Joe Steele

by Harry Turtledove

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alternative History sci-fi

Synopsis

President Herbert Hoover has failed America. The Great Depression that rose from the ashes of the 1929 stock market crash still casts its dark shadow over the country. Despairing and desperate, the American people hope one of the potential Democratic candidates—New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and California congressman Joe Steele—can get the nation on the road to recovery. But fate snatches away one hope when a mansion fire claims the life of Roosevelt, leaving the Democratic party little choice but to nominate Steele, son of a Russian immigrant laborer who identifies more with the common man than with Washington D.C.’s wealthy power brokers. Achieving a landslide victory, President Joe Steele wastes no time pushing through Congress reforms that put citizens back to work. Anyone who gets in his way is getting in the way of America, and that includes the highest in the land. Joe Steele’s critics may believe the government is gaining too much control, but they tend to find themselves in work camps if they make too much noise about it. And most people welcome strong leadership, full employment, and an absence of complaining from the newspapers—especially as Hitler and Trotsky begin the kind of posturing that seems sure to drag America into war.

Release date: April 7, 2015

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 448

Sample

ALSO BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE

Joe Steele is for Janis Ian.

 

The novel Joe Steele has plotline derived from the short story “Joe Steele,” which appeared in Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick (DAW Books: New York, 2001). In “god & the fbi,” Janis wrote “Stalin was a Democrat . . .” I started wondering how and why Stalin might have become a Democrat, and the story grew from there. So that’s one reason why I’ve dedicated the novel to her.

 

But wait! There’s more! When I was a teenager, still living at home, I listened to Janis’ music and read the article about her in Life. (She was a teenager, still living at home, then, too.) I never dreamt then that I might one day meet her. I really never dreamt then that we might become friends. That we have means a lot to me in a lot of different ways. So thanks, Janis. Thanks for everything. This one’s for you.

I

Charlie Sullivan never expected to meet Joe Steele in the service elevator of a cheap hotel only a couple of blocks from the Chicago Stadium. The AP stringer gaped at the Presidential candidate when Steele boarded on the second floor. Charlie had slipped the boss cook a buck, so he got on and off in the kitchen as he pleased.

“You’re—him!” Charlie blurted when Joe Steele and one of his aides strode into the car. Long-standing tradition said that candidates stayed away from the convention till it nominated them . . . if it did.

Governor Franklin Roosevelt, Steele’s main rival for the Democratic nomination in this summer of America’s discontent, was still in the Executive Mansion in Albany. Charlie’s older brother, Mike, who wrote for the New York Post, was covering him there. Roosevelt’s operatives worked the Stadium hotels and bars just as hard as Joe Steele’s, though. They glad-handed. They promised. They spread favors around.

“I am him,” the Congressman from California agreed. His smile didn’t reach his eyes. Charlie Sullivan was a scrawny five-eight, but he overtopped Joe Steele by three inches. Steele stood straight, though, so you might not notice how short he was. That his henchman, a cold-looking fellow named Vince Scriabin, was about the same size also helped.

“But . . . What are you doing in town?” Charlie asked.

The elevator door groaned shut. Joe Steele punched the button for 5. Then he scratched at his mustache. It was bushy and graying; he was in his early fifties. His hair, also iron-gray, gave a little at the temples. He had bad skin—either he’d had horrible pimples or he’d got through a mild case of smallpox. His eyes were an interesting color, a yellow-brown that almost put you in mind of a hunting animal.

“Officially, I’m in Fresno,” he said as the elevator lurched upward. That fierce, hawklike stare burned into Charlie. “You might embarrass me if you wrote that I was here.”

Vince Scriabin eyed Charlie, too, as if fitting him for a coffin. Scriabin also wore a mustache, an anemic one that looked all the more so beside Joe Steele’s. He had wire-framed glasses and combed dark, greasy hair over a widening bald spot. People said he was very bad news. Except for the scowl, you couldn’t tell by looking.

Joe Steele’s stare, though less outwardly tough, worried Charlie more. Or it would have, if he’d been on FDR’s side. But he said, “We need some changes—need ’em bad. Roosevelt talks big, but I think you’re more likely to deliver.”

“I am.” Joe Steele nodded. He wasn’t a big man, but he had a big head. “Four years ago, Hoover promised two chickens in every pot and two cars in every garage. And what did he give us? Two chickens in every garage!” Despite the big mustache, Charlie saw his lip twist.

Charlie laughed as the service elevator opened. “Good one, Congressman!” he said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll keep my trap shut.”

“I wasn’t worrying.” Joe Steele stepped out of the little car. “Come on, Vince. Let’s see what kind of deal we can fix with John.” Scriabin followed him. The door groaned shut again. The elevator lurched up toward Charlie’s seventh-floor room.

His mind whirred all the way there. You couldn’t find a more common name than John. But John Nance Garner, the Speaker of the House from Texas, also had a Presidential yen, and controlled his state’s delegation as well as other votes from the Deep South. He wasn’t likely to land the top spot on the ticket. Swinging him one way or the other could get expensive for Steele or Roosevelt.

Roosevelt had never known a day’s want in his life. His family went back to before New Amsterdam turned into New York. His cousin Theodore had been Governor ahead of him, and had served almost two full terms as President after the turn of the century.

Joe Steele was a different story. His folks got out of the Russian Empire and into America only a few months before he was born. He became a citizen well ahead of them. As a kid, he picked grapes under Fresno’s hot sun, and few suns came hotter.

He hadn’t been born Joe Steele. He’d changed his name when he went from farm laborer to labor agitator. The real handle sounded like a drunken sneeze. Several relatives still wore it.

Not all prices were payable in cash, of course. John Nance Garner might want as much power as he could get if he couldn’t be President. Veep? Supreme Court Justice? Secretary of War?

Charlie Sullivan laughed as he strode down the hall to the sweltering top-floor room. He wasn’t just building castles in the air, he was digging out their foundations before he built them. Not only didn’t he know what Garner wanted, he didn’t know whether Joe Steele and Scriabin had been talking about him to begin with.

The first thing he did when he went inside was to pull the cord that started the ceiling fan spinning. The fan stirred the hot, humid air a little, but didn’t cool it.

Chicago Stadium was just as bad. No, worse—Chicago Stadium was packed full of shouting, sweating people. A handful of trains, restaurants, and movie houses boasted refrigerated air-conditioning. The new scientific marvel got you too cold in summer, as central heating made you sweat in January.

But air-conditioning didn’t exist at the Chicago Stadium. Inside the massive amphitheater, you roasted as God had intended. If you walked around with an apple in your mouth, someone would stick a fork in you and eat you.

And too many Democrats knew more about politics than they did about Ivory or Palmolive or Mum. Some doused themselves in aftershave to try to hide the problem. The cure might have been worse than the disease. Or, when you remembered how some of the other politicos smelled, it might not.

Charlie eyed the Remington portable that sat on a nightstand by the bed. It didn’t quite lie about its name; he’d lugged it here without rupturing himself. He sure wouldn’t haul it to the convention floor, though. If he dropped it out the window, it would make a big hole in the sidewalk. And it would drive any passerby into the ground like a hammer driving a nail.

“Nope,” he said. For the floor, he had notebooks and pencils. Reporters would have covered Lincoln’s nomination in Chicago the same way. They would have given their copy to telegraphers the same way, too, though he could also phone his in.

He could make a splash if he reported that Joe Steele was in town to fight for the nomination in person. He suspected his brother would have. Mike liked FDR more than Charlie did.

Whoever nabbed the Democratic nomination this summer would take the oath of office in Washington next March. The Republicans were dead men walking. Poor stupid bastards, they were the only ones who didn’t know it.

They’d elected Herbert Hoover in a landslide in 1928. When Wall Street crashed a year later, the land slid, all right. Hoover meant well. Even Charlie Sullivan, who couldn’t stand him, wouldn’t have argued that. No doubt the fellow who’d rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg did, too.

No, when your name stuck to the shantytowns full of people who had nowhere better to live, you wouldn’t win a second term. Yet the Republican faithful had gathered here in June to nominate him again. Charlie wondered if they’d bothered looking outside of Chicago Stadium before they did.

He stuck a straw hat on his head and rode down on the regular elevator. His clothes would stick to him by the time he got to the Stadium. Why give them a head start by taking the stairs?

No sign of Joe Steele in the lobby. Through air blue with cigarette smoke, Charlie did spot Vince Scriabin and Lazar Kagan, another of Steele’s wheeler-dealers, bending the ear of some corn-fed Midwestern politician. He was pretty sure Scriabin saw him, too, but Steele’s man never let on. Scriabin wasn’t anyone you’d want to play cards against.

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.

He also wasn’t surprised at the answer. “C’mon, Jim,” he said. “Give me something I can write for a family paper.”

Farley said something about Joe Steele and a ewe that wasn’t printable but sure as hell was funny. Then, he added, “You can say I said it was much sound and fury, signifying nothing. That’s what it is, and that makes me sound smarter than I am.”

He was sandbagging, of course. Charlie knew very few people smarter than Jim Farley. He wasn’t sure Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of them, either. But Farley didn’t have his own political ambitions. He worked to put his boss over the top—and he did just-one-of-the-boys better than the aristocratic Roosevelt could.

After scrawling the answer in shorthand, Charlie asked, “How many ballots d’you think they’ll need this time around?”

Farley scowled. That was a serious question. “It won’t be a few,” he said at last, reluctantly. “But we’ll come out on top in the end. People don’t care how long the gal’s in the delivery room. They just want to see the baby.”

Charlie wrote that down, too. Big Jim gave terrific quotes when he kept them clean. Then, spotting Stas Mikoian in the Joe Steele conga line, Charlie hurried after him. The Armenian was another of Steele’s campaign stalwarts. They’d met in Fresno, and stuck together after Steele went to Washington.

Mikoian might not have been as clever as Farley, but he was no dope. His brother was one of Donald Douglas’ top aeronautical engineers in Long Beach, so brains ran in the family. Dancing along next to him, Charlie asked, “How do things look?”

“We’ll have a long night once the balloting starts,” Mikoian said, echoing Farley’s prediction. “We’ll have a long two or three days, chances are. But we’ll win in the end.”

He sounded as confident as Big Jim. Smart or not, one of them was talking through his hat. In ordinary times, Charlie would have figured Roosevelt had the edge. The Roosevelts had been important while Joe Steele’s folks—and those of most of his aides—were nobodies under the Tsar. FDR served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy when Wilson was President. He’d fought infantile paralysis to a standstill. How could you help admiring somebody like that?

You couldn’t. But these times were far from ordinary. Maybe they needed somebody without history behind him. Maybe Joe Steele’s upstarts had the moxie to go toe-to-toe with the well-tailored guys who’d been finagling since the Year One.

Actually, Stas Mikoian seemed pretty well tailored himself. The straw boater didn’t go with his sober gray suit, but you put on silly stuff like that when you joined a demonstration.

“Count on it,” Mikoian said, dancing all the while and never losing the beat. “Joe Steele’s our next President.”

A sly Armenian. And Lazar Kagan was a sly Hebe. And Vince Scriabin made a plenty sly whatever he was. Were they sly enough to lick FDR and his all-American veterans?

*   *   *

The chairman rapped loudly for order. Microphones and loudspeakers made the gavel sound like a rifle. “Come to order! The convention will come to order!” the chairman shouted.

Oh, yeah? Charlie thought from his seat in the stands. The floor went on bubbling like a crab boil. You just had to pour in some salt and spices, peel the Democrats out of their shells, and eat ’em before they got cold.

Bang! Bang! “The convention will come to order!” the chairman repeated, his voice poised between hope and despair. “The sergeant-at-arms has the authority to evict unruly delegates. Come to order, folks! We’ve got a new President to choose!”

That turned the trick. The delegates’ cheers echoed from the low dome of the ceiling. Somebody on the podium patted the chairman on the back. Beaming, the big shot positioned himself in front of the microphone again. “The secretary will call the roll of the states,” he said in his best dramatic tones, and then stood aside so the secretary could do just that.

Charlie figured the secretary actually knew what he was doing. No one so scrawny and bland and insignificant could have found himself in such an important place unless he did.

He knew the alphabet, and started at the top: “Alabama!”

The leader of the Alabama delegation made his way to the floor microphone. “Mr. Secretary,” he boomed in a drawl thick enough to slice, “the great and sovereign state of Alabama casts the entirety of its voting total for that splendid and honorable American patriot, Senator Hugo D. Black!”

“Alabama casts fifty-seven votes for Senator Black,” the secretary said. It was no coincidence that the Senator was from Alabama. The secretary continued, “Alaska!”

Alaska wasn’t a state. Neither was the Canal Zone or Guam or Hawaii or Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands or Washington, D.C. They couldn’t vote in the general election. They all could help—a little—in picking who would run.

Down the roll the secretary went. Along with plenty of other spectators, Charlie totted up the first-ballot totals. They’d look good in his story. They wouldn’t mean anything, though. Favorite sons like Senator Black still littered the field. They let states wheel and deal to their hearts’ content.

At the end of that first ballot, Joe Steele had a twenty-three-vote lead on FDR. At the end of the second, Roosevelt had an eight-vote edge on the California Congressman. After the third, Joe Steele was back in front by thirteen and a half votes.

A half-hour recess followed the third ballot. The gloves came off then. Most states were bound to favorite sons for three ballots, though a few had to stick with them through five. The fourth ballot would start to show where the strength really lay.

Or it would have, had it shown anything. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joe Steele wound up in a dead heat. Charlie whistled softly to himself. What were the odds of that?

Roosevelt took a tiny lead on the fifth ballot, and lost it on the sixth. Favorite sons bled votes to the two front-runners, though neither had gained a majority, much less two-thirds.

Huey Long stayed in the fight. He had not a delegate from north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but he’d picked up votes from lesser Southern candidates like Hugo Black. The Kingfish could dicker with the bigger fish from Yankeeland. Since he hadn’t a prayer of winning the nomination, no one seemed to mind his cutting capers on the convention floor.

Jim Farley paid him a courtesy call. Two ballots later, so did Stas Mikoian. Long preened and posed. Hardly anyone admired him more than he admired himself. He wasn’t just Kingfish, not for the duration. He had hopes of being kingmaker, too.

Ballot followed ballot. Tobacco smoke thickened the air. So did the growing fug of badly bathed, sweating pols. Most of the party’s anointed were in their shirtsleeves after a while, and most of the shirts had spreading stains at the armpits.

Charlie recorded each count, wondering whether Huey Long’s total plus that of one of the major candidates would reach the magic number. It didn’t look as though that would happen any time soon, though. Everyone had said Joe Steele and FDR were as close as two rivals could get. For once, everyone seemed to be right.

As if plucking the thought from his mind, another reporter asked, “How many ballots did they need to nominate Davis?”

“A hundred and three,” Charlie said with sour satisfaction.

“Christ!” the other man said. “They’re liable to do it again. If anything gives Hoover a fighting chance, this is it.”

“Yeah. If anything. But nothing does,” Charlie replied. The other reporter laughed, as if he were kidding.

They balloted through the night. Gray predawn light showed in the Stadium’s small number of small windows—they were there more for decoration than to let the sun shine in. At last, the chairman came up to the microphone and said, “A motion to adjourn till one this afternoon will be favorably entertained. Such a motion is always in order.”

Half a dozen men proposed the motion. Several dozen seconded it. It passed by acclamation. Delegates and members of the Fourth Estate staggered out into the muggy morning twilight.

A newsboy hawked copies of the Chicago Tribune. He bawled the front-page headline: “No candidate yet!” Charlie didn’t think that would tell the Democratic movers and shakers much they didn’t already know.

He ate bacon and eggs and drank strong coffee at a greasy spoon on the way back to his hotel. Coffee or no, in his room he put his alarm clock too far from the bed for him to kill it without getting up.

*   *   *

Mike Sullivan didn’t like going up to Albany to cover Governor Roosevelt. He didn’t like having to go to Albany to cover FDR. He was an inch taller and two years older than Charlie—two years grumpier, they both liked to say. Mike had a perfectly good apartment in Greenwich Village. As far as he was concerned, if the state of New York had to have a governor and a legislature, it could damn well stash them in New York City, which was where it put everything that mattered.

But no. He had to leave his cat and his girlfriend and come upstate to the front edge of nowhere if he needed to report on Franklin D. Roosevelt. (To him, the middle of nowhere lay about halfway between Syracuse and Rochester.)

Massachusetts did things right. The big city there was Boston, and it was also the state capital. But an amazing number of states, even ones with proper cities, plopped their capitals in towns that barely showed up on the map. Pennsylvania was run from Harrisburg, even though it boasted Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. California had San Francisco and Los Angeles, but it was run from Sacramento. Portland and Seattle didn’t tell Oregon and Washington what to do; Eugene and Olympia did.

The list went on. Tallahassee, Florida. Annapolis, Maryland. Springfield, Illinois. Jefferson City, Missouri. Frankfort, Kentucky. Not one a place you’d visit unless you had to.

Albany met that description. It did to Mike, anyway. It wasn’t a tiny village. It had something like 130,000 people in it. But when you came from a city of 7,000,000, give or take a few, 130,000 were barely enough to notice, even if one of them had a better than decent chance of becoming the next President.

Plenty of reporters camped around the big red-brick State Executive Mansion on the corner of Eagle and Elm. To keep them happy, Roosevelt held a press conference the morning after the Democrats started balloting. The press room was on the ground floor of the Executive Mansion. Despite the electric lamps that lit the chamber and the lectern with the microphone, it seemed to Mike to come straight out of the Victorian age, when the mansion was built. The building’s modern conveniences were, and obviously were, later additions.

Roosevelt already stood behind the lectern when his flunkies let the reporters into the room. With the braces on his legs, he could stand, and even take a halting step or two, but that was it. Somebody would h