But it wasn't, not as far as Sylvia was concerned. She wanted the Confederate States punished for what they'd done to the Ericsson, not forgiven their reparations. Hosea Blackford might not want a war, but wouldn't the Confederates if they ever got strong again? "I'm glad we came," she told Brigid Coneval on their way back to the subway station. "Now I'm surer than ever I'll vote for Coolidge."
"Sure and you can't mean it!" Brigid exclaimed, and argued with her all the way home even though she'd mocked both Hosea Blackford and his wife. She didn't change Sylvia's mind, or even come close.
O ver the supper table, Chester Martin grinned at his wife. "Election Day coming up," he said with a sly smile.
"And so?" Rita answered. But she smiled, too. "Plenty of worse ways to meet than at a polling place."
"I should say." Martin had met women at worse places-and that didn't even count the soldiers' brothels behind the front during the war, when you'd stand in line outside in the rain for a couple of minutes of what was much more catharsis than rapture. At least I never got a dose of the clap, he thought.
"Do you think Blackford can do it?" Rita asked.
"Hope so," Martin said. "I don't see why not. Everybody's making good money. Why should we change when things are going the way they're supposed to?" He spread his hands. "I still don't much like the Socialists' foreign policy-I'd take a stronger line than they do-but that's not enough reason to vote for the Great Stone Face."
Rita laughed at the nickname. "Coolidge doesn't have much to say for himself, does he?"
"I think there's a reason for that, too," Chester replied. "He's never done anything worth talking about."
"Massachusetts is prosperous," Rita said. "He takes credit for that."
After sarcastically clapping his hands a couple of times, Martin said, "He may take it, but who says he deserves it? The whole country's prosperous, and the Socialists deserve credit for that." He'd come late to the Socialists, but had what amounted to a convert's zeal. "Look where we were in 1920, before President Sinclair won, and look where we are now."
"You're preaching to the choir, you know," his wife told him with a smile. "I'm going to vote for Blackford, too."
"I know, but look." Chester felt expansive. He wanted to tell the whole world how well his party had run the country over the past eight years. Since the whole world wasn't sitting across the kitchen table from him and Rita was, she got to listen to him. He went on, "Look how high the stock market's risen. Who would have thought the proletariat could start owning the means of production by buying shares in the big companies? With buying on margin, though, it's awfully easy to do." He laughed. "If we can afford to do it, it must be easy to do."
Rita pointed to the newspaper, which lay on a chair. "The Wireless Corporation is splitting its stock again."
Martin nodded. "I saw that. I'm glad I got into Wireless somewhere close to the ground floor. I think it's going to be the big thing for years and years, and those four shares I managed to buy last summer are sixteen shares now. It's swell. Everything keeps going up and up and up. It's like coining money."
"Did you see that Congresswoman Blackford is coming to town Saturday?" Rita asked.
"No, I missed that," he answered. "Do you want to go see her?"
"Sure? Why not? It'll be fun," Rita said. "And besides, she shows what a woman can do when she puts her mind to it."
Although Chester wasn't sure he liked the sound of that, he said, "All right," anyhow, finding agreement the better part of valor. Then he added, "Did I ever tell you that I-"
"Met Flora Blackford when she was still Flora Hamburger?" Rita cut in. "Had her brother in your company during the war?" She shook her head. Her bobbed dark blond hair flipped back and forth. "No. You never, ever told me that. I've never heard it, not even once. Can't you tell?"
"I can tell you're giving me a hard time," he answered. She grinned. So did he.
Flora Blackford chose to speak near the Toledo city hall, in the shadow of the smaller copy of the great statue of Remembrance that stood on Bedloe Island in New York harbor. Chester found that interesting, even challenging. For more than a generation, remembrance had been the loudest drum the Democrats beat. For a nation twice defeated, twice humiliated, by the CSA and the Confederates' European allies, it was a drumbeat that had struck deep chords.
But now the Great War was eleven years past. The United States had won it. People still held Remembrance Day parades, but they didn't march with flags upside down any more. Having won, the United States were no longer in distress. And, ever since the Great War ended, the Democrats hadn't been able to find any other theme that resonated with the voters as remembrance had.
And now, here stood Flora Blackford under that great statue with the gleaming sword. By the way she stood there, she said Remembrance-and the Democrats-spoke to yesterday's worries, yesterday's needs. I'm going to talk about what you need to hear today-and tomorrow, she said without words, merely by standing there.
"We've come a long way the past eight years," she said, "but we've still got a long way to go. When President Sinclair was elected, you risked losing your job if you went out on strike. Some of you had lost your jobs. That can't happen any more, thanks to the laws we've passed."
Chester Martin pounded his palms together. He'd fought company goons, and he'd fought the police who served as the big capitalists' watchdogs and hunting hounds. Next to what he'd been through in the trenches, those brawls hadn't been anything much. And if you weren't willing to fight for what you wanted, did you really deserve to get it? He believed in the class struggle. He believed in it all the way down to his toes.
When the applause died down a little, Vice President Blackford's wife went on, "You know the Democrats never would have passed a bill like that, or like the one that gives workers the right to take leave without pay if there's a baby in the family or someone takes sick and then get their jobs back. They were in power from 1884 to 1920, and they still behave as though it's 1884."
That drew not only applause but whoops of laughter. It also fit in very well with what Chester had been thinking not long before. Flora Blackford continued, "And we tried to give you old-age insurance, too. We tried hard. But we couldn't quite manage that, because the Democrats had enough men in the Senate to tie up the bill with a filibuster. We've got to elect more Socialists. Friends, comrades, the presidency is important, but it's not enough, not by itself. We have to fight the forces of reaction wherever we find them. That's what the class struggle is all about."
It wasn't how Martin imagined the class struggle. He took the phrase literally. He'd broken enough heads in his time to have reason to take it literally. He'd taken his lumps, too; the real problem with the class struggle was that the capitalists and their lackeys fought back hard. But the idea of carrying the struggle even to the halls of Congress held a powerful appeal for him.
"We don't need the enormous Army and Navy we had before the Great War, the Army and Navy that ate up so much money and so much of our industry," Flora said. "We've won the war. Now we can enjoy what we won. Factories can make goods for people, not for killing. We can spend our wealth on what we need, not on battleships and machine guns and barrels. We've fought our neighbors too many times. We can work toward living at peace with them now."
That drew more loud cheers. Chester joined in them, but more than a little halfheartedly. This was the part of the Socialist platform that still graveled him. Still, Flora Blackford expressed it well. Maybe the 1920s were so prosperous because less money was going into weapons and fortifications and more into people's pockets. Maybe.