and Stripes, once more upside down. A Marine band at slow march followed him; they played 'The Star-Spangled Banner' with the tempo of a dirge. As the flag-bearer and the band went by, men uncovered and held their hats over their hearts.
Flora recognized the white-bearded bandmaster. 'That's Sousa!' she exclaimed with the respect one can give an effective foe. The musician's stirring songs had done more to fire narrow national patriotism and make the proletariat forget its international ties than the work of most jingo politicians.
Here and there in the crowd beyond the police lines, men left their hats on: odds-on candidates to be Socialists. Fights had started over such things in years past. Now, beyond a couple of low-voiced calls of 'Shame!', no one did anything. Almost no one in the Socialist Party delegation uncovered. The Marine musicians did not turn their heads, but sidelong glances said they took mental note.
Behind the band rolled a limousine that carried-Flora stiffened as she saw who the man standing in the back of the car was-Theodore Roosevelt. The president only showed himself; he did not wave to the crowd. His suit was as black and somber as Herman Bruck's, and almost as well cut. A few Socialists shouted catcalls at him. He ignored them.
Then came the veterans. After the limousine marched a contingent of men older than John Philip Sousa, survivors of the War of Secession. Some still strode straight and slim despite their years. Others shambled along as best they could, helped along by a stick or a cane. Some had one sleeve flapping empty or pinned to the front of their jackets. Some had one trouser leg pinned up, and propelled themselves with crutches. At the rear, attendants pushed a few legless men along in wheelchairs.
The old soldiers' faces, almost to a man, bore a grim sadness the passage of half a century had not erased. Flora sympathized with them; the USA had surely been more progressive than the feudal-minded Rebels. But, however sure the historical dialectic was, it did not always move straight ahead. The memory of failure still stung the veterans of the War of Secession.
Behind them marched another group of veterans, these middle-aged, many of them plump and prosperous: men who had fought in the Second Mexican War. Where their predecessors seemed proud of what they had done even in defeat, these ex-soldiers, some of them, had almost a hangdog air, as if they felt they should have done better but didn't quite know how.
Then came Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, fantastically bemedaled and riding in a limousine flanked by a color guard of German soldiers carrying the black-white-red banners of the German Empire. Those drew both cheers and jeers, many of the jeers either in German or in Yiddish, close enough to German for the spike-helmeted soldiers in field-gray to understand.
' Germany taught the USA to ignore the needs of the proletariat!' Herman Bruck shouted, shaking his fist.
' Germany taught the USA to fool the proletariat into thinking its needs are met,' Flora cried a moment later, which gave her the double satisfaction of telling the truth and correcting the self-righteous Bruck.
The mixture of applause and catcalls went on after the German ambassador and his escort passed. Behind him came a troop of men hardly younger than the Second Mexican War veterans: Soldiers' Circle members of the first class, men who had served their two years in the Army after conscription was passed in the wake of two lost wars.
Flora and Bruck and Maria and Angelina Tresca and all the Socialist representatives joined with their Party members in the crowd in shouting abuse at the marching men of the Soldiers' Circle, each successive troop from the conscription class a year later than its predecessor. Men who stayed in the Soldiers' Circle after they served their time were apt to be of a reactionary cast of mind: men who gladly served as strikebreakers, scabs, goons, men to whom even Teddy Roosevelt was a dangerous radical for worrying about the untrammeled power of the bosses.
As the Soldiers' Circle troops passed by, as the men became of the age where their contemporaries were fighting, other jeers rang out alongside those of the Socialists. Chief among them was the swelling cry, 'Why aren't you in the Army?'
While the youngish men who had done their time as conscripts but had not yet been dragged into the war ignored the mockery and marched stolidly down Broadway, mockery was all they got. But then, not far from the Socialist delegation, one of the men of the conscription class of 1901 lost his temper. He turned his head and shouted at an abuser, 'Why ain't I in the Army now? Fuck you and fuck your mother too, why ain't you?'
With a roar of rage, the fellow he'd cursed rushed at him, pulled out a knife, and plunged it into his side. The Soldiers' Circle man went down with a groan, blood bright on his white shirt. Four of his comrades threw the man with the knife to the ground, kicked the blade away, and methodically began stomping the stabber.
A few people in the crowd cheered, but others ran out to try to rescue the man who'd used the knife. More Soldiers' Circle men set on them.
Somebody-in the rapidly swelling chaos, Flora had no idea who, or on which side- fired a pistol. An instant later, several guns were popping away, as if the war had decided to pay New York a visit.
'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!' shouted the Irish policeman who'd made money-counting motions at Herman Bruck. Along with his fellows, he dashed toward what had gone in the space of half a minute from patriotic parade to riot.
Flora Hamburger turned her back on it. To her fellow Socialists, she cried, 'Stay here! Don't join it! Don't let the reactionaries exploit us in the newspapers!'
Angelina and Maria Tresca loudly added their voices to Flora's. Flora looked around for support from Herman Bruck. To her dismay, she saw him, along with several other hot-blooded Socialists, running straight toward the men from the Soldiers' Circle. They had their own rallying cry: 'Direct action!' The Socialist call to arms had rung out in mines and factories and lumber camps and fields across the USA for a generation, but now…? Flora shook her head in dismay. The place and the timing could hardly have been worse.
Riot spread up the parade, toward the Marine marching band at the front. From that direction, Flora heard a couple of explosions louder and fiercer than pistol shots. 'Bombs!' she exclaimed. 'They're throwing bombs!'
She didn't know who they were, but she feared with sick horror the Socialists would get the blame. In the 1880s and 1890s, direct action had often meant more than words; the Party's past had blood in it.
Another bomb went off, this one frighteningly close. Injured men and women screamed. Above their cries rose a great voice bellowing, 'Justice for Utah!'
Absurdly, relief flooded Flora: maybe the hard hand of the government would land on the Mormons, not on the Party. She was ashamed of herself a moment later. Do it to them, not to us was not the answer; the government, no matter how TR thundered about swinging a big club, had no right to oppress anyone.
Analyzing that in fullness, though, would have to wait. She grabbed Maria and Angelina. 'We'd better get out of here,' she said. The secretaries nodded vehemently.
It was easier said than done. A lot of the crowd was trying to flee the brawls and battles that roiled in the middle of Broadway, but almost as many people, women as well as men, were pressing forward, trying to get into the fray. Yet another pistol shot rang out, this one terribly close, terribly loud. Angelina Tresca shrieked. Blood, vividly, impossibly red, stained the white front of her shirtwaist. She stood staring in astonishment. When she opened her mouth to say something, only more blood came from it-not a word. Blood poured from her nose, too. She swayed, toppled, fell.
More pop-pop-pops went off, incongruously cheerful. Maria's shriek was louder than her sister's. She couldn't even run to Angelina; the crowd, panicked by gunfire, swept them apart. When Maria tried to go against it, she was swept off her own feet. Flora dragged her up before she could get too badly trampled, then dragged her away.
Clinging to each other, weeping, the two of them struggled to get off Broadway and onto Twenty-third Street so they could escape the riot. 'Oof!' A portly man ran into Flora. He acted as if he were trying to fend her off, but his hands slid up her body till they closed on her breasts, the crowd and turmoil offering concealment for what he did. She'd had such unwelcome attentions before. Snatching a pin from the floral hat she wore, she stuck him with it. He howled and whirled away. She stuck him again as he fled, this time where he sat down. He howled again, almost seeming to levitate. The pin was long and sharp and had blood on a good part of its length. Savagely pleased at that, she stuck it back amidst the artificial greenery on her hat.
Maria Tresca didn't react, staring numbly. Maybe she was too numb to think too much about Angelina yet.
