* * *
France didn’t lose all its royalists after the French Revolution, or after Napoleon, or even after the founding of the Third Revolution. France had royalists to this day, still convinced a Bourbon ought to be ruling from the palace of Versailles. People said about the French royalists that they’d learned nothing and that they understood nothing.
America didn’t have royalists-well, except for those who worshiped home-run hitters and movie stars. But nobody, not even the worshipers, wanted to see a movie star as President. That didn’t mean the USA did without people who’d learned nothing and who understood nothing. On this side of the Atlantic, they called them Republicans.
As the election of 1936 began to rise over the horizon, the GOP seemed intent on pretending that Joe Steele’s first term had never happened. The Elephants might better have been called the Ostriches, so intent were they on sticking their heads in the sand. When Hitler marched the Reichswehr into the Rhineland in March, not one of the leading GOP candidates said a word about it. It happened, after all, on the faraway planet called Europe.
Joe Steele spoke up. Charlie noticed that. Unlike most Republican politicos, Joe Steele didn’t come from a family American for generations. His parents had made the trip. The Old Country still meant something to him, as it did to millions of his countrymen.
“With this move, Adolf Hitler has torn up the Treaty of Locarno,” he said in a radio address. “Germany was not forced to sign that treaty. She did so of her own free will. And now German and French soldiers stare at each other across the Rhine, rifles in their hands. If France had moved, she might have toppled Hitler. The United States would have backed her by all means short of war. I am afraid it’s too late now.”
From across the Atlantic, the Führer thumbed his nose at the President. For all Charlie knew, they both enjoyed it. They could call each other as many names as they pleased. Neither was in any position to go after the other. “Joe Steele understands nothing of the national will or of national self-determination,” Hitler bellowed. “No one has ever told him he does not have the right to fortify his frontier.”
“Good neighbors don’t need forts,” Joe Steele retorted. “Our border with Canada is three thousand miles long, without a fort on either side of it. Trust counts for more in keeping the peace than concrete and cannons.”
Every bit of that flew straight over the Republicans’ heads. They wanted to turn the clock back to 1931. (Actually, they wanted to turn it back to 1928 and prosperity, but no one seemed to know how to bring that off.) In one of his articles about the state of the GOP, Charlie quoted Mr. Dooley, a wit from the turn of the century: Th’ raypublican party broke ye, but now that ye’re down we’ll not turn a could shoulder to ye. Come in an’ we’ll keep ye-broke.
He got a phone call from a chuckling Stas Mikoian about that one. And he also got a rebuttal of sorts from Westbrook Pegler. The Chicago Tribune columnist had supported Joe Steele over Hoover in 1932, but soon soured. Now nothing the President did was any good to him. He threw Mr. Dooley back in Charlie’s face-and in Joe Steele’s, too: A man that’d expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tu-rrned into angels be an iliction is call a rayformer an’ remains at large.
Charlie laughed in spite of himself when he saw Pegler’s piece. So did Esther, when he showed it to her. “He got you, Charlie,” she said, which Charlie couldn’t very well deny. But then she added, “I bet even Joe Steele thinks that’s funny.”
“Nope.” Charlie shook his head. “Mikoian may. Joe Steele and Scriabin, though, they don’t laugh at a whole bunch.”
He hied himself off to Cleveland to watch the Republicans pick someone to run against the President. Herbert Hoover wanted another crack at Joe Steele. However big a death wish the GOP owned, it wasn’t that big. The convention nominated Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas on the first ballot. For a running mate, the delegates gave him Chicago newspaper publisher Frank Knox (he put out the Daily News, not the Tribune).
Landon was in his late forties. He was better-looking than Joe Steele; he might have been a preacher or a high school principal. He meant well. Charlie could see that. Hoover had meant well, too. And what did it get him? Shantytowns named after him, and a smashing electoral defeat.
“I am a man of the people,” Landon said in his acceptance speech. “Someone needs to be for them, because Joe Steele has turned against them. The Populists came out of Kansas when I was a boy. If you like, I am a Populist myself.”
Charlie liked that fine. Quoting Ambrose Bierce was even more fun than quoting Mr. Dooley. Gone but not forgotten, Bierce defined a Populist as A fossil patriot of the early agricultural period, found in the old red soapstone underlying Kansas; characterized by an uncommon spread of ear, which some naturalists contend gave him the power of flight, though Professors Morse and Whitney, pursuing independent lines of thought, have ingeniously pointed out that had he possessed it he would have gone elsewhere. In the picturesque speech of his period, some fragments of which have come down to us, he was known as “The Matter with Kansas.”
He hadn’t thought to do anything more than have fun with The Devil’s Dictionary. But sometimes a phrase sticks. Sometimes people will make it stick if they think that will do them good. After the Democrats came together to renominate Joe Steele and John Nance Garner, they started calling Alf Landon “The Matter with Kansas,” too. Every ad for the ticket used the phrase.
“If I am ‘The Matter with Kansas,’ then Joe Steele is what’s the matter with the whole country,” Landon declared. He proudly wore a Kansas sunflower on his lapel. But he was about as exciting as oatmeal with skim milk. His campaign bounced and rattled. It never took off and flew.
The Literary Digest took a poll. It predicted that Landon would win twice as many electoral votes as Joe Steele. Charlie asked Stas Mikoian what he thought about that. “We aren’t voting about literature,” the wily Armenian answered.
People swarmed to the polls on election day. As soon as the polls started closing, it became obvious that The Literary Digest’s poll couldn’t touch the real results with a ten-foot pole. In 1932, Joe Steele had beaten Herbert Hoover by a landslide. Everybody said so at the time. That made headline writers grope for a new word to describe what he did to Alf Landon. Avalanche was the one they hit on most often.
An avalanche it was. Joe Steele won forty-six of the forty-eight states. AS MAINE GOES, SO GOES VERMONT, one wag of a newspaperman wrote. The President took more than sixty percent of the popular vote. His coattails gave the Democrats even more Senators and Representatives than they’d had before.
Over Christmas, Charlie and Esther went up to New York City to visit family and friends. Chanukah had ended on the sixteenth, but Esther’s mother made latkes for them when they got there. Charlie loved latkes. The only problem was. . “Gawd, I feel like I swallowed a bowling ball,” he said as the two of them staggered out of Istvan and Magda Polgar’s apartment.
“An onion-flavored bowling ball,” Esther said.
Charlie burped. “Yeah, that, too.”
With the Polgars, he didn’t have to worry about anything but overeating and heartburn. Things got trickier when he and Esther went out to dinner with Mike and Stella. “Well, your guy got another four years,” Mike said even before they sat down in the steakhouse. “Looks like you can fool most of the people most of the time.”