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Of course, one of the reasons the Freedom Party had almost won in 1921 was that its members went out there and brawled with anybody rash enough to have a different opinion. If you looked at things from one angle, President Hampton's assassination followed from the Freedom Party's nature almost as inexorably as night followed day.
Jake Featherston was not, had never been, and never would be a man to look at things that way.
He'd watched the Party lose seats in the 1923 Congressional elections. He'd been glad the losses weren't worse. Other people celebrated because they were as large as they were. Up till that damned unfortunate incident, the Freedom Party had gone from success to success, each building momentum for the next. Unfortunately, he was finding the process worked the same way for failure.
What do we do if the money doesn't keep coming in? What can we do if the money doesn't keep coming in? he wondered. Only one answer occurred to him. We go under, that's what. When he'd first joined the Freedom Party in the dark days right after the war, it had been nothing to speak of: a handful of angry men meeting in a saloon, with the membership list and everything else in a cigar box. It could end up that way again, too; he knew as much. Plenty of groups of disgruntled veterans had never got any bigger, and the Party had swallowed up a lot of the ones that had. Some other group could swallow it the same way.
"No, goddammit," Jake snarled. For one thing, he remained convinced he was right. If the rest of the world didn't think so, the rest of the world was wrong. And, for another, he'd got used to leading an important political party. He liked it. Without false modesty-and he was singularly free of modesty, false and otherwise-he knew he was good at it. He didn't want to play second fiddle to anybody else, and he didn't want to go back to being a big fish in a tiny pond.
The telephone on his desk jangled. He picked it up. "Featherston," he barked into the mouthpiece.
"Yes, Mr. Featherston," his secretary said. "I just wanted to remind you that you've got that talk on the wireless coming up in a little more than an hour. You'll want to make sure you're at the studio on time."
"Thank you kindly, Lulu," Featherston answered. He was more polite to Lulu Mattox than to practically anybody else he could think of. Unlike most people, his secretary deserved it. She was a maiden lady, somewhere between forty and seventy. Once upon a time, he'd read or heard-he couldn't remember where or when-that Roman Catholic nuns were the brides of Christ. What he really knew about Catholicism would fit on the head of a pin; he'd been raised a hardshell Baptist, and he didn't get to any church very often these days. But Lulu Mattox, without a doubt, was married to the Freedom Party. She gave it a single-minded devotion that put the enthusiasm of any mere Party man to shame. She had all the files at her fingertips, too, for she was the best-organized person Jake had ever met. He didn't know what he would do without her.
A few minutes later, he went downstairs. Guards outside the building came to attention and saluted. "Freedom!" they said. The uniforms they wore were similar but not quite identical to those of the Confederate Army. The bayoneted Tredegar rifles they carried were Army issue. Someone might have asked questions about that, but the Freedom Party had gone out of its way to show the world that asking questions about it wasn't a good idea.
"Freedom!" Jake echoed, returning those salutes as if he were a general himself. Part of him loathed the fat fools with the wreathed stars on their collar tabs who'd done so much to help the CSA lose the war. The rest of him wished he had that kind of power himself. I'd do a better job with it than those bastards ever could have.
A motorcar driven by another uniformed Freedom Party man stopped in front of the building. It was a boxy Birmingham, built in the CSA. Jake Featherston was damned if he'd go around Richmond in a Yankee automobile. "That wireless place," he told the driver.
"Sure, Sarge," the man replied. He was a large, burly fellow named Virgil Joyner. He'd been with the Freedom Party almost as long as Featherston had, and he'd been through all of the faction fights and the brawls with the Whigs and the Radical Liberals. Not many people could get away with calling Jake anything but "boss," but he'd earned the right.
The broadcasting studio was in a new brick building on Franklin near Seventh, not far from the house in Richmond where Robert E. Lee and his family had lived for a time after the War of Secession. Featherston knew that only because he'd grown up in and around Richmond. Nothing remained of the house these days; Yankee bombs and the fires that so often followed them had leveled it.
"Hello, Mr. Featherston!" exclaimed the bright little man who ran the studio and the wireless station of which it was a part. His name was Saul Goldman. Since he was a Jew, Featherston assumed he sounded so cheerful, so friendly, because he was getting paid. He was bound to be a Radical Liberal himself, if not an out-and-out Red. Long as we give 'em the money, these bastards'll sell us the rope we use to hang 'em, Featherston thought scornfully.
But if Goldman acted friendly, he'd play along-for now. "Good to see you," he said, and shook hands polite as a banker. "Everything ready for me?"
"Yes, sir. You're in Studio B this time. Follow me. You have your script?"
"Oh, yeah. You bet I do." Featherston followed Goldman down a narrow, dingy hall to a cramped little studio whose walls and ceiling were covered by what looked like the cardboard bottoms of egg cartons. The stuff looked fu
Saul Goldman smiled. "That's right. You know the routine almost like you work here."
"I'd better by now, don't you think?" Featherston sat down in front of the microphone and set his script on the table. He went through it quickly to make sure he had all the pages. Once he'd lost one, and had to ad-lib a bridge to the next one he had. Goldman slid out of the studio, closing the door behind him. The back of the door had more of those egg-carton sound deadeners glued to it.
After a bit, the engineer flashed two fingers-two minutes to go. Jake nodded to show he got it. The engineer was a professional, a man whose competence Jake respected. One finger-one minute. Then the fellow pointed straight at him at the same time as a red light went on. For half an hour, the airwaves were his.
"Confederates, wake up!" he said harshly. "This is Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, and I'm here to tell you the truth." He used that phrase to introduce every wireless talk.
He leaned toward the microphone, as he would have leaned toward a crowd. The first few times he'd done this, not having an audience in front of him had thrown him off stride. Now, though, he could imagine the crowd, hear it in his mind shouting for more. And he had more to give it.
"We can be a great country again," he said. "We can, but will we? Not likely, not with the cowards and idiots we've got ru
"They want to lick the Yankees' boots," Jake repeated. "They're great ones for sucking up to people, the Whigs are. They even suck up to our Negroes, our own Negroes, if you can believe it. And do you know what, folks? They've got reason to do it, may I go to the Devil if I lie." He couldn't say hell on the air, either, but he got his message across. "I'll tell you what the reason is. Thanks to the Whigs, some of those niggers are citizens of the Confederate States, just like you and me.