no work at all, and no work at all is what too many people have these days. But it feels like putting a bandage on a man who's just been shot through the heart. How much good is it going to do?'
He'd been president for only a little more than a year and a half. The pressure of the job, though, had aged him more in that time than all the years he'd spent as vice president. His hair was thinner and grayer, his face more wrinkled and more weary-looking; his clothes hung on him like sacks, for he'd lost weight, too.
Would he look this way if things hadn't gone wrong? Flora wondered. Guilt gnawed at her. She'd encouraged Hosea to run for president. If she hadn't, the country would be blaming someone else for its troubles now. Shantytowns inhabited by men who'd lost their homes wouldn't be called Blackfordburghs. Comics wouldn't tell jokes about him on the vaudeville stage and over the wireless.
Then he said, 'It's a good thing I've got this job instead of Calvin Coolidge. If he were sitting here, he'd veto this bill and all the others like it. Things would be a lot worse then-I'm sure of it. We have hungry people now-we'd have starving people then. The class struggle would go straight to the streets.'
Tears stung her eyes. She said, 'I was just thinking I never should have put you through all this.'
'You didn't put me through it,' he answered. 'I did it myself. I wanted it, too, you know. And, in spite of everything, I think I'm a better man for the job than Coolidge would have been.'
'The country doesn't deserve you,' Flora said.
'Oh? Are you saying it does deserve Coolidge?' her husband asked with a wry grin. 'I'm not sure even Massachusetts deserves him.'
'That's not what I meant, and you know it,' Flora said with some asperity.
'Maybe not, sweetheart, but it's what you said,' Hosea Blackford answered. Even that wry grin had trouble staying on his face. 'If only something we tried would do some real good for the country, so people would believe we had hope.'
'Things would be a lot worse without the relief programs and the dole,' Flora insisted. 'We'd have men out selling apples on street corners to try to stay alive.'
'We might as well, even now,' her husband said. 'I haven't seen the country so gloomy since… since before the Great War.'
Flora knew what a hard time he had bringing that out. The Socialists still looked at the war in terms of the lives it had squandered, the lives it had wrecked, the ruin it had wrought. They didn't usually talk about the triumph it had been, as Democrats were in the habit of doing. But before the war, the USA, caught between the CSA and Canada, with England and France always ready to pounce, had a downtrodden feel. Enemies had ganged up on the United States twice. The fear those enemies might do it again had filled the country-and, perhaps, with reason.
No more. Now the United States had their place in the sun. No one had a bigger place, either. Only the Empire of Germany came close. The Kaiser's monarchy was a rival, yes, but not the deadly foes the Confederacy and her allies had seemed in the old days, the days before they were beaten at last.
And, from 1917 to 1929, under Theodore Roosevelt and then under Upton Sinclair, the United States had walked tall, had walked proud. After half a century of furtive skulking, the United States had strutted. But now this. Nobody in all the world was strutting these days. Everyone was trying to figure out how to fix what had gone wrong. No one, though, was having much luck.
'What are we going to do?' Flora asked.
'You mean, besides take a drubbing at the polls next Tuesday?' her husband asked in turn. 'I don't know, dear. I really don't, and I wish to heaven I did. If I knew what to do, I'd be doing it. You can bet on that.' He drummed his fingers on the desk. 'Blackfordburghs.' He spoke the word as if it were a curse. And so, in a way, it was: a curse on him, and a curse on the party he headed.
'Maybe it won't be so bad,' Flora said. 'People aren't stupid. The Democrats can't mystify everybody. What's happened the past year and a half isn't our fault, isn't your fault. It would have happened if Coolidge were president, too. It would be worse then-you said so yourself.'
'That's logical. That's rational,' Hosea Blackford said. 'Politics, unfortunately, is neither. People won't think about what might have been. They'll think about what really happened. And they'll say, 'You were there. It damn well is your fault, and you've got to pay for it.' ' He pointed to himself.
Flora wanted to tell him he was worrying about nothing. She couldn't. He was worrying about something all too real, and she knew it. She did walk over and give him a hug. 'There,' she said. 'And Joshua loves you, too.'
'That's all good,' Blackford said. 'That's all wonderful, as a matter of fact. In my personal life, I'm as happy and lucky as a man could be. But none of it will buy the Socialists a single extra vote when voting day rolls around.'
He was right. Flora wished she could tell him he was wrong. He would only have laughed had she tried, though. He knew better. So did she.
Waiting for the election was like waiting for an old, sick loved one to die. Day followed day without much apparent change, but then, suddenly and somehow unexpectedly, the moment came at last. People went to the polls. Blackford's name wasn't on the ballot, but the election would be a judgment on him even so. He couldn't even vote for his party, nor could Flora; neither of them officially resided in Philadelphia.
Hosea Blackford could have gone over to Socialist Party headquarters to learn of voters' decision-or rather, decisions, for every race here, unlike in a presidential election, was individual, unique to its area. But he stayed in Powel House instead. Once more, custom triumphed.
Plenty of wireless sets and telegraph clickers brought in the news. And, from the very beginning, it was as bad as Flora and he had feared it would be. If anything, it was worse. Socialist after Socialist went down to defeat. Even the fellow who'd followed Flora to Congress in the Eleventh Ward in New York City found himself in deep trouble against a Democratic candidate of no particular luster.
'What are we going to do?' Flora wailed as the magnitude of the Socialist disaster grew plain.
'No. The question is, what will the new Congress do?' her husband said glumly. He answered his own question: 'Odds are, the Democrats won't do much, and they won't let us do much, either. They think we've done too much already, and that we're part of the problem.'
'They don't know what they're talking about,' Flora snapped.
'Well, I happen to agree with you, you know,' Hosea Blackford said. 'The voters, unfortunately, look to have other ideas.'
'How can they do this to us?' Flora didn't try to hide her bitterness.
'I'm sure the Democrats felt the same way ten years ago, when we first came to power,' her husband said.
That struck her as cold consolation. 'But we're right,' she said. 'They were wrong.'
He managed another of those wry smiles. 'Remember your dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Now the antithesis gets its turn for a while, and we see what comes of that.'
'Nothing good,' Flora predicted darkly. The irony was that she'd always been a much more ideological Socialist than Hosea. His chiding her on basic Party doctrine stung, as he'd no doubt meant it to. She went on, 'We have to keep them from doing nothing, the way you say they want to-and of course you're dead right about that. We have to. Maybe we can get a halfway worthwhile synthesis out of that.'
'We're going to lose the House,' Hosea said. 'I don't think there's any doubt about it. The Senate… well, that depends on how some of the races in the Far West go. If we're lucky, there may be enough Socialists and Republicans to go with a handful of progressive Democrats and let us do some useful things. We'll see, that's all.'
He sounded as if he looked forward to the challenge. That wasn't how Flora felt about it. As far as she was concerned, the faithless people had betrayed the Party. She'd always been on the barricades, throwing stones at the oppressors. Now, by their votes, the people thought the Socialists were among the oppressors. That hurt. It hurt a lot, and she knew she would be a long time getting over it.
C larence Potter tried to remember the name of the Englishman who'd written a novel about a man who'd invented a machine that let him travel through time. He hadn't altogether liked the book-parts of it struck him as a Socialist tract about the divisions between capital and labor-but he couldn't deny that it had more than its share of arresting images. The mere idea of a time-traveling machine was one.
On New Year's Eve, 1930, as the year was poised to pass away and usher in 1931, Potter felt as if not just he but all of Charleston were caught in the grip of a time-traveling machine and hurled back almost a decade into the
