XVI
'He's kept us out of war.' Flora Blackford repeated the Socialist Party slogan to a street-corner crowd in her district. 'He's kept us out of war, and he's done everything he could to keep food on the working man's table. If you want to see what the Democrats will do about that, look at what Herbert Hoover did. Nothing, that's what.'
People in the mostly proletarian crowd clapped their hands. A sprinkling of hecklers at the back started a chant: 'Taft! Taft! Robert Taft!'
Flora pointed at them. 'I served in Congress with Senator Taft's father. William Howard Taft was an honorable man. So is Robert Taft. I don't say any differently. But I do say this: Senator Taft would be horrified at the way his supporters are bringing Freedom Party tactics into this campaign.'
That got more applause. Next to nobody in this strongly Socialist district had a good word to say about Jake Featherston's gang. But one of the hecklers yelled, 'Al Smith's the one who's in bed with the Freedom Party!'
'Al Smith is against war. I am against war. I had a brother-in-law killed and a brother badly wounded in the Great War,' Flora said. 'If you are going to tell me you are for war-if you are going to tell me Senator Taft is for war-you will have a hard time selling that to the people of this district.'
'Taft is for keeping Kentucky and Houston,' the heckler called.
'How can you keep a state in the country when its own people don't want to be here?' Flora asked. 'That was the lesson of the War of Secession-you can't. Some things you can buy at too high a price.'
The crowd applauded again, but less enthusiastically than before. Flora understood why: they wanted to have their cake and eat it, too; to have peace and to hold on to Kentucky and Houston. She wanted the same thing. She understood the people who said the USA had sacrificed too much even to think about giving back the two states. At least half the time, she felt that way herself. She would have liked the idea much better if it didn't involve giving them back to Jake Featherston.
'I don't love the Freedom Party,' she said. 'But it is in power in the Confederate States, and we can't very well pretend it isn't and hope it will go away. What can we do if we don't try to deal with it?' She was trying to convince herself as well as her audience, and she knew it.
'I'd sock it in the nose!' that iron-lunged heckler yelled. 'Taft will sock it in the nose!'
'No, he won't.' Flora shook her head. 'If he does, he'll have a war on his hands, and I can't believe he wants one. He may talk tough, but his foreign policy won't look much different from President Smith's. And his domestic policy…' She rolled her eyes. 'He grows like an onion-with his head in the ground.' She said it in English. Some of the people her age and older in the crowd echoed it in Yiddish.
She managed to get through the rest of her speech without too much harassment. She had a pretty good idea why, too: the Democrats didn't think they could beat her. She'd never lost an election in this district. The Democrats had elected a candidate here while she was First Lady, but she'd trounced him as soon as she returned to the hustings.
At the end, she said, 'If you're in favor of what President Smith has done, you'll vote for him again, and you'll vote for me. If you're not, you'll vote for Taft. It's about that simple, my friends. Forward with Smith or back with Taft?'
She stepped down from the platform with applause ringing in her ears. When she'd started agitating for the Socialists, she hadn't had a platform-not a real one. She'd made her first few speeches standing on crates or beer barrels. She was right around the corner from the Croton Brewery, where she'd spoken at the outbreak of the Great War. She'd opposed war then; she still did. In 1914, her party hadn't gone along with her. This year, it did.
Why aren't I happier, then? she wondered.
In 1914, the Confederate States hadn't been that different from the United States. Most of the oppressed proletariat in the CSA had been black, but capitalists had oppressed workers almost as savagely in the USA. Now… Things were different now.
A middle-aged man in a homburg limped up to her, leaning on a stick. 'Good speech,' he said. A Soldiers' Circle pin showing a sword through his conscription year in a silver circle sparkled on his lapel.
'Thank you, David,' Flora said with a sigh. That her own brother could belong to a reactionary organization like the Soldiers' Circle-and not only belong but wear the pin that showed he was proud to belong-had always dismayed her. The Soldiers' Circle wasn't the Freedom Party, but some of its higher-ups wished it were.
'Good speech,' David Hamburger repeated, 'but I'm still going to vote for Taft.'
'I hadn't expected anything different,' she said. David had gone into the Great War a Socialist like the rest of the family. He'd come out a conservative Democrat. He'd also come out with one leg gone above the knee. Flora had no doubt the two were related.
She asked, 'And will you vote for Chaim Cohen, too?' Cohen was the latest Democrat to try to unseat her.
Her brother turned red. 'No,' he said. 'I don't like all of your ideas-I don't like most of your ideas-but I know you're honest. And you're family. I don't let family down.'
'Being family isn't reason enough to vote for me,' she said.
'I think it is.' David laughed. 'And you may not like my politics, but at least I care about things. Did you see your sisters or your other brother or Mother and Father at your speech?'
Now Flora was the one who had to say, 'No.' Sophie and Esther and Isaac had their own lives, and lived them. They were proud when she won reelection, but they didn't even come to Socialist Party headquarters any more. As for her parents… 'Mother and Father don't get out as much as they did.'
'I know. They're getting old.' David shook his head. 'They've got old. Bis hindert und tzvantzik yuhr.'
'Omayn,' Flora said automatically, though she know her mother and father wouldn't live to 120 years. People didn't, however much you wished they would. A stab of loss and longing for Hosea pierced her. She was grateful her parents had lived to grow old. So many people didn't, even in the modern world.
'Have you got plans for tonight, or can you go to dinner with your reactionary tailor of a little brother?' David asked.
'I can go,' Flora said. 'And it's on me. I know I make more money than you do.' She knew she made a lot more money than he did, but she didn't want to say so out loud.
With his usual touchy pride, David said, 'I'm doing all right.' He'd never asked her or anybody else for a dime, so she supposed he was. With a wry grin, though, he went on, 'I'll let you buy. Don't think I won't. How does that go? 'From each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs'? Something like that, anyhow.'
'I never heard anybody quote-I mean misquote-Marx to figure out who's getting dinner before,' Flora said, and she couldn't help laughing. 'Since I'm buying, how does Kornblatt's sound?'
'Let's go,' her brother said, so the delicatessen must have sounded good.
When they got there, he ordered brisket and a schooner of beer. Flora chose stuffed cabbage, which just wasn't the same in Philadelphia. What she got at Kornblatt's wasn't the same as what she'd helped her mother make when she lived on the Lower East Side all the time, but it came closer.
David attacked the brisket as if he hadn't eaten in weeks. He'd devoured almost all of it before he looked up and said, 'You really think we ought to give back what we won in the war? Give it back to those 'Freedom'-yelling mamzrim?'
'If the people who live there don't want to be part of the country, how can we keep them?' Flora asked.
'They were pretty quiet till Featherston started stirring them up,' David said, which was true, or at least close to true. He speared his last bite of meat, chewed it, swallowed, and went on, 'If we're not doing the same thing with the shvartzers in the CSA, we're missing a hell of a chance.'
'I don't know anything about that,' Flora said.
'Somebody ought to,' her brother said, and somebody probably did. If the United States weren't trying to use Negroes in the Confederate States to make life difficult for the government there, then the War Department was indeed falling down on the job. Flora disliked a lot of the people and policies in the War Department, but she did not think the men at the top there were fools. Over almost a quarter of a century of public life, she'd learned the difference between someone who couldn't do his job and someone who simply disagreed with her about what the job should be.
'Say what you want,' she told David, 'but we'd just have endless trouble if we tried to keep those
