In the sly and insightful story that follows, he introduces us to an alternate America where the Media Age came just a little bit early . . .
IT WAS AN ENLIGHTENED year, a young century from which to spring forward into the future, a year in which people pushed the new boundaries of freedom.
It was an era of marvels, and who knew what could or could not be done? Men had sent their signals by etheric wave across the English Channel, and the mighty Niagara had been tamed and harnessed to the yoke of man. Locomotive rails tunneled across and under the great Rocky Mountains, and America, the stripling giant, had beaten the tired empire of Spain to the ground in a war of only three months. Men now talked of airships that would fly to the moon, and of telephones to breach the vapory wall between worlds.
It was 1904. Who knew what marvels would be next?
The room was smoke-filled, but that was no surprise; the rooms where real decision making occurred were always smoke-filled.
“Damn Democrats,” Horovitz said. “They’re going to ruin everything we fought for.”
“Indeed,” Hanna said. Marcus Hanna, the Ohio senator, was the chairman of the Republican party, but Horovitz was its invisible leader. “You are only stating the obvious. But who have we got?”
“Damn that communist, that anarchist, that swine,” Horovitz said. “Why’d he have to shoot Teddy? Couldn’t he have shot McKinley? Damn it to hell, we need Teddy now, more than ever.”
Levi Horovitz – Leggy, to his friends, of which he had few, at least inside politics – was short and rotund. He was rarely seen in public, and never without a soggy cigar clamped in his teeth. For nearly twenty years, Horovitz had been the hidden power behind the Republican party – since 1884, when, with the aid of a handful of carefully paid newsmen, he had orchestrated his candidate Jimmy Blaine into the Republican nomination over the incumbent Chester Arthur.
Horovitz was bitterly aware that he would never serve in office himself. He could never get elected, not in this century, not in the next. Not a Jew. Not even in America, the most enlightened country in the world. But he had adapted, and presidents and generals danced to his orders.
“Roosevelt’s not much good to us now, six feet under,” Hanna said. In Hanna’s private opinion, Roosevelt had never been any good for the Republicans; the damned cowboy had been unsafe and erratic. But there was no per centage in talking against a war hero, especially a dead one; Hanna had learned that lesson well. “Better come up with somebody else.”
“Damn that anarchist,” Horovitz muttered again. “Damn him to hell.”
“That’s redundant; he’s there already,” Hanna said. “Now, who have you got?”
“Damn that Bryan, too.”
“Bryan’s got the masses behind him,” Hanna observed.
“Swine.” Horovitz spit out his cigar and ground it under his foot. “They’re all a bunch of swine.”
That was the problem facing the Republicans, all right. With Theodore Roosevelt dead, shot by a drug-crazed anarchist, who did they have? William Jennings Bryan was mobilizing the country yokels with his damned populist talk. The man was tireless, crossing and recrossing the country by rail, stopping at every cow-flop town on the tracks, talking about American imperialism as if it were a bad thing, asking the people whether they had ever seen the “full dinner pail” that McKinley had promised them. With his high-flown diction and rash promises, Bryan was raising their expectations – and harvesting their votes. He could motivate the rabble, old Bryan could; Horovitz would give him that. What a silver-tongued peacock he was at oration, with his talk of America “crucified upon a cross of gold” and his avowal of “plowshares of peace!”
If only the man had been a Republican, a true patriot, instead of a Democrat – one step away from being a communist. Or worse.
“Here’s my thought,” Hanna said. “We run John Hay.”
“Against William Jennings Bryan?” Horovitz dismissed him with a wave, and pulled a crumpled new cigar from his vest pocket. “You’re joking. Bryan would crumple him up like a page from last year’s Sears & Roebuck catalog and wipe his ass with the man.”
“Henderson, then?”
“Wouldn’t stand a chance. None of those old guys can stand against Bryan. We need somebody new.”
“Then who?”
“The boy genius,” Horovitz said. “The hero of America, the maestro of electricity.” At Hanna’s blank look, he said, “The wizard of Menlo Park.”
“You mean” – Hanna gasped – “Edison?”
Horovitz pulled a newspaper from his valise and dropped it onto the desk. The headline said, EDISON ANNOUNCES REST, HE IS TIRED OUT AND WILL STOP INVENTING FOR A WHILE. “He’s not tinkering,” Horovitz said. “He might as well run for president.”
“But – the man has no knowledge of politics.”
Horovitz lit his cigar, drew deeply, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and smiled. “So much the better.”
“No,” Edison said, “I have too much work to do. Wouldn’t think of it.”
He was no longer any sort of boy genius, not at fifty-five years of age, but his eyes had the restless, playful energy of a boy, darting away as if he were already bored with the conversation and itching to go outside to play. His suit was a stylishly cut gabardine, but wrinkled as if he had slept in it, and his tie was carelessly knotted and slightly askew.
Horovitz persisted.
“No,” Edison said, “I have no interest in politics. Gentlemen, I am duly flattered, but I do believe that you are importuning the wrong man.” He stood up and turned to the window, his back to Horovitz, pointedly gazing out across the East River.
It was intended as a gesture to dismiss Horovitz from his East Side office. Yet Horovitz persisted.
“Are you deranged,” Edison said, “or just deaf?” He turned back to Horovitz, his eyes blazing with irritation. “No, confound it, no, and again no! Why me?”
The question was exactly the opening that Horovitz was waiting for.
“Mr. Bryan is kind-hearted, Mr. Edison, but he is a man stuck deeply into the mire of the past,” he said. “He will lead us down from the heights we have scaled, and, in the name of his working man, will take us back into darkness. He is a fool, a fool who believes with utter sincerity that he is guided by God, and he will be the ruin of America.”
Horovitz was careful, telling Thomas Alva Edison just exactly what he wanted to hear. He worked words as carefully as playing a fish, in a net of flattery and sense in equal proportions.
“It is a century of science, Mr. Edison,” he concluded. “And if we cannot get leadership from a man of science, a man of your standing, what hope do we have? We come to you with our hats in our hands. So tell us, where is your equal? Is there another man of your caliber and perseverance? Give me but the name of this man, and we shall go on our knees and beg him to serve as candidate. No one but a man of science can help us. Join us, Mr. Edison. Lead us. Tell us how to steer America. You are our only hope.”
Edison slowly nodded. “A century of science. Yes, that it is. That, it most certainly is.”
“I love elections,” said Samuel Clemens. “It is the great American spectacle, featuring bloviating and drum-beating unmatched in the world, and it is always a thrill to see whether the hypocrites will beat the fools, or vice versa.”
Sam Clemens was in the barber shop. He was, as ever, resplendent in a white linen suit. For the new century, he had decided that he would wear only white; it made him look distinguished and dazzled the crowds, and Sam was a showman, every Missouri inch of him.
“Quiet down a bit now, please, Mr. Twain,” one of the men said. “We’re listening to Mr. Edison talk.”
Sam wasn’t in the barbershop for a haircut – he was cultivating the lion’s mane look that year – but had come to watch the men play checkers, listen to the election talk, and maybe join in and pontificate a bit about current events. Or perhaps he might pick up some gossip or some good lines he could use in an article or a spe
ech. But this time he was being upstaged, and upstaged by a doll, at that.
A talking doll. Sam had an Edison phonograph, of course; who hadn’t? They were all the rage. But this doll was a little Edison himself, a foot and a half tall, and spoke with Edison’s blunt, homespun voice. “I mean to put America to work,” the tiny Edison said. “Nothing great is accomplished without honest sweat, and I say America is great because we ain’t afraid of work.”
“Well, well,” Samuel Clemens said to it. “Truth, many folk as I know would sweat and toil and try just about anything to avoid honest work. I allow as the folk Mr. Edison knows must be a different kind of people entirely.”
“We shall enter the glorious future,” the Edison doll recited, “standing tall and proud.”
“Well, bully,” Sam told it. “That’s a fair promise, I’d say, about as honest as I’ve ever heard from a politician.” For a moment the men in the barbershop looked at him and not the talking Edison, and Sam went on, “We will enter the future, indeed. I reckon that will happen no matter which buffoon is elected. And glorious? Sure. ’Course, you can call a pig glorious, if you like.”
To tell the truth, Sam didn’t know what to make of Edison. He certainly admired him as an inventor, of course; Sam considered himself an inventor, but Edison was, no doubt about it, the top dog. But what in blazes was the man thinking of, running for president, and as a Republican, no less? Sam purely hated Republicans. Republican imperialism and jingoism, in his opinion, were likely to be the ruin of America. Was Edison too blind to know that only fools, charlatans, and con men ever ran for public office? Not that Sam necessarily minded a good confidence man; some of them were plain music to hear talk, and anyway, who else would he play pool with? But Edison?
He had to go see that Edison, he did. Give him a good talking to, let him know how he was being used.
He wondered if Edison played pool.
William Jennings Bryan was working like a mule; crisscrossing the country by rail, making fifteen and even twenty railroad-stop speeches a day, every day, save only Sunday, the sabbath, when he restricted himself to one speech, after church. To keep up his strength, he was eating six meals a day, and his campaign crew gave him a rubdown after each speech in a hopeless attempt to keep him fresh and vigorous.
Still, the Edison dolls were bringing the Republican campaign into every salon, barbershop, and cafe in America. After some desperate seeking, Bryan’s campaign found that the Victor grapho-phone company would make a talking machine small enough to hide inside a William Jennings Bryan doll, using a Victrola circular-platter instead of an Edison cylinder. The Edison company sued, but while the lawyers talked, the Bryan dolls battled the Edison dolls for the ears of America.
For that summer, the great American entertainment was to stage debates between the two dolls. The Bryan doll explained that the issue was the principles of democracy and rights for the working man against the plundering plutocracy and imperialism of the Republican party. The Edison doll talked about the future, the wonderful role America would have in bringing the engines of enlightenment to the world, as earlier electricity had distributed light. (Neither doll talked about real issues, as far as Sam Clemens could see.)
The talking cylinders were selling like blazes. “No band of train robbers ever planned a robbery upon a train more deliberately or with less conscience,” the tiny Bryan squeaked forth, “than the robbery the plutocrats plan upon this great nation.” “Innovation, confound it, innovation and pure honest sweat are what build American fortunes, and that is open to Americans of all cities,” the miniature Edison responded.
Edison set his team in the laboratory twenty-four hours a day trying to find ways to make reproductions of cylinders quickly and cheaply; inventing new materials to take the place of the fragile wax. As fast as he could innovate, the Victor talking-machine company matched Edison’s cylinders with new grapho-phone disks of Bryan’s speeches, and there was a new speech for sale for the dolls to talk every week.
“Edison is beating me,” Bryan said, “with light.” He was standing in the small office of the private railway car the campaign had hired. A pile of newspapers lay piled at the foot of the plumply cushioned armchair from which he had just arisen; he had scanned each one rapidly and discarded it. “It is not enough that the plutocrats are spending every dollar that they have stolen from the honest workingmen, but now Edison has started promising to bring electrification to every farmhouse in the country. The farmers are buying his electrical-miracle talk wholesale. He cannot do it, of course, but ever I fail to convince them.”
“Then promise electricity as well,” said Calhoun, his closest campaign adviser. Bryan was famed as a campaigner who revealed his strategies to no one, but Cal, who had no ambitions of his own but to be secretary to the great man, was one of the few that Bryan would trust to reveal his doubts to. “Just think what a benefit it would be for the common man, no longer to live under the tyranny of the sun!”
“I will not disparage the sun, which is God’s gift,” Bryan said curtly. “And, further, though all my advisers tell me to, I will cozen my people with no lies. The cost of the copper alone would bankrupt the nation, unless we are to implement a new tax, and that I will not do. I shall and will promise nothing that cannot be delivered.”
“There is a man,” Calvin said, “who has said – well, I don’t know myself, but he has said that he can send power without wires. He can control the lightning.”
“Who is this?” Bryan said.
“His name is Nikola Tesla.”
“And the problem?”
“Well,” Cal hesitated. “I’ve heard people say he’s mad.”
Nikola Tesla was Edison’s greatest rival – in the field of electrical inventing, his most vexing and only rival. Where Edison had electrified New York with direct-current electricity, Tesla’s alternating current, backed by Mr. Westinghouse, was electrifying the nation.
If the mad Serb said he could command the powers of lightning, it was no more or less a marvel, in its way, than Herr Daimler’s pneumatic-tired gasoline automobile.
Tesla had agreed to meet Bryan at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where he kept his room. Bryan had engaged a small private meeting room, decorated with a cabbage-rose wallpaper and an elaborate marble-topped table with an ormolu clock featuring the metaphorical figures of Time and the Lovers.
“I can create, or I can destroy,” Tesla said. He was impeccably dressed, in a dark suit whose shirt bore detachable cuffs and an elaborately knotted silk cravat of the palest blue. “I can make the Earth sing like a bell. I can excite the powers of resonance, and like that” – he snapped his fingers – “I could destroy buildings, cities, whole continents.” His stare was piercing, almost frightening in its intensity, like that of a preacher in the throes of the rapture. “I could split the Earth itself in two. Electricity? I can call forth the lightning from the deep blue sky and stand untouched in the electrical fires. God? You talk of God? I will show you God, the God of lightning. Give me only my dynamo, and I hold the powers of God in the palm of my hand.”
“Your talk is blasphemous,” Bryan said calmly. “If you wish to continue in this fashion, please absent yourself from my presence. And furthermore, I have no interest in your engines of destruction. America is no imperial war power; we are a power of peace, not a sower of human discord.”
Tesla was momentarily taken aback. “And what, then, do you want of me?”
“You seek backing. I am told that you want financial backers for your idea to create electrical power and send it through the ether across the Earth. Is this true?”
Tesla nodded. “Resonance,” he said. “Resonance is the secret; nothing works without resonance.”
“I think that without wires, there can be no meters, and without meters, the electricity would be free to all,” Bryan said. “And so, with no promise of fat remuneration, none of the plutocrats will finance your scheme.”
“All too true, I have found,” Te
sla said ruefully. “I must admit it.”
“Help me win this election.” Bryan’s eyes blazed with the strength of his sincerity. “Help me win, and I promise you, your electrical broadcast towers will be built.”
“Sir, I am yours.” Tesla bowed. “If invention is your requirement, you may have no fear of Edison, for in that respect I am his master. Only tell me what I must do, and I shall be at your most dedicated service.”
“Tesla? A fraud and a confidence man,” Edison said. He was dapper in a hundred-dollar silk suit now, sitting behind a marble-topped mahogany desk. His tie was still askew, probably from his having taken a nap on the desktop earlier.
Horovitz looked unconvinced. Edison was proving to be harder to manage than even Roosevelt had been; he had too many of his own ideas, some of them tending disastrously toward progressivism. But a victory by the populist Bryan would be far worse of a disaster.
Edison said, “Forget about Tesla. He will promise them the sky, anything, but he will take their money and deliver nothing but dreams and spun sugar. Believe me, I know; he worked for me, and he was nothing but trouble. Scientific research requires discipline and methodical experimentation. There is no place in electricity for a man with no discipline. Toys, that’s what he makes, gee-gaws to impress the masses. He is no inventor. And as for his vaunted etheric power beams – I say bah, and double-bah, and bah again. A fraud and a connivance. It will be like his alternating-cycle electrical tension; something that will kill people who use it, mark me well. It will kill people.”
Tesla’s joining the Bryan campaign as the candidate’s “electrical advisor” was in all of the news, and the excited journalists clearly hoped to pump up the rivalry between Tesla and Edison, harking back to the glorious days of the war between Edison’s direct-current and Tesla’s alternating electrical current. Perhaps Edison would electrocute somebody, as he had in the earlier war of the currents?
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