Sometimes Jake was part of those gatherings, sometimes he wasn’t. After tonight, either he would be or he wouldn’t have anything to do with the Party any more. He saw no middle way—but then, he’d never been a man who looked for the middle way in anything he did.
A small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the meeting hall: men in caps and straw hats crowding around the doorway, jostling to get in. They parted like the Red Sea to let Jake by. “Tell the truth tonight, Featherston!” somebody called. “Tell everybody the whole truth.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Jake answered. “I don’t know how to do anything else. You wait and see.”
Several people clapped their hands. But somebody said, “You don’t want to be Party chairman. You want to be king, is what you want.”
Whirling to turn on the man, Jake snapped, “That’s a goddamn lie, Bill Turley, and you know it goddamn well. What I want is for the Freedom Party to go somewhere. If it wants to go my way, fine. If it doesn’t, it’ll go however it goes and I’ll go somewhere else. No hard feelings.”
No matter what he’d said a moment before, that was a thumping lie. Hard feelings were what made Jake Featherston what he was. If the Freedom Party rejected him tonight, he would never forget and never forgive. He never forgot and never forgave any slight. And this rejection, if it came, would be far worse than a mere slight.
Inside, people buzzed and pointed as he walked up the aisle toward the long table on the raised stage at the front of the hall. Anthony Dresser already sat up there, along with several other Party officials: Ernie London, the treasurer, who was almost wide enough to need two chairs; Ferdinand Koenig, the secretary, a headbreaker despite his fancy first name; and Bert McWilliams, the vice chairman, a man who could be inconspicuous in almost any company.
Dresser, London, and McWilliams all wore business suits of varying ages and degrees of shininess. Koenig, like Jake, was in his shirtsleeves. As Jake sat down at the table, he looked out over the audience. It was a shirtsleeves crowd; he saw only a handful of jackets and cravats and vests. He smiled, but only to himself. Dresser and his chums no doubt thought they looked impressive. The crowd out there, though, would think they were stuffed shirts.
“And they are,” Jake muttered to himself. “God damn me to hell and gone, but they are.”
Anthony Dresser rapped a gavel on the tabletop. “This meeting of the Freedom Party will now come to order,” he said, and turned to Ferdinand Koenig. “The secretary will read the minutes of last week’s meeting and bring us up to date on correspondence.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Koenig said in a rumbling baritone. Jake Featherston listened with half an ear as he droned through the minutes, which were approved without amendments. “As for correspondence, we’ve had a good many letters from North and South Carolina and from Georgia concerning joining the Party and forming local chapters, this as a result of Mr. Featherston’s speaking tour. We’ve also had inquiries from Mississippi and Alabama and even one from Texas, these based on newspaper stories about the speaking tour.” He displayed a fat sheaf of envelopes.
Dresser gave him a sour look. “Kindly keep yourself to the facts, Mr. Koenig. Save the editorials for the papers.” He nodded to Ernie London. “Before we proceed to new business, the treasurer will report on the finances of the Party.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman.” London’s voice was surprisingly high and thin to be emerging from such a massive man. “As far as money goes, we are not in the worst situation. Our present balance is $8,541.27, which is an increase of $791.22 over last week. I would like that better if it were in dollars from before 1914: then we would have ourselves a very nice little piece of change. But even now, it is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”
“Question!” Jake Featherston said sharply. “Where did all that new money come from?”
Dresser brought the gavel down sharply. “That doesn’t matter now. Only thing that matters is how much money we’ve got.” He banged the gavel again. “And now, if nobody else has got anything to say, we’ll get on with the new business. We—”
“Mr. Chairman, I reckon Jake’s got himself a point,” Ferdinand Koenig said, “especially on account of the new business you’ve got in mind.”
Bang! “No, sir,” Dresser said, angry now. “I said it doesn’t matter, and my ruling stands, by Jesus.”
“Mr. Chairman, I appeal that ruling to a vote from the floor,” Jake said. He hated parliamentary procedure, but he’d started learning it anyhow, even if he did think it was only a way to cheat by the numbers.
“Second,” Koenig said.
“Never mind,” Dresser said in a low, furious voice. He wasn’t ready for a floor vote, then. Jake wasn’t nearly sure he was ready for a floor vote, either. When one came, he wanted it to be for all the marbles. Dresser said, “Go ahead, Ernie. Tell ’em what they want to know, so we can get on with things.”
Reluctantly, London said, “Some came from dues, some came from contributions from people who heard Featherston’s speaking tour.”
“How much came from each?” Jake demanded.
Fat as he was, Ernie London looked as if he wished he were invisible. “I don’t have the figures showing the split right here with me,” he said at last.
“Hell of a treasurer you are,” Featherston jeered. “All right, let me ask you an easy one: did I bring in more or less than half the week’s take? You tell me you don’t recollect, I’ll call you a liar to your face. Everybody knows bookkeepers like playing with numbers. They don’t forget ’em.”
Most unwillingly, London said, “It was more than half.”
“Thank you, Ernie.” Jake beamed at him, then nodded to Anthony Dresser. “Go on ahead, Tony. It’s your show for now.” He put a small but unmistakable stress on the last two words.
“All right, then.” Dresser looked around the room, no doubt gauging his support. Featherston was doing the same. He didn’t know how this would come out. He knew how it would come out if there were any justice in the world, but that had been in short supply for a while now. If there were any justice in the world, wouldn’t the CSA have won the war? Maybe the same sorts of thoughts were going through Anthony Dresser’s mind as he banged the gavel down once more and announced, “New business.”
“Mr. Chairman!” Bert McWilliams’ voice was more memorable than his face, but not much. When Dresser recognized him, he went on, “Mr. Chairman, I move that we remove Jake Featherston from his position as head of propaganda for the Freedom Party.”
“Second!” Ernie London said at once. Jake had expected London to bring the motion and McWilliams to second it; otherwise, he was unsurprised.
“It has been moved and seconded to remove Jake Featherston as head of propaganda,” Anthony Dresser said. “I’ll lead off the discussion.” He rapped loudly with the gavel several times. “And we will have order and quiet from the members, unless they have been recognized to speak. Order!” Bang! Bang!
When something not too far from order had been restored, Dresser resumed: “I don’t deny Jake has done some good things for the Party—don’t get me wrong. But he’s done us a good deal of harm, too, and it’s not the kind of harm that’s easily fixed. He’s taken all the great things we stand for and boiled them down to hang the generals and hang the niggers. Not that they don’t need hanging, mind you, but there are so many other things to get the country going again that need doing, too, and he never talks about a one of them. People get the wrong idea about us, you see.”
London and McWilliams followed with similar speeches. Out in the hard, uncomfortable seats that filled the hall, the Freedom Party members were silent, listening, judging.
Confidence surged through Featherston. Even here, when they should be doing everything to crush him, his opponents beat around the bush and tried to see all sides of the question. He would never make that mistake. “Mr. Chairman!” he said. “Can I speak for myself, or are you just going to railroad me altoget
her?”
Warily, Dresser said, “Go ahead, Jake. Have your say. Then we vote.”
“Right,” Featherston said tightly. He looked out at the crowd. “Now is the time to fish or cut bait,” he said. “The reason I’m head of propaganda is that I’m the only man up here people can listen to without falling asleep.” That got him a laugh. Anthony Dresser, sputtering angrily, tried to gavel it down and failed. “I’m the one who brings in the money—Ernie said so himself. And I’ll tell you why—I keep it simple. That’s what propaganda is all about. I make people want to support us. I don’t say one thing Monday and another thing Tuesday and something else on Wednesday. Like I say, I keep it simple.”
He took a deep breath. “I shake things up. I make the people in high places sweat. That’s the other thing propaganda is for, folks—to show people your way is better. So. Here it is: you can go on with me and see how much we can shake loose together, or you can throw me out and spend your time pounding each other on the back, on account of it’ll be a cold day in hell before you see any more new members.” He rounded on Anthony Dresser. In tones of contemptuous certainty, he said, “Mr. Chairman, I call the question.”
Dresser stared, the scales suddenly fallen from his eyes. “You don’t want to be head of propaganda,” he stammered. “You—You want to head the Party.”
Jake grinned, hiding his own unease where Dresser let his show. “I call the question,” he repeated.
Licking his lips, Dresser said, “In favor of removing Jake Featherston?” Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the men in the hall raised their hands. In a voice like ashes, Dresser said, “Opposed?” The rest of the hands flew high. So did a great shout of triumph. “The motion is not carried,” Dresser choked out.
“Mr. Chairman!” Ferdinand Koenig said, and Dresser was rash enough to recognize the Party secretary. Koenig went on, “Mr. Chairman, I move that you step down and we make Jake Featherston chairman of the Freedom Party.”
Another great shout rose. In it were two dozen cries of, “Second!”—maybe more. Featherston and Koenig grinned at each other as Anthony Dresser presided over voting himself out of office. In that glorious moment, Jake felt the world turned only because his hands worked its axis. He had his chance now. He didn’t know what he would make of it, not yet, but it was there.
Stephen Douglas Martin looked at his son. “I wish you wouldn’t do this,” he said, worry in his voice.
“I know,” Chester Martin answered. “You’ve got to understand, though—you have a place. The way the bosses are acting these days, I’ll never have one, not unless I take it for myself.”
His father pointed to the bulge of the pistol behind his belt. “You won’t get it with that.”
“I won’t get it any other way,” Martin said stubbornly. “I don’t aim to shoot first—I’m not that stupid—but I’m not stupid enough to stand around and watch my friends on the picket lines get shot down like dogs, either. If there’s no trouble, fine. But if those goons start banging away at me, I’m not going to run like a rabbit, not any more.”
His father shook his head, a troubled gesture. “You’ve been listening to the Socialists again. If I never see another red flag, it’ll be too soon.”
“You don’t get it, Pa,” Chester said, impatient with the ignorance of the older generation. “If it weren’t for the Socialists, nobody’d make any kind of decent money—the bosses would have it all.” Unending labor strife since he’d come home from the war had eroded his lifelong faith in the Democratic Party.
“You’re going to end up on a blacklist,” his father said gloomily. “Then you won’t have any work at all, no matter how the strikes turn out.”
“I won’t have any steel work, maybe,” Chester said with a shrug. “One way or another, though, I’ll get along. There’s plenty of things I can do if I have to. One of ’em or another is bound to work out. I’m a white man; I pull my weight.”
“Aahhh.” Stephen Douglas Martin made a disgusted noise. “You’re in it for the glory. I remember the red flags flying back in the ’90s, too, and the battles, and the blood in the streets. It was all foolishness, if you ask me.”
“Glory?” Chester Martin laughed bitterly. He unbuttoned his left cuff and rolled the sleeve high to show the scar a Confederate bullet had left on his upper arm. “There’s no such thing as glory, near as I can tell. If the machine guns didn’t kill it, the artillery did. Teddy Roosevelt promised us a square deal, but I don’t see him delivering. If I have to go out into the streets to get it, I’ll do that—and to hell with glory.”
“Aahhh,” his father repeated. “Well, go on, then, since that’s what you’re bound and determined to do. I only hope you come back in one piece, that’s all. You’re playing for keeps out there.”
Chester nodded. The thought did not bother him, or not unduly. He’d been playing for keeps since his first comrade got hung up on Confederate barbed wire and shot just inside the Virginia line back in August 1914. He said, “What was the war about, if it wasn’t about having a better life after it was over? I don’t see that, not for me I don’t, not without this fight. I’m still here in the old room I had before I went into the Army, for heaven’s sake.”
“I buried one son, Chester, when the scarlet fever took your brother Hank,” his father said heavily. “It tore my heart in two, and what it did to your mother…. If I had to do it twice, I don’t know how I’d get by afterwards.”
Chester Martin slapped his father on the back. “It’ll be all right. I know what I’m doing, and I know why I’m doing it.” That wasn’t the bravado he might have shown in the days before conscription pulled him into the Army. Instead, it was a man’s sober assessment of risk and need.
His father said nothing more. His father plainly saw there was nothing more to say. With a last nod, Chester left the flat, went down to the corner, and waited for the trolley that would take him into the heart of Toledo and into the heart of the struggle against the steelmill owners.
The strikers, by now, had their own headquarters, a rented hall a couple of blocks away from the long row of steelworks whose stacks belched clouds of black, sulfurous smoke into the sky. The hall had its own forward guards and then a stronger force of defenders in red armbands closer to it. Most of the strike’s leaders had served in the Great War. They understood the need to defend a position in depth.
An unusual number of trash cans and kegs and benches lined the street by the hall. If the Toledo police tried to raid the place, the strikers could throw up barricades in a hurry. They’d already done that more than once, when their struggle with the owners heated up. For now, though, motorcars whizzed past the hall.
For now, too, blue-uniformed police made their way past the strikers’ guards. The men in blue strolled along as if they were in full control of the neighborhood. Only a few of them strolled along at any one time, though. A tacit understanding between the leaders of the strike and city hall let the police keep that illusion of control, provided they did not try to turn it into reality. The agreement was not only tacit but also fragile; when things heated up on the picket lines, the cops drew near at their peril.
“What do you say, Chester?” Albert Bauer called when Martin walked into the hall. The stocky steelworker made a fist. “Here’s to the revolution—the one you said we didn’t need.”
“Ahh, shut up, Al,” Martin answered with a sour grin. “Or if you don’t want to shut up, tell me you were never wrong in your whole life.”
“Can’t do it,” Bauer admitted. “But I’ll tell you this: I don’t think I was ever wrong on anything this important.”
“Teach me to be like you, then,” Martin said, jeering a little.
“You’re learning.” Bauer was imperturbable. “You started out mystified by the capitalists, same as so many do, but you’re learning. Before too long, you’ll see them like they really are—nothing but exploiters who need to be swept onto the ash heap of history so the proletariat can advance.”
“I don’t know anything about the ash heap of history,” Martin said. “I hope some of them get swept away in the elections. They’re only a couple of months off. That would send the country the right kind of message.”
“So it would,” Bauer said. “So it would. That means we have to send the country the right kind of message between now and election day.”
“You mean you don’t want me to go out and start taking potshots at the ugly blue bastards who’ve been taking potshots at us?” Martin said.
“Something like that, yeah.” Bauer’s eyes went to the pistol concealed—but not well enough—in the waistband of Martin’s trousers. “We aren’t out to start any trouble now. If the police start it, we’ll give them as much as they want, but the papers have to be able to say they went after us first.”
“All right.” That made sense to Martin. He headed over to the neat rows of picket signs. Choosing one that read A SQUARE DEAL MEANS A SQUARE MEAL, he shouldered it as if it were a Springfield and headed out toward the line the striking steelworkers had thrown up around the nearest plant.
By then, the scabs who kept the plant running had already gone in. Martin was sure they’d gone in under a hail of curses. Perhaps they hadn’t gone in under a hail of rocks and bottles today. That was the sort of thing that touched off battles with the police, and everything seemed quiet for the time being, as it had on the Roanoke front when both sides were gearing up to have a go at each other.
Martin marched along the sidewalk. Toledo police and company guards kept a close eye on the strikers. The police looked hot and bored. Martin was hot and bored, too. Sweat ran off him in rivers; the day was muggy, without a hint of a breeze. He kept a wary eye on the company guards. They looked hot, too, but they also looked like Great Danes quivering on the end of leashes, ever so eager to bite anything that came near.
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