East Side several times since, this long campaign swing forcibly brought home to her how much she’d been away. Everything seemed shabby and cramped and packed tighter with people than a tin of sardines was stuffed with little fish. Things surely hadn’t changed much in less than two years. But she’d taken them for granted before. She didn’t any more.
Her posters—red and black, with VOTE SOCIALIST! VOTE HAMBURGER! in both English and Yiddish—were almost everywhere in the Fourteenth Ward, and especially in the Centre Market, across the street from the Socialist Party headquarters. Her district was solidly Socialist; the Democratic candidate, an amiable nonentity named Marcus Krauskopf, had for all practical purposes thrown in the sponge. The Democrats hadn’t been able to win two years before even with an appointed incumbent. Now that Flora held the advantage of incumbency, they looked to be saving their efforts for places where they had a chance to do better.
Flora was not the sort who took anything for granted. She stood on a keg of nails and addressed the people who crowded into the Centre Market, even if many of them were after pickled tomatoes or needles or smoked whitefish, not speeches. “What have we got from our great victory? Dead men, maimed men, men who can’t get work because the capitalists care more for their profits than for letting people earn a proper living. That was the war the Democrats gave you. This is the peace the Democrats are giving you. Is it what you want?”
Some people in the market shouted, “No!” About as many, though, went on about their business. Most of them—most who were citizens, at any rate—would vote when the time came. They’d known too much oppression to throw away the chance to have a say in government the United States offered them.
“If you want to help the capitalists, you’ll vote for the Democrats,” Flora went on. “If you want to help yourselves, you’ll vote for me. I hope you vote for me.”
Her breath smoked as she talked. The day was raw, with ragged gray clouds scudding across the sky. People sneezed and coughed as they went from one market stall to the next. The Spanish influenza wasn’t nearly so bad as it had been the winter before, but it hadn’t gone away, either.
When Flora stepped down from the keg of nails, Herman Bruck reached out a hand to help steady her. Bruck was dapper in an overcoat of the very latest cut: not because he was rich, but because he came from a family of master tailors. “Fine speech,” he said. “Very fine speech.”
He didn’t want to let go of her hand. Her being away hadn’t made him any less interested in her. It had made her much less interested in him, not that she’d ever been very interested. Next to Hosea Blackford, he was a barely housebroken puppy. Freeing herself, Flora said, “Let’s go back to the offices. I want to make sure we’ll have all the poll-watchers we’ll need out on the fifth.” She was confident the Socialists would, but it gave her an excuse to move, and to keep Bruck moving.
The Party offices were above a butcher’s shop. Max Fleischmann, the butcher, came out of his doorway and spoke in Yiddish: “I’ll vote for you, Miss Hamburger.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fleischmann,” Flora answered, genuinely touched—the butcher was, or had been, a staunch Democrat. His vote meant a lot to her.
In a slightly different way, it also meant a lot to Herman Bruck. As he went upstairs with Flora, he said, “If people like Fleischmann are voting for you, you’ll win in a walk.”
“We’ll know Tuesday night,” Flora said. Inside the office, people greeted her like the old friend she was. A term in Congress slipped away, and for a little while she was just the agitator she had been before Congressman Myron Zuckerman’s tragic accidental death made her run to fill his shoes and bring the seat back to the Socialist Party.
Everyone cheered when Bruck reported what Max Fleischmann had said. Maria Tresca remarked, “If we keep on like this, in 1920 the Democrats won’t bother to run anybody at all in this district, any more than the Republicans do now.” The secretary was a lone Italian in an office full of Jews, but probably the most ardent Socialist there—and, by now, not the least fluent in Yiddish, either.
“Maybe in 1920—alevai in 1920…the White House,” Herman Bruck said softly. Silence fell while people thought about that. When