was already growing rapidly. Most of the people gathering around the platform were men. Why not? They enjoyed the right to vote.
Even though Sylvia didn't, she wanted to hear what Roosevelt had to say for himself. She wanted to see him, too, and to have the children see him. They'd remember that for the rest of their lives.
Mary Jane, at the moment, had her mind on other things: 'The dome sure is shiny, Ma!' she said, pointing. 'It's as shiny as the sun, I bet.'
'That's because it's gilded, silly,' George, Jr., said importantly.
'What's gilded mean, Ma?' Mary Jane asked.
'It means painted with gold paint' her big brother told her.
'I didn't ask you, Mr. Know-It-All,' Mary Jane said. 'Besides, I bet you're making it up, anyway.'
'I am not!' George, Jr., howled. 'I ought to pop you a good one, is what I ought to do.'
'I'll pop both of you if you don't behave yourselves,' Sylvia said. What ran through her mind was that she'd remember this day for the rest of her life, but not because she'd seen the president.
'You tell Mary Jane that I do so know what gilded means,' George, Jr., said. 'I learned it in school. And there's a wooden codfish inside there somewhere, and it's gilded, too. They call it the Sacred Cod.' He frowned. 'I don't know what sacred means.'
'It means holy' Sylvia said. 'And your brother's right, Mary Jane. Gilded does mean painted with gold paint. And I'll thank you not to call him names. You're supposed to know better than that.'
'All right, Ma,' Mary Jane said in tones of such angelic sweetness, Sylvia didn't believe a word of it. The face Mary Jane made at George, Jr., a moment later said her skepticism had been well founded.
Sylvia worked her way as close to the platform as she could. It wasn't close enough to satisfy her children, who set up a chorus of, 'We can't see!'
At the moment, there wasn't anything to see. Sylvia pointed that out, but it did nothing to stem the chorus. She finally said, 'When the president starts to speak, I'll pick both of you up so you can see him, all right?'
'Will you pick both of us up at the same time?' Mary Jane sounded as if she liked the idea.
'No!' Sylvia exclaimed. 'If I do that, you and your brother can pick me up afterwards and carry me home.' She thought that might calm them down. Instead, it got them jumping around with excitement. George, Jr., did try to pick her up, and kept trying till she had to smack him to get him to quit.
After what seemed like forever, people started coming out of the New State House and going up onto the platform. They had the same look to them: plump men, middle-aged and elderly, many with big drooping mustaches, all of them in somber black suits with waistcoats. Most wore top hats; a few of the younger ones contented themselves with homburgs. They might have been rich undertakers. In fact, they were Democratic politicians.
They buried more men in the Great War than undertakers could in a hundred years, Sylvia thought bitterly. One of them stepped forward. 'Hurrah for Governor Coolidge!' somebody shouted, which told her who the fellow was.
'You didn't come here to listen to me today,' Coolidge said. 'I'm going to step aside for President Roosevelt.' With a bow, he did just that. 'Mr. President!'
'Thank you, Governor Coolidge.' Theodore Roosevelt matched the rest of the men up there in age and build and dress, but he had enough energy for four of them, maybe six. He bounded to the front of the platform, almost running over the governor of Massachusetts in his eagerness to put himself in the public eye. 'Ladies and gentlemen,' he cried in a huge voice, 'this is the greatest nation in the history of the world, and I am the luckiest man in the history of the world, to have had the privilege of leading her for the past eight years.'
'No third term! No third term!' The cry broke out in several places around Sylvia at the same time. She suspected that was not an accident. She also suspected Roosevelt would be hearing the same cry everywhere he went up till election day.
He must have suspected the same thing. He bared his mouthful of large, square teeth and growled, 'Ah, the Socialists are barking already. If they'd had their way, we would have sat on the sidelines while the greatest struggle the world has ever known was decided without us. I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that a great nation does not let others choose its destiny for it. A great nation makes its own fate: that is the mark of greatness.'
He got a round of applause. But the hecklers sent up another chant: 'How many dead? How many dead?' That one hit Sylvia hard. Had Roosevelt sat on the sidelines, her husband would have been alive today. Maybe the USA wouldn't have been so strong. Sylvia would have made that trade in a heartbeat, if only she could have, if only someone would have asked her.
'How many would have died had we waited?' Roosevelt returned. 'How many would have died if we'd let England and France and Russia and the Confederate States gang up on our allies? After the Entente powers beat down our friend Kaiser Bill, how long do you think it would have been before our turn came around again? They piled onto us in the War of Secession, didn't they? They piled onto us in the Second Mexican War, didn't they? Don't you think they would have piled onto us in the Great War, too? By jingo, I do! We're young and virile and up-and-coming, just like the German Empire. The countries that had the power didn't care to share it with the countries that wanted it, the countries that deserved it. Well, if they wouldn't yield us a place in the sun, we had to go and take one. And we did. And I'm proud that we did. And if you're proud, too, you'll vote the Democratic ticket in November.'
That earned him more applause, with only a thin scattering of boos mixed in. How many dead? still echoed inside Sylvia Enos as she lifted first her son and then her daughter to see Theodore Roosevelt. The president was a master of the big picture; he made her see the whole world turning in her hands. But that still counted for less with her than a husband who had not come home.
And the hecklers hadn't given up, either. 'No third term!'' they called again. 'No third term!'
Roosevelt stuck out his chin. The sun flashed from the lenses of his spectacles, making him look as much like a mechanism as a man. 'Because George Washington decided he would not seek a third term, is it Holy Writ that every succeeding president must follow suit?' he thundered. 'We are speaking of the United States of America here, ladies and gentlemen, not a hand of auction bridge.' He pounded fist into palm. 'I refuse to reckon my actions bound by those of a slaveholding Virginian a hundred and twenty years dead. Vote for me or against me, according to whether you think well or ill of me and what I have done in office. This other pernicious nonsense has no place in the campaign.'
'Four more years! Four more years!' Roosevelt had friends in the crowd, too: many more friends than foes, by the number of voices urging a third term for the president. With so much support, Sylvia didn't see how he could fail to be reelected. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. He probably wouldn't find any excuse to start a new war between now and 1924.
'Capitalist tool! Capitalist tool!'' The Socialists started a new jeer.
Roosevelt had been talking about the vote for women, which, rather to Sylvia's surprise, he professed to favor. 'I am the tool of no man!' he shouted, meeting the hecklers as combatively as he had throughout the speech. 'I am the tool of no man, and I am the tool of no class. Let me hear Mr. Sinclair say the same thing, and I will have learned something. A dictatorship of the proletariat is no less a dictatorship than any other sort.'
George, Jr., tugged at Sylvia's skirt. 'What's the pro-prole- prolewatchamacallit, Ma?'
'Proletariat. It means the people who do all the work in factories and on farms,' Sylvia answered. 'Not the rich people who own the factories.'
'Oh.' Her son thought about that. 'People like us, you mean.'
'That's right, people like us.' Sylvia smiled. Painting red rings on galoshes was about as proletarian a job as you could get. If she didn't come in tomorrow, the foreman could replace her with just about anyone off the street. And, the day after that, Frank Best would no doubt be trying to get the new ring-painter into bed with him.
Up on the platform, concerned with bigger things, Theodore Roosevelt was winding up his speech: 'I love this country. I have served this country all my adult life, and with every fiber of my being. If it please you, the citizens, that I continue to serve the United States, that will be the greatest honor and privilege you have in your power to grant me. I hope it will. I pray it will. Let us go forward together, and make the twentieth century be remembered forevermore as the American century. I thank you.'
'Is he finished?' Mary Jane asked as the crowd applauded. Sylvia nodded. Her daughter found another question: 'Can we go home now?'
