Forging America: My Campaign Manager is Roosevelt

Chapter 310 - 152: The Angry Rust Belt

After the video exploded online, Leo immediately dialed the number of Erie Mayor Ron Smith.

The phone rang twice before it was answered.

"Leo, if you’re calling to tell me the money still isn’t unfrozen, just hang up." Smith’s voice sounded agitated. "The Union guys have practically blockaded the entrance to my office."

"I’m calling to tell you how to get the money back."

Leo leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.

"Ron, do you want your factories to reopen?"

"Of course! But I’m not going to confront the State Government like you did."

There was a hint of caution in Smith’s voice.

"I’m a mayor. I can’t have Erie City in direct administrative opposition to the state. That would just invite more trouble."

"No, Ron, you’ve got it wrong."

Leo sat up straight, his voice becoming clear and forceful.

"I’m not confronting the State Government, and I’m not asking you to confront the State Government."

"The one we’re confronting is Aston Monroe."

"You need to distinguish between the two."

"The State Government is a vast administrative machine, but Monroe is just one politician within it—a politician running for Senator, desperate to score political points."

"His audit order might bear the seal of the State Auditing Bureau, but it’s essentially a political maneuver to attack his political opponents."

"We don’t attack the authority of the State Government. We only attack Monroe’s abuse of power."

Leo’s voice became highly persuasive.

"You can’t control the State Auditing Bureau, but you can control your streets. Organize the workers and tell them the truth."

"Tell them it wasn’t the State Government—it was Aston Monroe who stole their wages."

"We need to focus all of that anger precisely on him and him alone."

Smith was silent on the other end for a moment.

As a seasoned Republican politician, he quickly calculated the pros and cons in his head.

’If I organize a protest, I’d be opposing the State Government, and that carries administrative risks. But Monroe is a Democrat—a Democrat running for Senator, no less. As a Republican, making trouble for a Democratic candidate is practically a duty. Even the state’s Republican Party leadership would secretly cheer me on. More importantly, I could use this to transform myself into a local champion fighting against state bureaucracy. It’s a perfect political pivot.’

"Leo." Smith’s voice had changed. "I’m the Mayor. I can’t organize an illegal strike. That’s against the rules."

"Of course." Leo laughed. "Of course you can’t organize it. You’re simply unable to stop angry citizens from spontaneously expressing their demands. After all, as elected officials, we must respect the people’s right to assemble, as granted by the Constitution."

"I understand." Smith hung up.

Immediately after, Leo called Joe Byers in Scranton.

The same logic, the same rhetoric.

For these cities that had suffered so much from deindustrialization, anger was like gas trapped underground. All it needed was a single spark to explode.

And now, Leo had just handed them the match.

「...」

「The next morning.」

The sky over Pennsylvania was still overcast.

But on the ground, a "wildcat strike"—one not officially sanctioned by any central Union—was spreading like a virus through the industrial strongholds of Western Pennsylvania.

Erie City.

This was Pennsylvania’s gateway to the Great Lakes.

The State Government had a special administrative office here, responsible for handling taxes and business licenses.

At eight in the morning, the director of the office drove to work as usual.

As he rounded the corner, he had to slam on his brakes.

The road had vanished. In front of him was a wall of steel.

A dozen heavy-duty trucks were parked nose to tail, stretched across the middle of the road, completely blocking the office’s main gate.

Dozens of steelworkers stood in front of the trucks.

They wore grease-stained work clothes, holding wrenches, hammers, or simply clenching their fists.

They stood there, forming a human blockade around the building that represented Harrisburg’s authority.

The office director honked his horn, trying to disperse the crowd.

A tall foreman walked over and tapped on his car window.

The director rolled down his window, his face angry. "What are you people doing? This is illegal obstruction of official business! I’m calling the police!"

The foreman looked at him, his eyes cold.

"Go ahead. The cops are on our side."

The foreman pointed to the trucks behind him.

"We’re not looking for trouble. We just want to ask, where did our wages go?"

"We heard Vice Governor Monroe froze our money. Fine. If we can’t get paid, you don’t get to work."

"Tell Harrisburg we’ll move the trucks when they unfreeze the funds."

"Otherwise, you can just wait it out here with us."

The office director looked at the angry faces all around, silently rolled up his window, and backed his car away.

He knew these people were serious.

「At the same time, in Scranton.」

This old industrial hub, known as the "Electric City," erupted in massive protests.

Mayor Joe Byers happened to be out of town on an inspection tour at this very moment, leaving the chief of police in charge of maintaining order.

The police chief dispatched a few squad cars to lead the procession, under the guise of "ensuring traffic safety."

The massive procession of construction workers marched through the city center.

They held up huge signs.

"WE WANT TO WORK!"

"MONROE = UNEMPLOYMENT!"

"GIVE US OUR MONEY BACK!"

The procession stopped at the entrance of the Democratic Party’s campaign office in Scranton.

The workers threw hundreds of worn-out hard hats into the office’s courtyard.

"Aston Monroe!" a worker leading the group shouted through a megaphone. "While you’re in Philadelphia sipping red wine, do you have any idea our kids are going hungry?"

"You talk a big game about being for Pennsylvania, but you’re nothing but a Vampire!"

「And in Pittsburgh, at the center of the storm.」

Frank Kovalsky demonstrated the decisiveness of an old-school Union leader.

He didn’t organize a massive march. Instead, he chose a more visually striking method.

「Ten o’clock in the morning.」

A massive dump truck drove into Pittsburgh’s East End.

There stood an elegant, small red-brick building—Aston Monroe’s campaign branch in Pittsburgh, set up specifically to connect with local middle-class voters.

The truck reversed, its rear end aimed at the building’s main entrance.

WHOOSH—

With a tremendous roar, tons of rusted scrap metal poured out from the truck bed.

It was discarded rebar, sheet metal, and broken pipes from a demolition site.

This spiky, rusted junk instantly formed a small mountain, completely blocking the campaign office’s doors.

A few professionally dressed staff members heard the noise and ran out, only to be stunned by the sight before them.

Frank jumped down from the truck’s cab.

He stuck a wooden plank into the very top of the scrap heap.

A line of large words was written on the plank in red paint:

"THIS IS THE FUTURE YOU’RE GIVING US."

Frank dusted off his hands and grinned at the terrified staffers.

"Give your boss a message."

"If he doesn’t let our factories run, we’ll bring all of Pittsburgh’s trash right here."

"Let him see what a city looks like after his audit."

These three protests simultaneously broke into Pennsylvania’s media landscape.

But these three were far from the only bleeding wounds.

Anger spread along the state highways, burning like wildfire to every corner of their alliance’s territory.

In Johnston, in Altoona, in Newcastle, Bethlehem...

Every place that had signed the "Memorandum of Regional Economic Mutual Assistance" erupted.

Seven cities, seven angry powder kegs, all detonated at the same time.

The media went wild.

Pennsylvania’s local television stations had never seen such a synchronized display. This simultaneous protest, spanning regions and industries, sent a shiver of excitement through the entire news industry.

Satellite signals from broadcast vans crisscrossed the skies above the state. Even media outlets in Philadelphia and Washington were alerted.

Directors scrambled to switch camera feeds, because there was news everywhere, a breaking story at every turn.

The television screen was split into a nine-panel grid.

The top left panel showed the streets of Erie blockaded by heavy trucks; the center showed the courtyard in Scranton piled high with discarded hard hats; the bottom right showed the mountain of scrap metal in Pittsburgh.

The other panels showed protest scenes from the other cities.

The visual language was incredibly powerful.

This was a statewide class uprising. This was the Rust Belt making its voice heard.

Reporters shoved microphones in front of the angry workers.

"My name is Mike, and I have three kids." A steelworker from Erie spoke to the camera, his eyes red. "The factory shut down because the state said the order was ’in violation.’ In violation? Is buying bread for my kids a violation? Is wanting to work a violation?"

"My wife is sick and needs money for surgery." Another man, a driver from Scranton, held up his bank card. "The money was transferred from Pittsburgh, but the Vice Governor won’t let us touch it. He says it needs to be audited. By the time he’s done auditing, my wife will be dead."

The images were all too real.

The rough skin, the grease-stained clothes, the look of desperation in their eyes after being pushed to the brink—no PR team could ever fake that.

Aston Monroe’s carefully crafted image began to crumble in that instant.

On the billboards in Philadelphia, he was the elite in a custom suit, with a wise gaze, talking about a green future.

But in these television clips, he had become the bureaucrat sitting in his high tower in Harrisburg, callously cutting off workers’ livelihoods and willing to let common people starve for the sake of a political fight.

The winds of public opinion began to shift violently.

People saw only one thing in all this news:

Leo Wallace was creating jobs.

And Aston Monroe was creating unemployment.

Who was the good guy? Who was the bad guy?

In the cold winter of this economic downturn, it was a moral judgment that required no thought at all.

「Twelve o’clock noon.」

Leo sat in the Mayor’s Office, watching the news on the wall-mounted television.

The screen was frozen on the image of the wooden plank Frank had planted in the heap of scrap metal.

"THIS IS THE FUTURE YOU’RE GIVING US."

Leo read the words aloud.

He picked up the phone beside him and dialed Sarah’s number.

"Let’s begin the second wave of the offensive."

Leo gave the order.

"Release the video we shot at the hospital, the one about the father who broke his leg and his son with a broken leg."

"Title it ’The Price of Monroe’s Audit’."

"I want everyone in Pennsylvania to see what Monroe’s ’by-the-book’ audit has really brought to this state."

Leo hung up the phone.

He walked to the window and looked out at the sky.

He knew that Monroe must be fuming in his office in Harrisburg right now.

The Vice Governor who had been hiding behind the scenes, thinking he could use the rules to crush them, had finally been dragged down into the mud.

Now, everyone was in the mud.

It was just a matter of who could hold their breath longer, and who could tolerate the filth.

And on that front, Leo was very confident.

Because he had crawled out of the mud himself.