembered she’d told him and Custer her father had been a newspaperman, too. Dowling said, “Strictly off the record, I’d bet on Teddy Roosevelt.”

  “I thought as much,” she said. “Custer was nothing but a phony and a blowhard, wasn’t he?”

  “Strictly off the record,” Dowling repeated, “he was a humbug and a blowhard. But if you say he was nothing but a humbug and a blowhard, you’re wrong. He always went straight after what he wanted, and he went after it as hard as he could. When he was right—and he was, sometimes—that made him one of the most effective people the world has ever seen. The rest may be true, but don’t forget that part of him.”

  Ophelia Clemens considered that. In the end, a little reluctantly, she nodded. “Yes, I suppose you have something. People need to judge a man by what he did, not just by the way he acted.”

  “Custer did a lot,” Dowling said. “No two ways about that.” He might have managed more, he might have managed better, if he hadn’t become a self-parody in his later years. But what he had done would be remembered as long as the United States endured.

  Dowling told Custer stories all the way from Salt Lake City to Washington, D.C., some on the record, some off. Ophelia Clemens wrote down what she could and either laughed or rolled her eyes at the rest. Dowling was sorry they went their separate ways after the train rolled into Union Station.

  He paid his respects to Libbie Custer, who sat beside the general’s body where it lay in state in the Capitol. “Hello, Colonel,” Custer’s widow said. “We had a fine run, Autie and I. I don’t know what in heaven’s name I’ll do without him.”

  “I think you’ll manage,” Dowling said, on the whole truthfully. He’d always reckoned Mrs. Custer the brains of the outfit.

  “I suppose I could,” she said now. “But what’s the point? I spent the past sixty-five years taking care of the general. Now that he’s gone, what am I supposed to do with myself? I haven’t much time left, either, you know.”

  With no answer for that—how could he contradict an obvious truth?—Dowling murmured, “I’m sorry,” and made his escape.

  He marched in the mourners’ procession behind Custer’s flag-draped coffin. The general’s funeral was modeled on Teddy Roosevelt’s; Dowling found it strangely fitting that the two men, longtime rivals in life, should be equals in death. The only difference he could see was that no foreign dignitaries came to say their farewells to General Custer.

  A bespectacled man hoisted a boy onto his shoulders. In the funereal hush, his words carried: “Look, Armstrong. There goes the man you’re named for.”

  Custer’s final wishes—or maybe they were Libbie’s wishes—were that his remains be buried at Arlington, across the Potomac from Washington in what was now West Virginia. He would spend eternity with Teddy Roosevelt, and Robert E. Lee, presumably, would spend it gnashing his teeth at having not one but two U.S. heroes take their final rest on his old estate.

  “Well, to hell with Robert E. Lee,” Dowling muttered, and he felt sure both Custer and Roosevelt would have agreed with him.

  Flora Blackford had spent years speaking in front of crowds of workers. A women’s club in Philadelphia wasn’t the same thing. Speaking as First Lady in front of organizations like this wasn’t even like speaking in the House of Representatives. There’d been plenty of cut-and-thrust in the House. Here, Flora had to be polite whether she wanted to or not.

  “I’m sure you’ll agree that we can return to prosperity, and that we will return to prosperity,” she told the plump, prosperous women. Even if it was noncontroversial, it was also a campaign speech, with the 1930 Congressional election just around the corner. “The worst is over. From where we are now, we can only go up.”

  The women applauded. She’d told them what they wanted to hear, what they wanted to believe. She wanted to believe it herself. She’d wanted to believe it ever since the stock market crashed right after her husband became president. She’d wanted to, but believing got harder every day.

  “We were the party of prosperity through the 1920s,” she insisted. “We don’t deserve to be labeled the party of depression.”

  Even though the women applauded again, Flora knew more than a little depression herself. Her husband had done what only twenty-nine men had done before him—he’d become president. And what had it got him? Only curses and the blame for the worst collapse the United States had known since the bad times after the Confederate States broke away in the War of Secession.

  She got through the speech. She’d learned all about getting through speeches despite a heavy heart when she’d had to stand up in Congress after her brother David lost a leg in the Great War. She had to do a good job here. The coming election would be the first chance voters had to say anything about the Blackford administration and the Socialist Party since things went sour.

  What would they say when they got the chance? Nothing good, she feared. The Socialists, naturally, had taken credit for everything that had gone right in their first two terms, Upton Sinclair’s terms, in Powel House, regardless of whether they’d caused it. Political parties did that. How could they keep from getting the blame for everything that was going wrong now? The Democrats—even the remnants of the Republicans—were certainly doing their best to pin that blame on the party of Marx and Lincoln and Debs.

  After the speech, after the coffee and cakes and polite talk that followed, she went back to the presidential residence. Traveling by chauffeured limousine to the Powel House struck her as expensive and wasteful, to say nothing of being the very opposite of egalitarian. But against entrenched presidential custom the Socialists had struggled in vain. The limousine waited for Flora outside the women’s club—waited for her and whisked her away.

  When she got back to Powel House, she found her husband studying a bill. “Is that the new relief authorization from Congress?” she asked.

  Hosea Blackford nodded. “That’s what it is,” he said. “I’m going to sign it, too—even makework is better than no work at all, and no work at all is what too many people have these days. But it feels like putting a bandage on a man who’s just been shot through the heart. How much good is it going to do?”

  He’d been president for only a little more than a year and a half. The pressure of the job, though, had aged him more in that time than all the years he’d spent as vice president. His hair was thinner and grayer, his face more wrinkled and more weary-looking; his clothes hung on him like sacks, for he’d lost weight, too.

  Would he look this way if things hadn’t gone wrong? Flora wondered. Guilt gnawed at her. She’d encouraged Hosea to run for president. If she hadn’t, the country would be blaming someone else for its troubles now. Shantytowns inhabited by men who’d lost their homes wouldn’t be called Blackfordburghs. Comics wouldn’t tell jokes about him on the vaudeville stage and over the wireless.

  Then he said, “It’s a good thing I’ve got this job instead of Calvin Coolidge. If he were sitting here, he’d veto this bill and all the others like it. Things would be a lot worse then—I’m sure of it. We have hungry people now—we’d have starving pe
ople then. The class struggle would go straight to the streets.”

  Tears stung her eyes. She said, “I was just thinking I never should have put you through all this.”

  “You didn’t put me through it,” he answered. “I did it myself. I wanted it, too, you know. And, in spite of everything, I think I’m a better man for the job than Coolidge would have been.”

  “The country doesn’t deserve you,” Flora said.

  “Oh? Are you saying it does deserve Coolidge?” her husband asked with a wry grin. “I’m not sure even Massachusetts deserves him.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Flora said with some asperity.

  “Maybe not, sweetheart, but it’s what you said,” Hosea Blackford answered. Even that wry grin had trouble staying on his face. “If only something we tried would do some real good for the country, so people would believe we had hope.”

  “Things would be a lot worse without the relief programs and the dole,” Flora insisted. “We’d have men out selling apples on street corners to try to stay alive.”

  “We might as well, even now,” her husband said. “I haven’t seen the country so gloomy since . . . since before the Great War.”

  Flora knew what a hard time he had bringing that out. The Socialists still looked at the war in terms of the lives it had squandered, the lives it had wrecked, the ruin it had wrought. They didn’t usually talk about the triumph it had been, as Democrats were in the habit of doing. But before the war, the USA, caught between the CSA and Canada, with England and France always ready to pounce, had a downtrodden feel. Enemies had ganged up on the United States twice. The fear those enemies might do it again had filled the country—and, perhaps, with reason.

  No more. Now the United States had their place in the sun. No one had a bigger place, either. Only the Empire of Germany came close. The Kaiser’s monarchy was a rival, yes, but not the deadly foes the Confederacy and her allies had seemed in the old days, the days before they were beaten at last.

  And, from 1917 to 1929, under Theodore Roosevelt and then under Upton Sinclair, the United States had walked tall, had walked proud. After half a century of furtive skulking, the United States had strutted. But now this. Nobody in all the world was strutting these days. Everyone was trying to figure out how to fix what had gone wrong. No one, though, was having much luck.

  “What are we going to do?” Flora asked.

  “You mean, besides take a drubbing at the polls next Tuesday?” her husband asked in turn. “I don’t know, dear. I really don’t, and I wish to heaven I did. If I knew what to do, I’d be doing it. You can bet on that.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Blackfordburghs.” He spoke the word as if it were a curse. And so, in a way, it was: a curse on him, and a curse on the party he headed.

  “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.

  Clarence 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 do
wn 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.”