Ignition

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.