American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  Lucien reached for the jug of applejack. “I think that calls for another drink,” he said.

  Clarence Potter smelled trouble as soon as he walked into Whig headquarters in Charleston. The first thing he did was go over to a neat rank of bottles set against one wall and pour himself a whiskey. Thus armed, he buttonholed Braxton Donovan, who, by his red face, had started drinking quite a while before. Donovan was typical of the men in the hall: more than whiskey, which he held well, made him look as if he’d been hit in the head with a club. A speechless lawyer was a novelty Potter had thought he would relish, but he turned out to be wrong.

  “God damn it, snap out of this funk,” Potter said crisply.

  “Why?” Donovan answered, breathing whiskey fumes into his face. “I don’t even know why I’m going through the motions. It’s only March, but you can already see how the Freedom Party is going to kick our ass come November. What’s the use of pretending anything different?”

  “Of course those know-nothing bastards will win—if nobody stands up and tries to stop ’em,” Potter said. “That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”

  “What can we do? What can anybody do?” Donovan said. “Who’s going to vote for us, with one white man in four out of work? Christ, if I’d lost my job I wouldn’t vote Whig, either.”

  “Yes, I believe that.” Withering scorn filled Potter’s voice. “You’d be out there yelling, ‘Freedom!’ and wondering how to spell it.”

  The lawyer glared. “Fuck you, Clarence.”

  Potter beamed. “Now you’re talking!” Donovan stared at him. He nodded emphatically and repeated himself: “Now you’re talking, I say. If you can get pissed off about me, you can get pissed off about the Freedom Party, too. And you’d better—if you don’t, the Confederate States are going right down the drain.”

  But Braxton Donovan, no matter how angry at Potter he might be, couldn’t or wouldn’t turn that anger where it might do some good. He said, “I can deal with you. How are we supposed to deal with Featherston? Grady Calkins’ way?”

  “If you want to know the truth, I’ve heard ideas I liked less,” Potter answered. “The Freedom Party without Jake Featherston is like a locomotive without a boiler. Odds are it wouldn’t go anywhere, and it wouldn’t take the country with it.”

  “Fine sort of republic you want,” Donovan said. “Anybody disagrees with you, off with his head.”

  “Oh, rubbish,” Potter said. “I’ve got no quarrel with the Radical Liberals. I think they’re wrong, but the world wouldn’t end if they got elected. And you know why, too: they play by the same rules we do. But the only thing the Freedom Party cares about when it comes to the republic is using the rules to take it over. If Featherston wins the election, look out.”

  “What can he do?” Donovan asked. “We’ve got the Constitution. If he does get in, he has to play by the rules, too.”

  He had a point—of sorts. It was enough of a point to make Potter draw back from more direct argument. He said, “I hope you’re right,” and let it go at that.

  “Of course I am,” Donovan said, which made Potter regret being conciliatory. The lawyer fixed himself another drink, then added, “The regular meeting’s going to start in a few minutes. If you intend to fortify yourself before it does, you’d better do it now.”

  “God forbid I should face it sober.” Potter built himself a tall one.

  After the minutes and other routine business, the meeting might have been a reaction against the Freedom Party. People talked about more effective campaigning on the wireless. They talked about recruiting tough young men to protect Whig street rallies and even to try to break up the Freedom Party’s. They talked about getting the Whig message out to disaffected voters.

  That made Potter raise a hand. With the look of a man doing something against his better judgment, Robert E. Washburn recognized him. “Mr. Chairman, what is our message?” Potter asked. “ ‘Sorry you’re out of work, and we’ll see if we can do better next time’? That didn’t do the Socialists up in the USA much good.”

  Bang! went the gavel. “Mr. Potter, you are out of order—again,” Washburn said.

  “Not me—I’m fine,” Potter insisted. “The country’s out of order. We’re supposed to be trying to make it better.”

  “I was under the impression that was what we were doing,” the chairman said. “Forgive me if I’m wrong.”

  “What’s our message?” Potter asked for the second time. “Why should anybody vote for us? If you ask me, the only chance we’ve got is to make Jake Featherston look like a dangerous lunatic. That shouldn’t be too hard, because the son of a bitch really is a dangerous lunatic. But we aren’t working hard enough to make him out to be one.”

  Bang! went the gavel again. “I repeat, you’re out of order, Mr. Potter.”

  “Hang on.” That was Braxton Donovan. “Clarence has a point, by God. We can’t campaign on what we did this past presidential term, that’s for damn sure. And if we can’t make ourselves look good, we’d better try to make the Freedom Party look bad. Otherwise, we are stone, cold dead.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Clarence Potter muttered. Somebody had listened to him. He wasn’t used to that. Even the clients who paid him pretty decent money to find out this, that, or the other thing often ignored what he learned when it didn’t gibe with what they thought they already knew.

  Donovan went on, “We ought to pass that notion on to the national party in Richmond. They may not have thought of it for themselves.” He made a sour face. “Who knows how well they’re thinking up there these days?”

  Reluctantly, Washburn nodded. “Let it be noted in the minutes,” he said. He was a good man. He’d been a good man for a long time—he had to be seventy, near enough. Potter wondered if the Freedom Party had any city chairmen that old. He would have bet money against it.

  As far as he was concerned, nothing else of any importance happened during the meeting. Since he hadn’t expected anything at all important to happen, he left feeling ahead of the game: not easy, not for anyone who cared about the Whig Party in 1933. Maybe, just maybe, the Whigs could keep Jake Featherston out of power one more time by making him look like a raving maniac. Potter felt like Horatius at the bridge, doing everything he could to keep the enemy from breaking into the city.

  He started back toward his neat little flat. Behind him, Donovan called, “Wait a second, Potter. I had an idea.”

  Clarence stopped. “Congratulations.”

  “Smarty-britches. Your pa should have walloped you more when you were little.” But the lawyer spoke without heat. He went on, “You ever see Anne Colleton these days?”

  “No,” Potter said shortly. That he didn’t still pained him. They’d got on very well; in a lot of ways, they were two of a kind. But they hadn’t come close to seeing eye to eye about politics, and they both took politics too seriously to let them stay together. So much for bedfellows, strange or otherwise, he thought.

  “Maybe you ought to try again,” Donovan said. “If you can convince her that Featherston needs a straitjacket and a rubber room, you’ll hurt the Freedom Party.”

  “I would,” Potter said, “but I don’t think she’s likely to pay any attention to me.”

  “What have you got to lose?” Donovan asked. “If you haven’t got the price of a long-distance telephone call, I can pay for it.” He reached for his hip pocket.

  “I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” Potter waved for him to stop, and he did. What have you got to lose? It was a good question. How would he be worse off if Anne hung up on him or told him to go peddle his papers? Oh, his self-respect would take a beating, but that didn’t have anything to do with the Whigs and their hopes, such as those were. He nodded to Braxton Donovan. “All right, I’ll take a shot at it. Don’t say I never did the Party a good turn.”

  “Heaven forbid such a thought from ever crossing my mind.” Donovan sounded pious as a preacher. Such fine phrases meant exactly nothing, as Potter knew perfectly we
ll. Maybe Donovan would remember them, maybe he wouldn’t. Potter also knew which way he would guess.

  Being in the line of work he was, he had a telephone back at his flat. As he took the mouthpiece off the hook, a black excitement filled him. “Operator, I’d like to make a long-distance call, please,” he said, and gave the telephone number he’d never scratched out of his address book.

  “One moment, sir, while I place the call,” the operator replied. “And whom shall I say is the calling party?” Potter gave her his name. The call took longer than the promised moment to complete. He listened to clicks and pops on the line and a couple of faint, almost unintelligible, conversations between operators.

  Then a telephone rang. He heard that quite plainly. “Hello?” There was Anne Colleton’s voice, almost as clear as if she were down the block instead of halfway across the state. Telephones had come a long way since the Great War. The operator announced the long-distance call and gave her Potter’s name. “Yes, I’ll speak to him,” Anne said at once, and then, “How are you, Clarence? What’s this all about?”

  “I’m fine,” he answered. “How have you been? Haven’t talked to you in a while.”

  “No—you chose your party, and I chose mine,” Anne said. “When November rolls around, we’ll see who chose better.”

  Clarence knew then his call was hopeless. He went ahead anyway: “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You’ve met Jake Featherston. You must know as well as I do, he’s got a few screws loose up there. Lord knows we’re sinners here in the CSA, Anne, but do we really deserve Jake for president? What ever we may have done to make God angry at us, it’s not that bad.”

  Anne laughed. “What does he say that’s wrong? That we need to get back on our feet? We do. That the niggers rose up and stabbed us in the back? They did. That the War Department didn’t know what was going on till way too late? It didn’t. That we ought to stand up to the United States? We should. If any of that’s crazy, then I’m crazy, too.”

  “Wherever you want to go, there are lots of ways to get there,” Potter said stubbornly. As long as they were talking, he’d give it his best try even if he was sure it wasn’t good enough. “Featherston’s going over the rocks and through the swamp. You ask me, he’s more likely to put us on our backs than on our feet.”

  “I didn’t ask you, Clarence,” Anne said. “You made this call.”

  “I’m trying to tell you the man’s dangerous.”

  “I know he is—to everybody who wants to keep us down.”

  “No, to us,” Potter insisted. “Is he going to pay the niggers back or scare them into another uprising? Wasn’t one bad enough?”

  “If they try it twice, they’ll never try it three times.” Anne sounded almost as if she looked forward to crushing another Negro revolt.

  Even so, Potter went on, “If he cleans out the War Department, who goes in instead? His drinking buddies? Will they be any better?”

  “How could they be any worse?” Anne returned.

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to find out, either. And do you really want us to fight the United States again and lose?”

  “No. I want us to fight those goddamn sons of bitches again and win,” Anne said. “And so does Jake Featherston, and I think we will.”

  “How?” Potter demanded. “Think straight, Anne. I know you can if you want to. They’re bigger than we are. They’re stronger than we are. They would be even if they hadn’t stolen two of our states and pieces of others. Whatever we want to do to them—and I don’t love them, either; believe me, I don’t—what chance have we got to actually do it?”

  “We haven’t got any chance if we don’t try,” Anne said. “Good-bye, Clarence.” She hung up. Potter wondered if he ought to call her again and try to make her see reason. Slowly, he shook his head. She wouldn’t do it. That seemed only too plain. With a soft curse, he set the mouthpiece back in its cradle.

  Like most Confederate veterans, Jefferson Pinkard belonged to the Tin Hats. They weren’t nearly so important in his life as the Freedom Party. He paid his dues every year, and that was about it. Still, when Amos Mizell, the longtime head of the Tin Hats, came to Birmingham to make a speech on a bright spring Sunday, Jeff went over to Avondale Park to hear what he had to say.

  Taking the trolley to the east side of town, just past the Sloss Works, made him mutter to himself. He hadn’t gone that way very often since losing his job at the steel mill. Even the air here tasted different: full of sulfur and iron. The first good lungful made him cough. The second one made him smile. He’d lived with that taste, that smell, for most of his adult life. He hadn’t even known he missed it till he found it again.

  He wore a clean white shirt and butternut trousers, the not-quite-uniform of the Freedom Party. Most of the people on the trolley car were men about his age, and many of them had on the same kind of outfit he did. He didn’t see anybody with a bludgeon. This wasn’t supposed to be that kind of meeting. You could belong to the Tin Hats without being a Freedom Party man, and some people did.

  When the trolley stopped at the Sloss Works, half a dozen more men got on. He recognized two or three of them. They nodded to one another. “Good to see you,” one of them said. “How are you doing?”

  “Not too bad, Tony,” Pinkard answered. “No, not too bad. Party found me a job after I got canned, so I’m eating. And things look mighty good when the election rolls around.”

  “Sure do,” Tony said. “About time, too.”

  The trolley stopped, brakes screeching. The motorman clanged his bell. “Avondale Park!” he said loudly. By the time men finished getting off the car, it was almost empty.

  Under that warm, hopeful sun, Jeff walked toward the rostrum from which Amos Mizell would speak. Confederate flags and Tin Hat banners fluttered in the breeze. Here and there in the swelling crowd, men waved Freedom Party flags: the Confederate battle flag with colors reversed, red St. Andrew’s cross on blue. Those, though, were unofficial.

  Or were they? Up there on the rostrum, chatting with Mizell, stood Caleb Briggs, the head of the Freedom Party in Birmingham. The leader of the Tin Hats leaned closer to hear what Briggs had to say. Even nowadays, Briggs couldn’t talk above a rasping whisper; the damnyankees had gassed him during the Great War.

  Somebody yelled, “Freedom!” In an instant, the cry was deafening. Jefferson Pinkard shouted it out at the top of his lungs. The Freedom Party was the most important thing in his life these days. If it weren’t for the Party, he hardly would have had a life.

  Caleb Briggs grinned out at the crowd. His teeth were white and straight. A good thing, too—he was a dentist by trade. If he’d had a couple of missing choppers, he wouldn’t have made much of an advertisement for his own work. He waved. The cries of, “Freedom!” redoubled.

  Amos Mizell grinned and waved, too. A few people started singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” the song the Tin Hats had taken for their own. Only a few, though—“The Bonnie Blue Flag” was hard to make out among the shouts of, “Freedom!” Mizell’s grin slipped, although he kept waving. As at the rally, so across the CSA: these days, the Freedom Party spoke with a louder voice than the Tin Hats. That hadn’t always been so. Had things gone a little differently, Mizell might have been standing in Jake Featherston’s shoes. He had to be thinking about what might have been.

  Then Caleb Briggs stepped up to the microphone. In his ruined voice, he said, “This is a Tin Hats rally, boys, not one of ours,” and he started singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” That tipped the balance. Following his lead, the Freedom Party men in the crowd sang the Tin Hats’ anthem. Amos Mizell tipped his hat to Briggs. He still didn’t look perfectly happy, though. The men weren’t singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag” because they’d thought of it themselves, but because a Freedom Party big wig had asked them to. That had to sting.

  Jeff pushed and elbowed his way toward the front of the crowd, trying to get as close to the platform as he could. A lot of other determined men were doing t
he same thing. He didn’t get quite so close as he would have liked. Still, he was taller than most, and he could see well enough.

  When the loud chorus of “The Bonnie Blue Flag” ended, Caleb Briggs walked up to the microphone again. He raised both hands in the air, asking for quiet. Little by little, he got it. “Let’s give a big hello to a man who’s done a lot for the cause of freedom in the Confederate States,” he said, and paused to draw in a wheezing breath. He sounded as if he’d smoked a hundred packs of cigarettes all at once. “Friends, here’s Mr. Amos Mizell.”

  Mizell towered over Briggs. He held up both hands, too. He was missing his left little finger—one more man who’d spilled his blood for the Confederate States. The fat cats had got the CSA into the war, Pinkard thought, and then they’d sat back in Richmond, miles away from the trenches, and let other people do the fighting. Well, their time was coming. His smile had nothing to do with mirth. Yes, their time was coming fast.

  “We’ve been through it,” Mizell said. “We’ve all been through it, and we wonder why the devil we went. By the time we were done, the Confederate States were worse off than when we started, and that’s not how things were supposed to work. We were patriots. They told us we were going to teach the damnyankees another lesson. And then what happened?

  “I’ll tell you what, my friends. They left us in the lurch. We had to stand up to gas before we could give it back. We had to face barrels before we had any barrels of our own. We were fighting the USA, but we had to fight our own civil war, too, on account of they were asleep at the switch and didn’t know the niggers were going to rise up and kick us in the . . . the slats. I see some ladies here.”

  The veterans who made up most of the audience snickered. They knew what Mizell would have said if he were, say, sitting in a saloon with a whiskey in his hand. The few women surely knew, too, but he hadn’t said it, so their honor was satisfied.

  He went on, “And then, after we did everything we could do, we lost anyway. I don’t reckon we would have if the niggers had stayed and done their work, but we did. And what about the folks who sent us out to die? They kept on getting rich. They let the money go down the drain, but you didn’t see them missing any meals.”