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Warm Spit

Written by Virginia DeMarce

Grantville, September 1634

“I say that we bring back nominating conventions.” Henry Dreeson folded his hands over the little paunch that sat so oddly on his otherwise scrawny frame. “Real ones, that amount to a hill of beans. Conventions that nominate the candidates. Smoke-filled rooms. Horse trading. What’s the point of sticking ourselves with the damned primaries that run the whole time in between the elections?”

Tom Riddle shook his head. “Can we sell it to the League of Women Voters?”

Henry started to pick up his coffee and then put it down again. “Play the nostalgia card. How many of the old ladies will remember sitting at their radios back in 1952, listening to the roll calls in the contest between Estes Kefauver and Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic nomination. That’s where the country went wrong. If they’d nominated Kefauver . . .”

Riddle nodded reluctantly but opened his mouth fast, before Henry could digress into his views on Adlai Stevenson. “Yes, I can remember. Not that Veleda would appreciate it if anyone called her an old lady. It was hot that summer. Chuck had just turned six and Mary Myra was almost four, so there was a lot of washing. I was just getting ready to open my own law office in Morgantown, so we had to save every cent. She would stand there in that little apartment with all the windows open, hoping for a bit of a breeze, ironing. First the “starched and sprinkled” ironing, then the “sprinkled” ironing, and finally the “dry” ironing. She’d put my shirts on hangers, and then hang them on one of those pull-up wooden drying stands . . .” He shook his head. “All that week, from morning to night, she had that little brown bakelite radio on, listening to the convention.”

Chad Jenkins pulled a little notebook out of his shirt pocket. Those stands—fastened together with wooden pegs, too, if he remembered them right. Perfect down-time technology that any village carpenter could manage. He could make some money selling the stands, but even more selling the plans. Just think what Mary Simpson’s maid Hilde and her boyfriend had done selling plans for those folding wood-with-a-strip-of-canvas camp chairs. Not to mention what he’d made himself on diagrams for folding wooden TV trays. With most down-time houses so small for the number of people who lived in them, fold-away furniture—the easier to make, the better—was a gold mine. He scribbled, his mind half-way on the continuing conversation and halfway on prospects for making more money.

“Theater,” Ed Piazza said. “Pure theater.”

“Better than a lot of professionals. During the war . . .” Riddle turned to Constantin Ableidinger. “That was the Second World War. I was a journalist. I accompanied Bob Hope on one of his tours to entertain the troops.”

“They were professionals,” Piazza said. “The guys who staged those conventions were professionals. Entertainment. Songs. Demonstrations. Placards.” He looked at Ableidinger. “Annabelle showed you a couple of those Bob Hope tapes, didn’t she?”

Ableidinger had expressed his appreciation of the amenity of Dorothy Lamour in a sarong at the time. Now his smile started at his mouth. It finally ended somewhere about the tips of his ears. “The Ram Party agrees,” he said, his voice booming out as usual. “Nominating conventions.”

“That’s the easy part,” Henry answered. “Now let’s get down to business. We don’t have to rig our convention to make sure that it nominates Ed here for president. We can rely on the Fourth of July Party delegates. There’ll be some other nominations, of course, but he’ll win. Franconia, though—Ableidinger, I expect that your Ram people down in Franconia will do their own convention and nominate not just you—they will, but you can decline gracefully on the grounds that you’d rather make a run for delegate in the USE House of Commons—but some other favorite sons, too. How are you going to make sure that they finally nominate a guy to fly the Ram banner who will make a respectable showing in the statewide presidential vote but still be sure to lose to Ed?”

“Favorite sons?” Ableidinger asked.

Tom Riddle started to explain.

Chad tucked the notebook into his shirt pocket and leaned his chair back. “That’s manageable. Let’s get to the hard part. Who do we want for Ed’s running mate and how do we make sure that the convention picks him? The State of Thuringia-Franconia is going to need a vice-president and I’m not going to put up with some Balkanized idea that the head of the losing party gets to be the second fiddle in the executive branch in some kind of coalition arrangement. That’s a recipe for disaster. Think of Italy.”

Only Tom Riddle immediately thought of the correct aspect of Italy.

Ed Piazza actually thought first of Mario Lanza, Ezio Pinza, and Luciano Pavarotti. Some of the special effects in Il Trovatore didn’t need any up-time technology . . . Bizet . . . Carmen . . . working-class factory girls . . . Toreador would make a catchy tune for a campaign song if somebody didn’t take offense that the setting was Spanish . . . or the composer French . . .

October 1634

Philip Massinger’s theater troupe was in Grantville for the winter. Massinger, along with the new drama teacher at the high school, had agreed to take responsibility for staging the public events—music, “spontaneous” demonstrations in favor of the various candidates, ghost-written orations, and such, which was why he was sitting in Chad Jenkins’s living room this evening.

He had even sent a selection of his personnel down to Franconia to do the same for the Ram party. Personally, he thought that they were fortunate to have him. He couldn’t think of any competitor likely to do as well for the Crown Loyalists—who didn’t show any sign of holding a nominating convention in any case. From a professional standpoint, he thought the CLs were making a mistake. Just the convention coverage in the newspapers would bring a lot of free publicity for the FoJP and he suspected that a significant portion of the voters would simply mark in favor of someone whose name they had heard before, even if they weren’t sure where, how, or why. Any dramatist who wanted to make money served up a certain number of simple-minded farces for those paying customers who couldn’t or wouldn’t grasp anything more complex.

While Massinger kept one ear on the discussion, just in case anything that might affect his proposed designs came up, his thoughts wandered. Democracy might not be so bad. He had developed some concerns last summer that the foreseeable decline in coronations, royal progresses, ceremonial entrances, princely weddings, and other such occasions would have a bad effect on business. Royalty was good for business, usually—when they weren’t closing down the theaters because of politics. He remembered one of the appearances of Tom and Dick Quiney’s grandfather, livery-clad, marching through the streets of London with the remainder of the King’s Men, swelling the parades.

But apparently not. Democracy seemed to need pageantry too, and where there was pageantry, there would be actors and musicians. Thus far, moreover, the representatives of democracy appeared to be more inclined to pay their bills in a timely manner.

****

“We ought to run a down-timer with Ed,” Chad Jenkins said. “Chip thinks that having a down-timer for VP will pull in a lot of votes and make people think that the up-timers are serious about not turning into an aristocracy of their own.”

“Well, we’re not running any of Chip’s new cronies from Jena,” Henry Dreeson answered. “And Ableidinger’s doing his own thing with the Ram, so we can’t pick anyone from Franconia without stepping on toes. Most of the people at Weimar are Crown Loyalists because of the Wettin connection. Maybe we could find someone in Erfurt, but I don’t know the guys up there very well, yet.”

“Precisely what does a vice president do?” Johann Georg Hardegg asked. He was attending his first Grantville FoJP meeting because Mary Kat Riddle’s grandfather Tom wasn’t feeling very well and Georgie had come with her. “How significant is the office?”

The up-timers looked at each other.

“Well, there’s John Nance Garner’s opinion,” Jenny Maddox ventured.

“Which was? Or, first, who was he?” Hardegg, as a lawyer, liked to lay things out in order.

“A conservative Democrat,” Ed said. “Senator. Ally of Sam Rayburn when Rayburn was in the House of Representatives. Both of them Texans.” He checked Hardegg’s expression. “Guess that doesn’t help very much.”

“It goes back to 1932. Garner ran for the Democratic nomination against Roosevelt—Franklin, not Teddy. Roosevelt had the most delegates going into the convention, but not a majority. Garner was one of Roosevelt’s strongest rivals and cut a deal with him. The ticket was re-elected in 1936. Garner’s famous for saying that the vice presidency was ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss.’ Which got bowdlerized to ‘warm spit’ by the media. Garner then called the reporters ‘a bunch of pantywaists.’” Henry Dreeson grinned.

“What he meant,” Mary Kat said, “is that the position doesn’t have any power of its own and deprives the holder of any real power base he had before he accepted it.”

“Two more questions. First, what’s a ‘pantywaist’?” Once that was settled, “So there’s no power?”

“None, really. Lyndon Johnson was far more powerful as a senator than as vice-president.”

Hardegg frowned. “I thought that Lyndon Johnson is a young policeman here in Grantville.”

Mary Kat giggled. “Different guy. Hank and Karleen just couldn’t resist the temptation.”

“If you ...