American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  “You thinking of going over to the Freedom Party?” Donovan asked. “You blocked me when I tried to read Anne Colleton out of the Whigs, and now she’s back in bed with dear old Jake. Fat lot of good you did us.”

  “I was wrong,” Potter said with a scowl. “You’re lucky—you’ve never been wrong in all your born days, have you?” He still missed Anne. His mind kept exploring how things between them had soured, as a man’s tongue will explore the empty socket that recently held a tooth.

  Admitting he was wrong disconcerted Donovan. The lawyer probably didn’t hear it happen often enough to know what to do when it did. “All right, all right,” he said gruffly. “Let’s forget about it, then.”

  “I wish I could,” Potter said. The other Whig didn’t know what to make of that, either. Too bad, Potter thought.

  A white-shirted Freedom Party man came up to them. “You fellas want to move along now,” he said, almost indulgently—he knew he had strength on his side.

  Potter looked at him. “What we want to do is kick your damn teeth down your throat,” he growled.

  “Watch your mouth,” the Freedom Party man said, indulgent no more. “We can squash y’all flat like a cockroach—and just what you deserve. If I give a yell—”

  “If you give a yell, you’re a dead man,” Clarence Potter promised. “Your side might win the fight afterwards, but you won’t be around to enjoy it. I promise.”

  The man in white shirt and butternut trousers scowled at him. He stared back, no expression at all on his face. The Freedom Party hooligan was the first to look away. A moment later, he spun and stalked off. “You told him,” Braxton Donovan said, as if Potter and the Whigs had won some sort of victory.

  “He’s going to come back with enough men to squash us flat,” Potter said. “Go on home, and take the boys with you. We’ll get other chances. I’m going to hang around.”

  “You’re crazy,” Braxton Donovan declared.

  “No, it’s just that I was in intelligence during the war. I want to know what the enemy is up to,” Potter replied with a shrug. “Or maybe I am crazy. You never can tell.”

  As the Whigs’ outnumbered toughs headed away from Hampton Park and back toward downtown Charleston, Potter mingled with the Freedom Party men and women still streaming in to hear Featherston speak. That mingling came just in time, too. The fellow he’d faced down returned with a lot of men at his back. He looked around and laughed when he didn’t see Potter or any of the other Whigs.

  They were leaving anyway, you son of a bitch, Potter thought, and now I’ve found my way inside.

  By their clothes, most of the men who wanted to hear Jake Featherston were farmers and laborers—most, but far from all. Potter saw druggists and shopkeepers and businessmen and even a few who looked like professional men. Not all the men were Great War veterans, either. More than Potter had expected looked too young to have fought in the war. That surprised and dismayed him. The women coming in—perhaps a third of the audience—likewise came from all social groups, with the emphasis on the lower middle class.

  Potter pushed forward as far as he could. Even so, the rostrum from which Featherston would speak remained halfway across the park from him, and seemed tiny as a toy. Everyone exclaimed as searchlights, swinging toward the podium, picked out a face behind it. But that wasn’t Jake Featherston’s lean visage, which Potter knew all too well. Whoever that was, pinned in the glow of the bright lights, he’d never missed a meal and was nobody Potter recognized. Some of the people around Potter grumbled, too.

  Then the plump stranger introduced himself as one of the new Freedom Party Congressmen South Carolina had sent up to Richmond in the election of 1929. That was plenty to win him a round of applause from the Party faithful. Clarence Potter had to join it to keep something dreadful from happening to him. He felt like washing his hands the first chance he got.

  “And now,” the Congressman boomed, “it gives me tremendous pleasure to have the privilege of presenting to you all the leader of our great Freedom Party, Mr. Jaaake Featherston!”

  The roar of applause and cheers that went up stunned Potter’s ears. He opened his mouth, but silently. He didn’t have to shout, and keeping his mouth open helped protect his ears. Featherston, an old artilleryman, likely knew that trick himself.

  Through the shouts and clapping from the crowd came disciplined yells from the men in white shirts and butternut trousers: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Little by little, more and more people joined that chant, so it began to drown out the noise all around: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The two-syllable word felt as heavy and regular as a heartbeat.

  Jake Featherston let the chant build to a deafening crescendo, then raised both hands above his head. Still disciplined, the blocks of goons fell silent at once. Without their steadying influence, the cries faded away after perhaps fifteen seconds.

  Into the ringing quiet that followed, Featherston said, “It’s always good to come to Charleston, on account of this here is where the Confederate States of America were born.” He couldn’t miss getting applause with that line. He couldn’t—and he didn’t. Again, Clarence Potter had to clap along with everybody else to keep from standing out. He hated that, but saw no way around it.

  Featherston went on, “They say showing’s better than telling, and I guess they’re right. We’ve been telling people what’s wrong with the Confederate States for more than ten years now, and not enough folks wanted to listen. Now the Whigs have gone and shown we were right all along, and all of a sudden everybody’s paying attention to us. I wish to heaven it didn’t have to happen like this, I truly do, but here we are just the same.”

  To Clarence Potter, staunch Whig, it wasn’t much of a joke, but people around him laughed. Featherston said, “I’m warning people right now, it’s not a good idea to think about the Freedom Party like we’re just another bunch of politicians.”

  Cries of, “No!” and, “Hell, no!” and, “Better not!” rang from the crowd. Featherston let them spread through Hampton Park, then raised his hands again. This time, silence fell at once.

  Into it, he said, “We are the Confederacy’s destiny. We are the Confederacy’s future. We’re giving our dear country a faith and a will again. We have to concentrate all our strength on action, revolutionary action. Because we’re going that way, we’re gathering into our ranks every last member of the Confederate people who still has energy and nerve—that’s you, folks, and I’m glad of it!”

  People were even more eager to applaud themselves than they were to applaud Jake Featherston. Again, Potter had to clap, too. As he did, he reluctantly nodded. He’s shrewder than he used to be, he thought. He doesn’t just think of himself any more. But that wasn’t right. No, he lets people think he’s thinking about them. Inside, he’s still the same cold-blooded snake he always was.

  “Burton Mitchel wants to cozy up to the United States. The USA saved his bacon once,” Featherston shouted. “But the United States can’t save his bacon this time around, on account of they haven’t got any bacon of their own. And even if they did, do y’all want to be the USA’s tagalong little brother from now till the end of time?”

  Some people shouted, “No!” Others shouted things a good deal more incendiary. Potter would never have said anything like that where ladies might hear. But then, not ten feet away from him, a woman who looked like a schoolteacher yelled something that would have made a sergeant, a twenty-year veteran, blush.

  “We’ve got us a duty: a duty to be strong,” Jake Featherston declared. “We’ve got us a duty to stand up to the United States just as soon as we can. And to do that, we’ve got us a duty to put our own house in order. We’ve got us a duty to put people back to work. We’ve got us a duty to make sure they don’t go hungry. We’ve got us a duty to keep the niggers in their place, and not to let them steal work from white folks. And we’ve got us a duty to remember what the Confederate States of America are all about. And folks, what we’re about is—”


  “Freedom!” The great roar staggered Potter.

  “Y’all remember that,” Featherston said. “Remember it every single day. When you see the liars and the cheats getting together, don’t let ’em get away with it. Smash ’em up! How can you have freedom when the rich folks want to take it away from you?”

  Does he see the irony there? Potter wondered. Does he see it and not care, or does it go right by him? As the crowd roared, as Jake Featherston wished them a happy New Year and exhorted them to vote for the Party in November, Potter wondered which of those possibilities frightened him worse.

  When Jake Featherston came through South Carolina on his speaking tour, Anne Colleton tried to see him. She tried, and she failed. Featherston wouldn’t talk to her; a flunky told her he wasn’t available.

  She fumed for days afterwards. She wasn’t used to getting brushed off. Her habit, in fact, was to brush off others. Featherston annoyed her enough to make her wonder if she shouldn’t stay a Whig after all. In the end, what made her decide she had to swallow her pride was the thought that staying a Whig meant admitting Clarence Potter had been right all along. If he had, why had she broken up with him over their political differences? Staying a Whig would mean swallowing her pride, too, and swallowing it in front of an old lover. She preferred making up with Jake Featherston to that.

  After the papers announced Featherston’s return to Richmond, she sent a telegram to Freedom Party headquarters: SHALL I COME NORTH TO TALK THINGS OVER?

  The answer, at least, returned promptly: COME AHEAD. CONVINCE FERD KOENIG. THEN WE’LL SEE. FEATHERSTON.

  Anne said something extremely unladylike as she crumpled up the telegram and threw it in the trash. Having to talk with anyone except Jake Featherston himself was galling. But Ferdinand Koenig wasn’t a flunky, or not precisely a flunky. He’d been in the Freedom Party even longer than Featherston had, and had twice been his running mate on the Party ticket. The main difference between him and Jake was that he wasn’t colorful.

  And so, swallowing her pride again, Anne wired, ARRIVE NEXT TUESDAY. LOOKING FORWARD TO MEETING MR. KOENIG.

  As she usually did when coming up to Richmond, she booked a room in Ford’s Hotel, just north of Capitol Square. The room she got gave her a fine view of the square. In happier times, it would have been a peaceful, restful, patriotic view. She could have looked out on the grass and on the splendid statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston.

  She could still see the statues. Tents and shanties swallowed almost all the winter-brown grass. Men walked aimlessly from one to another, some smoking, some sipping from whiskey bottles. Here and there, women hung out laundry on lines that ran from tents to trees. Children ran this way and that.

  Columbia and Charleston had shantytowns, too. Even St. Matthews had a little one. But Anne had never seen any to match Richmond’s. The capital of the Confederate States was a great city. When things went wrong, they went wrong more visibly here than anywhere else.

  She asked the house detective, “How bad are things? Will my clothes and suitcases still be in my room when I get back?”

  “Likely so, ma’am,” he answered. “We work hard at keeping the trash out of the hotel. We had some trouble with that when things first went sour, but we don’t let it happen any more. It’s just a matter of taking pains.”

  Giving pains, too, she thought. The house dick was about six feet three, with shoulders wide as a barn door. He wasn’t visibly armed, but she was sure he had brass knucks or a blackjack stashed where he could get at them in a hurry. She wouldn’t have wanted to run into him if he found her anywhere she wasn’t supposed to be.

  When she waited on the street for a taxi, though, beggars hurried across Capitol Street to try to pry money out of her. She knew that, if she gave anything to anybody, none of them would ever leave her at peace. Closing the motorcar door on them was a relief.

  “Where to, ma’am?” the cabby asked.

  “Freedom Party headquarters,” Anne answered. She wondered if she would have to give him the address.

  As things turned out, she didn’t. The driver nodded. “Take you right over there. It ain’t far at all. I’m thinking about voting that way myself come November, matter of fact.”

  Alert guards armed with bayoneted Tredegars stood outside the headquarters. They wore what was almost but not quite Confederate Army uniform. Their clothes weren’t quite the same as what the Tin Hats put on. These men looked somehow more menacing than most members of the big veterans’ outfit. Anne didn’t know whether that was the cut of their uniforms or the expressions on their faces. Some of each, she thought.

  “You’re Mrs. Colleton, come to see Mr. Koenig?” one of them asked.

  Anne shook her head. “I’m Miss Colleton, and you’d better remember it.”

  “Sorry,” the disconcerted guard muttered, and passed her on into the building.

  She had to ask two more people how to find Ferdinand Koenig’s office, which struck her as inefficient. When at last she got there, a pretty secretary led her inside. Koenig looked like a man who’d done time in the trenches. He had fierce eyebrows, a jutting jaw, and a rumbling baritone voice. “Good to see you again, Miss Colleton,” he said. “It’s been a few years, hasn’t it? Sit down. Make yourself at home. Tell me why you’ve decided the Freedom Party isn’t such a bad thing after all.”

  He looked like a bruiser. He didn’t sound like one, though. He’d been Jake Featherston’s right-hand man for a long time now. That almost certainly meant he could think as well as break heads. Anne said, “When I left the Party, you were still tainted by what Grady Calkins did. Our politics have never been that far apart, whether I was formally with you or not.”

  “You’re saying you’re a fair-weather friend. You’ll back us if we look like winners and dump us if we don’t,” Koenig said. “Question is, in that case, why should we want to have anything to do with you?”

  “Because we’re going the same way. Because I can help you get there. You’ll know what I did in South Carolina. When I wasn’t with you, I was trying to bring the Whigs more into line with what you’ve been saying all along.”

  Ferdinand Koenig paused to light a cigarette. After blowing out a cloud of smoke, he said, “And you were doing us a favor by this, you say?”

  “No, I don’t think so, and that isn’t what I said,” Anne answered. “But I think I was doing the country a favor. That’s what this is really all about, isn’t it?—what happens to the Confederate States, I mean.”

  Another cloud of smoke rose from Koenig. “That’s . . . some of what this is about,” he said at last. “The rest of it is, why should we trust you now? You walked away once, walked away and left us in the lurch. Who says you won’t do it again?”

  “No one at all, if I don’t happen to like the way you’re going,” Anne said. “But as long as we’re heading in the same direction, wouldn’t you rather have me on your side than against you?”

  “Maybe,” he answered. “Maybe not, too.” His eyes measured her. She didn’t care for that gaze; Koenig might have been looking at her over the sights of a rifle. “You don’t pull any punches, though, do you?”

  “I try not to,” Anne said. “Getting straight to the point saves time.”

  “Maybe,” Koenig said again. He didn’t say anything more till he’d finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in an brass ashtray made from the base of a shell casing. Then he went on, “You talk a good game, I will say that for you. I’m not going to tell you yes or no. I’m going to pass you on to the Sarge. He’ll make up his mind, and we’ll go on from there. How does that sound?”

  “I came to Richmond to see him,” Anne answered.

  Ferdinand Koenig shook his head. “No, you came up here to see me, remember? Now you’ve passed the first test, so you get to see him. See the difference?”

  “Yes,” Anne said, though she’d always assumed she would pass it.

  “Well, come on, then.” Koenig heaved his bulk o
ut of the chair. He led her down the hall, up a flight of stairs, along the corresponding hall on the next floor up, and into an office. The secretary there wasn’t decorative; she was, in fact, severely plain. That probably meant she was very good at what she did. Koenig nodded to her. “Morning, Lulu. Here’s Miss Colleton, to see the boss.”

  Lulu gave Anne the once-over. She sniffed, as if to say, What can you do? Anne bristled. The secretary took no notice of that at all. With a small sigh, she said, “Go right in, Miss Collins. He’ll be expecting you.” She wasn’t the sort who’d get names wrong by accident. That meant she’d done it on purpose. Anne bristled all over again, and again got nothing resembling a rise from Lulu.

  When she walked into Jake Featherston’s office, the leader of the Freedom Party rose and leaned across the desk to shake her hand. He wasn’t handsome. Still, those strong, bony features and the energy that sparked from him made mere handsomeness seem insipid. Anne had had that thought before. “Sit down,” he said, waving her to a chair. “Sit down and tell me why I should pay any attention to you after you went and left us when we needed you bad.”

  He hadn’t forgotten. Anne doubted he ever forgot anything that went against him. They weren’t so far apart there. She answered, “Two reasons: my money and my brains.”

  He frowned. “If you had any brains, you never would’ve walked out on us in the first place.”

  “No.” Anne shook her head. “I back winners. If you think you looked like a winner after Calkins killed President Hampton, you’re not as smart as you think you are. But times are hard again, and in hard times the Freedom Party shines. So . . . here I am.”

  How many people gave him such straight talk? Not many, Anne suspected. What would he do when he heard it? Get angry? Yes, by the slow flush that mounted to his cheeks and by the way his eyes flashed. But he held it in, saying, “You’re a cool one, aren’t you? You’re telling me straight out you’d walk away again if you saw us in trouble.”