How Few Remain (82 page)

“Perhaps, then, you will to Berlin send officers to learn our ways,” Schlieffen said. “Perhaps also your minister to my country will speak with Chancellor Bismarck to see in what other ways we can work together to help us both.”

“Perhaps we will,” Blaine said. “Perhaps he can. It might be worth exploring, at any rate. If nothing comes of it, we are no worse off.”

Schlieffen and Schlözer glanced at each other. Schlieffen knew fellow officers who were avid fishermen. They would go on at endless, boring length about the feel of a trout or a pike nibbling the hook as it decided whether to take the bait. There sat James G. Blaine, closely examining a wiggling worm.

“The enemy of my enemy is—or can be—my friend,” Schlieffen
murmured. Blaine nodded again. He might not bite here and now, but Schlieffen thought he would bite. Nothing else in the pool in which the United States swam looked like food, that was certain.

“May we now return to the matter of the cease-fire and the peace which is to come after it?” Schlözer said. Schlieffen wished the German minister had not been so direct; he was liable to make Blaine swim away.

And, sure enough, the president of the United States scowled. “The Confederates hold us in contempt,” he said sullenly, “and the British aim to rob us of land they yielded by treaty forty years ago. How can I surrender part of my own home state to those arrogant robbers and pirates?”

“Your Excellency, I feel your pain,” Schlözer said. “But, for now, what choice have you?”

“Even Prussia, for a time, yielded against Napoleon,” Schlieffen added.

Blaine did not answer. After a couple of silent minutes, the two Germans rose and left the reception hall.

XVIII

The cab drew to a halt by the edge of the sidewalk. The Chicago street was so narrow, it still blocked traffic. Behind it, the fellow atop a four-horse wagon full of sacks of cement bellowed angrily. So did a man in a houndstooth sack suit whizzing past on an ordinary. The cab driver said, “That’s sixty-five cents, pal. Pay up, so I can get the hell out of here.”

Abraham Lincoln gave him a half dollar and a quarter and descended without waiting for change. No sooner had his feet touched the ground than the cab rolled off, escaping the abuse that had been raining down on it.

This was a Chicago very different from the elegant, spacious North Side neighborhood in which Robert lived. People packed the streets. Lincoln had the feeling that, were those streets three times wider, they would still have been packed. One shop built from cheap bricks stood jammed by another. All of them were gaudily painted, advertising the cloth or shoes or hats or cheese or dry goods or sausages or pocket watches or eyeglasses sold within. Most had signs in the window proclaiming enormous savings if only the customer laid down his money now.
FIRE SALE! GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! SHOP EARLY FOR CHRISTMAS!

Capitalism at its rawest
, Lincoln thought unhappily. The weather was raw, too, a wind with winter in it. Hannibal Hamlin, who, being from Maine, knew all about winter, had called a wind like this a lazy wind, because it blew right through you instead of bothering to go around. Lincoln pulled his overcoat tighter about him; he felt the cold more now than he had in his younger days. The wind blew through the coat, too.

He looked around. There, a couple of doors down, advertising itself like all its neighbors, stood the frowzy, soot-stained office of the
Chicago Weekly Worker
. Lincoln hurried to the doorway and
went inside. A blast of heat greeted him. Because the winters in Chicago were so ferocious, the means deployed against them were likewise powerful. He hastily unbuttoned his coat. Sweat started on his forehead.

A bald man in an apron and a visor who was carrying a case of type looked up at the jangle of the bell over the door. “What do you wan—” he began, his English German-accented. Then he recognized who was visiting the newspaper, and came within an inch of dropping the case and scattering thousands of pieces of type all over the floor. “What do you want, Mr. Lincoln?” he managed on his second try. The type metal rattled in its squares, but did not escape.

“I would like to see Mr. Sorge, if you would be so kind,” Lincoln answered, as politely as if he were addressing one of his son’s clients rather than a typesetter who hadn’t had a bath in several days. “I do understand correctly, do I not, that he heads the Chicago Socialist Alliance?”

“Yes, that is right,” the man in the apron said. “Please, you wait here, uh—” He looked confused and angry at himself. He’d probably been about to say
sir
, and then caught himself because
sir
was not the sort of thing a Socialist was supposed to say. He set down the type case, grunted in relief at being rid of the weight, and hurried into a back room.

A couple of printers and a fellow who, though he was surely a Socialist, too, looked like most of the other reporters Lincoln had seen over the years stopped what they were doing to gape at him. Then the typesetter came out of the back room with a lean man in his fifties, a fellow whose wary, hunted eyes said he’d made a lot of moves one step ahead of the police in the course of his lifetime.

“You
are
Abraham Lincoln,” he said in some surprise. “I wondered if Ludwig knew what he was talking about.” Like the typesetter’s, his speech had a guttural undertone to it. “And I, I am Friedrich Sorge. I have had to flee Germany. I have had to flee New York City—Democrats can be as fierce in their reactions as Prussian
Junkers
. But I will not flee Chicago.
‘Hier steh’ ich, ich kann nicht anders.’ “

“I don’t follow that,” Lincoln said. “I’m sorry.”

“Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,” Sorge translated. “Martin Luther. A progressive in his day, aiding the rising bourgeoisie
against the church and the feudal aristocracy that supported it. Now, Mr. Lincoln—why do you stand here?”

“Because it has been made painfully clear to me that the Republican Party is not and cannot be the party that represents the laboring class in the United States,” Lincoln answered. “I believe that class deserves representation. I believe this democracy will fail unless that class has representation. If the Republican Party is not up to the job, then the Socialists will have to be.”

Friedrich Sorge and Ludwig the typesetter exchanged several excited comments in German. After a minute or so, Sorge returned to English: “This is what we have been doing since founding the party ten years ago.”

“I know,” Lincoln said. “I’ve watched you. I’ve watched your progress with no small interest. I would have watched it with even greater interest had there been more progress to watch.”

“Too many American workers are in love with the
status quo
to make progress quick,” Sorge said with a grimace. “It is the same as it is in Europe. No, it is worse than it is in Europe. In the United States, a man who despairs of factory labor will go and start a farm or prospect for gold in the hope of becoming rich at a stroke. This can never be an answer, but it can look like one, and it gives the capitalists a safety valve to drain off revolutionary energy.”

“The safety valve will not stay open much longer,” Lincoln said. “The prairies are filling up. Failed miners become proletarians in Western towns instead of Eastern cities, or they stay on as miners for the lucky handful who do grow rich, and serve as labor in the mines of the big companies.”

“Yes.” Sorge nodded emphatically. “So, as I say, though progress is slow, the revolution will come, and will throw down the capitalists and their minions.”

“You believe the engine
is
broken and
will
explode,” Lincoln said. Sorge nodded again. So did Ludwig. The ex-president went on, “I believe the engine
is
broken but
may perhaps
be repaired. The Republicans would not hear me because I dared to say something was wrong with the engine. Will you now cast me forth because I dare to say it may be set to rights?”

For a moment, he thought Sorge would tell him yes, and that would be that. Then the Socialist newspaperman said, “Come back into my office, Mr. Lincoln. We do not need to speak of
these things standing here at the counter like men choosing pickles from the barrel.”

The office was small and cramped and dark and full of bookshelves. Most of the books on them were in German, the rest in English and French. The word
Socialist
looked much alike in all three languages. Sorge had to clear more books off the chair in front of his desk to give Lincoln room to sit down. The desk itself was a disorderly snarl of papers.

Seeing Lincoln take the measure of the little room, Sorge chuckled wryly. “I, you see, will never be a wealthy capitalist. Luckily for me, I never wanted to be a wealthy capitalist.”

“Had you wanted to be one, I should be here, or perhaps somewhere else close by, speaking of this with someone else,” Lincoln answered, “for the Socialists in Chicago would have a leader, regardless of whether or not you were he. Now to come back to the question I asked out front: will you condemn me for not being revolutionary enough, as the Republicans condemned me for being too revolutionary?”

“Socialist thought is divided on whether the proletarian revolution is inevitable,” Sorge said. “The Marxian Socialists, now, believe it is, and—”

“I am familiar with the division,” Lincoln broke in. “Not long ago, in Montana Territory, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt accused me of being a Marxian Socialist, and I told him I had to decline the honor. This was before he became a national hero, you understand.” His laugh was as wry as Sorge’s. “Now, of course, I could deny him nothing.”

“Of course,” the Socialist answered, his voice curdled with irony. “The only confusion the papers have had is whether to fawn more on Roosevelt or on Custer. If something is before their eyes, they will never look farther. Pah!”

“This digression is my fault,” Lincoln said. “I do apologize for it. Let me ask my question a third time: am I too soft for you, as I am too hard for the men of what had been my party?”

Sorge frowned in thought. “I have seen little in the behavior of capitalists to cause me to believe they will not create so much outrage among the proletariat as to make revolution inevitable.”

“You have never seen the behavior of capitalists reined in by government regulation, either,” Lincoln replied.

“No, I have not,” Sorge said. “I have not seen the second
coming of Jesus Christ, either. I do not expect to see the one thing or the other while I live, and which is less likely I would not even guess.”

“Here in the United States, the power of the ballot box gives the laboring classes a power, or the potential for a power, that they lacked in the days when Marx wrote the
Communist Manifesto
, and in the places he knew best,” Lincoln said.

“Marx yet lives. Marx yet writes,” Sorge answered in tones of reproof.

“But he does not live here. He does not write here,” Lincoln said. “By what I have read of his writings, he does not understand the United States well. You have lived in New York, you say. Now you live in Chicago. Can you tell me I am mistaken?”

He gave Friedrich Sorge credit: the Socialist gave the question serious thought before answering. At last, Sorge said, “No, Marx does not understand this country as well as he might.”

“Good. We can go on from there: Will you also agree this is true of many Socialists in the United States?” Lincoln asked, pressing the newspaperman as if he still were a lawyer questioning an opposing witness. “With the labor problems this country has, would you not have enjoyed greater success if you could have figured out how to make the voting man see things your way?”

“It could be. It is not certain, but it could be,” Sorge said cautiously. “I think you are now coming to say what it is your aim to say. Say it, then.”

“I will say it,” Lincoln replied. “Leaving revolution out of the bargain save as a last resort, I feel the Socialists offer the laborers of this country their best chance to reclaim it from the wealthy. If and when I bolt the Republican Party, I can bring some large fraction of its membership—a third, maybe half if I’m lucky—with me into the fold here. That is not enough to elect a president or senators, not yet, but it is enough to elect congressmen, state legislators, mayors, and it is a base from which to build. When Blaine goes down in ‘84, as you know he will, more people will see the Republicans are doomed and join our ranks. Now, how does that look to you?”