At the next table was a happy-looking woman with wild gray hair tucked into a conical paper hat of American flags. Lee gave his assumed name, explaining that he was now Lee Duncan, not Leland Reid. He’d worried for several blocks about how to explain this, but she just crossed out the old name and wrote in the new, and gestured that Lee should quietly enter the house.

Inside, the lights were low on the theater seats, and bright onstage. Lee wondered how he could pretend this meant something. A forthright young man who had thought to dress in blue wool coat and red-and-white pinstriped shirt and blue tie—just like a Four Minute Man!—was hectoring his nearly invisible audience.

Some say that from this conflict
Our Nation should keep out.
That sounds to me like sacrilege
And smells like sauerkraut.

Lee’s eyes narrowed. Four Minute Poetry. He had heard rumors that there were Four Minute Poets. This one prowled from stage left to right like a big cat, gesturing into the lights as if he were flinging scoops of water into the audience.

Kaiser Bill, he’ll grab and steal
Most everything he can haul.
He’ll take your farm, your factory,
Your wife and babies all.

Now a reverse flinging motion, as if taking things back and stuffing them into a sack.

He’ll make you work, he’ll make you sweat,
He’ll squeeze you till you groan.
So be a man and come across,
Let Uncle have that loan!

“Thank you.”

This came from the middle of the orchestra seats, where a row of five people sat. Lee, eyes adjusted, could see their silhouettes from behind. These would be the judges, grading each performer on that famed rubric of projection, poise, demeanor, dress, clarity, forcefulness, and grammar.

Most of those who auditioned, Lee knew, hadn’t a clue what the judges wanted. But he was a leg up, for he had purchased a pamphlet from an advertisement in the back of Photoplay, “240 Seconds to Glory: A Guide to Learning the Four Minute Ropes.” Here he learned that most speakers wear their trousers too long. Onstage, your trousers should be hitched higher than normal. Do not try rhetorical flights of fancy, because your audience will hate you. A speech should have fifteen seconds of opening words, forty-five seconds to describe the campaign, two minutes forty-five seconds to heart of appeal, fifteen seconds to seal the deal.

The pamphlet cautioned that to attempt poetry or singing without the requisite knowledge of poetry or singing was a sure recipe for failure.

All it really took was competitors. Discounting his doubts as those of a wartime saboteur, Lee felt emboldened by his original plans. He wasn’t going to say a word. Making a leap that is perhaps faintly familiar, one equating passion with ability, as if staging his own battle with enormous rocks, Lee Duncan was going to be the first Four Minute Actor.