American Front by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

going crazy now, though. We’re the ones who are trying to stay sane, to do what needs doing.”
    “Crazy is right.” Fleischmann clenched a work-roughened hand into a fist. “The Confederates, they’re moving all sorts of troops to the border, trying to get the jump on us. And the Canadians, their Great Lakes battleships have left port, it says in the papers. What are we supposed to do, what with them provoking us from all sides like this?”
    Flora gaped at the butcher in blank dismay. The bacillus of nationalism had infected him, too, and he didn’t even notice it. She said, “If all the workers would stand together, there’d be no war, Mr. Fleischmann.”
    “Oh, yes. If we could trust the Rebels, this would be wonderful,” Fleischmann said. “But how can we? We know they want to fight us, because they’ve fought us twice already. Am I right or am I wrong, Flora? We have to defend ourselves, don’t we? Am I right or am I wrong?”
    “But don’t you see? The Confederate workers are saying the same thing about the United States.”
    “Fools!” Max Fleischmann snorted, Realizing the argument was hopeless, Flora started upstairs. The butcher’s voice pursued her: “Am I right or am I wrong?” When she didn’t answer, he snorted again and went back into his shop.
    The Socialist Party offices were almost as crowded as the tenements all around: desks and tables and file cabinets jammed into every possible square inch of space, leaving a bare minimum of room for human beings. Two secretaries in smudged white shirtwaists tried without much luck to keep up with an endless stream of calls. They mixed English and Yiddish in every conversation—sometimes, it seemed, in every sentence.
    Herman Bruck nodded to her. As usual, he seemed too elegant to make a proper Socialist, what with his two-button jacket of the latest cut and the silk ascot he wore in place of a tie. His straw boater hung on a hat rack near his desk. He looked so natty because he came from a long line of tailors. “How did it go?” he asked her. Though he’d been born in Poland, his English was almost without accent.
    “Not so good,” Flora answered, setting down the can with a clank. “Do we know what’s what with the caucus?”
    Bruck’s sour expression did not sit well on his handsome features. “A telegram came in not half an hour ago,” he answered. “They voted eighty-seven to fourteen to give Roosevelt whatever money he asks for.”
    “
Oy!
” Flora exclaimed. “Now the madness is swallowing us, too.”
    “On theoretical grounds, the vote does make some sense,” Bruck said grudgingly. “After all, the Confederacy is still in large measure a feudal economy. Defeating it would advance progressive forces there and might lift the Negroes out of serfdom.”
    “Would. Might.” Flora laced the words with scorn. “And have they declared Canada feudal and reactionary, too?”
    “No,” Bruck admitted. “They said nothing about Canada—putting the best face on things they could, I suppose.”
    “Putting the best face on things doesn’t make them right,” Flora said with the stern rectitude of a temperance crusader smashing a bottle of whiskey against a saloon wall.
    Bruck frowned. A moment before, he’d been unhappy with the delegates of his party. Now, because it
was
his party and he a disciplined member of it, he defended the decision it had made: “Be reasonable, Flora. If they’d voted to oppose the war budget, that would have been the end of the Socialist Party in the United States. Everyone is wild for this war, upper class and lower class alike. We’d have lost half our members to the Republicans, maybe more.”
    “Whenever you throw away what’s right for what’s convenient, you end up losing both,” Flora Hamburger said stubbornly. “Of course everyone is wild for the war now. The whole country is crazy.
Gottenyu
, the whole
world
is crazy. Does that mean we should say yes to the madness? How wild for war