Re: Blood and Iron - Chapter 721: The March of Industry
Chapter 721: The March of Industry
The stars over Detroit were gone.
Smoke rolled from the riverfront like thunderclouds trapped on earth, glowing orange from the forges beneath.
Factory sirens howled through the night, and every few blocks, the blue flash of a military truck signaled another seizure, another plant, another company, another piece of America claimed in the name of unity.
Captain James Mallory stood at the gates of the Ford River Rouge complex as the soldiers fanned out before dawn.
His uniform still smelled of ash from New York. The bayonets gleamed wet under the floodlights.
The crowd outside the fences wasn’t protesting, no one dared anymore. They just watched.
Workers in soot-streaked overalls, wives clutching ration books, children who’d grown up believing that the only war that could ever be fought was far away across the Atlantic.
Incapable of threatening them.
Now the war had come home in olive drab and steel helmets.
An officer from the Bureau read the order aloud through a loudspeaker:
“By authority of the President and the Emergency Command Act, all industrial facilities of national importance are hereby placed under temporary military administration for the duration of the crisis. Property and personnel are requisitioned for patriotic service. Resistance will be considered treason.”
The words echoed off the smokestacks and faded into silence.
Mallory turned toward his platoon. “Move in.”
The gates creaked open. The soldiers filed inside, boots clanging on catwalks as the workers stepped back from their machines.
Steam hissed, pistons groaned, and the first banners of the new America, bald eagle carrying the arrows of war in one hand, and the olive branch of peace in the other. A single star emblazoned in the shield within the Eagle’s chest.
For a moment, no one spoke. Then the foreman, a burly man with a burn scar across his neck, whispered, “Guess we’re government men now.”
Mallory didn’t answer. He only nodded to the signal corps sergeant setting up a small black-and-white television on a crate beside the production line.
A cable ran to a field generator humming like a wasp.
“Broadcast’s at nineteen hundred,” the sergeant said. “President’s speech. Mandatory viewership.”
—
In Washington, the lights of the White House burned against a city still half-scarred from riot fires.
Roosevelt sat behind the Resolute Desk, his hair greyer than it had been a month earlier, his face drawn but steady.
Two microphones faced him, black and polished, the seal of the Republic hanging above like a watchful god.
Around the room stood the new cabinet, half generals, half bureaucrats. Hopkins. Morgenthau. MacArthur.
Each bore the expression of a man who’d crossed a river that could not be uncrossed.
“Ready when you are, Mr. President,” the technician said quietly.
Roosevelt’s fingers brushed the edge of his papers. He didn’t need them, but the ritual mattered.
The nation needed ritual now, something to believe in that wasn’t falling apart.
He drew a breath, steady and deliberate, and nodded.
The red light on the camera blinked to life.
“My fellow Americans,” Roosevelt began, his voice solemn but firm.
“Tonight, I speak to you not as a partisan, not as a politician, but as a man charged by Providence to keep this Republic alive.”
The words carried across the airwaves to every radio, every television, every factory floor.
The screens flickered to life in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis; faces lifting from machinery and oil-stained hands to watch the President framed in monochrome light.
“Our Union has endured its trial by fire. The traitors who sought to tear us apart have been purged by their own hand. Their blood has washed the sins of the Republic away and given birth to a new, unified nation… stronger, cleaner, indivisible.”
In the factory, a worker crossed himself. Another spat into the floor grating. The soldiers kept their eyes forward.
“For too long,” Roosevelt continued, “we were divided by greed, by ideology, by the false comfort of complacency. But from the embers of our cities, a greater America rises, one forged not by profit, but by purpose.”
The camera panned slightly closer. His voice hardened, every syllable a hammer striking iron.
“The means of production now belong to the people through their government, through you, the citizens who will build the arsenal of a reborn world. The furnaces of Detroit, the mills of Pennsylvania, the shipyards of California, these are not the property of the few. They are the beating heart of the nation. And they will beat in unison, until victory is ours.”
The sound of the factories filled the gaps in the broadcast, clanging steel, the hiss of welding torches, the thrum of engines turned over by trembling hands.
“Let no foreign power mistake our resolve. Let no enemy believe our internal strife has weakened us. The age of disunity has ended. America stands united again, one flag, one destiny, one people.”
Roosevelt paused. In the control booth, the technicians exchanged glances; the President’s tone was different now, measured, almost liturgical.
“I ask not for faith,” he said softly. “Faith is for the comfortable. I ask for labor, for sacrifice, for vigilance. Together we will build an America that no foreign empire can break, a tide of industry and spirit before which our enemies will shatter.”
He leaned forward, eyes unwavering into the camera.
“To every worker watching tonight: You are soldiers now. Your tools are your rifles. Your shift is your campaign. Each rivet you drive, each engine you build, each shell you cast, these are bullets in the defense of freedom. The arsenal of democracy has become the crucible of rebirth.”
He glanced briefly to the notes before him, then folded them aside.
“There will be those who whisper that this is tyranny. But tyranny is the rule of the few. This, my countrymen, is the rule of necessity. And necessity is the mother of all survival.”
A murmur went through the staff behind the camera, half awe, half fear.
The President straightened, shoulders squared against the invisible weight of the world.
“We will endure,” he said, voice rising now. “We will work, we will fight, we will win. The blood of traitors has purchased our unity, let their sacrifice not be in vain. The Republic is reborn.”
He let the silence hang before finishing, quieter, almost reverent.
“God bless the United States of America and its people….”
The red light blinked out. The studio fell still except for the hum of the transmission dying.
Outside the White House, the floodlights cut through a soft drizzle that turned the steps into mirrors.
Roosevelt stared at the microphone for a long moment. Then he said, to no one in particular,
“There’s no going back now.”
—
In the foundries, the speech echoed through the loudspeakers and faded into the roar of machinery.
The workers resumed their stations, some wordless, some muttering prayers, some simply staring at the blank screen until it went to static.
Mallory watched from the catwalk as sparks rained from a welding torch below.
A teenage boy, barely old enough to shave, guided molten steel into a mold for tank treads. His hands shook.
“Keep it steady,” Mallory said, stepping down beside him.
“Yes, sir,” the boy answered. His voice cracked.
“You from around here?”
“Dearborn. My father used to work this line.”
“Where’s he now?”
The boy hesitated. “Didn’t take the oath fast enough.”
Mallory looked away. “Get back to it.”
The boy nodded, swallowing hard. The next weld hissed to life.
Around them, soldiers stood watch among the machines.
The factory had become a barracks, their bunks stacked between conveyor belts, their rifles leaned against engine blocks.
Even the air smelled military now: oil, sweat, cordite.
Above the noise, a foreman’s voice barked, “Keep those turbines moving! You heard the President, we’re the arsenal now!”
Someone laughed bitterly. “Yeah, until the arsenal’s out of bodies.”
No one replied.
By midnight the snow had started falling outside, melting as it hit the factory roofs. Steam rose like ghosts over the river.
Mallory walked alone along the catwalk toward the loading bay.
The flicker of welding arcs lit the faces of the men below, young, exhausted, hollow-eyed. On one wall, someone had scrawled in chalk:
WORK IS VICTORY.
Below it, another hand had written smaller:
VICTORY FOR WHO?
He paused, looking at the words, then at the endless rows of machines pounding out the rhythm of the new Republic.
The speech still played faintly over the intercom, looping its closing refrain:
“The Republic is reborn… reborn… reborn…”
Each repetition grew fainter, like a heartbeat slowing.
Mallory found a cigarette in his pocket and lit it with trembling fingers.
The smoke curled upward, joining the haze.
From somewhere outside, the factory whistle blew, shift change.
The workers filed past the guards in silence, faces lit by the sodium glow of floodlights. The next shift entered the gates without a word.
He looked toward the horizon where the smokestacks met the dark clouds and thought of Roosevelt’s voice again: The blood of traitors has washed the sins of the Republic away.
It sounded almost holy.
Mallory crushed the cigarette under his boot. “Lord have mercy….” he whispered.
Roosevelt sat alone now in the Oval Office.
The others had gone to draft the orders, nationalizations, wage controls, production quotas.
The desk before him was littered with telegrams from the Bureau and the Army. All said the same thing: Compliance achieved.
He turned the radio knob until he found a local broadcast replaying his own speech.
Hearing it from outside his own walls, through static and distance, it sounded different, colder, older, as though someone else had spoken through him.
He poured a small glass of bourbon and stared out the window at the darkened city.
For the first time, he thought he understood Bruno’s calm, the calm of men who had already accepted history’s verdict before it was written.
He raised the glass toward the reflection of the Capitol dome.
“To unity,” he said quietly. “Whatever it costs.”
The bells of midnight tolled through Washington, mingling with the low hum of the generators that kept the Republic alive.
