Breakthroughs

what kind of bargain we can make to get your vote on that immigration bill,” he said.

She shook her head. “Ask me something else. Half the people in my district have relatives in Europe, and that bill would strand them there forever. If I vote for it, they’ll throw me out, and I’ll deserve it.”

He frowned. “The party leadership backs it, you know.”

“The party leadership backed the war, too, right from the start,” Flora answered. “Were they right then?” Before Blackford could say anything, she waved him to silence. “Here come the president and the chief justice.” She smiled down at the floor. Here she was, glad to see Theodore Roosevelt after all.

He wore cutaway, white tie, top hat, and gloves: all the trappings of capitalist power. With him strode Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, his big fierce white mustache a fitting ornament for his proud hawk face. Holmes was only a few days away from his seventy-fifth birthday, but moved like a much younger man. He was, without a doubt, a class enemy; reckoning him an honest man, Flora granted him grudging admiration for that.

He and Roosevelt took their places behind a podium more often used to let officers know the upcoming plan of attack. After Vice President Kennan took the oath for his second term, Roosevelt did the same in a loud, firm voice.

Once the applause had died down, Justice Holmes stepped away from the podium. President Roosevelt stared out over it at the senators and representatives and other assembled dignitaries. The electric lights flashed off the lenses of his spectacles, giving his face a curiously mechanical appearance, as if a device had taken almost human form and were running the United States.

“Without the fighting edge,” he said, “no man and no nation can be really great, for in the really great man, as in the really great nation, there must be both the heart of gold and the temper of steel.” His gestures were stiff, adding to the industrial impression those blank, shining disks that seemed to replace his eyes created.

“In 1862 England and France said it was the duty of those two nations to mediate between the United States and the Confederate States, and they asserted that any Americans who in such event refused to accept their mediation and to stop the war would thereby show themselves the enemies of peace.

“Even Abraham Lincoln regarded this as an unfriendly act to the United States, but he had not the strength to withstand it. And in so regarding it, as in few other things, Lincoln was right. Looking back from a distance of more than fifty years, we can clearly see as much. Such mediation was a hostile act, not only to the United States but to humanity. The nations that forced that unrighteous peace upon us more than fifty years ago were the enemies of mankind.

“Very many of the men and women who are at times misled into demanding peace, as if it were itself an end instead of being a means of righteousness, are folk of good will and sound intelligence who need only seriously to consider the facts, and who can then be trusted to think aright and act aright. Well-meaning folk who always clamor for peace without regard as to whether peace brings justice or injustice should ponder such facts, and then should still their clamor.”

Ponder the facts, and then think my way, Flora thought scornfully. President Roosevelt pounded on: “England and France and the cuckoo’s egg they planted in the American nest of freedom humiliated our great nation again a generation later, and have sought to encircle us on our own continent ever since, just as they and the Russian tyrants have sought to encircle our partner, friend, and ally, the German Empire, on the European continent.

“They have tried. And they have failed.” Roosevelt could not go on then; thunderous applause interrupted him. He basked in it before raising his hands to ask for quiet. “I promise you this: my second term will show us the victory we have longed for since those now old were young. The debt we owe is old, too, and has accumulated much interest through the years. We shall repay it in full, and more besides.” More applause echoed from the ceiling of the briefing room.

“We must stand absolutely for the righteousness of revenge,” Roosevelt finished, “and we must remember that to do so would have been utterly without avail if we had not possessed the strength and tenacity of spirit which back righteousness with deeds and not mere words. Until we complete our vengeance, we must keep ourselves ready, high of heart and undaunted of soul, to back our rights with our strength.”

He stepped back from the podium. The torrent of applause that rose up made everything that had gone before seem like a whisper in a distant room. Flora Hamburger joined in the applause, though tepidly and for politeness’ sake. She looked around and saw that most of her fellow Socialists and the handful of Republicans still in Congress were doing the same. It mattered little. The Democratic majority made plenty of noise on their own.

Roosevelt took his time leaving the hall. He paused in the aisles to chat with soldiers and politicians and functionaries who came crowding up to him, eager to be recognized. Flora’s lip curled at their fawning sycophancy…till she saw Senator Debs talking amiably with the president. The cooperation she’d already seen between Socialists and Democrats in Congress had surprised her. This shook her. It was as if a long-familiar picture, turned upside down, yielded another image altogether.

Then Roosevelt caught sight of her. She was easy to spot. The audience held only a handful of women, and she was the youngest by at least fifteen years. The president smiled in her direction. “Miss Hamburger!” he called, and beckoned her to him.

She could either go or, staying in her place, seem rude. What ran through her mind as she approached Theodore Roosevelt was, My parents will never believe I’m talking with the president of the United States. She might not share his politics, but the USA had never yet had a Socialist chief executive. “I’m honored to meet you, Mr. President,” she said, honored being true because of his office where pleased would have stretched a point.

“And I am honored to meet you, Miss Hamburger-Congresswoman Hamburger, I should say,” Roosevelt answered, and surprised her by sounding as if he meant it. “You showed great pluck in the campaign that won you your seat; I followed it with interest and no little admiration. And, by all accounts, you seem to be shaping well in the House.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” she said. “You surprise me, since I am not of your party and”-she couldn’t resist the jab-“I don’t see much point to this war, even if I know a good many of the facts about it.”

He surprised her again by not getting angry. “The point is that winning it will at last let our country take its rightful place in the sun, a place wrongly denied us since the War of Secession.”

“My question is, what price do we pay for our place in the sun?” Flora replied. “How many young men will never see that place in the sun, some because they are blind, most because they are dead? How many young working men will die so the capitalists who own the steel mills and the coal mines and the weapons plants can buy new mansions, new motorcars, new yachts with the profits they make selling munitions to the government?”

Now Roosevelt frowned, but still did not explode. “If the capitalists can afford new toys after the war tax we’ve slapped on ’em, they’ve got better bookkeepers and lawyers than I think they do. You have a fine stump speech there, Congresswoman, and I think you are sincere in it, but it doesn’t altogether match the way the world works. A pleasure to meet you, as I said. If you’ll excuse me-” He shook someone else’s hand.

Flora found herself more impressed with him than she’d thought she would be. Part of that was the office he held. Part of it was realizing that what she had taken for political bombast were in fact his true beliefs. And part was the force with which he expressed those beliefs, a force mocked in her own party but, she discovered, not one to be taken lightly.

Hosea Blackford came up to her in Roosevelt’s wake. His expression was somewhere between amused and curious. “Well, what do you think of the earthquake that walks like a man now that you’ve met him in the flesh?” the congressman from Dakota asked.

“He’s-formidable,” Flora answered. “He’s easy to caricature, but I have the idea that taking the caricature for the man would be a mistake.”

“A dangerous mistake,” Blackford agreed. “Roosevelt has made a lot of people pay for doing that. When he goes charging straight at something, he seems to have no more brains than a bull moose, but anyone who thinks they aren’t hiding behind that smirk ends up regretting it.”

Flora sighed. “He does argue better than I thought he would.”

“He met Lincoln during the Second Mexican War, I gather, the same as I did,” Blackford answered. “They quarreled, so he was less impressed than I was.”

“There’s only one kind of person Roosevelt doesn’t quarrel with, as far as I can see,” Flora said. The congressman from Dakota raised a questioning eyebrow. She explained: “Someone who already agrees with every word he says.”