He sighed. He made a production of lighting a cigarette (Joe Steele’s pipe was better for that). He blew out smoke. Having stalled as long as he could, he mumbled, “I’ll take care of it.” He was a reporter, not a hero.
Had Vince Scriabin been a proper politician, he would have glad-handed Charlie till Charlie felt good, or at least not so bad, about doing what he saw he had to do. But the Hammer was an aide. He didn’t have to worry about getting elected. He was prickly, not greasy. He grudged Charlie a nod. “Okay. Good.” He shoved the Post at him. “Take this with you. If it stays here, I’ll use it in the bathroom.”
“Nice to see you’re still as charming as ever,” Charlie said, and had the small pleasure of walking out while Scriabin scratched his head.
He wrote the story. Where Mike had painted the bill as black as he could, Charlie chose pastels. He went on about the ruination of the Dust Bowl. He went on about how empty the states where the bill would take effect were, and about how much they needed labor. He talked about how the criminals who would be doing the labor were paying their debt to society. He put in so much sugar, if he were a diabetic he would have needed an insulin shot.
He wondered if he was laying it on too thick, if the White House would think he was mocking it by singing its praises too loudly. He also wondered if he really was doing that. You could insult somebody by calling him sweetie just as well as you could by calling him a son of a bitch.
But the story ran in papers from Bangor to San Diego. A few days after it did, he got a call from the White House at home. It wasn’t Scriabin this time. It was Stas Mikoian. “Good job, Charlie!” the Armenian said. “The wires and letters coming into the Senate about the bill are running close to four to one for it.”
“They are?” Charlie said. “How do you know?”
Mikoian laughed. “We have ways. You bet we do.”
He didn’t say what they were. Did someone report to Joe Steele from every Senator’s office? Did the President have spies in the mailroom at the Capitol? Did somebody in the Western Union office tally every telegram as it came off the wire? Charlie had trouble believing that, but he had just as much trouble not believing Mikoian. Vince Scriabin, without a doubt, would lie straight-faced. Mikoian seemed much more at home with the truth.
Which meant . . . what? Suppose you were one of the minority, someone who didn’t like Joe Steele’s bill. Would a cop or a Justice Department agent knock on your door or rough you up on the street? Charlie shook his head. This was America, not one of those sorry countries far away across the sea. That kind of thing couldn’t happen here.
“Anyhow,” Mikoian went on, his voice warm and genial, “Joe Steele’s pleased with what you did. He told me to say thanks, so I am. See you.”
“What was that all about?” Esther asked as Charlie hung up.
“That was the White House—Mikoian.” If Charlie sounded dazed, well, he felt that way, too. “Joe Steele liked my piece.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Probably.” Charlie walked into the kitchen and fixed himself a stiff drink.
A week later, the bill for reconstructing the Midwest passed the Senate. Joe Steele signed it into law. Charlie was one of the reporters he invited to cover the signing ceremony. J. Edgar Hoover stood at the President’s right hand while Joe Steele put on his John Hancock. Hoover looked even happier about the law than his boss did. Seeing Hoover happy made Charlie wonder how big a mistake he’d made.
* * *
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 P
opulists 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.”
“Mike, I’m gonna tell you two things about that,” Charlie answered. “The first one is, Joe Steele ain’t my guy. I just work out of Washington, so I write a lot about politics.”
“You suck up to those California gangsters, is what you do,” Mike said.
Charlie held up a hand, and held on to his temper. “The other thing is, we came up here to see people we care about—”
“People we love,” Esther broke in.
“People we love.” Charlie nodded. “That’s right. We didn’t come up here to wrangle about politics. That’s not a whole lot of fun. Okay?”
Mike was scowling. Charlie wondered if he’d had a drink or three before he came over here. Stella put her hand on his arm. He started to shake her off, but seemed to think twice. With what looked like a real effort, he made himself nod. “Okay, Charlie. We’ll do it that way. For auld lang syne, and all.”
“For auld lang syne,” Charlie agreed gratefully. He didn’t want to fight with his brother, especially out in public. He was in New York for a good time, not a row.
He got a T-bone. Esther chose a New York strip. Each cut off a bite and passed it to the other. Mike and Stella did the same thing with his sirloin and her veal chop. Marriage had all kinds of advantages. You got to try two different entrees whenever you went out to eat together.
But, except for the food, the dinner wasn’t a success. Charlie sighed once he and Esther got back to their hotel room after good-byes and handshakes and hugs. “Even if we didn’t talk about it, the elephant was still in the room,” he said.
“The elephants are all lying on their backs with their legs in the air,” Esther said.
He made a face at her. “You know what I mean. He thinks I’m a sellout. He might not’ve said it, but he still thinks it. And the way it looks to me is, he’s so buggy about Joe Steele, he doesn’t like anything the man does. And he has done some good, doggone it.”
“Some, maybe,” Esther said judiciously. “But everything comes with a price. And now we’ve got four more years to see how expensive it is.”
* * *
March, people said, came in like a lion. If March did come in like a lion, then January, 20, 1937, was . . . what? A Tyrannosaurus rex, maybe. The Twentieth Amendment had moved Inauguration Day forward by six weeks, but it hadn’t moved the weather.
The day was about as nasty as Washington ever got, in fact. Close to a quarter of a million had come into the nation’s capital to watch Joe Steele take the oath of office for his second term, and Charlie was sure just about all of them wished they’d stayed wherever they came from. Several thousand holed up in Union Station and never got any farther. They might have been the lucky ones, or the smart ones.
It was cold. It was wet. It was miserable. It started raining before sunup and it didn’t stop all day. In the morning, some of the rain was freezing and some turned to sleet. By noon, the mercury did climb above freezing: one whole degree above freezing. Shivering in a topcoat under an umbrella, Charlie would sooner have been home in bed. Much sooner.
Joe Steele went ahead with the ceremony as if it were seventy-five degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Joe Steele, from everything Charlie had seen, always went ahead with what he’d already planned to do, no matter what. If people got in his way, he went through them or ran over them. If the weather got in his way, he just ignored it.
That meant Charles Evans Hughes also had to go ahead with the ceremony. The Chief Justice was in his mid-seventies. Watching water drip from the end of his nose and from his beard, Charlie hoped the poor old man wouldn’t come down with pneumonia and die. Hadn’t that happened to somebody, to one of the Presidents? Was it William Henry Harrison? He thought so, but wasn’t sure without looking it up. (Was Joe Steele, on the other hand, hoping Hughes did die of pneumonia so he could name a pliable replacement? Charlie told himself that was the kind of thing Mike would think.)
The President took the oath of office about twenty past twelve. It was raining harder than ever. A Secret Service man held an umbrella over Joe Steele’s head. Another held one above the microphone. Charlie watched that with some apprehension. Wouldn’t you fry yourself using the mike in this weather?
It didn’t bother the President. Or if it did, Joe Steele didn’t show it. Not showing he was bothered was another of his strengths. Not far from Charlie, Lazar Kagan and Stas Mikoian both looked miserable. Even Scriabin might have wanted to be somewhere else, and his pan was almost as dead as his boss’.
“We have finished the first Four Year Plan. We will go on with the second Four Year Plan.” Joe Steele made his program seem as implacable as he was. “The first Plan laid the foundation for moving forward with reconstructing our country. Now we will build on that foundation. The powerful who have become powerful by tricks and by guile have tried to stop me, but they have failed. The people see through their lies. We will move forward, and we will have better days ahead.”
&nbs
p; He paused for applause. He got some, but it was tepid and muffled. Almost everybody was too soaked to show much enthusiasm—and the steady rain drowned the sound of clapping.
“I will work without rest to make this great nation more secure both at home and abroad,” the President said. “No wreckers will be allowed to stand in the way of progress or to sabotage it. No foreign foe will be allowed to challenge our strength. We defy Reds and Fascists alike. Neither disease will ever touch these shores!”
Another pause for applause. Some more soggy handclaps. Charlie thought the inaugural address would read well, but nobody except perhaps Gypsy Rose Lee would be able to excite this crowd—and Gypsy Rose Lee would freeze to death if she came out in what she usually almost wore.
Joe Steele plowed ahead. He promised jobs. He promised food. He promised dams and highways and canals. He promised warships on the seas, warplanes in the skies, and tanks on the ground. The microphone didn’t electrocute him. Charlie couldn’t have said why it didn’t, but it didn’t.
And after the speech was done, Joe Steele stood on an open-air reviewing stand while soldiers and tanks and marching bands rolled past. No one held an umbrella over his head there. He had his familiar cloth cap, and that was it. According to the program, bombers were supposed to have flown by overhead, but that bit of business did get canceled. Nobody could have seen the planes through the thick, dark clouds.
When he went back to the White House, it was in the same open car that had brought him to the Mall. Charlie was also in an open car, eight or ten vehicles behind the President’s. People lining the streets waved to him and the other shivering, dripping reporters, thinking they were dignitaries. A couple of them waved back. Charlie didn’t have the energy.
Secret Service men hurried the reporters into the White House. Going past the President’s car, Charlie saw that it had something like a half inch of water sloshing around in the bottom of the passenger compartment. The one he’d ridden in must have, too.
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