Chapter 3
In an auditorium at the University of Lowell, Meade Alexander was explaining where the nation had dropped its molasses jug and why. The room was mostly full. Ronni sat behind him on a folding chair on the stage, her knees and ankles neatly together. Her feet firmly on the floor, her white-gloved hands folded neatly in her lap, her eyes riveted on her husband, her interests animated and her expression approving, maybe even adoring.
'There is a crisis in this land,' Alexander said. 'Nearly half of the marriages in this nation end in divorce; what God has joined, any man can now put asunder at will.'
I was leaning against the wall of the auditorium, near the stage, beside a window. When I looked out the window I could see the Merrimack River break over some rapids and drop in a waterfall before it moved off toward Newburyport. I had heard that someone caught a salmon in it not long ago. Or maybe that was another river, and I was being optimistic. At least it hadn't caught fire like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.
'My friends, nearly eighty percent of the video cassettes now sold are pornographic,' Alexander said.
Some kid in the back of the room said audibly, 'Right on.'
Tom Cambell was on stage, in the wings, and Fraser was at the back of the auditorium standing beside the campus security chief, who had a walkie-talkie.
'Nudity and sex are big business. Any small grocery store in the land will sell magazines that twenty years ago would have landed the seller in jail. Television sells jiggle, newspaper columnists routinely suggest that any form of sexual excess is acceptable, that abortion is simply a matter of personal preference-as if the slaughter of unborn children were no more significant than an upset stomach.'
The audience was a mix of students and faculty, with a few citizens of Lowell who were interested. Outside the auditorium there were pickets representing gay liberation, NOW, NAACP, the Anti-Nuclear Coalition, Planned Parenthood, and everyone else to the left of Alexander. Since, as far as I could tell, there was no one to the right of Alexander, it made for a considerable turnout. They were quiet by the standards I had learned in the late sixties and early seventies, but campus and Lowell city police had kept them at passive bay.
'The family, the nucleus of civilization, is under attack from the spread of feminism, from those who council a form of rebellion under the deceitful rubric of 'children's rights,' from drug pushers who would poison us, from those who would urge homosexuals to marry, from an intrusive government whose social workers all too often violate the sacred web of family with their theories of social engineering.'
Beneath my window, on the grass, a young woman in a plaid skirt sat, leaning her back against a tree. A young man lay flat on the ground, his head in her lap. Each was reading, and as they read, her left hand absently stroked his hair.
'My candidacy is not merely political. I am striving not only to change laws, but to change the assumptions of a nation, to reinvigorate the purity and sinew of a younger America. To call forth the inherent decency in the people of this country, united under God, to refortify the resolve of this nation to stand firm against Godless communism. This is beyond legislation. I am calling upon all of you to join me in a crusade, to help me find America reborn.'
There were four or five reporters down front who traveled with Alexander's campaign, heard him say America reborn, and opened their eyes, closed their notebooks, and stood up. They were halfway down the aisle before the applause sounded. Most of the audience stood to applaud and the applause seemed heartfelt. Here and there a professor shook his head, but the overwhelming body of the audience seemed to love what it had heard.
Alexander shook hands with the college president, who had introduced him. He faced the audience for a long minute with both hands above his head, then came down the stairs at the side of the stage. Tom Cambell came behind him and I closed to his side as we went up the aisle. Outside on the steps, there were some pictures taken of Alexander holding Ronnie's hand. Then into the cars and away from the campus.
Looking back out the rear window of the car, I saw the young man and woman who had been reading on the lawn standing holding hands watching us go.
Twenty minutes later Alexander was sipping a cup of tea with milk and sugar and eating a pineapple pastry and telling several members of the Haverhill Republican Women's Club that the interference of the Internal Revenue Service with Christian schools was intolerable, as was our abandonment of Taiwan and our loss of the Panama Canal.
Ronni smiled, helped pour the tea, spoke briefly on the sacredness of the marriage bond and her conviction that her husband was all that stood between us and the arrival of the anti-Christ.
During this, Fraser circulated, keeping liaison with the local fuzz. Cambell and I tried to stay roughly on either side of Alexander. The only danger to him that I could spot were the pastries. I tried one and they tasted like something you'd swallow to avoid torture.
A smallish woman with short blond hair asked me if I was with Congressman Alexander. She wore a sensible gray suit and a corsage.
'Yes,' I said.
'Well,' she said, 'we're all behind him up here. He's the first politician in this state to make sense since I've been voting.'
'This is the only state that voted for George McGovern in 1972,' I said. 'You think a conservative can get elected in Massachusetts?'
'Absolutely. Massachusetts was just a little slower to come to its senses. But it has. Liberalism is bankrupt.'
I was looking at her corsage. You don't see a corsage all that often, especially during the day. It was an orchid.
'Don't you love my corsage? Donald, my husband, gave it to me last night when he knew I was going to meet the congressman. I kept it in the refrigerator all night.'
I smiled. 'It's certainly attractive,' I said.
We left the Haverhill Republican Women's Club in time to get to the Raytheon plant in Andover for the shift change. Alexander stood at the gate and shook as many hands as he could as the workers came out heading for the parking lot. More than half the workers brushed by Meade and Ronni and ignored the outstretched hands. Some others shook hands without any sign of recognition. Most of the workers were men, and most of them turned after they'd passed Ronni and looked at her. A bearded worker in a plaid cap said, 'Nice ass.'
As soon as the four o'clock shift had stopped admiring his wife's backside, Alexander was back in the caravan and heading for a shopping mall in Peabody.
Alexander took up a position outside a Jordan Marsh store, across from Baskin-Robbins, and shook some more hands. Fix Farrell and Abel Westin kept herding people over toward him, and Alexander shook hands and smiled, and Ronni stood beside him and smiled.
A short woman with her gray hair tightly permed asked Alexander what he planned to do about the 'darks.'
Alexander said, 'I beg your pardon?'
She said, 'The darks. What are you going to do about them? They're getting in everywhere and we're paying for it.'
Alexander said, 'I feel the government has no business in education.'
The woman nodded triumphantly. A young woman in over-the-ankle moccasins and gold-rimmed glasses said, 'You're opposed to public education. You wish to abolish it?'
Abel Westin slipped between Alexander and the young woman. He said, 'That's too complex a question for a forum like this, ma'am.'
'But he said the government had no business in public education.'
Alexander smiled. 'We're preparing a position paper on that, my dear. When it appears I think you'll be satisfied.'
'Good question though,' Westin said.
The young woman said, 'Bullshit,' and went over to Baskin-Robbins for an ice cream.
From the shopping center we went to a reception at the Colonial Hilton Inn in Lynnfield. Alexander met with the Christian Action Coalition in a function room where jug wine, cheese spread, and Wheat Thins were served from a small buffet table along one wall.
Alexander sipped a small glass of wine, nibbled a Wheat Thin, and smiled graciously at the adoration that
