Chapter 1, Scene 3
Date: February 6, 1936
Location: Washington, D.C. – Press Gallery, U.S. Capitol
Outside the Capitol, the streets of Washington lay slick with sleet. Gray salt crusted every curb. Sofia Rodríguez had chosen the wrong shoes. Again. Leather too thin, soles too honest. The city chewed them to pieces.
She arrived fifteen minutes before the vote, breathless, damp, and unimpressed. The House chamber roared below, all booming laughter and polished brass. Above them, behind a thin pane of glass in the press gallery, Sofia sat with a yellow notebook in her lap and a fountain pen leaking blue onto her fingers.
To her right, a pair of New York Times correspondents traded remarks like fencing blows—tight, fast, and always a little smug. Sofia ignored them. Her mind was on Madrid, and the question that would dominate tomorrow’s front page:
Lindbergh: President of the People, or Engineer of Empire?
That was the headline she’d written in her notes, though it would never run under her byline. El Nacional was still controlled by old monarchists, despite their flirtation with the Popular Front. They didn’t care for nuance. Or women. Or expatriates. But they paid her, and they published her—so long as she didn’t write anything too sharp.
Below, the House Speaker banged his gavel. The chamber quieted. The vote was called.
“On the matter of appropriations for the National Infrastructure Act of 1936…”
The roll call began.
Sofia glanced at her notes. The bill included subsidies for highway construction, dam expansion, electrification of rural districts, and expanded apprenticeships in electromechanical fields. It was Roosevelt’s DNA with Lindbergh’s blueprints. A strange hybrid. Conservative newspapers called it a betrayal. The left still didn’t trust him.
And yet—he was winning.
“Bastard’s made peace with both sides,” she muttered.
“Sorry?” asked the man beside her.
She waved him off and stood, pressing her face close to the glass. The air smelled of floor polish and slow tension. Lindbergh wasn’t in the chamber—presidents didn’t attend these things—but his fingerprints were everywhere.
The vote tally lit up on the board. 283 in favor. 149 opposed.
Passed.
A cheer went up below. Sofia stared, stunned—not by the outcome, but by the ease of it.
Two hours later, she sat in a small café off Constitution Avenue, hunched over her Remington portable. Her coat dripped onto the floor. A cinnamon bun cooled on a saucer. The radio behind the counter buzzed faint jazz and presidential quotes.
“Employment is not charity,” Lindbergh’s voice crackled. “It is dignity.”
She paused, frowning.
That line… she’d heard it before. Not from him—from a miners’ union in Bilbao. Were his speechwriters stealing from Spanish radicals now? Or was he just an intuitive plagiarist?
She resumed typing:
President Lindbergh’s sweeping infrastructure program passed the House today by a comfortable margin. Though praised by industrialists and labor leaders alike, the bill’s contents reveal a deeper ideological tension in the administration—an attempt to reconcile technical elitism with popular need.
She sipped her coffee, black and bitter. The truth was, she didn’t know what to make of Lindbergh.
He supported government-led employment, yes. But he’d also blacklisted three immigrant newspapers last week for “promoting sedition.” He wanted electric roads and modern schools—but remained silent on the lynchings in Mississippi. He had grounded airships for safety, yet refused to speak against Mussolini’s campaign in Abyssinia.
A man of contradictions.
A man of silence.
And silence, Sofia believed, was the most political act of all.
She closed her typewriter, packed her notes, and lit a cigarette on the walk back to her boarding house in Adams Morgan. Valentine’s Day advertisements lined the windows—roses, telegrams, dinner for two. In Mexico City, February was a slow festival of soft heat and false romance. Here, it was a gringo holiday dressed in frost and phoniness.
Still, a part of her ached. She hadn’t kissed anyone since crossing the border in ’34. Two years of headlines and cheap cigarettes. She thought of Emilio, her old friend in Mexico’s foreign press office. He would have teased her: “Washington is too cold, Sofi. No one there believes in love. Only order.”
She smiled.
Maybe he was right.
At 8:15 the next morning, she was back at the Capitol—this time for the Senate hearing on funding allocation. She recognized the same aides, same lobbyists, same leather-bound boredom. This was a city that wrapped steel around words.
“Ms. Rodríguez?”
She turned.
A staffer in gray held out an envelope. “From the Executive Office,” he said. “Signed by Mr. Walker.”
She raised a brow. “The President’s private secretary?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’re requested at the South Auditorium at ten.”
He left before she could ask why.
At 10:02, Sofia stood in a side hall of the Executive Office Building, heart beating faster than she liked. The room smelled of paper and pipe smoke. Five other journalists stood beside her—two Americans, one French, one Brazilian, and a tall woman from India whom Sofia recognized from League of Nations briefings.
Lindbergh entered without warning.
No introduction. No aides. No ceremony.
He wore a dark suit, gray tie, no lapel pin.
“Good morning,” he said. “I appreciate your time.”
The room stood straighter.
“I’m not issuing a statement,” he continued. “But I thought the foreign press deserved clarity.”
He looked at Sofia first.
“You’re with El Nacional?”
“I file there, yes. And with several Latin American publications.”
He nodded. “Then you understand: America’s future is tied to its ability to stand alone. Not in isolation, but in independence.”
“Are those different things?” she asked.
Lindbergh paused. His eyes were pale and sharp, like Arctic glass.
“Isolation is retreat. Independence is restraint.”
The others scribbled. Sofia didn’t.
He continued: “We cannot fix Europe. We can fix our roads. We can fix our water lines. We can fix what’s broken in Pittsburgh and Peoria and Mobile. That’s where I will focus.”
Sofia said, “And when the broken parts lie outside our borders?”
He hesitated.
“Then I will weigh the cost.”
Later, in the coatroom, the Indian journalist turned to her. “He didn’t answer you.”
Sofia zipped her notebook shut. “He never does.”
“Do you believe him?”
“No,” Sofia said, slipping on her scarf. “But I believe what he builds will last. The question is who gets to use it.”