Harry Turtledove: Joe Steele

Lighting a Chesterfield of his own, Charlie hurried west along Washington Boulevard toward the Chicago Stadium. He went by Union Park on the way. An old man sat on a park bench, tossing crumbs to pigeons and squirrels. Maybe he was making time go by. Then again, maybe he was hunting tonight’s supper.

Charlie didn’t look behind him when he tossed away his cigarette butt. Somebody would pick it up. You didn’t want to take a man’s pride, watching him do something like that. He wouldn’t want you to see what he was reduced to, either.

Two ragged men slept under the trees. A bottle lay near one. By that, and by his stubble, he might have been sleeping on the grass for years. The other guy, who used a crumpled fedora for a pillow, was younger and neater. If he didn’t have some kind of hard-luck story to tell, Charlie would have been amazed.

He also didn’t look back at a thirtyish woman who gave him the eye. Some gals thought they had no better way to get by. It wasn’t as if Charlie had never seen the inside of a sporting house. This poor, drab sister only gave him the blues, though.

He walked past a tailor’s shop with a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! sign in the window. Next door stood a shuttered bank. Close to forty banks had gone under in a local panic earlier in the year. They wouldn’t be the last, either. These days, Charlie kept his money under his mattress. Thieves with masks seemed a smaller risk than the ones who wore green eyeshades.

Chicago Stadium was the biggest indoor arena in the country. The red-brick pile had a gently curving roofline. Lots of American flags flew from it any day of the week. With the convention there, they’d draped it with so much red-white-and-blue bunting, it might as well have been gift-wrapped.

Cops and reporters and politicians milled around outside. Charlie thought of the line Will Rogers used to fracture audiences all over the country: I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat. The scene here lived up to, or down to, it all too well.

“Press pass,” a flatfoot growled at him.

“For Chrissake, Eddie,” Charlie said-they’d had coffee and donuts together plenty of times when he wrote for a Chicago paper.

“Press pass,” Eddie repeated. “I gotta log that I’m doin’ it for everybody.” A disgusted look on his face, he showed a notebook of his own. Bureaucrats were taking over the world.

Charlie displayed the press pass. The cop scribbled and waved him on. The first thing he saw when he got inside was Huey Long, as comfortable as anyone could be in there with a white linen suit and a blue silk shirt, laying down the law to someone much bigger in an undertaker’s suit of black wool. Listening to Huey made the man even less happy than baking in that outfit.

Whenever Charlie saw the Kingfish, lines about the jawbone of an ass jumped into his mind. Long made such an easy target. He couldn’t possibly be as big a buffoon as he seemed. . could he?

A loud brass band blaring away and a demonstration much less spontaneous than it looked turned the floor to chaos. The great state of Texas-as if there could be any other kind at a convention-had just nominated its favorite son, John Nance Garner. No, it had placed his name in nomination. No, it had proudly placed his name in nomination. People seeking clear English at a gathering like this commonly needed to pay a sin tax on account of their leaders’ syntax.

If a demonstration got big enough and rowdy enough, it could sweep previously undecided delegates along in its wake. It could, yes, but the odds were poor, especially at the Democrats’ national clambake. The Democrats still hung on to the two-thirds rule.

Two delegates out of three had to agree on the Presidential candidate. If they didn’t, the Democrats had no candidate. Will Rogers isn’t kidding, Charlie thought as the demonstration began to lose steam.

The two-thirds rule had been around a long time. In 1860, the Democratic Party fractured because Stephen Douglas couldn’t get over the hump. That let Lincoln win with a plurality far from a majority. Secession and civil war soon followed.

One might think that memories of such a disaster would scuttle the rule. One might, but one would be wrong. Just eight years earlier, in 1924, the Donkeys needed 103 ballots to nominate John W. Davis. By the time they got done, he was a national laughingstock. Calvin Coolidge walloped him in November.

The only Democratic President this century was Woodrow Wilson. He won the first time because Teddy Roosevelt’s revolt split the GOP, and-barely-got reelected when he said he’d keep America away from the Great War. . a promise he danced on less than a year later. Aside from that, the Democrats might as well have been short-pants kids swinging against Lefty Grove.

But they’d win this time. They couldn’t very well not win this time. They might pluck Trotsky out of Red Russia and run him against Hoover. They’d win anyway, probably in a walk.

Somebody from Wisconsin was making a speech for Joe Steele. Why Wisconsin? It had to come down to courting delegates. “Joe Steele has a plan for this country! Joe Steele will set this country right!” the Congressman on the podium shouted.

People yelled themselves hoarse. Joe Steele did have a plan: a Four Year Plan, straightening things out through his first term. And Franklin D. Roosevelt offered the American people a New Deal, one he claimed would be better than the bad old deal they had now.

Hoover had no plan. Hoover stood for the old deal that had left the country in the ditch. He was making it up as he went along. He didn’t even bother pretending he wasn’t. He was about as political as a pine stump. No wonder he wouldn’t win.

When the guy from the great state of Wisconsin proudly placed the name of Joe Steele in nomination for the office of President of the United States of America, the place went nuts. Confetti and straw hats flew. A new brass band did terrible things to “California, Here I Come.” People snake-danced through the aisles screaming, “Joe Steele! Joe Steele! Joe Steele!”

Not everybody got caught up in the orchestrated frenzy. Big Jim Farley kept the New York delegation in line for Governor Roosevelt. He was FDR’s field boss, the way Vince Scriabin was for Joe Steele. Roosevelt’s other chief sachem, Lou Howe, hadn’t left his Madison Avenue office for a hick town like Chicago. That was how you heard it from Joe Steele’s troops, anyway.

Roosevelt’s people told a different story-surprise! They reminded people that Howe was an invalid, and didn’t travel. They also claimed he made a better pol by remote control than most people who pumped your hand and breathed bourbon into your face.

You heard all kinds of things, depending on whose story you listened to at any given moment. Never having met Lou Howe, Charlie didn’t know what to think about him. Gotta ask Mike next time I talk to him or shoot him a wire, the reporter thought.

There stood Farley by the aisle, thumbs dug into the front pockets of his trousers. He couldn’t have radiated any more disgust if Typhoid Mary were prancing past him. Not even the suntanned California girls who made up part of the Golden State’s delegation wiped the scowl off his jowly mug.

Charlie slipped between two dancers and bawled a question into Big Jim’s imperfectly shell-like ear. Then he bawled it again, louder: “What do you think of this show of strength?”

“It’s all bullshit, Charlie, piled up like in the stockyards,” Farley shouted back.

Like any good politico, he was endlessly cynical. Even more than most, he made a point of knowing-and of making sure Roosevelt seemed to know-any reporter or legislator or preacher or fat cat he ran into. Charlie had heard he kept files on everyone he met so he and FDR would never get caught short. He didn’t know if that was true, but he wouldn’t have been surprised.