“That’s a truly whimsical ability you now have,” Mr. Lowden sneered, now working hard to retrieve his hand from Hastelloy’s grasp.
“Indeed. In your case, I can now prove your fingertips were around the windpipe of a prostitute last Christmas when she was strangled to death,” Hastelloy elaborated while strengthening his handshake to a crushing vise grip that brought Mr. Lowden to his knees. “Why choose some nasty street whore instead of a young, beautiful call girl to pay for sex? Perhaps you thought no one would miss an ugly fatty for you to carry out your sick snuff fetish upon.”
“Stop, please,” Mr. Lowden begged from his knees as his other hand attempted to aid his trapped appendage.
“No, you are the one who will stop,” Hastelloy insisted. “You will stop your bid to challenge President Hoover for the nomination, and you will most definitely stop murdering prostitutes. Stop these two activities, and I will keep my evidence against you private. Continue, and you will be placed behind bars and publically humiliated. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, sir.” Mr. Lowden shrieked along with a chorus of bones snapping in his hand under Hastelloy’s grasp.
“Then you’re free to go,” Hastelloy declared and released his grip. He hauled Mr. Lowden to his feet as the man cradled his right hand and shoved him out the door of his office. He pushed him again down the hallway toward the building’s main reception area. “I trust you’re capable of seeing yourself out?”
If Mr. Lowden had a response, it was lost on Hastelloy whose attention now lay upon his secretary. “Are they ready in the conference room?”
“Yes, Director,” Alvina answered with a broad grin of satisfaction on her face as her eyes followed the wounded man out the door leading to a bank of elevators. In her position, she was privy to nearly as much intelligence information as Hastelloy. “Mister Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Morgan and DuPont are all waiting for you. By the way, each of them is wearing my salary; I need a raise.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Hastelloy teased on his way to the conference room to greet his distinguished guests. Inside the dimly lit conference room, and seated around a circular table, Hastelloy found the four wealthiest and most powerful industrialists in the world. Each of them was either influential enough to keep incriminating evidence out of his hands, or actually abided by the laws. Either way, Hastelloy would have to use other motivating factors to secure their cooperation.
“Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time this evening,” Hastelloy offered in greeting.
“I was led to believe I didn’t have much choice in the matter,” Mr. Rockefeller said with an encouraging amount of good cheer in his voice. “How about the rest of you fine gentlemen?”
“There were no handcuffs involved,” Mr. Guggenheim chuckled, “though I did feel a certain necessity to cancel my dinner reservation. What is this all about, Director?”
Hastelloy allowed the question to hang over the room as he pulled out a chair for himself at the table of distinguished men. “It’s about the future. Each of you placed your considerable financial and organizational backing behind President Hoover’s election on the basis that he was a business friendly capitalist whose policies would bring you much prosperity. Three years and an unprecedented economic collapse later, I am now forced to ask the four of you how that has worked out for you?”
“Considering a third of my factories sit idle and I’ve lost nearly half my net worth, I have to answer that it hasn’t worked out the way I’d hoped,” Mr. DuPont answered.
“What was our alternative?” Mr. Morgan insisted. “Lose half our wealth with a Republican in office or all of it with some Communist sympathizing Democrat as president? Those liberals are all backed by labor unions supporting minimum wages, fixed forty-hour work weeks, and requiring employers to contribute toward an unemployment benefits pool to be paid out to laid off workers. They want to destroy everything that our meritocracy was based upon in favor of handouts.”
“Oh spare me, Morgan. You were handed most of what you control from your father, the same as me,” Rockefeller objected with a nonchalant wave of his hand across the air in front of him.
“Be that as it may,” Morgan conceded, “the only way to recover from this economic depression is for us to grow our way out of it. That is accomplished by way of President Hoover’s policies to issue tax breaks and lend capital to manufacturers in order to encourage their expansion. Our businesses would then hire more workers and pay them a decent wage for a day’s work rather than having them sitting around waiting to collect a handout.”
“Morgan, I find it rather ironic that you sit here and in one breath denounce the worker’s cries for financial help. Then in your very next breath, you insist the only way to fix things is for the government to give tax breaks and cheap lending, also known as handouts, to us and our businesses,” Rockefeller objected.
“We industrialists will put that money to good use making products the people will want to buy. What are millions of workers going to do with the few dollars they receive from some unemployment fund handout that I paid into on their behalf?” Morgan asked. “It gets diluted across the economy and does nothing for it in the end.”
“Collectively those millions of laid off workers and their families will buy food to keep farmers farming, and they’ll buy clothing to keep textile mills running. Let’s be honest with each other,” Rockefeller instructed. “A lack of money is not holding any one of us in this room back from expanding our enterprises. It is a complete lack of profit in doing so. No one is buying anything; therefore, we don’t make anything. Demand must be created from the bottom and ripple up through the economy.”
“This has certainly been a fun debate,” Hastelloy interrupted while opening his hands out wide and looking to his left palm. “On the one hand, we have the idea of giving money to the top as the titans of industry attempt to predict what the people will want to buy and build out their industrial capacity in kind. That of course assumes the funds handed out get spent at all and don’t just disappear into ever fattening bank accounts. Assuming that, more workers will get hired and the economy will grow happily ever after.”
Hastelloy shifted his gaze to his right hand. “On the other hand we have the bottom up approach of supporting the little guys so that they may buy things that they need to survive and thereby instruct the titans of industry what they want manufactured. The industrialists then build out to meet that demand, hire workers and again the economy grows on its merry way.”
“I personally see a dangerous parallel between the top down approach and communism’s central economic planning. In both cases a small, elite group tries to decide where money and economic capacity should be spent without much input from the fundamental laws of supply and demand.”
“Then again, what do I know? I’m just the nation’s top cop,” Hastelloy sighed. “My life revolves around facts, not theories. That being the case, the fact of the matter is we already tried Hoover’s top down solution and it failed in spectacular and disastrous fashion. It’s time for something new, a New Deal for America. A deal which grants relief to the unemployed and the poor, recovery to economic normalcy, and reform of the financial system to prevent this from ever happening again.”
“Who is proposing this New Deal?” Morgan asked.
“That is why the four of you are here now. Gentlemen, I would like you to meet Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Hastelloy announced and had his words rewarded with a distinguished individual in his early fifties enter the room. “President Hoover and his history of failed economics will represent the Republican ticket in the next election cycle. None of you can afford another four years like the last four. Mr. Roosevelt, with the backing of you four gentlemen, will represent the Democratic ticket and usher in his New Deal with America. All I ask as your host this evening is that you listen to him and his ideas. At that point you are free to make your own decision.”
Just over a year removed from the initial introductory meeting he facilitated between Mr. Roosevelt and his financial backers, Hastelloy stood in the crowd to watch the newly elected President Roosevelt take the oath of office.
As predicted, President Hoover was soundly trounced in the election. The deeply unpopular sitting president received only thirty-nine percent of the popular vote, and managed to carry only six states in the all-important Electoral College count.
Hoover was a fool who wasted America’s vast potential in a vain attempt to cling to some outdated political dogma of strict meritocracy. It was a simple message that played well to the crowds, ‘You get what you earn’. Once upon a time it was absolutely true, but the moment labor became specialized and economies grew into impossibly complex intermingled, interdependent systems, it all changed.
If one economic pillar such as spending from the lower classes of society, the big national banking institutions, or massive manufacturing firms collapsed, it toppled and took with it the entire economic system. Therefore, as abstract and flawed as it seemed, the economic philosophy of one prosperous sector of an economy bailing out a faltering one benefits everyone and ultimately leads to greater prosperity for all.
Roosevelt, and eventually his financial backers, understood this new reality and the new President said as much in his acceptance speech. “Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth…I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people. This is more than a political campaign or slogan. It is a call to arms…”
Hastelloy watched the president’s acceptance speech with great delight. He knew this nation, with all the potential in the world within its borders, was now moving in the right direction under President Roosevelt’s leadership. His plan to destroy the Alpha base on Mars once and for all was off to a good start.
Chapter 7: Departing from us, Comrade Lenin
Oleg took a look at his surroundings and felt a wave of warmth radiate from within on this otherwise freezing cold afternoon. The icy wind had long since numbed his extremities through the thick gloves, coat and hat he wore, but the inferno of pride burning in his heart was untouched. It was his family duty to honor this moment in a proper manner. This gave him cause to defy the thirty-five degree below freezing temperature to stand at the closest corner of the train station’s arrival platform, the premier spot in all of Moscow, to greet the arrival of the revolution’s dearly departed leader; Vladimir Lenin.
Over the last six hours of waiting, many had attempted to dislodge Oleg from his chosen place of tribute, but he would not be moved. To do otherwise was cowardly and contrary to all that Comrade Lenin stood for during his inspiring life. For most of his existence, Oleg had chosen the cowardly course of deference and inaction. Comrade Lenin gave him the courage to admit this about himself and then imparted upon him the resolve to remain strong and unyielding to those seeking dominion over him. Twenty years ago, he was not so brave.
All those years ago, Oleg was made to stand with his father and mother among a crowd. In front of them rose an elevated platform featuring two hanging nooses. There he looked on with a stomach hollowed out from weeks of starvation as his older brother and a friend stood trial. The pair dared to poach a deer on the Tsar’s land and would answer for the ‘grave offense’.
It was one deer; one scrawny buck out of several million that roamed the monarch’s land consisting of a massive estate the royal had not bothered to visit for countless years. The deer was not shot for sport, or any other foolishness. It was meant to feed a starving family. This much was said to justify the act in a plea for leniency, but only a peasant’s implied insult to his better was recognized by the courts. The Tsar’s rigid social hierarchy would be enforced without charity or humanity.
Oleg was only ten at the time, but he never forgave himself for just standing there. He just watched in deferred silence as they passed judgment and wrapped the noose around the neck of his best friend in the world. Even when the executioner kicked the stool out from under his brother, his only reaction was to watch his boyhood idol flail about in a losing battle to live. Oleg, his parents, and the entire crowd of hundreds forced to watch did nothing to stop the injustice.
The Tsar’s soldiers would have thwarted any attempt at rescue; Oleg did not fool himself in that regard. The instant his brother was arrested for the crime his fate was sealed. Oleg’s most haunting memory of that day was that he and the others did not feel they had the right to interfere. Their betters had the right to do it, and the peasants had an obligation to watch it be done because that was the order of things.
Five years later, the people made a bashful attempt at standing up to the Tsarist regime of Nicolas II. They rallied behind the call of Father Gapon, a very popular Orthodox priest among the working class. He led a peaceful protest of over one hundred thousand unarmed, striking workers to the Tsar’s seat of power at White Palace. It was there that they intended to present a petition calling for reforms.
Rather than accept the petition from his subjects, Nicholas II had his soldiers open fire into the unarmed crowd whose only real demand was to be treated as human beings rather than cattle. Oleg’s father was among the fallen in that Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1905. Yet again, cowardice governed Oleg’s reaction, or rather inaction.
His abuse of alcohol that followed, his mother’s suicide, and the meaningless passage of a decade did nothing to prod Oleg into action. It took Comrade Lenin. The great man emboldened the impoverished, overworked and starving labor class to finally stand up as one and say to the Tsar and his bourgeoisie backers ‘you are not my better just because some rich bitch gave birth to you’.
This great man and his fellow Bolsheviks inspired Oleg to, at last, avenge the wrongs visited upon his family at the hands of the Tsarist regime. He followed his father’s example and joined a march on Winter Palace. This time they did not approach the Tsar’s seat of imperial power armed with paper. They carried guns and wore uniforms of the people’s Red Army, and they took back their dignity. Oleg recalled that great day with the rare clarity one reserves only for the greatest moments of one’s existence.
Without song or cheer, they poured into the streets and through the Red Arch toward the monstrous palace. The white and green façade stood three levels tall and stretched nearly a quarter mile from one end to the other. It was said that the massive structure had nearly two thousand rooms, over a hundred separate staircases and some three hundred thousand square feet of living space. Now seeing the structure for himself, Oleg believed every word of it.
A man just ahead of him said in a low voice, “Keep your heads down comrades. They killed ten of our friends earlier as they crossed the courtyard, and they will surely fire upon us as well.”
The large mass of bodies moved into the open and began to run with everyone stooping low and bunching together. All of them made it to the pedestal of the Alexander Column and huddled behind the base. Then, without orders, the mass of several hundred men began flowing forward with the weight of numbers behind them.
To his great surprise and relief, the palace guards did nothing except throw down their rifles into a pile and stand there as the onrush overtook them. The first soldiers to reach the main gateway pulled the doors wide open, allowing the golden light from within to shine out. Watching the cagey gates of the Tsar’s authoritarian rule pried open sent a triumphant shout throughout the group of men. Oleg, carried along by the eager wave of men, found himself swept into the right hand entrance that opened into a great vaulted room.
Beyond that chamber ensued a maze of corridors and staircases. A number of huge packing crates stood about the first vaulted room, which the soldiers fell furiously upon to batter them open. Once pried apart, they pulled out lavish rugs, curtains, linens, porcelain plates, and glassware. Each precious piece was worth more than any of them could hope to ear
n in a lifetime, and it was theirs for the taking.
One soldier strutted around the chamber with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder. Another found a plume of ostrich feathers and stuck them in his hat. Oleg managed to get his hands on a set of silver dinnerware before the looting began to gain momentum.
Then a proud and commanding voice cried, “Comrades! Don’t touch anything! Show them that we are not thieves and bandits! This is the property of the People!”
Oleg spun around to find the voice belonged to none other than Leon Trotsky, Commissar of the People’s Red Army. The man’s narrow frame and equally unimpressive set of glasses gave the deceptive appearance of a weakling, but he was in fact the heart of the revolution’s military planning and preparation. He had the undying devotion of the men and his words were heeded at once.
Twenty voices began crying out among the maze of corridors, “Stop! Put everything back! Don’t take anything! This is the property of the People!”
Oleg relinquished his booty without a fuss, but others were not so accommodating. He looked on as many hands dragged the spoilers down. Tapestries were snatched from those who carried them, and two men took away the bronze clock. In rough and hasty movements, the things were crammed back into their cases and self-appointed sentinels stood guard. It was all utterly spontaneous as Comrade Trotsky moved on to the more pressing matter of securing the palace grounds and apprehending the residents.
Oleg witnessed a lifetime of wages slip through his fingers, and felt empowered by the experience. If he ran around and greedily hoarded everything he could get his hands on, then he was no better than the Tsar and the rest of his privileged upper class. He was a part of something bigger - a movement that belonged to the people, a communal state of shared ownership, responsibility, and privilege. Looting this palace was akin to stealing from family; every soldier present to a man was dedicated to that ideal, the communist ideals of Vladimir Lenin.
Origins: The Reich Page 5