American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold Read online

  Before Thomas could reply, the telephone on General Liggett’s desk rang. He snatched it up. “Confound it, you know what sort of meeting I’m in,” he snapped, from which Morrell concluded he was talking to Lieutenant Colonel Abell in the outer office. But then Liggett said, “What? What’s that?” Color drained from his face, leaving it corpse-yellow. “Dear God in heaven,” he whispered, and hung up.

  “What is it?” Morrell and N. Mattoon Thomas said the same thing at the same time.

  General Liggett stared blindly from one of them to the other. Tears glistened in his eyes. All at once, he looked like an old, old man. “Teddy Roosevelt is dead,” he said, sounding as stunned and disbelieving as a shell-shocked soldier. “He was playing a round of golf outside Syracuse, and he fell over, and he didn’t get up. Cerebral hemorrhage, they think.”

  “Oh, my God.” Again, Morrell and Thomas spoke together. Thomas might be a Socialist, but Theodore Roosevelt had been a mighty force in the United States for more than forty years. No one, regardless of party, could be indifferent to that.

  So far Morrell thought, and no further. Then what he’d just heard really hit him. To his amazement and shame and dismay, he began to weep. A moment later, blurrily, he saw tears running down the faces of Hunter Liggett and N. Mattoon Thomas, too.

  Congresswoman Flora Blackford should have been packing for the trip from Philadelphia to Chicago, for the Socialist Party’s nominating convention. President Upton Sinclair would surely get his party’s nod for a second term: the Socialists’ first president, elected almost forty years after the modern Socialist Party began in Chicago, when in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War Abraham Lincoln led the Republican left wing out of one organization and into another.

  Yes, the presidential nomination was a foregone conclusion. The vice presidency? Flora smiled to herself. The vice presidency was a forgone conclusion, too. Nothing in the world, as far as she could see, would keep Hosea Blackford, her husband, from getting the nomination again. And then, in 1928 . . . He’d once said he didn’t expect to get the nod for the top of the ticket then. Maybe, though, maybe he was wrong.

  Such things were what she should have been thinking about—what she had been thinking about up till a few days before. Now she put her most somber clothes into a suitcase. She wouldn’t be going to Chicago, not yet, and neither would her husband. She’d always wanted to visit the city where the modern Party was born, and she would—but not yet. Instead, she packed for the short trip down to Washington, D.C., for the funeral of Theodore Roosevelt.

  Hosea Blackford came into the bedroom carrying black trousers and a white shirt. As he put them in the suitcase, he shook his head. “I’m almost as old as Teddy Roosevelt, and I still feel as though my father just died.”

  Both of Flora’s parents were still alive, but she nodded. “Everybody in the whole country feels that way, near enough,” she answered. “We didn’t always like him—”

  “If we were Socialists, we practically never liked him,” Hosea Blackford said.

  Nodding, Flora went on, “But whether we liked him or not, he made us what we are. He raised us. He raised this whole country. It’s no wonder we feel lost without him.”

  “No wonder at all,” her husband said over his shoulder as he went back to the hall closet for a black jacket and a black homburg. “He was always sure he knew what was best for us. He wasn’t always right, but he was always sure.” He chuckled. “Sounds like my pa, I’ll tell you that.” His flat Great Plains accent was a world away from her Yiddish-flavored New York City speech.

  He went back for a black cravat. Flora closed the suitcase. “Are we ready to go?” she asked.

  “I expect so.” He looked out the window of the flat that had been his alone—across the hall from hers—which they now shared. A motorcar waited in front of the building. Grunting, he picked up the suitcase.

  When they went outside, the driver saw him carrying it and rushed to take it from him. Grudgingly, Blackford surrendered it. He gave Flora a wry grin. Ever since she was elected to Congress, she’d wrestled with the problem of the privileges members of government—even Socialist members of government—enjoyed. For all her wrestling, for all her commitment to class struggle, she had yet to come to a conclusion that satisfied her.

  She and her husband enjoyed even more privilege on the southbound train: a fancy Pullman car all to themselves, and food brought to them from the diner. When they got to Washington, another motorcar whisked them to the White House.

  The flag in front of the famous building flew at half staff. The White House itself looked much as it had before the Great War. Repairs there had been finished almost a year before. The Washington Monument off to the south, however, remained a truncated stub of its former self. Scaffolding surrounded it; it would rise again to its full majestic height.

  “If there’s ever another war, all this work will go to waste,” Flora said.

  “One more reason there’d better not be another war,” her husband answered, and she nodded.

  President Upton Sinclair met them in the downstairs entry hall. After shaking hands with his vice president and kissing Flora on the cheek, he said, “I would sooner have done this in Philadelphia, but Roosevelt left word he wanted the ceremony here, and I couldn’t very well say no.”

  “Hardly,” Hosea Blackford agreed. “What does it feel like?—staying in the White House, I mean.”

  “Well, look at the place. I feel as though I were living in a museum.” Sinclair waved. He was a tall, slim man in his mid-forties: the youngest man ever elected president. His youthful vigor had served him well in 1920, when Teddy Roosevelt, even then past sixty, could be seen as a man whose time, however great, had passed him by. The president shook his head. “It’s even worse than living in a museum. It’s the reproduction of a museum. They didn’t get a whole lot out of here before the Confederates bombarded the place in 1914. Frankly, I’d rather be in Philadelphia. The Powel House doesn’t make me think I’ll get thrown out if I speak above a whisper.”

  Flora found herself nodding. “It is more like the American Museum of Natural History than any place where you’d want to stay, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.” President Sinclair nodded emphatically.

  “Strange that we should be doing the honors for Roosevelt,” Hosea Blackford observed.

  “He was a great man,” Flora said. “A class enemy, but a great man.”

  “Easier to admire a foe, especially an able one, after he’s gone,” Sinclair said.

  Like a lot of men largely self-taught—Abraham Lincoln had been the same—her husband was fond of quoting Shakespeare: “ ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.’ ”

  “An American Caesar.” President Sinclair nodded. “That fits.”

  But Flora shook her head. “No. If he’d been Caesar, he never would have given up the presidency when he lost four years ago. He would have called out the troops instead. And if Teddy Roosevelt had called them, they might have marched, too.”

  No one cared to contemplate that. Hosea Blackford said, “Well, he’s gone now, and . . . ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.’ ”

  “And we’ll give him a grand funeral, too,” the president added. “We can afford to do that. He’s a lot easier to deal with dead than he was alive.”

  Sleeping in the Mahan Bedroom felt strange to Flora; it was as big as the flat in which she and her whole family had lived in New York. The next morning, a colored servant—a reminder that Washington had once been closely aligned with the states now forming the Confederacy—brought her and her husband bacon and eggs and fried potatoes. She ate the eggs and potatoes; her husband demolished her bacon along with his own. “I shouldn’t, I suppose,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it. I don’t,” she answered, which was true most of the time. Only later did she wonder in what the eggs and p
otatoes had been cooked. Bacon grease? Lard? She was Socialist and secular and very Jewish, all at the same time, and every so often one piece bounced off another and left her unsure of what she ought to feel.

  Tens—hundreds—of thousands of people lined the route from the Capitol to the remains of the Washington Monument and then south. She and Hosea Blackford took their places on a reviewing stand near the Monument to watch Theodore Roosevelt’s funeral procession, along with members of Congress and some foreign dignitaries: she recognized the ambassador from the Confederate States, who stood close by his colleagues from Britain, France, and the Empire of Mexico in a glum knot. No one else came very close to them.

  Down among the ordinary spectators near the stand were a middle-aged woman wearing a gaudy medal—the Order of Remembrance, First Class—and a younger one who looked like her with the slightly less flamboyant Order of Remembrance, Second Class, hanging around her neck. They both held young children. The gray-haired man with them, who had a Distinguished Service Medal on his black jacket, said, “If she gets fussy, Nellie, give her to me.”

  “I will, Hal,” the older woman answered. Flora wondered what she’d done during the war to earn such an important decoration.

  She never found out. Indeed, a moment later, she forgot all about the people in the crowd, for flourishes of muffled drums announced that the procession was approaching. Behind the drummers—one each from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard—came a riderless black horse led by a soldier. As the animal slowly walked past, Flora saw that it had reversed boots thrust into the stirrups and a sheathed sword lashed to the saddle.

  Six white horses, teamed in twos, drew the black caisson carrying Roosevelt’s body in a flag-draped coffin. All six of the horses were saddled. The saddles of the three on the right were empty; a soldier, a sailor, and a Marine rode the three on the left.

  President Upton Sinclair, in somber black, marched bareheaded behind the caisson, along with some of Roosevelt’s relatives—including one man of about Flora’s age who had to be pushed along in a wheelchair. She wondered what sort of injury he’d taken in the war that had crippled him so.

  The premier of the Republic of Quebec strode along a few paces after Sinclair and the Roosevelt family, accompanied by a couple of Central American heads of state who’d taken a fast liner to reach the USA in time for the funeral. After them came the ambassadors from the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire: the great wartime allies, given pride of place. Envoys from Chile and Paraguay and the Empire of Brazil came next, followed by other emissaries from Europe and the Americas—and the ambassador from the Empire of Japan, elegant in a black cutaway. Alone of all the Entente nations, Japan hadn’t yielded to the Central Powers. She’d just stopped fighting. It wasn’t the same thing, and everyone knew it.

  After the foreign dignitaries marched a band playing soft, somber music. Another riderless horse brought up the rear of the procession. Flora found that excessive, but nobody’d asked her opinion. And the Socialist Party, being in power, did have an obligation to send the departed Roosevelt to his final rest with as much grandeur as possible, to keep the Democrats from screaming about indifference or worse.

  Once the procession had passed the reviewing stand, it turned south, toward the Potomac. The crowds there were just as thick as they had been between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. The sounds of weeping rose above the music of the band. “Say what you will, the people loved him,” Hosea Blackford remarked.

  “I know.” Flora shook her head in wonder. “In spite of the war he led them into, they loved him.” That war had cost her brother-in-law his life and her brother a leg. And David voted Democratic despite—or maybe because of—that missing leg, though he’d been a Socialist before.

  Her husband said, “Well, he won it, no matter how much it cost. And now he gets his last revenge on the Confederate States.” He chuckled in reluctant admiration.

  Flora didn’t know whether to admire Teddy Roosevelt’s final gesture or to be appalled by it. On the southern bank of the Potomac, in what had been Virginia but was now annexed to U.S. West Virginia, Robert E. Lee had had an estate. Since the Great War rolled over it, it had lain in ruins. That hadn’t bothered Roosevelt at all. He’d left instructions—and President Sinclair had agreed—that his last resting place should be on the grounds of Arlington.

  Clarence Potter paid two cents for a copy of the Charleston Mercury. “Thanks very much,” he told the boy from whom he bought it.

  “You’re welcome, sir,” the boy said, the thick drawl of the old South Carolina coastal city flavoring his speech. He cocked his head to one side. “You a Yankee, sir? You sure don’t talk like you’re from hereabouts.”

  “Not me, son.” Potter shook his head. The motion threatened to dislodge his steel-framed spectacles. He set them more firmly on the bridge of his long, thin nose. “I came to Charleston after the war, though. I grew up in Virginia.”

  “Oh.” The newsboy relaxed. He probably hadn’t gone more than ten miles outside of Charleston in his whole life, and wouldn’t have known a Virginia accent from one from Massachusetts or Minnesota.

  Holding his newspaper so he could read as he walked, Potter hurried down Queen Street toward the harbor. He moved like an ex-soldier, head up, shoulders back. And he had been a soldier—he’d served as a major in intelligence in the Army of Northern Virginia during the war. His accent had aroused some talk, and some suspicion, there, too. Even men who knew accents thought he sounded too much like a Yankee for comfort. And so he did; not long before the war, he’d gone to Yale, and the way people spoke in New Haven had rubbed off on him.

  Below the fold on the front page was an account of a speech by Jake Featherston, raising holy hell because Teddy Roosevelt’s bones were resting in the sacred soil of Virginia. Potter clucked and rolled his eyes and made as if to chuck the paper into the first trash can he saw. He would have bet Featherston would make a speech like that. But in the end, he didn’t throw away the Mercury. He opened it and read till he’d seen as much of the speech as it reprinted.

  He clicked his tongue between his teeth as he refolded the newspaper. Featherston would pick up points for what he’d said. Damn Teddy Roosevelt and his arrogance, Potter thought. As far as he was concerned, anything that helped the Freedom Party was bad for the Confederate States of America.

  He’d got to know Jake Featherston pretty well during the war. Featherston had made the fatal mistake of being right when he said Jeb Stuart III’s Negro servant, Pompey, was in fact a Red rebel. Young Captain Stuart, not believing it, had got Pompey off the hook, only to have his treason proved when the Negro uprising broke out a little while later. Stuart had gone into action seeking death after that, and, on a Great War battlefield, death was never hard to find.

  General Jeb Stuart, Jr., a hero of the Second Mexican War, was a power in the War Department in Richmond. He’d made sure Jake Featherston, who’d been right about his son’s error in judgment, never got promoted above the rank of sergeant no matter how well he fought—and Jake fought very well indeed. For that matter, Potter himself had also been involved in uncovering Jeb Stuart III’s mistake, and he’d advanced only one grade in three years himself.

  But his failure to get promoted affected only him. Had Jeb Stuart, Jr., relented and given Featherston the officer’s rank he deserved, the CSA would have been saved endless grief. Clarence Potter was sure of that. Featherston had been taking out his rage and frustration against Confederate authorities ever since.

  I knew even then he was monstrous good at hating, Potter thought. Did I ever imagine, while the fighting was going on, that he’d turn out to be as good at it as he has? He shook his head. He was honest enough to admit to himself that he hadn’t. He’d thought Jake Featherston would disappear into obscurity once the war ended. Most men—almost all men—would have. The exceptions were the ones who had to be dealt with.

  For the time being, it looked as if Featherston had been
dealt with. Not so long before, his speech would have stood at the top of the front page, not below the fold. He was a falling star these days. With luck, he wouldn’t rise again.

  When Potter got to the harbor, he stiffened. A U.S. Navy gunboat was tied up at one of the quays. Seeing the Stars and Stripes here, where the Confederacy was born and the War of Secession began, raised his hackles. The flag stood out; the C.S. Navy used the Confederate battle flag as its ensign, not the Stars and Bars that so closely resembled the U.S. banner. And the U.S. Navy men’s dark blue uniforms also contrasted with the dark gray their Confederate counterparts wore.

  These days, Clarence Potter made his living as an investigator. He’d been looking into smuggling going through the harbor, and had headed there to report his findings to the harbormaster. But that warship flying the hated Northern flag drew him as a magnet drew iron.

  He wasn’t the only one, either. Men in both C.S. naval uniform and in civilian clothes converged on the U.S. gunboat. “Yankees, go home!” somebody yelled. Scores of throats roared agreement, Potter’s among them.

  “Avast that shouting!” a U.S. officer on the deck of the gunboat bawled through a megaphone. “We’ve got every right to be here under the armistice agreement, and you know it damned well. We’re inspecting to make sure you Confederates aren’t building submersibles in these parts. If you interfere with us while we’re doing our duty, you’ll be sorry, and so will your whole stinking country.”

  They love us no better than we love them, Clarence Potter reminded himself. And that lieutenant commander had a point. If he and his men couldn’t make their inspection, the CSA would pay, in humiliation and maybe in gold as well. The Yankees had learned their lessons well; as victors, they were even more intolerable than the Confederates had been.

  “Yankees, go home!” the crowd on the quay shouted, over and over.

  At a barked order, the sailors on the gunboat swung their forward cannon to bear on the crowd. The gun was only a three-incher—a popgun by naval standards—but it could work a fearful slaughter if turned on soft flesh rather than steel armor. Sudden silence descended.