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."