A country defeated in a bitter war and divested of half its territory loses its drive and spirit and suffers a shock which is communicated to all its people. For generations its citizens brood over what has happened, preoccupied with the past and dreaming of a miraculous change, until time brings apathy or a reversal of history. The Grand Army, with its crude and brutal philosophy and methods, was pride’s answer to defeat.
It was not the only answer; the two major political parties had others. The realistic Whigs wanted to fit the country and its economy into actual world conditions, to subordinate it wholly and openly to the great manufacturing nations and accept with gratitude foreign capital and foreign protection. The immediate result would be more prosperity for the propertied classes; they contended this would mean a gradual raising of the standard of living since employers could hire more hands, and indenture, faced by competition with wages, would dwindle away.
This the Populists denied. The government, they insisted when they were out of office, should create industries, forbid indenting, buy up the indentures of skilled workers and offer high enough pay to create new markets, and defy the world by building a new army and navy. That they never put their program into effect they laid to the wily tricks of the Whigs.
The presidential election of 1940 was as violent as if the office were really a prize to be sought rather than a practically empty title, with all real power now held by the Majority Leader of the House and his cabinet of Committee Chairmen. As early as May one of the leading contenders for the Populist nomination was shot and badly crippled; the Cleveland hall where the Whig convention was being held was fired by an arsonist.
I would not be old enough to vote for two years, yet I too had campaign fever. Jennings Lewis, the Populist, was perhaps the ugliest candidate ever offered, with a hairless, skeletonlike face; Dewey, the Whig nominee, had a certain handsomeness, which might have been an asset if the persistent advocates of woman suffrage had ever gotten their way.
Traditionally, candidates never ventured west of Chicago, concentrating their appearances in New York and New England and leaving the campaign in the sparsely settled trans-Mississippi to local politicians. This year both office-seekers used every device to reach the greatest number of voters. Dewey made a grand tour in his balloon-train; Lewis was featured in a series of short phonotos which were shown free. Dewey spoke several times daily to small groups; Lewis specialized in enormous weekly rallies followed by torchlight parades.
One of these Populist rallies was held in Union Square early in September; outgoing President George Norris spoke, and ex-President Norman Thomas, the only Populist to serve two terms since the beloved Bryan. Tyss indulgently gave me permission to leave the store a couple of hours before the meeting was to commence so I might get a place from which to see and hear all that was going on. Though he characterized all elections as meaningless exercises devised to befuddle, he had been active in this one in some mysterious and secretive way.
The square was already well filled when I arrived, with the more acrobatic members of the audience perched on the statues of LaFayette and Washington. Calliopes played patriotic airs, and a compressed air machine shot up puffs of smoke which momentarily spelled out the candidate’s name. Resigned to pantomime glimpses of what was going on, I moved around the outside edge of the crowd, thinking I might just as well leave altogether.
“Please don’t step on my foot so firmly. Or is that part of the Populist tradition?”
“Excuse me, Miss; I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”
We were close enough to a light standard for me to see she was young and well-dressed, hardly the sort of girl to be found at a political meeting, few of which ever counted much of a feminine audience.
She rubbed her instep briefly. “It’s all right,” she conceded grudgingly. “Serves me right for being curious about the mob.”
She was plump and pretty, with a small, discontented mouth and pale hair worn long over her shoulders. “There’s not much to see from here,” I said; “unless youre enthusiastic enough to be satisfied with a bare look at the important people, perhaps you’d let me help you to the streetcar. For my clumsiness.”
She looked at me thoughtfully. “I can manage by myself. But if you feel you owe me something for trampling me, maybe you’ll explain why anyone comes to these ridiculous gatherings.”
“Why ... to hear the speakers.”
“Hardly any of them can. Only those close up.”
“Well then, to show their support of the party, I guess.”
“That’s what I thought. It’s a custom or rite or something like that. A stupid amusement.”
“But cheap,” I said. “And those who vote for Populists usually havent much money.”
“Maybe that’s why,” she answered. “If they found more useful things to do they’d earn money; then they wouldnt vote for Populists.”
“A virtuous circle. If everyone voted Whig we’d all be rich as Whigs.”
She shrugged her shoulders, a gesture I found pleasing. “It’s easy enough to be envious of those who are better off; it’s a lot harder to become better off yourself.”
“I can’t argue with you on that, Miss ... um ...?”
“Why Mister Populist, do ladies always tell you their names when you step on their feet?”
“I’m not usually lucky enough to find feet to step on that have lovely ladies attached,” I answered boldly. “I won’t deny Populist leanings, but my name is really Hodge Backmaker.”
Hers was Tirzah Vame, and she was indentured to a family of wealthy Whigs who owned a handsome modern castiron and concrete house near the Reservoir at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. She had used the apt word “curious” in characterizing herself but it was, as I soon found out, a cold and inflexible curiosity which explored only what she thought might be useful or which impressed her as foolish. She was interested in the nature of anything fashionable or popular or much talked of, the idea of being concerned with anything even vaguely abstract struck her as preposterous.
She had indented, not out of stark economic necessity, but calculatedly, believing she could achieve economic security through indenture. This seemed paradoxical to me, even when I contrasted my “free” condition with her bound one. Certainly she seemed to have minimum restriction on her time; soon after our introduction at the rally she was meeting me almost every evening in Reservoir Square where we sat for hours talking on a bench or walking briskly when the autumn weather chilled our blood.
I did not long flatter myself that her interest—perhaps tolerance would be a better word—was due to any strong attraction exerted by me. If anything she was, I think, slightly repelled by my physical presence, which carried to her some connotation of ordinary surroundings and contrasted with the well-fed smooth surfaces of her employers and their friends. The first time I kissed her she shuddered slightly; then, closing her eyes, she allowed me to kiss her again.
She did not resist me when I pressed my lovemaking; she led me quietly to her room in the big house on my transparent plea that the outdoors was now too cold even for conversation. I was no accomplished seducer, but even in my awkward eagerness I could see she had made up her mind I was to succeed.
That her complaisance was not the result of passion was soon obvious; there was not so much a failure on my part to arouse her as a refusal on hers to be aroused beyond an inescapable degree. Even as she permitted our intimacy she remained as virginal, aloof and critical as before.
“It seems hardly worth the trouble. Imagine people talking and writing and thinking about nothing else.”
“Tirzah dear—” “And the liberties that seem to go with it. I don’t think of you as any more dear than I did an hour ago. If people must indulge in this sort of thing, and I suppose they must since it’s been going on for a long time, I think it could be conducted with more dignity.”
As my infatuation increased her coolness did not lessen; curiosity alone seemed to move her. She was amused at my pathetic search for knowledge. “What good is your learning ever going to do you? It’ll never get you a penny.”
I smoothed the long, pale hair and kissed her ear. “Suppose it doesnt?” I argued lazily; “There are other things besides money.”
She drew away. “That’s what those who can’t get it always say.”
“And what do people who can get it say?”
“That it’s the most important thing of all,” she answered earnestly. “That it will buy all the other things.”
“It will buy you free of your indenture,” I admitted, “but you have to get it first.”
“Get it first? I never let it go. I still have the contract payment.”
“Then what was the point of indenting at all?”
She looked at me wonderingly. “Havent you ever thought about serious things? Only books and politics and all that? How could I get opportunities without indenting? I doubt if the Vames are much of a cut above the Backmakers; well, youre a general drudge and I’m a governess and tutor and even in a way a sort of distant friend to Mrs Smythe.”
“That sounds suspiciously like snobbery to me.”
“Does it? Well, I’m a snob; Ive never denied it. I want to live like a lady, to have a good house with servants and carriages and minibiles, to travel to civilized countries, with a place in Paris or Rome or Vienna. You can love the poor and cheer for the Populists; I love the rich and the Whigs.”
“That’s all very well,” I objected, “but even though you have your indenting money and can buy back your freedom any moment you want it, how does this help you get rich?”
“Do you think I keep my money in my pocket? It’s invested, every cent. People who come to this house give me tips; not just money, though there’s enough of that to add a bit to my original capital, but tips on what to buy and sell. By the time I’m thirty I should be well off. Of course I may marry a rich man sooner.”
“That’s an awfully cold-blooded way of looking at marriage,” I remonstrated.
“Is it?” she asked indifferently. “Well, youve been telling me I’m cold-blooded anyway. I may as well be cold-blooded profitably.”
“If that’s the way you feel I don’t understand what we’re doing here at this moment. I’d have thought you’d have picked a more profitable lover.”
She was unruffled. “You didnt think about it at all. If you had, you would have seen I could hardly encourage any of the men from the class into which I intend to marry. Great ladies can laugh at gossip, but the faintest whisper about someone like me would be damaging. Scandal would be unavoidable if I appeared to be anything in this house but a chilly prude.”
An appearance not too deceitful, I considered, sickly jealous at the thought of men who might have been in my place if they had been as anonymous, as inconsequential as I. But this writhing jealousy was little more painful than my frustration at having been made a convenience, a trial experiment. Almost anyone of equal unimportance, anyone who was not a fellow-servant or a familiar in the house would have done as well as I, anyone unlikely ever to come face to face with Mrs Smythe, much less talk to her.
Looking back, trying to recapture for a moment that vanished past, I have a sad, quizzical welling of pity for the girl Tirzah and the boy Hodge. How gravely we took our moral and political differences; how lightly the flying moments of union. We said and did all the wrong things, all the things which fostered the antagonism between us and none of the things which might have softened our youthful self-assurance. We wrangled and argued: Dewey and Lewis, Whig versus Populist, materialist against idealist, reality opposing principle. It all seems so futile now; it all appeared so vital then.
Added to the almost unanimous distrust and hatred of all foreigners in the United States, we regarded the Confederates in particular as the cause of all our misfortunes. We not only blamed and feared them, but looked upon them as sinister, so Populist orators had a ready-made response every time they referred to the Whigs as Southron tools.
Contrary to the accepted view in the United States, I was sure the victors in the War of Southron Independence had been men of the highest probity, and the noblest among them was their second president. Yet I also knew that immediately after the Peace of Richmond less dedicated individuals became increasingly powerful in the new nation. As Sir John Dahlberg remarked, “Power tends to corrupt.”
From his first election in 1865 until his death ten years later, President Lee had been the prisoner of an increasingly strong and imperialistic congress. He had opposed the invasion and conquest of Mexico by the Confederacy, undertaken on the pretext of restoring order during the conflict between the republicans and the emperor. However he had too profound a respect for the constitutional processes to continue this opposition in the face of joint resolutions by the Confederate House and Senate.
Lee remained a symbol, but as the generation which had fought for independence died, the ideals he symbolized faded. Negro emancipation, enacted largely because of pressure from men like Lee, soon revealed itself as a device for obtaining the benefits of slavery without its obligations. The freedmen on both sides of the new border were without franchise, and for all practical purposes without civil rights. Yet while the old Union first restricted and then abolished immigration, the Confederacy encouraged it, making the newcomers subjects like the Latin-Americans who made up so much of the Southron population after the Confederacy expanded southward, limiting full citizenship to posterity of enfranchised residents in the Confederate States on July Fourth 1864.
The Populists claimed the Whigs were Confederate agents; the Whigs retorted that the Populists were visionaries and demagogues who tolerated if they did not actually encourage the activities of the Grand Army. The Populists replied by pointing to their platform which denounced illegal organizations and lawless methods. I was not too impressed by this, knowing how busy Tyss, Pondible and their associates had been ever since the campaign started.
On election night Tyss closed the store and we walked the few blocks to Wanamaker & Stewarts drygoods store where a big screen showed the returns between tinugraphs puffing the firm’s merchandise. From the first it was apparent the unpredictable electorate preferred Dewey to Lewis. State after state, hitherto staunchly Populist, turned to the Whigs for the first time since William Hale Thompson defeated President Thomas R Marshall back in 1920 and again Alfred E Smith in 1924, before Smith gained the great popularity which gave him the presidency four years later. Only Massachusetts, Connecticut, Dakotah and Oregon went for Lewis; his own Minnesota along with twenty-one other states plumped for Dewey.
Disappointed as I was, I could not but note Tyss’s cheerful air. When I asked him what satisfaction he could find in so overwhelming a defeat he smiled and said, “What defeat, Hodgins? Did you think we wanted the Populists to win? To elect Jennings Lewis with his program of world peace conferences? Really Hodgins, I’m afraid you learn nothing day by day.”
“You mean the Grand Army wanted Dewey all along?”
“Dewey or another; we prefer a Whig administration which presents a fixed target to a Populist one wavering all over the place.”
Of course it should have occurred to me that Tyss and Tirzah would wind up on the same side. It was a measure of my innocence that it never had.