American Front (5 page)

But she had to answer him. She paused a moment to adjust her picture hat and pick her phrases, then said, “We will be caucusing in Philadelphia day after tomorrow to discuss that. As the majority votes, the party will act.”

She never would have yielded so much a few days before. Here in New York City, sentiment against the war still ran strong—or stronger than most places, anyhow. But many of the Socialists’ constituents—the miners of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the farmers of Minnesota and Dakota and Montana—were near one border or another, and were bombarding their representatives with telegrams embracing, not the international brotherhood of labor, but rather the protection of the American frontier.

Almost pleadingly, Flora said, “Can we let the madness of nationalism destroy everything the workers not just here in the United States but also in Germany and Austria and in France and England and even in Canada and the Confederacy?—yes, I dare say that, for it is true,” she went on over a chorus of boos, “have struggled shoulder to shoulder to achieve? I say we cannot. I say we must not. If you believe the sacred cause of labor is bound up in the idea of world politics without war, give generously to our cause.” She pointed down to a washed-out peach tin, the label still on, that sat in front of her crate. “Give for the workers who harvested that fruit, the miners who by the sweat of their brow dug out the iron and tin from which the can is made, the steelworkers who made it into metal, the laborers in the cannery who packed the peaches, the draymen and drivers who brought them to market. Give now for a better tomorrow.”

A few people stepped up and tossed coins into the peach tin. One or two of them tossed in banknotes. Flora had plenty of practice in gauging the take from the racket the money made. She would have done better today working in a sweatshop and donating her wages to the cause.

She thanked the small crowd less sincerely than she would have liked, picked up the can, and started down the street with it toward Socialist Party headquarters. She’d gone only a short way when a beer wagon full of barrels pulled by a team of eight straining horses rattled out of the Croton Brewery and down Chrystie Street. It got more applause than she had—seeing a load of barrels was supposed to be good luck—and would make far more money for its firm than Flora had for the Socialists.

The thought depressed her. The Party had been educating the proletariat all over the world, showing the workers how they could seize control of the means of production from the capitalists who exploited their labor for the sake of profit. They’d made progress, too. No civilized government these days would call out troops to shoot down strikers, as had been commonplace a generation before. Surely the revolution, whether peaceful or otherwise, could not be far away. What sort of weapon could the plutocrats devise to resist the united strength and numbers of the working classes?

Her lips thinned into a bitter line. How simple the answer had proved! Threaten to start a war! All at once, you estranged German workers from French, English from Austrian, American from Confederate (though the Rebels also called themselves Americans). Few Socialists had imagined the proletariat was so easily manipulated.

Tenth Ward party headquarters was on the second story of a brownstone on Centre Market Place, across the street from the raucous market itself. A kosher butcher shop occupied the first story. Flora paused for a moment in front of the butcher’s plate-glass window before she went upstairs. Some of her dark, wavy hair had come loose from the bobby pins that were supposed to hold it in place. With quick, practiced motions, she repaired the damage. Inside the shop, the butcher, aptly named Max Fleischmann, waved to her. She nodded in reply.

Fleischmann came out and looked down into the peach tin. He shook his head. “You’ve made more,” he said in Yiddish, then reached into his pocket and tossed a dime into the can.

“You didn’t have to do that.” Flora felt her face heat. Her eyes flicked to her reflection in the window. She couldn’t tell if the flush showed. Probably not, not with her olive skin. “You’re not even a Socialist.”

“So I voted for Roosevelt? This means my money isn’t good enough for you?
Feh!
” Fleischmann’s wry grin showed three gold teeth. “If you people go bankrupt and have to move out from upstairs, who knows what kind of crazy maniacs I get right over my head?”

“When we moved in, you called us crazy maniacs—and worse than that,” Flora reminded him. She stared down into the can of peaches. That charity dime made the day’s take no less pathetic. Shaking her head, she said, “The whole world is going crazy now, though. We’re the ones who are trying to stay sane, to do what needs doing.”

“Crazy is right.” Fleischmann clenched a work-roughened hand into a fist. “The Confederates, they’re moving all sorts of troops to the border, trying to get the jump on us. And the Canadians, their Great Lakes battleships have left port, it says in the papers. What are we supposed to do, what with them provoking us from all sides like this?”

Flora gaped at the butcher in blank dismay. The bacillus of nationalism had infected him, too, and he didn’t even notice it. She said, “If all the workers would stand together, there’d be no war, Mr. Fleischmann.”

“Oh, yes. If we could trust the Rebels, this would be wonderful,” Fleischmann said. “But how can we? We know they want to fight us, because they’ve fought us twice already. Am I right or am I wrong, Flora? We have to defend ourselves, don’t we? Am I right or am I wrong?”

“But don’t you see? The Confederate workers are saying the same thing about the United States.”

“Fools!” Max Fleischmann snorted, Realizing the argument was hopeless, Flora started upstairs. The butcher’s voice pursued her: “Am I right or am I wrong?” When she didn’t answer, he snorted again and went back into his shop.

The Socialist Party offices were almost as crowded as the tenements all around: desks and tables and file cabinets jammed into every possible square inch of space, leaving a bare minimum of room for human beings. Two secretaries in smudged white shirtwaists tried without much luck to keep up with an endless stream of calls. They mixed English and Yiddish in every conversation—sometimes, it seemed, in every sentence.

Herman Bruck nodded to her. As usual, he seemed too elegant to make a proper Socialist, what with his two-button jacket of the latest cut and the silk ascot he wore in place of a tie. His straw boater hung on a hat rack near his desk. He looked so natty because he came from a long line of tailors. “How did it go?” he asked her. Though he’d been born in Poland, his English was almost without accent.

“Not so good,” Flora answered, setting down the can with a clank. “Do we know what’s what with the caucus?”

Bruck’s sour expression did not sit well on his handsome features. “A telegram came in not half an hour ago,” he answered. “They voted eighty-seven to fourteen to give Roosevelt whatever money he asks for.”

“
Oy!
” Flora exclaimed. “Now the madness is swallowing us, too.”

“On theoretical grounds, the vote does make some sense,” Bruck said grudgingly. “After all, the Confederacy is still in large measure a feudal economy. Defeating it would advance progressive forces there and might lift the Negroes out of serfdom.”

“Would. Might.” Flora laced the words with scorn. “And have they declared Canada feudal and reactionary, too?”

“No,” Bruck admitted. “They said nothing about Canada—putting the best face on things they could, I suppose.”

“Putting the best face on things doesn’t make them right,” Flora said with the stern rectitude of a temperance crusader smashing a bottle of whiskey against a saloon wall.

Bruck frowned. A moment before, he’d been unhappy with the delegates of his party. Now, because it
was
his party and he a disciplined member of it, he defended the decision it had made: “Be reasonable, Flora. If they’d voted to oppose the war budget, that would have been the end of the Socialist Party in the United States. Everyone is wild for this war, upper class and lower class alike. We’d have lost half our members to the Republicans, maybe more.”

“Whenever you throw away what’s right for what’s convenient, you end up losing both,” Flora Hamburger said stubbornly. “Of course everyone is wild for the war now. The whole country is crazy.
Gottenyu
, the whole
world
is crazy. Does that mean we should say yes to the madness? How wild for war will people be when the trains start bringing home the bodies of the laborers and farmers the capitalists have murdered for the sake of greed and markets?”

Bruck raised a placating hand. “You’re not on the soapbox now, Flora. Our congressmen, our senators, are going to vote unanimously—even the fourteen said they’d go along with the party. Will you stand alone?”

“No, I suppose not,” Flora said with a weary sigh. Discipline told on her, too. “If we don’t back the caucus, what kind of party are we? We might as well be Democrats in that case.”

“That’s right,” Bruck said with an emphatic nod. “You’re just worn out because you’ve been on the stump and nobody’s listened to you. What do you say we walk across the street and get something to eat?”

“All right,” she said. “Why not? It has to be better than this.”

Bruck rescued his boater from the hat rack and set it on his head at a jaunty angle. “We’ll be back soon,” he told the secretaries, who nodded. With a flourish, he held the door open for Flora, saying, “If you will forgive the bourgeois courtesy.”

“This once,” she said, something more than half seriously. A lot of bourgeois courtesy was a way to sugar-coat oppression. Then, out in the hall, Bruck slipped an arm around her waist. He’d done that once before, and she hadn’t liked it. She didn’t like it now, either, and twisted away, glaring at him. “Be so kind as to keep your hands to yourself.”

“You begrudge bourgeois courtesy, but you’re trapped in bourgeois morality,” Bruck said, frustration on his face.

“Socialists should be free to show affection where and how they choose,” Flora answered. “On the other hand, they should also be free to keep from showing affection where there is none.”

“Does that mean what I think it means?”

“It means exactly that,” Flora said as they started down the stairs.

They walked across Centre Market Place toward the countless stalls selling food and drink in a silence that would have done for filling an icebox. From behind the butcher-shop counter, Max Fleischmann watched them and shook his head.

All of Richmond streamed toward Capitol Square. Reginald Bartlett was one more drop of water in the stream, one more straw hat and dark sack suit among thousands sweating in the early August sun. He turned to the man momentarily beside him and said, “I should be back behind the drugstore counter.”

“Is that a fact?” the other replied, not a bit put out by such familiarity, not today. “I should be adding up great long columns of figures, myself. But how often do we have the chance to see history made?”

“Not very often,” Bartlett said. He was a round-faced, smiling, freckled man of twenty-six, the kind of man who wins at poker because you trust him instinctively. “That’s why I’m on my way. The pharmacist told me to keep things running while he went to hear President Wilson, but if he’s not there, will he know I’m not there?”

“Not a chance of it,” the accountant assured him. “Not even the slightest—Oof!” Someone dug an elbow into the pit of his stomach, quite by accident. He stumbled and staggered and almost fell; had he gone down, he probably would have been trampled. As things were, he fell back several yards, and was replaced beside Bartlett by a colored laborer in overalls and a cloth cap. Nobody would be asking the Negro for a pass, not today. If he got fired tomorrow for not being on the job…he took the same chance Bartlett did.

There weren’t many Negroes in the crowd, far fewer in proportion to the mass than their numbers in Richmond as a whole. Part of the reason for that, probably, was that they had more trouble getting away from their jobs than white men did. And part of it, too, was that they had more trouble caring about the glorious destiny of the Confederate States than whites did.

The bell in the tower in the southwestern corner of Capitol Square rang the alarm, over and over again.
Clang, clang, clang…clang, clang, clang…clang, clang, clang
. Most often, those three chimes endlessly repeated meant fire in the city. Today the alarm was for the nation as a whole.

Bartlett nimbly dodged round carriages and automobiles—some Fords imported from Yankee country; a Rolls full of gentlemen in top hats, white tie, and cutaways; and several Manassas machines built in Birmingham—that could make no headway with men on foot packing the streets. Even bicycles were slower than shank’s mare in this crush.

He rounded a last corner and caught sight of the great equestrian statue of George Washington in Capitol Square. Washington, in an inspiring gesture, pointed south—toward the state penitentiary, wags said whenever scandal rocked the Confederate Congress.

The bronze Washington also pointed toward an even larger, more imposing statue of Albert Sidney Johnston. He and the bronze warriors in forage caps who stood guard at the base of the pedestal he topped memorialized the brave men, prominent and humble alike, who had fallen for freedom in the War of Secession.

Just to one side of the Johnston Memorial, a team of carpenters had hastily run up a platform to set dignitaries above the level of the common throng. The pine boards of the platform were still bright and yellow and unweathered. The same could not be said for the men who sat in folding chairs upon it. A lot of the graybeards had seen service not merely in the Second Mexican War but also in the War of Secession. Nor were the beards all that was gray: there side by side sat Patrick Cleburne and Stephen Ramseur wearing identical uniforms of the obsolete color more like what the Yankees wore nowadays than modern Confederate military dress. Aging lions, though, could wear what they pleased.

As everyone else was doing, Bartlett wiggled as close to the platform as he could. If the crush on the street had been bad, that within Capitol Square was appalling. Not twenty feet from him, somebody shouted in outrage: he’d had his pocket picked. Sneak thieves were probably having a field day, for people were packed so tight, they couldn’t help bumping up against one another, and accidental contact was hard to tell from that made with larcenous intent.