Chapter 561: Men in Distant Castles
The windows of the Oval Office were thrown open, but the summer breeze brought no comfort.
It smelled of wet pavement, distant smoke from freight yards, and that rank electric stink that rose from a city stewing under too many bodies, too many fears.
President Herbert Hoover sat behind his oak desk, sleeves rolled to his elbows, spectacles perched low on his nose as he reread the latest polling data.
It was grim, though not outright damning. A nation still half-starved by the ghosts of the Panic, but now shambling toward an awkward recovery.
Numbers on the page told one story; wages marginally up, breadlines shortening, factory doors reopening under new owners.
But the people’s eyes on the street? They whispered another.
A nation torn. Half of them were ready to crown Hoover as the man who had "pulled them back from the brink," forgetting entirely that it wasn’t his stimulus packages that stabilized markets, but a sudden rush of foreign capital.
Capital from places whose names the common American couldn’t pronounce; or wouldn’t dare to if they understood who truly owned their factories now.
The other half? They spat at the name of Herbert Hoover as though it were a swear. For every mill that clattered back to life, there was a mother standing over a child’s grave dug shallow in dry Midwestern dirt.
For every broker smiling at new shipping orders, there was a miner coughing blood into a rag that cost more than his lunch.
It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. And the next election was only months away.
Across the radio waves, on every clattering newsstand, the voice and grin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt loomed.