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?”
“All right, dear.” Sylvia didn’t quite know how to take the question. She wondered whether Mary Jane really would remember the day as long as she’d hoped. As they were heading toward the trolley stop, she asked, “What did you think of the president?”
“He talked for a long time.” By the way Mary Jane said it, she didn’t mean it as a compliment.
“He had a lot of things to talk about.” Sylvia gave credit where it was due, even if she didn’t care for all the things Roosevelt had said. “Running the country is a big, complicated job.”
“Huh,” Mary Jane said. “I bet more people would vote for him if he didn’t talk so much.” Sylvia tried to figure out how to answer that. In the end, she didn’t answer at all. Her best guess was that Mary Jane had a point.
Jake Featherston had never imagined he’d end up working out of an office. He had one now, though, paid for with Freedom Party dues. He had a secretary, too, whose pay came from the same source. Without Lulu endlessly tapping away on the typewriter, he wouldn’t have got done a quarter of what needed doing. As things were, he got done half of what needed doing, sometimes even more.
Lulu couldn’t handle everything by her lonesome. Featherston studied the snapshot on his desk. It showed a British- or Confederate-style rhomboidal barrel in the middle of some dry, rough-looking country. The letter that had come with the photo was from a Party member fighting for the Emperor of