Archive of Our Own ^beta

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DISCLAIMER: This fanfic takes place entirely in the universe of "Kaiserreich," a mod for Hearts of Iron 4. The Kaiserreich universe belongs to the developers of the mod, and only the characters and plotlines I create belong to me. (The historical characters themselves don't belong to me, of course!) 
Hearts of Iron 4 itself belongs to Paradox Interactive.  

But anyway, please enjoy, compadre!   

10-20-36: New York City  

AHEM. This is my diary. Comfy, eh? I know, people might never find this garbage, but just in case, and for my own spurious motives, I'm writing it. Who knows, maybe someday I can sell it off for a couple hundred bucks as my memoirs for some quick cash. That sound good, huh? Could be helpful in the rancid shithole of an economy the good ol’ US of A is embroiled in right now.  

Eh, you didn’t take a gander at my magnificent work for some crass social commentary. That’s what subtext is for!  
Let's get to the point. Some quick credentials, why not? 

Name: Richard Dale Sinclair. Fancy, ain’t it? 
 

Nationality: American, but my very lifeblood hails from the European lands of Britain and Germany. Ascertaining that, it’s a goddamn mystery what skin color I have. 
 

Political Affiliation: Well, if the Syndicalists really want to hear it, I'm a Social Liberal. Yes, execute me for treason, I know.  
Who knew that supporting civil rights and full justice under the law for everyone in this nation would turn out to be a good idea, yet one that no one can get around to since it’s far easier to stamp your piss-covered boots down the throats of minorities?  
America: the united nation of equality and racial tremor. Majestic. 
Oh, and yeah, I also think that the government should actually work to ensure that poor people, y’know, have a chance of subsisting at livable conditions and not living in a hellhole of economic desperation and squalor for their whole lives. I’m not into the whole “wealth redistribution!” and “dictatorship of the proletariat!” schtick as those god-forsaken Syndies, but sure, I think it’s fair if Industrial Tyrant Joe got poached of his petty profits a tad to share the wealth after all the poaching he’s done of this country’s wellbeing. 
 

Gender: Male, duh. You think Rick’s a girl's name? I’d beg to differ, personally, but to each their own. 
 

State: New York. The land where the Yankees dominate Baseball and men in trench coats and fedoras try to rip you off big time. Also, there’s a shit-ton of social uproar and workers’ riots happening on the daily. 
Not too important. 
 

Age: 24. Been two years since my time circulating in the plush hedge gardens of the Ivy League ended.  
How unique: a middle-upper-class intellectual fighting for the rights of the poor and fledgling masses of society. I wish, anyway. 
 

Nickname: call me Rick. Or Rich. Whichever you deem more acceptable in your weird social circles. I prefer the intrepid, machismo allure of Rick, thank you very much. 
 

So, yeah, I hope the blokes (as they used to say in England before that island turned red as a fucking pimple) that read this have a wonderful time. Or a terrible time. Whichever suits your fancy in life, I suppose!  

Chapter Text

10-21-36

My apartment was quite the beauty. Well, to the extent that New York City apartments can rival the aesthetic grandeur of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, anyway.  
 
My personal joint had an air of dignified chaos that encapsulated it. The floor’s blood-red rug held up scattered pieces of paper and vagabond literary masterpieces, all my half-finished articles and books setting a hazardous scene that was painted by the pen. Traipsing about the room as I attempted to avoid tripping on The Communist Manifesto or The Scarlet Letter, I had the pleasure of falling into the cream-colored covers of my bedside and soaking up their heavenly feel. (If I couldn’t haggle my way to a girlfriend’s heart, bedsheets were the obvious alternative.)  
 
Though even my blanket wasn’t safe from a little productive scattering, its sheets sprawled about the bed and drooping down to the floor like a throng of ivy. And as I peered up towards my ceiling, lost in all manner of flowery thoughts (AKA, meaningless bullshit) like always, I marveled at its quality of both smoothness and roughness, little cracks on the surface muddling up the ceiling’s homely feel. 

Not only that, my house was filled to the brim with luxurious knick-knacks, baseball cards and imported European antiques (this time, a bunch of useless bullshit). There was hardly a time when there wasn't something to gawk at, regarding both the room’s contents and my own adonis-esque figure.  

But hey, this was New York City, dammit! The city that never sleeps! I may be a vagabond reporter who prefers waxing poetic about the wonders of morality over getting beat up in an alleyway, but you’ve got to curl out of your cocoon and see the real world sometimes! Reporting, as it turned out, required some sense of actual physical activity in order to get pen to paper, pronto. 

Strutting over to the windowsill, rolling up the ornately-colored curtains with intrigue in my eyes, the view of contemporary NYC was laid bare before me: workers huddling together in strikes, police officers accosting criminals and scaring off unionists with impunity, concession stands feeding the masses with overpriced hot dogs--and various campaign yes-men haggling the gullible of Manhattan for votes. (Election year—what a time!)  
It was such a melting pot of ideas, people, politics; delicacies, destitution, indebtedness! It all absolutely intoxicated me. So many conflicts of interest, so many things to do, so little time at hand for a recent graduate like me. (At least I had a copious amount of words at my disposal to describe the chaos of this time! As half-assedly as I could, of course.) 

Even for all my intrigue, however, it wasn't like I wished to partake in it directly. New York's melting pot could be indeed quite a sweltering one, with enough twists and turns and backstabs to make Hamlet blush. So, for now at least, I wouldn't philander with the Syndicalists or hop on some parade float commemorating how Huey Long will make “every man a king!” if you vote for him.  
No, now was not the time for that. Now was the time for sitting back, taking a swig of beer and enjoying the intricacies of America from a safe view. To recline and watch the world burn, if only for a moment. That was my goal. 

And why not attend the greatest theater for this display of man’s depravity: Peterson's Bar. A recluse for any New Yorker wishing to find solace in the warm embrace of alcohol. Or just to banter with their most charismatic of friends and family. Possibly both. They are two good options.  
 
So, I found myself quickly packing up for a go-around at the alcoholic apple of New York’s eye. If apples could get drunk, anyway. The Big Apple damn sure is! 
 
Onward to Peterson’s, I went! 

Chapter Text

10-21-36

I scurried out of my apartment room with a backpack dangled on my spine and notebook in hand, dodging various hotel workers and fellow residents on my way towards the exit. My journey through the elevator, although an arduous voyage, was short-lived, and I was relieved to indeed be at my destination. Now I jaunted out victorious, beating the trials of both time and crowded hallways to embark on a new quest across the even more trying seas of New York City infrastructure and transit. (Christopher Columbus would piss his pants if he had to cross through a rush-hour Times Square to get to America!) 

Oh yes, it was a beast. Cars buzzing by at electrifying speeds, New Yorkers of all types rushing to work, school or to just argue about some political bullshit with their friends, pigeons begging for you to either end their monotonous existences or step aside so they could consume their barely-edible lot of bread crumbs and meat chunks strewn nicely on the ground. It was quite the experience to be in this mercilessly quick and overwhelming machine, although one that left an everlasting impression on me. If only because I was hardened by its transit-tribulations.  
Now, where were we? Oh, yeah, the bar. 

Peterson's Bar. The crown jewel of New York entertainment. If a man with a strangely designed 'N' and 'Y' cap says no to this objective assumption, you are to immediately deem him as either an insane man or a liar. This was drunk, gregarious heaven, I say. Maybe a heaven even better than the real one! (Those be-damned socialists don’t believe in the holy cross, so it’s definitely heaven for them!) 
Anyway… 

I gently opened the doors after breathing in a great gust of air from the outside world, entering this new and exotic place of coziness. I could see waiters dealing delectable drink and food to the establishment’s patrons, their feet swishing each and every way to the rhythm of Duke Ellington blues. The bar’s denizens held faces that were as gay and joyous as could be, taking pride in drinking away their lives with a smile. If hell’s bound to freeze over, then why not enjoy yourself while fate’s going at it?  
After this bout of prolonged gawking, I strutted over and sat down on a roughly polished stool beside my trio of friends present at Peterson’s. 

"Hey, Rick. It's a beautiful day, and we're having fun drinking the night away. I saved a beer for you, too. Have a sip, will you?" spoke the generous and cordial David Milton White, words crooned in an elevated Princeton accent. He was an old college friend of mine, what do you know.  
Dave had quite the pure physique: his skin was paler than a bunch of Christian snowflakes, he had large emerald eyes, a thin chiseled-nose, puffy cheeks, stalky legs and coiffed blonde hair. His magnanimity was near unmatched by anyone on this Earth: I'm sure he would take Jesus' spot on the cross if he could. 

"Nice to see you again, Rick. I say, every time you come 'ere this place gets twice as lively," said a certain Jacob Bradley Howard in his light Brooklyn accent, a no-nonsense person with double the balls of anyone I knew.  
He had a nose that was so big I swore it covered a third of his goddamn face, small eyes of light blue, a pure-black haystack for 'hair' and an incredibly athletic build. His muscles could intimidate any of President Hoover’s strongmen at a first glance. 

"Ey, it's nice to see a friend who blabbers about politics but has the cynical wit to get away with it! You're just gold, Rick," barked the esteemed Jason Mavis Baker in a bit of a mixed Pittsburgh-Queens accent. This guy was probably my closest friend, though I'm sure the other two wouldn't be thrilled to hear me playing favorites. There's always the "Fuck off!" card to nip their feelings in the bud!
His demeanor was an admirable combination of David's witty restraint and Jake's down-to-earth likability. Couple that with a general feeling of kindness towards others and you'd be hard-pressed to want another guy by your side damn near any moment of the day.
He was fixed with brown eyes, locks of fuzzy black hair, and a physique screaming 'average joe' in your ear. That would be quite rude, though. His ebony skin may have been a turn-off to the moronic supporters of a one Huey Long down in Louisiana, but thankfully racial equality was one of the most admirable qualities of the Syndicalist platform, which held quite the influence in the bar and the surrounding area. Syndie-stalwart Jack Reed had gotten something right, at least. 

Sitting down, hollering away my hello’s and how-do-you-do's with the ease of charisma emanating in the air, I grinned.  
"Ah, shucks, it's like I'm getting ass-kissed thrice, gentlemen! Which, now that I think of it, would be kinda painful. Let’s talk, yeah?"  
And there it was. My words kicked off a ride of vocal cord ringing and dinging that would make a doorbell blush. Of such memorable conversation to make any long-winded speech seem like a normal Sunday afternoon. Oh, the emotions! Oh, the comedy! 

"So…whatcha think of the Syndies?" 

Chapter Text

10-22-36

There was a banging sound that kept echoing and echoing throughout the night: prickly words boring into my skull. I nearly bashed my pillows open, tossing them onto the ground and laboring up with my pajamas hanging out, my ass sticking out my pants without any covering to bear. As I scurried off to the shaking window curtains, I'd make them shoot up with a nifty little chain, gazing upon the raucous mob below.
It appeared those maligned bastards wouldn’t let me get much beauty sleep tonight.

Bantering forth again and again, sounding, skimping, simmering along the Big Apple's Appian Way—oh how important they thought they were. All high and mighty, blaring out their myriad of cutting complaints and rejoinders against society as we knew it, they'd drunken a bit too much liquor by now. Feisty and frolicking and fucking annoying, it made them.
Who did they think they were? God's disciples? Good enough to wake up the entire city? To ruin my whole night?

I knew the “good of the cause” was something to die for, something to hail. I knew damn well that these “United” States of America were just about prowling for change amid economic depression and sociopolitical upheaval.
I knew that much of the animosity hurled at the grandstanding elite of this nation was well-warranted, business magnates and heiresses and presidents refusing to answer the call for some modicum of salvation for their lives’ endless worries.
The task of collecting a paycheck, that most existential of financial endeavors, had become so harrowing a task in Uncle Sam’s free land as to unleash a tidal wave of chaos and stress that absorbed all society’s fabric.

But did the cause really have to wake me the hell up? Don’t these people go to sleep, too? I suppose it was New York…

I calmed down myself, grasping a spare baseball card of Ruthy to ease my jumbled nerves. Now here’s an ideal moment for observing the social powder keg of America before my eyes.
Pensions. Labor safety. Unionization—unions, unions, unions they scream! The banding together of brothers in arms for the sake of their wellbeing in the world, economically and politically. Ah, it was quite a Syndicalist dandy, save for the blue-capped counterattack the crowd received.

The contingent of burly policemen (resembling more an organized army than a public service organization designed to “protect public safety”) began, as you’d expect, charging into the people’s wake with batons slashing and pistols raised. Gunshots flickered every now and then, the cops not merciless enough to begin gunning down the strikers en masse but not nearly angelic enough either to hold in their murderous impulses and do their jobs. Even still, the crowd was not exactly scared shitless, as with every battered body flying back into their beaten ranks, more activists answered the call and marched on.

And here I was, lounging in bed. Watching the march of history from a safe, worthless distance. Doing nothing but waxing artful about all manner of high-minded literature and drama while people were dying out there for the sake of what they believed in. I may not have been a solid Syndie but there was something admirable about their plight that made my lethargy all the more damning.

What were you, some kind of Ivy-educated idler? Destined to sip tea and watch the world burn? There had to be an ounce of courage in my fucked-up load of a body, my two-faced persona of social commentary and social isolation a disgrace that I needed to correct. To go into the world and fight!

* * *

…The door opened.

Look who it was. Jason, that genius. He must've done some voodoo magic or something to know that it was just the right time to free me of my insanity. Taking his hand off the bronze knob, he leaned back against one side of the doorway.

"The crowd noise hitting you hard, eh? Don’t worry, Rick, I’ve had to go through my earplug-supply too. Now that’s an industry they should make a union for!”
His charismatic demeanor near single-handedly broke me of my hard-nosed frustration, making me grin a bit. Give it to Jason to clear the mind of all political chicanery with a choice bout of humor!

"I mean, c’mon, Rick! Ain’t this shithole of a situation the perfect excuse to pry your eyes off those Yankee cards and do something already? Say what you want about it, but this riot’s sure-as-hell fired me up.”

“’Fired-up’ enough to bang down my door, that’s for sure.”
A sly chuckle exited my vocal cords as I happily absorbed his brightening presence. A social miracle-maker, he was.

His smirk not abating, Jason entered into the room with a gallivanting gait.
"While the whole city’s burning down, we might as well do something productive. Turn sins to omens, you get me?"

Rising up from my tousled bedsheets, I couldn’t help but gingerly pat him on the back, as all good friends were ordained to indulge in from time to time.

"A beaming pile of sunshine, you are. Let's talk about it over some supper, shall we?"

Plans swiftly made, we scurried over to the hotel café, which was quite the contrast from Peterson's lack of niceties. Boy oh boy, they made you feel like the scrappy grub they served here was fine dining! Fine paintings, waxed flooring, a jazzed-up jukebox, pretty waitresses—man, if Peterson's was Heaven, this must've been Nirvana or something. Aesthetically speaking.
The food was just a couple notches above grade-A garbage, but the décor at least gave a comforting feeling to the senses, as if our hotel overlords desired to distract our tongues from the taste.
Although, even if I may be a shit-for-brains college grad who once marinated in the fields of posher academia, I tend to prefer the hustle and bustle of more rustic establishments. Peterson’s still takes the win for me, of course.

Without further masquerading as a ‘man-of-the-people,’ back to business. Digging in to some half-delicious, half-disgusting pieces of steak, I faced Jason as he went to work in that cranium of his, setting down a newspaper with a traditionally dramatized headline and array of photographs adorning the cover.

"This is heating up, fast, man. The Syndies, the Feds, the AUS way down South. It's a threesome of a conflict at the ballot box, and in more ways than one, too.”

I smiled, taking one last bite of the scraggly chicken.
The presidential election of 1936 was right around the corner, and with three vastly disparate political factions jockeying for authority to save the nation’s future in the midst of its shambles, there was plenty to think about in the weeks leading up to election day.
Months before we’d worked for the New York Times as the best damn two-man band in all of New York journalism, our muckraking asses delving into the thick of the political scene with pieces centering on everything from voting rights to income inequality and the federal government’s depravity.
Perhaps I’m leaning too much into the romance of it all, but we did try our best to bring the news to the people in this turbulent age. And we didn’t look too shabby doing it, either!

However, the run had to end at some point, and lo-and-behold the Times went and fired us both due to a strict adherence to the bottom-line. I understand if times are tough (no pun intended, bastards) and you’ve got to make some adjustments, but neither I nor Jason could stand the political climate after that. We were relegated to working odd-jobs and commiserating with each other about this rotting world of ours, as if devolving into idle passersby after our previous stint diving into the thick of action.
…Whatever the case, it was time to get into the arena once again after weeks upon weeks of inaction. The salacious pomp and splendor of contemporary America demanded it.

Sitting back up, I glanced towards Jason with an enterprising gleam in my eye.
“I think it’s about time we tell the world what’s happening, Jase. The scoop’s calling for us.”

Jason could only nod at my newly- crested tide of confidence, and pitched in with his own pragmatic mind.  
“No doubt about it, and luckily enough, I’ve scouted out the perfect locale for some good ol ’ journalistic sleuthing.”  
 
His hands scuffled through his worn-out jeans pockets before he laid across the dining table the Holy Grail of leftist dreams. The Workers’ Refuge: the Syndicalist headquarters of New York City, and the palace of the party’s kingpin, Jack Reed.  
 
“What’s a better place to scout out than the centerpiece of underground New York politics itself?”  
 
I could only give a wide-brimmed grin back to Jason’s optimistic demeanor, pushing myself out of the well-cushioned chair I once sat to prepare on a voyage to the cornerstone of the down-and-out. The pinnacle of the working man.  
 
The day’s rioting clamor was nothing compared to The Workers’ Refuge. And I was going to need all the help I could get from Jason and my two other intervening partners-in-crime.  

Chapter Text

10-24-36

The stiff breeze of New York City air railed against the contours of my face, its ridges poised in great determination as my eyes laid their gaze upon the big, shady warehouse to rule them all. Its bricks’ red veneer shone in the moonlight like a beacon for the proletariat, all constructed in exact, painstaking fashion. All propping each other up in an immaculate form, without a single defector in the bricks’ midst; not one questioning the architectural party-line. The building’s roof was as flat as a Syndicalist pancake, no outer décor in sight to sully its pragmatic quality. The windows were scraped to perfection, all dissenting dirt and dust erased from the surface as sounds of verbal uproar boomed through the glass framework.

The Workers’ Refuge stood tall and ominous, nestled in the labyrinthine patchwork of New York City’s industrial district. Close enough to the bustling hubs of working-class activity to attract a large, zealous crowd—yet also tucked away deep enough from the general public to avoid scrutiny by a police force all too happy to break up any demonstration, whether peaceful or violent—for over a year it was a breeding ground for socialist thought and a lion’s den of leftist up-and-comers who wanted to make a name for themselves.

That lion’s den happened to be just the perfect place for my sorry journalist ass to capture the heart of the American Syndicalist movement up close and personal: shielded from the prying eyes of the greater public, yet simultaneously brimming with the support of the working class. This chilly October night was the Hajj to Mecca of the Syndicalist party.
And who better to prop me up on this journalistic escapade than my three equally enterprising companions, all decked out with notepads and pens aplenty! (And the occasional blunt implement, lest our friends on the far-left start reading The Communist Manifesto a little too hastily.)
The four of us stood stalwart against the towering image of The Workers’ Refuge as the forces of nature blew strongly against the cuffs of our clothes.

David, for all his intellectual (I.E., smartass) splendor, wore the traditional façade of academia with a well-tailored suit and long-legged pants, all colored with a distinctive shade of black as if to blend into the darkness of the night itself. Topped off with a sleek-fitted beret and a wristwatch that dangled idly by on his left wrist, you’d think David was actively trying to get himself burned alive by a mob of angered workers. They would gladly get his blood on their hands at the slightest gaze of “white-collar” attire, ready to parade his mangled corpse of new money across Broadway and beyond next Labor Day, or some shit.

Thankfully, Dave did have that whole Ivy League college degree going for him to dispel that rumor of dumbassery, and as such took the necessary camouflage precautions against the whims of the proletariat: he scuffed up his shoes a tad with soot, dirtied up his suit with a few patches of good ol’ Central Park soil, and even changed his posture as to come off as more down-and-out, scrappy. He hunched over a few inches to complete the multi-faceted look. An ensemble that not only spoke to his background of affluence and undeniable silver-spoon-mouthage, but also his sympathy for those who could barely afford a wooden spoon nowadays, much less the silvered luxuries of the wealthy. Perhaps he would never shake the stink of a spoiled upbringing, but at least he could do something good with all that inheritance money. To help make sure the lives of others were just a wee bit less deplorable.
He was ready to engage in a high-minded, academic analysis of the labor movement for sure, but still bothered to observe it at a close distance.

Jacob, meanwhile, took a good gander at David’s get-up, nodded his head a little in mild candor, and then delivered a big ol’ fuck you to all Dave’s notions of elegance in the art of clothes-wearing. Taking advantage of his burly physique and brusque exterior, he boasted a strong white shirt across those gaping muscles of his, encompassed by an intimidating cloak of a jacket that scared off incoming snowflakes and Syndies alike. His wide-rimmed shoes scraped against the alleyway floor with a battering sound accompanying every step, as if a warning signal to any of those who wished to accost our merry band for the things we believed in. A stern protector of the first amendment right to freedom of the press, that’s who Jacob was!

Fittingly enough to supply that rough-and-tumble profile, there drooped a bluntly edged crowbar out from the chasm of his jacket pocket. Its tip dangling inches free and swaying back ever so slightly with every movement. It too was a reminder that us journalists weren’t exactly arriving empty-handed to a scene of police-provoking radicals.
All-in-all, Jacob was more than down to get physical with a bunch of Marxists if the situation required it. Doesn’t mean he couldn’t agree with a few of their points, but let’s just say a hard slab of metal edging into your jaw wouldn’t exactly make you find him cordial.

As we waltzed towards the building entrance, Jason still carried a smile on his weather-worn face. He wore a bit of a casual ensemble to the night’s festivities, with a light brown jacket laid over a blue shirt of wool on his torso. His grey pants braved through the inclement effects that pressed against them as we trotted through the snow-ridden streets leading up to The Refuge. And what better than a fedora to adorn his head and give focus to his sapphire eyes with its wide rims? He wasn’t gazing up at the stars like some coddled astronomer; his glance was fixed precisely on the action at hand.

More importantly for our purposes, Jase held a notepad in his grasp that shook with the deft movement of his pen against the flipping leaflets of paper, his mind taking in the present scenery before his eyes and interweaving the locale with the socio-political tides of the time. He noted the enthusiastic discontentment of the workers that poured into the warehouse chamber, the bloody nature of yesterday’s strike fueling a raucous spirit to organize against those who wronged them. He jotted down the graffiti masterworks that lined the walls like a Marxist version of the Louvre, with portraits of blood-soaken bodies and domineering blue-caps catching the eye. We each had our own notepads, sure, but Jase could take a scene and transmit it into written pages like no other mind.
Jason was to be my observant right-hand-man on this fateful night, catching wind of all the socialist pomp and splendor that was about to occur.

And then there was I. It took a while to get to me, didn’t it? Whether I’m the humblest man alive for describing my three friends first or a self-assured narcissist wanting to ‘save the best for last,’ I was prepared to get right down to business in the lion’s den.

As my auburn hair frisked against the air, a gleam present in my blazing brown eyes, my face bore a smirk of confidence. Indeed, my apparel was sparse for the frigid temperature of the occasion—only a few inches of leather lined my clear-black coat, a challenge to Mother Nature to cut me down if she so dared. My hands were neither draped with woolen cloth nor drenched in my pockets; instead, they took the pursuit of sliding stalwart against my sides, splayed outward from time to time as if the physical embodiment of my mind’s own movements. (Twiddling fingers representing my own inner web of neurons. There’s no question I think I have a lot of those bad boys.) So too were my pants a thin veil of protection against the cold, all the way down to my polished shoes that gave a certain swagger to my gait. Hypothermia could kiss my ass for all I cared.

I flaunted a sort of open nakedness, a projection to the world of my own grand intentions, to the whole of the Syndicalist Party itself! I didn’t give a damn what crowd-rousing diatribes Jack Reed was going to spellbind with. What potential punches to the face I’d get from the rowdy warehouse patrons for my beliefs. What the inevitable onslaught of policemen would bring against my slim writer’s physique.
I walked with a long strut, taking in all the sights and sounds to be had in a world of individual freedom. The extralegal aspect of it all, to bear witness to a shadowy performance of fringe extremists—it was liberating. I went up to the head of the pack, my friends following my high-falutin ass right on by as I led them into the lion’s den without an inkling of hesitation.

“I have to say, this is just as exciting as you said it’d be, Rick. I’m shivering, and it’s not just because of the temperature!”
David slotted himself right in the middle of our collective, perhaps angling to examine the scene but still ready to use us as meat shields if things got testy.

“Don’t piss your pants, pretty-boy. I’ve got your back,” Jake’s imposing presence was nearly as towering as the Refuge itself, and he’d do quite well in warding off any assailants.

“Keep tabs on everything that’s goin’ on, don’t let your guard up. Anything goes in a Jack Reed spectacle,” Jason said as he strolled by my side, his supportive aura a godsend to my crusading mind.

And there it was. The gilded entryway of The Workers’ Refuge, speckled with pieces of propaganda hailing the Syndicalist cause as the cure to all the country’s ills. Blue-collar denizens flocked through the blood-red doorways with stunning anticipation at what they were about to see. The voice they were about to hear in such booming tones.

I turned back to my partners-in-crime and had a grin long enough to reach the stars.

“It’s right this way, gentlemen. The opportunity of a lifetime, right at our feet!”
My energy was palpable, completely uninhibited.
My lust for the cover story of our age knew no bounds.

Chapter Text

10-24-36

Laid before all our eyes was the roaming, roosting innards of The Workers’ Refuge. The Versailles of leftist activity in these ‘United’ States of America. Beams of twilight scoured in through the windowsills, illuminating the warehouse expanse and lighting the way for the night’s beady-eyed party members who poured in along with us. It was crucial that we could see where we’re going, too, since there was a red stampede afoot! The four of us sidled close as the mob of armbands waved over us. The Syndies were a sea of unrelenting zeal that hoped to falter the steady sails of the current social order. And there were plenty of sharp rocks along the way: their shoulders pricked at us, the sting of their pride bashing against us. Till we kept at the edges, sheltering for cover.

“Keep your distance, assholes!”
Jake had his crowbar on standby, if we ever needed to remind our free-thinking friends about personal space.

Temporary bruises aside, our journalistic escapade was well up and running as we ventured into the Refuge’s depths. Across the floor a tide of foot-marks and boot-jabs aplenty created a cacophony of sound to complement the chatter swerving in. Eyes drifting from group to group, it quickly became apparent that Syndicalist fashion was an ode to metropolitan variety: from the soot-laden trousers of the steelworkers to the ashen shirts of the electricians; the battered cufflinks of security guards to the beaten sleeves of construction workers. They were an inchoate band, this working class, so fragmented by the multiplicity of their trades. Yet in the constant peddling of their footsteps there brimmed the heart of the collective. Thousands of little human interactions coming together to form something whole, orbiting around the crimson star that was Jack Reed’s visage.

David’s eyes drifted across the warehouse, a hand perched on his chin.
“A confluence of humanity, eh? Reed’s rabble-rousing tactics may be iron-fisted, but I suppose nothing less could wrangle together a mob like this.“

“It ain’t just Reed, Dave.
Nothing unites folks like empty pockets. Pennies talk, y’know,” Jake barked back.

“Not as much as Reed. Do well to remember that.”

Their bickering fell into the background while I strolled about the various concessions stands and makeshift storefronts that lined the entrance. It was a bazaar of Syndicalist activity that deluged the senses. The acrid scent of hotdogs filled the nostrils. T-shirts and soiled pant-leggings from the Garment District were scrawled red all over—the Syndie insignia of a golden hammer and sickle splayed before the fabric. There were guitarists and singers set on the sides of the walkway, crooning La Marseillaise with as much panache as their comrades in Paris: comrades who had already secured the means of production by their own tricolor arms. Aspiring writers too creaked across the Refuge landscape, some expats from the French Riviera and others New World-born idealists, their minds scintillating with the sights and sounds of the revolution from either side of Atlantic shore.

“Reed’s really wrangled up every class, color, and creed this side of the Hudson, huh.”

I turned back to the three, gauging if their reactions to the Refuge were as starry-eyed as mine. But it wasn’t a gleam I saw in Jason’s eyes. Rather, a pallor on his pupils, dark but not unexpected, given their subject.

“Every last one, Rick. Whether they wanna be here or not.”

I followed his gaze, immediately understanding the malaise behind his words. Off in the left corner of the warehouse, I spotted a culture within the culture, a nation within a nation. The socialist black caucus of New York City.

“For them, this ain’t some party. Ain’t your ordinary rally. It’s a business opportunity, Rick, and they know it.”

I kneaded my hands together, nodding over. For this segment of black America in the Big Apple—journalists, novelists, jazz performers, artists, craftsmen and unionists alike—there were layered emotions to be found. Under the swill tune of saxes and bass thrills, they sensed the piercing eyes of their white ‘comrades’ who frolicked at the other side of the Refuge. Sure, there were smiles and laughs to go around in this caucus; the richness of their cultural milieu was not to dull out easily. But the beads of hope their faces betrayed weren’t for Reed, I felt, or his party, but for them gambling on themselves. Staking their place here, because Reed wouldn’t be inviting them otherwise.

A tap fell on my shoulder.

“Hey, wait—Rick. I can see Earl over there. Looks like he wasn’t gonna miss out on this for the world.”

That name exerted a pull on my memory, causing my eyes to squint, grasping for the past image now present. Earl, Earl...how could I forget.

His glove clasped the bill of his cap as it arched ever so slightly upward. The ebony shade of his jacket pitted against the beige of his shirt, and his ascot flayed outward at the tips. Not frills. Jagged points.

Even from this distance, I could feel the authority flowing from his mouth. Never loud, never high, but pinpointed words that strapped themselves to parts of my psyche. He was talking to a few colleagues, I gathered, and I smirked back to Jase.

“Hasn’t changed.”

Not in 365 days. Not in the whisk of my eyes. Earl Jackson: our mentor and galvanizing presence.

Starting out, Jason and I were the biggest no-names in the New York press. We did each have our connections to different outlets—the Times and Daily Post scoped me out during my time at Princeton, and Jase had come from a lineage of black journalists himself—but the rawness of our talent couldn’t match the portents of our journalistic heritage. We needed a sculptor of young minds to help shape ourselves into who we wanted to be. And Earl was the Michelangelo of the broadsheet.

He ran The Daily Polaris, one of the most popular black-owned papers in the city, even as the economy’s plunge drove down subscriptions citywide. In a time when the scarcity of demand made hires all the more cutthroat, Earl had a knack for seeing beneath the cloudy composure of a writer’s work, to grasp at the heart of his style. Or her style; as rare as it was, in our newsroom, sex nor race saw formal persecution from the boss himself. As much as he could ensure, anyway, given the fickleness of our limitations.

Whomever the person, Earl demanded excellence, and it was his exacting, excoriating expectations that helped ensure we reached our potential.

“Cut the fluff outta there, Rick. You ain’t Faulkner, you’re the junior staff writer,” he always used to tell me, puffing away smoke from his cigar, as if the clouds of tobacco were clearer than my plays on words. (He was right, by God!)

In time, the two of us rose the ranks. And I rose as a person, all the same; even as the ascent of artistic success so rarely matches the climb of human character. Far from my Princeton puff pieces or fantastical short stories, there was a worldliness to the Polaris that allowed me to view New York uncut. Boiled down to its base components, the glimmering streets of our great city started to darken during the Depression. And yet it was the shadows of economic turmoil that made the stories of humanity gleam ever brighter: these crackles of bliss amid a firestorm of pandemonium.
The fervency of this paper, unfettered by business ties or social expectations, opened my eyes to the glory of journalism. These people couldn’t rely on Uncle Sam alone to rid them out of the Depression, a depression whose burden they carried hardest, from second-class citizens in a booming economy to being left to die in a deplorable one. Earl embodied that tenacity.

Eventually, we left the nest and started our own independent fieldwork. But Earl’s didactic baritone never left our ears. His teachings lived with us, and flowed from our pens to our peers.

“Right in the thick of things, just like always,” Jason had a tight smile.

I didn’t think he expected much from Reed, old Earl. Union culture was rife with segregationist sentiments from the mid-19^th century onward, after all, with the blue-collar kingpins of New York not willing to let a shade of black slither into union ranks. Race riots had crackled up since even before the Depression’s start, as the golden age of Harlem was tainted by the blood of white fury. Unions, conveniently enough, happened to be the bedrock of Reed’s support as a candidate.

But Reed had a gamble here. Upending the capitalist system wasn’t just about economic liberation, but the destruction of the social order as we knew it. To brand himself as the messiah of a new age of liberty, with rival Huey Long’s party stoking the fires of antiblack sentiment north and south, he tried to offer an olive branch to the black community. Meeting with black labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Harry Haywood, he knew it wasn’t only a moral obligation but a political gambit to expand his electorate, and augment his power base.

“Not the first promises we’ve been dangled, ‘course,” Jason mused, clamping up his notebook for the time being.

“Won’t be the last. But hey, Earl’s doing his damndest here, regardless. I bet his stare alone will make Reed think twice about bailing on the struggle.”

Jase hesitated to nod, and I could only nod back as we continued our march across the Refuge.

But our shoes couldn’t get far. A booming voice halted our journey.

“Rick, Jase, stop loafin’ your asses around, we’ve got a job to do.” Jake pointed towards the epicenter of the warehouse, where the flock of Syndies were starting to arrive.

“Reed’s party-men are massaging the crowd. Unless we want some early fireworks, let’s get going, quick.”
Peering up from his notebook, Jason spotted Reed’s in-famed Instigators: Syndicalist Party devotees who were most likely born suckling at the teats of Marxist teachings. Their all-black uniforms were marred by a streak of red at the chest, zagging diagonally from shoulder to hip, and even as they sweetly guided the crowd towards Reed’s podium, it wasn’t like their grey nightsticks were easing anyone’s spirits.

While David shrugged off the piercing looks his patchwork attire implored from the crowd, we scurried forth to the heat of the action. Blazing red like the fires of Hades, a ruby-tinted banner rimmed around the podium. Well, if a giant, unremarkable slab of concrete a foot deep could be called a  “podium.” I bet Reed had a streak of meekness in his design of the place, trying to appease the minimalist sympathies of the proletariat. Even still, its surface had a sort of mundane glisten to it, like a break from the torrent of Syndicalist rhetoric we braved through on the way up here.

Dave stopped his hunchback façade and peered upwards, awe lighting his eyes.

“Behold the grandeur of the Syndicalist insignia, men.”

His deep tone was fitting. The flag of the Combined Syndicates of America—Jack Reed’s socialist dream for the USA—shone down from the rafters with its towering form. A striking black-and-red complexion swarmed over the canvas, with but a thin white slant across the middle separating the smoke and blood from seeping against each other. And at the center, a trio of stars orbited a wireframe of the globe, with the initials “C S A” standing high above the world.

It was the banner of a hundred years’ worth of sweat and toil for American socialists that had finally captured a political vehicle. A vehicle more powerful than the blast of a howitzer, yet suaver than the whisk of Manhattan wind.

John Silas “Jack” Reed—the first Socialist Party member elected to the United States Senate, and in the Empire State no-less—was the vessel of the American left. You couldn’t see it from his strut; you could only gape at it from his veins, percolating as he strode along a pathway towards the podium. Below the fabric that flew overhead, his blonde strays of hair swayed with every step, limning a stony face that could rival the statues of Maecenas. A three-piece set emanated off his body, the sable of his suitjacket lined against the snowy descent of his shirt—and with tie dyed burgundy to top the look.

Throngs of Instigators blocked off the podium from the crowd’s lunges, hands waving out towards a Reed setting his hands atop the oratorical cement. Unlike other candidates who wished to create a veil of connection between voter and power, ogling at the electorate and grasping hands and glomming their lips on babies’ foreheads, Reed was content with an air of distance. Perhaps to elevate the stature of his persona, cleaving the flaws of man from his flesh, the blots of the skin that one can only fully behold face-to-face. He had a posture that demanded fire and servility both from his apostles.

“BLEED FOR REED! BLEED FOR REED!”

A chime sundered in. All synchronized, like a symphony.

“C S A ! C S A ! C S A !”

It was like they were spouting combination numbers to open a safe; to unlock the untapped vigor of America’s masses.

“They don’t get the irony, do they,” David watched on in disbelief, peering on to Reed as he cleared his throat.

“Save the mulling for later, Dave. Speech’s about to cut loose.” Jake’s cloth-garbled mitts held tight to his crowbar.

With the four of us huddled in the front of the crowd’s red ocean, we looked towards the stage, the senator’s searing brown eyes pacing through the souls of the men and women of his parish.

“Try not to cave in to Reed’s spell,” Jason whispered in my ear, his hand patting my shoulder. I nodded back, the eagerness on my face souring some, stoifying amid this seminal moment in my life. To observe the workings of a genius at play, a cataclysm of politics. He was all articulation and manipulation, now, and I wasn’t to forget it.

Then, the strike of a polished shoe against concrete stilled a thousand voices, the sound the progeny of a silent whirlwind. Only the rustle of oxygen out our lungs could be heard, now.
Jack Reed held the most forceful aura I ever saw.

“C o m r a d e s.”

As he opened his mouth, the letters of that singular word fluttered out across the Refuge. A sanctimonious slowness it was, where each gesture of the hand or quirking of the eye could quake the hearts of humanity.

The only question was how many beats we had in us till the night shuddered away into stardust.

Chapter Text

10-24-26

The Workers’ Refuge: a refuge of what, we asked ourselves, the four of us standing amid the throngs of workers that willed themselves before Reed’s presence. Wide windows above held the moonlit darkness of the New York skyline, alighting this forgotten segment of the city’s populace. The metropolis within—the apple within the apple—with all the worms biting towards the rotting core.  

Senator Jack Reed sought to grasp at the core of the American economy, his gloves hanging outward from his post at the podium, fingers splayed towards the crowd as if they were about to be clenched by him in one swift motion. 

My mouth paused, and I could see that even the curvature of Reed’s lips was perfectly poised, the sutures of flesh that lined his tongue gyrating with every letter. His Western voice collided with the crowd like the snowfall off the Cascade Mountains. 

“The Manhattan chapter of the Combined Syndicates of America welcomes the humble masses of New York. Why, it’s the perfect symbol of these United States that the greatest city on the planet bears its greatest injustice—from sea to shining sea.” 

He paused for a moment, basking in the emptiness of noise before him; the exotic veneer of his accent gave him an ambiance. Then he stepped towards the podium’s southern end, towards the vigorous flock of his idolizers. So he could see the soot on their shirts, the scars on their faces, and ball his fist as he prepared to speak forth. 

“The Big Apple has become the eternal paradise for the sons of the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Carnegies and the Goulds. Penthouses and mansion complexes, pretty parks and boutiques dot our streets across Madison Avenue. The silvery fabric of their suits shines in the light of Times Square. Their golden teeth glimmer along the sidewalk, don’t they?” 

He shook. 

“Don’t they!” 

As a sleeve-laden fist rose, hundreds more followed in quick succession. At once they spouted all they could. Our hands bored into the reams of our notebooks, cataloging the succor of workers’ enmity that began to roost. 

His voice rose in turn. 

“The gleam of all the jewels in the world could not blind us from the baseness of America!” 

Stepping across the length of the podium edge, he lowered his tone. 

“I see and hear all of you. The Tillmans, the Smiths; the Bakers and the Novaks, the Brooks and the Gallsons. The men and women at the heart of New York’s industry. The drivers of wealth, the cogs in the machine.” 

His rhetoric wasn’t all semantics, either—there were entire families of the impoverished huddled together on this solemn night, opting to don their tattered work attire in solidarity with the workers’ front. Of children with mangled hands, sidling next to their fathers with a hopeful glint in their eyes. Of the mothers who sang lullabies to babies at bedtime, hoping that the week’s loaf of bread would arrive by next sunrise. Of the vagabond New Yorkers who ventured from alley to alley, whisked away in the nomadic tide of the Depression, looking for purpose in their hearts as much as cash in their wallets. 

I tried to keep an objective view, but damn. In the middle of the crowd, I felt this garbled microcosm of humanity: a thousand weary souls, but a thousand faithful souls, nevertheless. If only for the prophet who stood at the podium. 

“That’s who we are. These poor and tired and huddled masses— tired of having to deal with the corruption of the capitalist system. Tired of putting up with city hall’s debauchery!” 

In one strong motion, Reed grasped his tie and ripped it from his collar, thrusting it into the crowd. The people raved and joined in to tear huge chunks of fabric from the tie’s edges. The air became a snowstorm of red specks. 

While Reed swallowed, a dramatic pause letting the chaos simmer, Jason scribbled ardently into his notebook. I could see various words repeated along the sepia lines: “compulsion,” “action,” “sundering,” “splitting,” written in the collage of letters he often composed in times like these, ejecting his emotional response to the current scene exactly as it was conjured in his mind. These collages often formed the basis of our articles, returning us to the moment in time when we saw history in the making—especially when Reed was the maker. 

“But we know this all doesn’t stem from the Apple alone. Greed festers like a cancer, sprawling out to infect the sharecropping plantations of Tennessee, the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, the teeming dockyards and wharves of California, and the meat plants of New York. Its source is none other than the poisonous current of the Potomac River. 

The ‘People’s House’ in D.C. is sucking our people dry, every second.” 

I could feel a restlessness brew across the crowd like a singed flame. A low hum began amongst them, the resentment building from the core of their battered bones. 

“H o o v e r...!” 

Cresting, this gale of hatred. And no one embodied it more than Jacob to my right—I didn’t think muscles could be visible under thick leather fabric, but I sensed a bulge on the crown of his shoulder. He grasped my arm tight, teeth clenched. 

“President Herby, eh? I don’t know about you, Rick, but while you were finishing off your papers on Wealth of Nations at Princeton, guys like me were scrounging for food in those damned shantytowns.” 

Right... It was hard to recall in the throes of the crowd, but a memory resurfaced. Or maybe I just needed a temporal escape from the tensions and chose to sojourn into memory lane. 

A few years ago, I was nestled in the wooden catacombs of the New York Public Library, sitting by my lonesome in the far-end corner at a table. Dickens’ Hard Times in my grasp, back then it was just another lazy day snooping through books on winter break. Hell, I can still remember the red scarf dangling around my neck, the cuffs of my sloppy dress shirt jutting outward like tree branches. To me, the heartaches of the Depression were social fodder during discussions on the campus green—I peered in towards the crisis with interest, but not urgency. 

But then, I had a visitor. A stalky man, hands drenched in pockets with the fabric half-woven, the shadow over his mouth deep as it gazed towards me. He set himself down on the chair opposing me and quirked his head. 

“Not so much of an Oliver Twist fan, are ya.” 

I smirked, inviting the challenge of a man who somehow was as well-versed in the literary arts as my ingenious ass! While his unkempt face made me a tad uncomfortable, his keen mind drew me in.  

“Jake Bradley, at yer service,” he crooned as we met often over the next few months and years. But even as we sparred over the interpretations of various Dickensian protagonists, it was his own story that compelled me most. 

“Surprised you were bold enough to scamper on back to this shithole,” he told me when I filled him in on my status as an Ivy League blueblood on sabbatical, returning to the Manhattan neighborhood of my youth dazed at the sagging flit of the skyscrapers and the declining posture of the denizens. 

His tone had an edge of rustic snark to it, but there was another angle to his glance, bearing a trace of decades-long bitterness, that I couldn’t help but notice. 

“I’ve had to hold down the fort these past few years, I guess. Maybe it’s time you get the ‘scoop’ of New York City, Rick.”  

1925. It was the year my parents shuttled me off into the suburbs north of the city center, journeying up the Hudson to the middle-class parapet that was Nyack, New York. Each time I asked them about the cause behind the migration, they waved me off—something or other about education and “securing my future”—though for them too I sensed a hidden vigilance. As if they’d caught wind of what was to come. 

The crown jewel of the Empire State had steadily risen with the stature of the American empire itself, as the States took satisfaction in merely profiting off the war in Europe from afar, keeping its boys at home to bolster the balance sheet rather than bear the bullet fire. Uncle Sam looked on across the pond as the Krauts secured themselves supremacy over the continent of Europe, with Britain and France defeated to the point of anarchy; it was through the workers’ revolutions of Europe’s former patriarchs that the old order was forever shattered. Red flags waved over London and Paris, slamming the door on America’s enterprising shippers and sailing sale-ers: with exports down the drain for the country’s manufacturers, the rising economy went up in flames. Wall Street was bulldozed by a tidal wave of shorted stocks and brokers faceplanting into the asphalt, and the whole of New York seemed to sink under its own insecurity. 

All the while, Hoover sat on his throne in the Oval Office, watching the carnage unfold much like I did from the comforts of my dorm. 

“The charity of the private citizen will cure all of our social evils,” he said. I could still remember his hoarse California tongue blaring across the radio waves. But as the soup kitchens swelled in numbers and hordes of the unemployed waltzed the streets, it became evident that there was no charity to be found in the 20th-century American system. 

Unable to find jobs and housing, they took to using whatever they had to survive amid the upheaval. Across the country, so-called ‘Hoovervilles’ sprouted: shantytowns with buildings composed of the materials left over from the wreckage of the city. Walls formed out of chipped-away bricks and stitched together with stray glue and spit. Curtains made of dejected newspapers, covering windows of church-pane fragments. Fireplaces kindled from the gasoline of discarded Model Ts, burning away incipient dreams for mobility into the middle class.  

What’s more, the architects of these towns were once heralded masons and engineers in their communities. Where before they worked to uplift urban society with the metal towers that touched the heavens, like Babel they were doomed by the arrogance of their country, and so they were smote down into shambles. 

Jake’s eyelids lowered telling me what happened one day, when he sat penning a poem on a tree stump in one Brooklyn Hooverville following a successful scavenging run. Before the Feds caught wind of the inhabitants’ survivalist instincts.  

“They started rifling through the place, those National Guard boys,” he told me. “Looked like Albany couldn’t afford the laundry, those scraps of dirt and muck still left on their sleeves. Standin’ up, peering around, I saw our Community President cornered off by our dirty well, steam comin’ out of his ears. Like some West Point hot-shot lookin’ for work in the Guard would tell him to vacate the premises, with his people? He told ‘em to fuck off, making a stand for us, the martyr...” 

I remember how Jake shook his head, his hands scalping against his temple. 

“It didn’t make ‘em any more negotiable. That’s when he swung against him, fists against his chest, and that horde of green berets began shovin’ out entire families. I, I can still remember it, too-” 

He let out a rueful chuckle, his eyes piercing my own. 

“I was helpin’ a woman fend off one of the crooks when those silver canisters started flying, when they saw the fight in our bodies. Some tough guy I was, bravin’ through that tear gas, throwin’ my arms up in the air like I just stumbled into a goddamn hornet’s nest.” 

Canaantown was the name of this particular ‘ville. Its many remains now laid in the wake of its ruins at Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where police still roamed as pedestrians peered over their shoulders at every moment. 

“Not much survived but that lil’ ode I was writing,” Jake said, his face contorting into a toothy grin. 

“To President Herbert Hoover.” 

...Hoover. I roused myself from the hollow chamber of the past, noticing how the crowd’s chant hadn’t ceased all this time. Not until Jake’s grip on my arm lessened, and Reed’s grasp on his audience hardened. 

“To think, 150 years of working away at this grand American promise, and we end up with just another corporate frontman, flaunting himself as the leader of the free world.” 

Reed shrugged. His hands laid out towards the crowd. 

“The drive towards a ‘more perfect union,’ is it? This trial and error of democracy? We live in a false promise, designed to let us all suffer through its fatal flaws till we can’t suffer any longer. Seduced by the fantasy of the nation we desire, it’s this fleeting dream that keeps us going as our muscles writhe and our backs shatter, till it’s too late for us to do a damn thing.” 

And then, he chuckled. A mysterious, low-pitched ardor echoed out from his mouth. 

I looked to Jason, and he bit his lip, his hand shaking as he grasped his notebook.  

“The way he can put on so many faces, speak in so many different tones...surreal.” 

More words scattered the collage. Nodding back, I braced myself for his next move. 

“There’s one harlot in our nation who has deluded himself into the idea of a perfect America. Ladies and gentlemen, the last respite for the country as we know it—” 

His fingers fiddled into the air, signaling a few Instigators to start shuffling around. Another banner flew down from the ceiling, but this time it wasn’t a flag; it was the grisly visage of a man in a suit. Oh yes, his hair was slick back just right, and through the photo’s monochrome hues, you could see charcoal fabric creased around his neck. But there was something in his gaze, stern-faced, like he was on some journey within the bounds of formality. Chained, but still moving. 

“Presidential hopeful Floyd Olson!” 

Unlike Hoover, this man’s announcement drew more groans than growls, and even some laughs chimed in with the joviality of the prophet. 

David crossed his arms and stood firm in the crowd. Tipping his beret down, he gritted his teeth, turning towards us with an unusual disdain in his voice. 

“These fools will balk at anything that makes a fraction of sense. So much for blue-collar pragmatism.” 

I quirked my head. 

“Since when was Olson your favorite? Since when was he anyone’s pick for president?” 

Dave’s mouth devolved into some mix between a smirk and a droopy scowl, glancing back. 

“You’ve forgotten already? Well, not like I expected anything better...” 

My eyes returned to the man’s portrait, and the hopeful glimmer in his eyes brought me back to a photo I once eyed in Dave’s apartment. It’s an image that you can’t make up: Olson standing tall with a hand perched on David’s shoulder, my friend and colleague displaying a rare sense of reverence. Like he was in a future president’s presence. 

“I know that man. Knew him, anyway. I can still remember the contours of his Minneapolis office, when I interned with him on winter break.” 

Normally I’d question Dave’s sanity for venturing into American Siberia for winter break. But remembering his account of Olson, the stalwart governor and new face of the American mainstream, I conceded that there was some appeal to him that could cause a man to wade through snow and tundra. 

“He’s the last hope for the status quo, you know. Shows how desperate those morons in Capitol Hill have become—better a social democrat to lead them than a socialist, I suppose.” 

On the surface, Olson seemed like your typical American politician, with all the expected trappings and fickle ideations. A lawyer, boasting relatively deep pockets and connections alike, he touted his veneer as a man of the people while attempting to massage the political circumstances of the time. First elected Minnesota governor in 1931, he was the golden boy of the Farmer-Labor party, a radical offshoot of the traditional Democratic and Republican circus tents that sought to present a more practical form of socialism for the masses. 

“The old guard in Congress labeled him a rabble-rouser upon his first rise to stardom, of course. Bringing corporations down to his heel, nationalizing railroads and power lines, in general making the lives of our ‘bourgeoise’ not so chirpy. 
But, Rick—he had a solid head on his brazen shoulders, one that could temper his goals. He wasn’t stupid enough to think he could maintain power by siphoning off Syndie supporters alone; he struck a compromise.” 

When a spate of general strikes rocked the nation (caused in large part by our friendly senator in New York), Olson stood firm. He mobilized the National Guard just like Hoover, stemming the tide of union surges for the sake of law and order. But at the same time, he promised further reforms for the unions that kept in line, wielding both sword and silver lining to ease the vengeful spirit of his constituents. 

“He stopped the violence, Rick. He halted the inevitable bloodshed. 
He’s the only hope for any semblance of peace, and you know it.” 

I raised an eye at Dave’s desperate tone. Usually, I thought he was A-OK with keeping his head in the clouds, above the fray of emotions that Jake always displayed with unnerving confidence. But then I realized that maybe I was so swept into the romance of this adventure, that I forgot what Reed truly insinuated. 

That I was blinded by the rhetoric. So much so that I missed the black sheen of the batons those Instigators toted around. That I glossed over the teeth borne by the crowd, ready for blood. 

“The last hope for America as we know it!” Reed’s cackle jolted me back to the scene. 

“Finally, the Democrats and Republicans confess to the likeness of their goals; they both scheme for the exact same corruption that capitalism brings, marketed in colors red and blue, yet striking the same tune.” 

David’s arms crossed against each other. Once a face of reflection, now he sported a mire of rough features and narrowed eyes. 

“That Republican-Democratic ticket. It may not be perfect, but it’s what we need. What we all need!” 

Jake gave Dave the pity of a side-eye, before returning his attention to Reed. Though I could see his gloves were tightening, too. 

“...Olson’s their candidate. ‘Farmer-labor’ might be his selling point, but he really is the last breath for this America.” 
Jason shuddered his eyes, closing his notebook. 

“If that America’s worth the oxygen we give ‘er.” 

“You’d rather see her drown in the red tide, Jason? Look, we have problems, but how’re Reed and his sycophants going to solve a single one when they’re marching all across town like Sherman’s army? Poised to salt the earth.” 

“It’s called cleanin’ house. It’s an opportunity to change things up. Even if he might not be the man for the job, he may be the only one bold enough to get us somewhere, somewhere outta here,” Jase raised his voice, looking out to Reed, conflict and bitterness intertwined. 

Somewhere outta here. Somewhere where we could breathe. 

I nodded back to him, pleating my hands together. To the outsider, this was just another coven of the crazies, plotting their insurrection against the government.  

But it’s rational, isn’t it? After all, I can’t sense the bile in their bones for the world that’s left them to die. It makes sense that they’d take a cue from the Vikings and react to a pre-ordained fate—the destiny of their destitution—by going out with a bang of revolution. The Norwegians were feeling pretty red right now, so why couldn’t their friends across the Atlantic feel the same? 

It’s obvious. Washington’s strongmen always kept a close eye on the uproar in Europe, planning wargames and exercises to quell the inevitable dissent. Naturally, it was always the threat of a seismic change in society on the home front that justified the worst of the government’s austerity measures. Hoover himself was never strong enough of a president to do anything against the red tide, and so rumors abounded about the real man masterminding these National Guard mobilizations that seemed to turn up just in time to “restore order.”  
None other than General Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, a towering man whose sunglasses blinded the viewer from any semblance of his humanity, eyes shuttered off in a veil of black. 

Rebuking decades of military protocol that mandated he keep his pipe-laden mouth shut, the “Big Chief” took to the media to combat the political maelstrom his country was facing. With William Randolph Hearst’s news empire as his messenger, MacArthur made his animus towards Reed’s socialist designs very public, as were his reservations about Olson’s potential sympathies for the “red devil.” The Chief had always been a man of action; he prided himself on that machismo image, anyway. And it was this show of force in the papers—paired with a brash concern for American stability—that made people question if the Pentagon was paying a little too much attention to the 1936 election. 

If Reed somehow managed to eke out a victory and stride across Pennsylvania Avenue, would MacArthur be ready for him, tanks and howitzers ordered to fire at will? Would America eagerly take a cue from the rest of the world, with once-permanent administrations toppled like dominoes, seemingly every other month? 160 years after the country’s founding, would this great experiment—sixteen decades of American data manipulated and manufactured by its chief researchers to fit the hypothesis of equality—finally reach its morbid conclusion? 

Hoover, Olson, Macarthur, Reed. These degrees of radicalism, of upending equilibrium. They weren’t cumulative, like the smooth rise of a thermometer to measure the rising fires across the nation, but were rather firecrackers lobbed against each other, with flames of different colors and intensities that would serve to ignite a hundred million lives all the same. I knelt for a moment, my hand raking through my hair in a sudden malaise. How had America gotten to this point? Or were we always here in the depths of Hades’ domain, fooled into thinking we were prancing through the fields of Elysium? 

These issues were once all too easy to dismiss as idle prattle. Affecting people set within the margins of the population, shoved away into the cracks so that we could pride ourselves as the height of civilization. But now there was no patriotic blinder to America as the golden child. And it haunted me to think of the image that would unfold before my eyes: the bleeding portrait of my country just a few weeks from now after the dust had settled.  

“Rick! Stand up and pay attention!” 

Dave clasped my shoulder and forced me up. I blinked, lost in both my thoughts and the shock that that doughboy had any strength in him. 

“I’ve never seen you like this, Rick. I guess we’ve never seen anything quite like Jack Reed...” 

Jason shook his head, looking back off to the podium. 

“And I think we’re in for a roaring final act.” 

The next phase of the speech went like crimson clockwork. Reed’s everyman persona transformed itself into the mask of an esteemed politician, as he listed out the bold proposals of the Syndicates. 

“In order to create a nation of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers, we must boil America down to its component pieces: the thousands of trade unions that drive American progress!” 

Ah, yes, the lynchpin of Syndicalist theory. For 150 years socialist musings had plotted their rise to prominence against the upward arc of capitalism, its sanguine branches diverting ever further from Marx’s original vision as different thinkers imagined vastly different worlds for workers’ freedom. But it was Syndicalism, once an unpopular doctrine that seemed bound to fail, that ended up providing just the breakthrough the socialists needed: the banding together of workers’ unions from the micro professions to the macro strongholds of power. 

“We cannot trust the privileged few—both the suit-stuffers in Washington and the stock-stuffers in New York—to represent those like us, those forced to lick off their boots! We must be at the epicenter of power, we must be the ones holding the whip, forcing them to build our pyramids! 

Not by the politician’s pen will America be ruled, but by the hammer of the steelworker and the zap of the electrician’s wire; not by feckless debate and procedure will the American creed manifest, but by the force of the workers’ will!” 

To think, his masquerade was so convincing, so laced with a mock-authentic zeal, that his crowd could forget that he was the son of rich industrial magnates on the other side of the nation, in Portland. They could ignore the fact that, in his blood, there flowed just as much silver as hatred for the corporations that kept the silver flowing. 

It couldn’t dampen his spirit, though. Maybe it even amplified it, I wonder, escaping the plush comforts of American nobility to enter the field of populist provocation. It takes a certain will to be so bold. 

“So take up your arms, my great American workers! 
And let us bleed the streets red with your vigor for a new age! 
WORKERS UNITE!” 

He howled! And like a wolfpack, they all started barking back in assent, and I could see the sheets of spit cluttering the air. 

“Watch it, bastard!” 

Jake started fending off the intense jostling of the crowd: it was ready to explode after hours of hiding away a revolutionary nitroglycerin. From the zeal of Reed’s words to the ardor of their fists, there was a quake amidst the proletariat. 

I huddled next to Jason and Dave. I grabbed their shoulders, trying not to be parted from them as we were yanked and shoved. 

“We’ve got to get the hell out, Rick!” 

“They’re going to eat us alive, these fools!” 

It’s surprising it took this long to devolve. But we knew what we were getting into. This wasn’t a red tide; it was a red vortex, waters caving against our bones, suffocating humanity in the asphyxiation of anger. Yet in these moments, I found my mind not focusing as much on the fabric chafing against my flesh or the invectives spewed by the workers as it was on the cause behind the rage. What had my parents done to them to incite this? What had I perpetrated against them? Was I a key actor in the kleptomaniacal forces chaining them down; was my safe a sort of thief’s haven, hoarding all the money that should’ve been theirs by way of merit, but was in my mitts by way of blood? Or was I just another pawn in the chess game of class economics, just as chained as they were, heeding commands from Uncle Sam’s hand? 

Reliving this moment now, where I felt like shards of glass and metal could puncture my flesh at any second, even then I wondered at the cause behind the calamity. 

Blood gives no answers. For how much was to pour, so much more would I question in the fleeting corridors of the Workers’ Refuge: 

It’s time to get it over with, Reed. We’re waiting. 

Chapter Text

All was quiet, and all was loud. Hundreds of devotees to the Syndicalist agenda vibrated with their party colors, causing miniature tremors to overtake the Refuge, making us feel like the entire building would collapse in on itself. Their anticipation was deathly, like an old child waiting for daddy’s death to reap the inheritance money. The four of us practically stitched ourselves together to stay in place, barely able to stand, much less get our notes down. It appeared that our minds would be our greatest notebooks for the rest of the night, in the mental encapsulation of the Syndicalist promise. 

Even as my view zigzagged from the motion, I kept my eyes firmly placed on Reed’s character. Still were his teeth borne in a voluptuous grin, eyeing the fruits of his labors. He observed this crafted chaos, spirited out from lifetimes of pain. He was just the alchemist the people needed to boil their anger to the surface, combusting with the whole warehouse! 

This wasn’t a refuge, it was a goddamn cesspool! 

“Rick, what the fuck are you doing? Stop ogling him and let’s get to the exit!” 

I shook my head as Jake grabbed my chest. 

“He’s not done. We’re not over.” 

Jase put his hand to his mouth, and our squadron stilled in the wave of humanity. 

“...how could I forget?” 

Senator Jack Reed had no short supply of enemies, that was true. His rhetorical theatrics (and devil-may-care perspective on the physical wellbeing of others) had made him the goriest man in America by reputation alone, inciting violence through the very image of his upward-facing eyes and tightly-lined mouth that was seen in photographs and propaganda posters.  
But if he was the protagonist of this socialist epic, then he needed a foil. And no man had drawn his ire more than his warm colleague in the Senate, hailing from down the Mason-Dixon line. 

Louisiana's finest— 

“Can you see this, Huey!? Red all over!” 

Huey Pierce Long. The “Kingfish” of the South. 

“Oh, shit! He lets that slip now?” 

“Don’t you see? He planned it all along! 
He’s going to drown us!” 

Dave could barely eke out enough oxygen for the words when a musty fist knocked him on the back of the head. 

“DAVE!” 

I choked as the crowd gurgled with enmity towards Reed’s archenemy. I held onto Jason, vision lapsing, with Jake kneeling at Dave’s side, motioning into his pockets for the crowbar. 

I couldn’t even get a good glance of the final banner, a de facto mugshot of Long himself laid out between Olson and the CSA flag. But I could hear Reed’s voice piercing through the uproar—the loudest of them all. 

“He thinks he can build his own Christian utopia! He thinks he can be the one to tell down Tammany Hall and Madison Avenue and the D.C. establishment! Old-age pensions, nationalization, a minimum income for all, eh!” 

Reed started to clap, and in between each fire-branded word, his cackle returned. I felt like my ears were bleeding. 

“He thinks that every man can become a king under his watchful eye! 

Hah! The gall!” 

The crowd chimed and chafed. 

“Get your lighters! Get your lighters!” 

“Let’s watch that cotton suit burn right with him!” 

Reed clasped his hands. How’s that for fire and fury, I mused, looking back off to him. 

“He thinks his agents can outmaneuver us. Outwit us. Outmuscle us. 

That America is his land to conquer. 

I’m going to enjoy watching his blood barrel down some prison bars from my perch at the White House, when the snow starts falling. 

To see his plans smote down by the ferocity of the CSA!” 

“YEAH!” 

I couldn’t breathe. The huffs of words and wills were taking the air out of the place. I looked for the exits, the night sky contorting into a malaise of light. 

But then the world paused for a moment, and instead of an escape, what caught my view was a derelict section of the spectators, portraited by the chaos. 

There was Earl, and his band of artists, intellectuals, and journalists, bearing a unified front of monochrome suits, a show of status as much as anything else in this depression, especially when most of the crowd was crinkling through hand-me-down dusters, tattered scarves, and hole-filled shoes. I could see his hand reaching for something deep in his pocket—not a pencil, I thought, nor a notepad; perhaps what lurked underneath the black fabric was something more defensive. 

Earl and company knew that even this was just the calm. I could see it in the pointed gaze of his eyes, and the slant of his brows. It reminded me of the time he looked at me when giving an assignment for the Polaris, with the white walling of the office corridor staring us down. 

“The readers are demanding an inside look into Long’s party organization. I don’t blame them; it’s a mobilization on a scale we haven’t seen in history. I need you to be our eyes on the ground. Got it?” 

I nodded, sensing the gravity embedded in the task. The America First Party was just starting its national organizing efforts, and what better way to announce its place on the continental stage than by targeting the cornucopia of political fortunes: the Big Apple. Its populist promises of 8-hour workdays, ‘social security’ payments, and mass regulation of the railroads, meat-packing plants, and a bevy of other industries seemed scarily familiar to the American reds, all trumpeted by a figure who in some ways was more warm and personable than the western ice lord of New York that was Jack Reed. 

But Earl could pore through the propaganda, and to me unveiled Huey Long’s vision for America in its rawest contents: socialism for the Anglo-Saxons. It was as if Karl Marx had been invoked in the Bible for him: Long was able to fuse Evangelical theology with socialist policy to create a form of government that Christ could smile down upon. Citing New Testament passages on campaign stumps while emphasizing the merits of his “Share Our Wealth” redistribution program, he marketed Longism as the only viable opponent to Syndicalism in America. 

While Reed’s unionist and anti-religious elements had drawn division between blacks and whites across the country, it was Long who actively aligned himself with the sects and Klans of the South to preach his vision for the nation, and cast his lot with the cotton-colored crowd of the South. 

“I’ve seen life down there, believe me. This might just be different.” 

From what he’d told me, I heard that Earl was originally born in Mississippi before he was able to find work and a new (if not always welcoming) home in New York. He lived through the worst of a post-Plessy South, seeing the toll of the sharecroppers on the way to a poor, pipeless school, at a time when the lynchings often made the cover stories in the daily papers he combed through. Violence and vandalism had long been perpetrated by state and citizen alike, that much was true, but the amount of uproar generated by the Longist movement ignited tensions even further, kindled by the Silver Legion of armed supremacist followers who worked hand-in-hand with the Ku Klux Klan. 

He slapped down the headlines to me, that day: 

NEGROES STAMPEDED OUT OF TOWN BY LEGION ARMS 

NEGROE HOOVERVILLE BURSTS IN FLAMES; LEGIONARIES TO BLAME? 

LYNCHING SEASON PICKS UP IN BIRMINGHAM—IS LONG-MANIA BEHIND IT? 

Of course, these headlines were put on only for show, to grasp the Yankee’s attention well enough to fork over a few pennies for the paper fare. Making social progress wasn’t where the profit was at, ‘course.  
The stories themselves amplified the drama of it all, allowing the Legionaries to cover their crimes with lofty rhetoric and a damnation of the current administration, the cheap silver gloss on their uniforms blinding any unsuspecting readers. Most papers focused on Long’s ‘progressive’ policies either way, the brewing ‘black attacks’ just a footnote on a packed campaign schedule. 

Where did they get the funding? How did they establish their network of resources and mobilization efforts? Was Long truly the commander leading the charge, or did he passively benefit from the chaos, leveraging the support of entrenched rightist elements in the South to jumpstart his campaign? 

There were too many questions to answer, too many possibilities to ponder, but I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to let Earl down. Not a chance. I had to shine the light, I had to! 

That Longist meeting burbles in my mind, a distant memory, churned by the current circumstances but refusing to cooperate with the present slice of my psyche. I wonder if it’s the same for Earl, remembering the story I published, maybe hoping I’d be safe; or, better yet, preparing to ensure the safety of his comrades, come what may of the fisticuffs. 

Before the scene continued and tensions exploded, I remember that Jason was peering in the same direction. He must’ve felt that similar connection to Earl, but buoyed by the kinship of race, of course, a magnification of closeness that I could never quite share, but appreciated and respected nevertheless. I asked myself if he wanted to join them, just for a night, or otherwise if he wanted to lead the way if pain were to come rushing towards us, when the notes were no longer needed, and only the noises of human tumult filled the air. 

Whatever path he chose, it wasn’t my business to pry, nor to meddle with. The only thing I could do was be at his side, just like I was at the Polaris, and be that friend to him, in the throes of uncertainty that engulfed our lives. 

* * *  

But I couldn’t ponder forever. I heaved a breath, lunging in a random direction, disoriented, newly searching for a way out of here while navigating the political bumps and quagmires nestled across the Refuge. 

“C’mon! We’re gonna be goners here...!” 

My eyes scanned everywhere, searching for our salvation. Instead, they found a new spectacle to gawk at, widening in a quick splay of eye flesh, and I heard a crash at the back.  
I knew we wouldn’t be gone just yet. 

“The Minutemen! What in God’s name—they found the Refuge!?” 

Tricorn hats shuttled into the warehouse, tens upon hundreds of the Longists’ paramilitary fighters pushing back against Reed’s diehards. My eyes were gouged by the sway of their white cravats in the wind, the ebony finish on their fabric lined with ridged edges like they’d been kept away from view since the Revolution itself. Fitting, styling themselves in the American facsimile of bloodthirsty patriots, to parade Huey Long’s image for the country. Sable boots chafed against the floor as I felt a rumble overtake the entire area. Supposedly, they operated independently of the Silver Legion, though I had a feeling their goals and resources were quite the same. 

“You want red, bastards!? We’ll give you plenty to muse about!” 

“Rick, they’re coming this way!” 

I choked in a breath, seeing those long, thick shafts of wood branded by them—they were using musket designs as blunt instruments. Not long after were wrenches, mop handles, forks and rolling pins, walking sticks, and all matter of hard-hitting objects lifted from the floor into the Syndie crowd’s hands. Reed’s Instigators flooded in, commanding officers of the counterattack, arming their comrades and steeling for battle. The screams curdled our blood as much as theirs, no doubt dripping away while we gazed. 

“Stay together, guys!” 

The four of us linked up, arm to arm, with the two armies jerking back and forth against each other. Air pouring fast into our mouths, water flowing out our pores, it was a dynamic equilibrium. An osmosis of human bodies. 

That was until the wave of entropy finally reached our skin. 

“AAAGH!” 

The guttural scream that David echoed blazed through my ears. I saw wood gash into his sleeve, the muck from his shirt scattered onto the floor. 

“Syndie shitheads!” 

Then the punches came. No, not punches, backhands into our flesh. Fists scuffing back out the fabric of our clothes. I saw Jake brandish the crowbar and begin his swinging rampage. Jason took my arm as we scuttled through the chaos. 

“Rick, we’ll drop dead here if we can’t find an out!” 

Hoarse tones reached my ears as my eyes flicked across the scene. My fingers straddled against hostile torsos flinging themselves against us. Red or black or white, wood or brass or metal. Spit, yes, saliva, dotting the ground. Dammit, Rick, keep your eyes off the floor! 

CRACK! A fresh stalk of bark slacked against my jaw. I felt my head curdle upwards—nigh out of its socket—as I lost myself in the group. 

“RICK!” 

Cigarettes. Splinters crashing. Blood on the tongue. The world shuddered to a halt as the arc of my crown continued. 

But in this broken state, I found an opening. Sharp crystal ends, jutting outward at a slant—but on a single plane, like a portrait fastened onto an easel. And with a big white orb glimmering at the center. 

The orb called out to me with its sparkling eyes. Saying, ‘Hoist yourself! Hoist yourself!’ I swallowed, backpedaling, hands rushing to below my chin. 

The thing that awoke me from my daze? The sight of a tricorn painted magenta, shooting to the ground. 

“That’ll serve ya right for kissin’ Daddy-Long-Legs' ass!” 

Jake’s crowbar decked a man in the side of the head, and I could see his body slither out into the crowd. 

“Rick! Get a hold of yourself, man!” 

Jason kept me upright, and his pupils followed my view. 

“You saw it too?” 

“The windowsill! That’s our ticket outta this hellhole! C’mon!” 

Jase and I started elbowing and jawing and jostling our way through the crowd. David joined in too, using his entire arm as a baton, even as his hand pressed against it to keep the juice from flowing out. Jake battered his way through the Syndies, banking on them worrying more about the tide of Minutemen bolting towards Reed by the second than us. 

The orb kept calling to me. Its crescent shape cut into the sky, slicing against the darkness. My vision crept up its length, wanting to climb to the peak, limbs inching for it. We’re so close, just a little more! A little more mucus and muscle-mass to get there! 

“The sill!” 

Jason eked out the words from his throat. I slammed my fist at its surface. The glass cut into my hand. But I could see the moon’s reflection in the reservoir that poured from it. 

Jake pretty much picked me up and shoved me through that damn hole, my arms slacking against my sides, trying to weather the shards. Then Jason, then Dave—then Jake sliding through himself, wiping the muck from his pale cheeks. 

As we scurried away, the last snapshot of the night was harrowing: 

Jack Reed. Standing at the center of the platform. Watching on with interest. He was far, my vantage point reduced to a sliver of a rectangle into the Refuge. But I could see the lines of his face creeping upwards. 

Did he know? Did he prep? Did he care? 

I didn’t know. Didn’t have the time to find out, as we huddled off into my apartment to tend to our wounds. A black canvas painted across the stars, frowning down upon what had just happened, save for the watchful glimmer of the moon that lighted our way to safety. 

The stars must’ve been looking towards him. His suit, bloodless; his hair, still combed and full of color. And yet, those aspects of his visual character didn’t grab me most. 

It’s that distant smirk before savagery that still haunts me like nothing else in a war-torn world.