In the east, Philadelphia's war machine revealed its suffocating immensity.
There lay the heart of the Democratic Party's Establishment Faction, the fortress of Aston Monroe.
Tens of thousands of volunteers in neat uniforms swarmed the streets like worker ants. They knocked on the door of every middle-class home, efficiently delivering voters to the polls like products on an assembly line.
This was the triumph of order, the pinnacle of elite politics on display.
But in the west, in rust-covered Allegheny County, in the bleak winds along the Lake Erie Shoreline, another, more primitive, more savage power was erupting.
Steelworkers, coal miners, truck drivers—people usually hidden amidst smoke and noise—now converged into a black tide.
They wore grease-stained work clothes and drove roaring pickup trucks, flocking to the polling stations set up in firehouses and church basements.
