It's either dead or in a coma, and if the latter is the case, then I think it might wake up on its own without us bumping it all the time.
Napoleon's Victory [LONG]
- Thread starter Zach
- Start date
True Enough. Bumping threads only results in giving false hopes to readers (thinking the timeline has been updated) and can annoy the writer.EmmettMcFly55 said:
As I said in another thread, there are two factors that generally explain a long pause or a writer's block: Time and Motivation. If I remember correctly, Zach has said several times that his studies take a lot of time that he thus can not use to write an update. We can't do anything but wait until he gets time and motivation to work on the next update.
Still hoping to see an update though: long time since I've seen a good Napoleonic timeline.
Titus_Pullo
Banned
I'm a film student, and I despeately want to make a faux documentary about this timeline, for a project but since Zach hasn't been on, there's no way to get his permission. Granted this is a long timeline, my faux documentary will only involve the invasion of England and the first few years of the French occupation.
Send him a PM, as I believe Zach still occasionally visits this site.
Who thinks might happen next? I think there might be a WW3 which would lead to a striking French victory and lead to the destruction of the British and Ottoman Empires and would establish America, Russia, and France as the main world powers. Russia and America would compete with France in a Cold War over controlling the world.
Petike
Kicked
This is not an update !!! Calm down, everyone.
I just wanted to inform all of the old and new fans of Pax Gallicana that I've greatly expanded the wiki page of the TL. I've deliberately set up a reading guide that would help first time readers to better appreciate this old but great TL :
http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/timelines/pax_gallicana
But that's not all - I've also made a separate page with several neat lists of all the artworks and visual media that appear in the TL :
http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/timelines/pax_gallicana_media_and_artworks
This way, you'll be able to view them all in one place.
I'm not completely finished with the media section yet (a few more links need to be added), but it's near-complete. Even if this TL never comes alive again and this is the last ever post in this thread, I want the TL to go out with a bang and not be forgotten on AH.com.
I just wanted to inform all of the old and new fans of Pax Gallicana that I've greatly expanded the wiki page of the TL. I've deliberately set up a reading guide that would help first time readers to better appreciate this old but great TL :
http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/timelines/pax_gallicana
But that's not all - I've also made a separate page with several neat lists of all the artworks and visual media that appear in the TL :
http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/timelines/pax_gallicana_media_and_artworks
This way, you'll be able to view them all in one place.
I'm not completely finished with the media section yet (a few more links need to be added), but it's near-complete. Even if this TL never comes alive again and this is the last ever post in this thread, I want the TL to go out with a bang and not be forgotten on AH.com.
The Elusive Update
It is has been 22 months since the last update and before that spurt of updates in 2010 there was another period of absence. Needless to say, I am rather irregular with these updates and I apologize for the haphazard manner of writing this alternate history. I am happy to announce that I've begun writing so far and have sketched a rough draft of this timeline into the 1990s. On a more personal note, I have graduated college and am now working in New York City. Working full time means that there are more evening hours I can devote to creating this alternative universe. Finally, I can't believe that I began this thread when I was still in high school and the thread before this one back in 2006. A lot of personal growth in the meantime.
Anyway, without further ado, here is the first of several updates you may expect from me in the following month:
As soldiers returned home from the war, they faced varying degrees of domestic situations at home. The era between the end of the Second Great War and the late 1970s were truly an era of peace and good feelings. For many countries, that era existed beginning in the early 1940s. The world’s nations turned its attention toward improving the quality of life for its inhabitants. Science and technology spurred along advances in medicine, transportation, health care and education. Items became massed produced for the public consumption. Governments, no longer looking to modernize its armories with the latest killing machines, dedicated more funds toward enhancing standards of living. People in the Americas and Europe born in between the 1920s and early 1940s suddenly faced an unknown future in which no imminent war loomed and no great power posed an immediate threat to their homes. That generation, nicknamed the Expectations Generation because of the sense of optimism and hope for their future, entered the mid-twentieth century facing economic growth, prosperity and unparalleled potential.
Emerging again from a Great War relatively unscathed, the United States was unquestionably the most prosperous country in the world. Its manufacturing sector, sprawling across dozens of cities on the Great Lakes, had churned out weapons, ammunition and supplies for the nation’s war effort. Those factories quickly shifted their focuses toward domestic items. Previously unobtainable luxury items such as televisions, kitchen appliances and automobiles flooded American homes and driveways. Returning soldiers from the Far East brought back stories of battle and horrors but mainly wanted to return to their normal lives. Women, who had worked in the factories while so many men were gone, returned to the homes but many sought jobs in varying fields. The veterans were helped by the government’s passage of the American Servicemen’s Return and Reinvestment Act (ASRRA) in 1942 that provided federal funds to aid returning soldiers in education, housing and health. It was a sprawling bill that aided untold millions of men in their desire for a better life. Notably, there was also a Women’s Vocational Support Act (WVSA), passed in 1944 with the strong support of the few female members of Congress, which provided federal funds for single and married women to attend day or night school to learn a trade or skill. Through this bill, tens of thousands of nurses, teachers, secretaries and more than a few small business owners learned their trade.
The United States, and its southern neighbor to some extent, also experienced a boon in immigration during the postwar period. Many fled during the war from the ravages that plagued their homelands. New York City in particular became home to large Polish and other Eastern European populations. In the aftermath of Russia’s creation of Velikslavia and Byzantium, several hundred thousand Muslims immigrated to the Americas. The vast majority, fearing the backwards attitude the Confederacy still harbored toward people of color, settled across the Northeastern United States, where they, like Jewish populations years before, assimilated in the countries of religious freedom. The Bronx, in New York City, long on the periphery of the large metropolis and home to a small black community, became the center for Muslim culture in the United States. Before long, minarets would dot the borough’s skyline, a sharp contrast to the towering spires of the new skyscrapers downtown. For some wealthy Ottoman landowners that had ruled the Balkans for centuries, the appeal to transfer to the Confederacy was evident. Many did go to the fertile agriculture grounds of the Carolinas and the Mississippi Delta, buying up struggling plantations and turning them around. Others, mainly merchants, rose to prominent positions in trading houses from New Orleans to Charleston. The Ottoman Diaspora to the Americas shaped the two republics for decades to come.
Even within the borders of the American republics the populations shifted, attracted by the appeal of warmer and sunnier weather. In the United States, the populations of California, Lower California, New Mexico and Monterrey boomed from the 1940s onward. The Gulf of California, an American lake for decades but long neglected by any significant population centers, became the site of extensive real estate deals. The area became a popular destination spot for tourists, wealthy individuals and retired workers who could afford the trek. A sleepy coastal city on the eastern shore of Lower California, Las Verdades, grew in the 1950s as a glittering center of casinos and show business. The population of “Sin City” as it became popularly known, grew from a few thousand in 1930 to nearly a hundred thousand by 1970 with no signs of slowing down. The burgeoning motion picture industry blossomed in Southern California’s Los Angeles, particularly in Hollywood. In the Confederate States, the state of Florida’s southern coastline experienced further growth in development and growth as dozens of expensive resorts were created. The area, which was sparsely populated, soon became the fastest growing in the state and Florida became the third-most populated state in the country by 1960 after Virginia and Georgia. Cuba and Puerto Rico, Confederate state and American territory, respectively, also benefited from the growth of the republics’ real estate, construction and tourism interests. The Spanish-speaking islands became prime tourist destinations for the English-speaking mainland.
In 1944, the United States faced its first competitive election in many years. After the so-called Secret Pocketbook Scandal of the late 1920s had forced President Woodruff out of office by not seeking the nomination and the subsequent revelations that the whole embarrassment had been a Democratic plot, the party of Jefferson, McClellan and Deveraux had been stained. The Democrats had lost the 1936 and 1940 elections by fairly wide margins, as the Republicans ran on “stability and scandal,” alluding to the damaging “Gang of 49” scandal of 1931. Throughout the 1930s and during the war, the Republicans’ laissez-faire, pro-business policies led to tremendous growth among industries by the gap between rich and poor grew wider than it had ever been before. Labor, which had been the strongest opposition to the Republican policies during the 1930s, regularly agitated against Woodruff and Everett’s ignorance of the lower classes’ struggles. In 1940, the presidential election was closer but the Democrat, veteran statesmen Donald L. Littleton of Wisconsin, fell dramatically short because of the finely tuned Republican campaign tactics tying Littleton to the “gang of 49.” In 1942, however, a small postwar economic slump fueled resentment toward the ruling party and the Democratic Party captured control of Congress for the first time since 1930. In 1944, the Democrats faced an exciting primary (the first of its kind, as opposed to the convention system) that pitted Columbia Governor Kenneth C. Minton against West Virginia Senator Oscar N. Sawyer. Minton was ultimately victorious and chose Sawyer, a handsome and charismatic former small town lawyer, as his running mate. The incumbent, President Everett Glenn, had been weakened by the economic downturn and his seeming inability to combat it. Still, Minton had to contend with wealthier Republican opponents and their personal attacks against he and his record in Columbia. The race was close. Minton swept the labor-friendly Great Lakes region and agrarian Western States while Glenn retained his bastions of support in New England and New York. The election was decided in the Far West, where the growing states cast their lot with Minton and he became the first Democrat to be president in 12 years.
President Kenneth C. Minton of the United States of America signing legislation to improve the lives of millions of Americans.
The Minton Administration brought broad-based reform and positive changes to American life. Buoyed by strong Democratic majorities in Congress and the popularity of the ASRRA programs, Minton embarked on a campaign that he called the “Fair Shake,” but was officially known as the American Dream Project (A.D.P.). It consisted of numerous welfare programs to assist the poor, needy, and the elderly, federal projects to enhance public spaces including roads, highways, railroads, parks, and waterways, and the creation of specific guidelines to streamline and improve the American education and health care systems. Under President Minton, the federal government grew and expanded. The Department of Education, Health and Welfare formed, along with the popular Bureau of Social Protection (formed from the Social Protection Act) that guaranteed income to retired Americans after a certain age. In addition, Minton authorized several projects to bring about electricity to rural communities across the country, from the Dakotas to Monterrey. The various projects in the A.D.P. were, of course, not free and the country’s coffers, though buoyed by prosperity, growth and a booming international trade, were soon also filled with taxes from the wealthiest citizens. Respected or reviled, these men had enjoyed the various Republican administrations since the turn of the century by their anti-tax attitudes; some of these “robber barons” paid nothing at all. The disparity between rich and poor slowly decreased, primarily because the legions of poor soon found themselves aided in their dire straits by a friendly and proactive force in Washington. The popularity of Minton’s programs were manifested in his landslide re-election in 1948. During his second term, Minton continued overseeing these programs and advocated for further funds to be used to help women and minorities across the country gain access to more education, earning him the nickname the “Schoolhouse President.” While he faced opposition from Republicans and conservative Supreme Court Justices, the 1947 Supreme Court ruling Warren v. Roberts found Minton’s policies to be constitutional and broadly expanded the power and scope of the federal government.
Not so, in the Confederate States. Long a bastion of conservatism and state autonomy, the country entered the 1940s victorious but less prosperous than the United States. Indeed smaller and with a less impressive industrial base, the war had been more of a drain on the country than it was worth for many citizens. Although the Confederacy continued dominance of the Caribbean and even parts of Latin America, many voters (which, beginning in 1940 included women, a full 30 years after the United States) had had enough with the foreign interventions. The Confederacy soon turned inward despite its winning status as a world power. Whig President Bates, who should have, by all accounts, become increasingly popular as a victor against Japan and the authoritarian governments in South America, became unpopular among the still-powerful wealthy planter class and in 1946 they supported the National Party’s nominee, Governor Olin B. Riley. Ironically, the National Party had moved to become the party of limited federal government, the position once held by the Whig Party. Riley won the election with a plurality of the vote in a sort of last hurrah for the old planter class, now doomed to be in the ideological minority. The Freedom Party had an impressive showing and its candidate took the state of Sumter. A radical party, the Anti-Constitutionalists, which advocated for a much more centralized and authoritarian regime, made a strong showing in its debut election, drawing a hundred thousand votes from disgruntled white workers.
Meanwhile, the class issues in the country remained rocky. While returning veterans from Japan and South America benefited from various state programs ensuring pensions and even subsidies for higher education, many men found themselves unemployed or underemployed as Confederate factories shifted their attention to commercial goods. In the 1930s, thousands of unemployed blacks had left the country, many to Mexico and Central America, where their skilled labor in agriculture and manufacturing contributed to those countries’ growth. For the remaining blacks in the Confederacy, still numbering around 12 million, life was harsh as second-class citizens, often remaining in urban ghettos or in abject poverty in rural areas. Many worked for small wages in the fields as sharecroppers. Hundreds of thousands of black men were arrested regularly across the Deep South states and impressed into convict-labor units, often for the paltriest crimes – if there was any crime at all. White workers, meanwhile, had been allowed to form unions, but during the mid 1930s and across 1940s – with a brief break during the war – the white laborers had been at odds with management across the board, particularly in the larger manufacturing centers in Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Birmingham, among other cities.
These men and few women comprised the backbone of the Anti-Constitutionalists’ support in the 1946 election. The Confederacy had always been comprised of men and women who most of the times rejected national government support and relied on various state governments’ actions. Indeed, the thirteen states’ politics were much more fluid and turbulent, with various factions and sub-factions of various parties aligning and forming coalitions for or against a governor or legislator. The government in Richmond since President Jackson’s administration’s abolition of slavery had done very little in the way of domestic policy and particularly in forging any new paths for the betterment of the population. That was the work of the states. But when the state governments in the 1930s and 1940s became inadequate for many voters’ demands – for a number of reasons, including but not limited to, a growing population, demands for a higher standard of living, and the growing restlessness of the extremely poor black millions – more and more white voters looked to the Confederate national government. Unfortunately for them, President Riley, riding a wave of elite support that wished to maintain the status quo, was not the president for activism from Richmond. The government activist to the north in Kenneth Minton did certainly not help Riley’s political situation. Riley, for six undistinguished years, sat in the Gray House and stuck to his limited federal government principles and signed a record low number of laws. Meanwhile, his countrymen’s standard of living plummeted, whites workers began to slip into poverty once known only to blacks, and blacks, always at the short-end of the Confederate hierarchy, emigrated, starved, or eked out a poor living into the 1950s.
In the 1948 midterm elections in Confederacy, the Anti-Constitutionalists elected their first representative and drew a quarter million votes. Sanford Tarbell, a steelworker from Birmingham, raised hell in the 43rd Confederate Congress. The Anti-Constitutionalists were a unique brand in Confederate political philosophy. For many years, the Whig and National Parties had dominated politics, the latter advocating for more federal intervention than the former, but still within tight constraints as the Confederate Constitution allowed. The Freedom Party of the twentieth century, liberally radical in its advocacy of civil rights for all citizens, took the traditional local approach and attempted to change the conversation among the states. The Anti-Constitutionalists were new in that they looked to Richmond for change. More radically, they looked to changing the Confederate Constitution to increase federal power. The party was also unique in that they were in part inspired by the federal advocacy of the American Democrats under President Minton, who took federal government intervention to a new level. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, white Confederate workers looked enviously at their American counterparts as their standard of living increased, buoyed by the help of the central government. The Confederate state governments could do little with their smaller budgets and limited reach to help the millions of disgruntled whites. In 1950, voters sent five more Anti-Constitutionalists to the Confederate Congress and made big gains in various state houses. Clearly, the movement was growing as the Confederate economy stagnated.
Congressional candidate Sanford Tarbell on the campaign trail in Alabama, giving a speech in favor of a stronger national government to a crowd of disgruntled white workers.
The new party did hold one Confederate tradition near and dear: subjugation of the country’s vast black population. Unlike the Freedom Party, the Anti-Constitutionalists appealed only to whites, who, after all, made up Confederate voters. The situation for the oppressed minority grew worse in the 1950s, spawning a number of alternative solutions to their plight. Previously, some had escaped to the United States but were limited in a series of harsh laws passed in the 1920s and 1930s. Others left for Latin America or Africa but many more stayed. Thousands more fled into the deep swamps in the wetlands in the Carolinas, Georgia, Louisiana and Florida where they formed independent communes, under the radar of state law enforcement. While highly illegal, officials who knew about these communities turned a blind eye because in some ways they alleviated the strain on resources present in so many large towns and cities with large black populations. In some rural areas, blacks were able to form loose alliances with poor whites who were traditionally averse to the Confederate government, such as the regions in Appalachia and eastern Tennessee. Unfortunately, the vast majority of blacks remained stuck in desperate urban ghettos or impoverished rural communities, working low-paying jobs or not at all, hardly helped by the overstretched state agencies and ignored by wealthier whites. They viewed the Anti-Constitutionalists with some sort of favor; after all, decades of Whig or National control had brought scant improvement in their way of life. Still, something had to be done for the millions of blacks living in poverty. The class divide in the Confederacy, between rich and poor, black and white, was growing too stark.
The Federated Indian Tribes of North America prospered due to its oil wealth, stable government and non-interventionist foreign policy. Although American and Confederate speculators dominated the nation’s oil reserves, the twenty million inhabitants of FITNA enjoyed the economic benefits of the resource. A broad expansion in public services, primarily education, arrived in the early 1940s, pre-dating Minton’s Fair Shake. The nation’s Chiefs continued to rule for two years at a time over a loose confederation of tribes, deferential to the colorful Council of Chiefs and the democratic House of Representatives. The Council of Chiefs consisted of the largely elected heads of the numerous Native American tribes and served as both a governing and advisory body to the Chief of the Federated Tribe, chosen every two years from among the Council. In the 1920s, there was an effort to give more power to the House of Representatives but the more conservative Council shot the idea down. In a sense, the country remained fairly undemocratic at its top levels, but among the forty tribes in the country, traditional mechanisms of governance existed and thrived. The government outlawed a brief foray into the growing gambling industry, citing its damaging social consequences and observing that their Anglo neighbors, particularly in Las Verdades, provided plenty of opportunity for such a vice. The neutral country entered the mid-twentieth century wealthy and prosperous, friendly to its neighbors and at peace.
It is has been 22 months since the last update and before that spurt of updates in 2010 there was another period of absence. Needless to say, I am rather irregular with these updates and I apologize for the haphazard manner of writing this alternate history. I am happy to announce that I've begun writing so far and have sketched a rough draft of this timeline into the 1990s. On a more personal note, I have graduated college and am now working in New York City. Working full time means that there are more evening hours I can devote to creating this alternative universe. Finally, I can't believe that I began this thread when I was still in high school and the thread before this one back in 2006. A lot of personal growth in the meantime.
Anyway, without further ado, here is the first of several updates you may expect from me in the following month:
The World in the Era of Peace and Good Feelings (1941-1976)
As soldiers returned home from the war, they faced varying degrees of domestic situations at home. The era between the end of the Second Great War and the late 1970s were truly an era of peace and good feelings. For many countries, that era existed beginning in the early 1940s. The world’s nations turned its attention toward improving the quality of life for its inhabitants. Science and technology spurred along advances in medicine, transportation, health care and education. Items became massed produced for the public consumption. Governments, no longer looking to modernize its armories with the latest killing machines, dedicated more funds toward enhancing standards of living. People in the Americas and Europe born in between the 1920s and early 1940s suddenly faced an unknown future in which no imminent war loomed and no great power posed an immediate threat to their homes. That generation, nicknamed the Expectations Generation because of the sense of optimism and hope for their future, entered the mid-twentieth century facing economic growth, prosperity and unparalleled potential.
The North American Republics to 1952
Emerging again from a Great War relatively unscathed, the United States was unquestionably the most prosperous country in the world. Its manufacturing sector, sprawling across dozens of cities on the Great Lakes, had churned out weapons, ammunition and supplies for the nation’s war effort. Those factories quickly shifted their focuses toward domestic items. Previously unobtainable luxury items such as televisions, kitchen appliances and automobiles flooded American homes and driveways. Returning soldiers from the Far East brought back stories of battle and horrors but mainly wanted to return to their normal lives. Women, who had worked in the factories while so many men were gone, returned to the homes but many sought jobs in varying fields. The veterans were helped by the government’s passage of the American Servicemen’s Return and Reinvestment Act (ASRRA) in 1942 that provided federal funds to aid returning soldiers in education, housing and health. It was a sprawling bill that aided untold millions of men in their desire for a better life. Notably, there was also a Women’s Vocational Support Act (WVSA), passed in 1944 with the strong support of the few female members of Congress, which provided federal funds for single and married women to attend day or night school to learn a trade or skill. Through this bill, tens of thousands of nurses, teachers, secretaries and more than a few small business owners learned their trade.
The United States, and its southern neighbor to some extent, also experienced a boon in immigration during the postwar period. Many fled during the war from the ravages that plagued their homelands. New York City in particular became home to large Polish and other Eastern European populations. In the aftermath of Russia’s creation of Velikslavia and Byzantium, several hundred thousand Muslims immigrated to the Americas. The vast majority, fearing the backwards attitude the Confederacy still harbored toward people of color, settled across the Northeastern United States, where they, like Jewish populations years before, assimilated in the countries of religious freedom. The Bronx, in New York City, long on the periphery of the large metropolis and home to a small black community, became the center for Muslim culture in the United States. Before long, minarets would dot the borough’s skyline, a sharp contrast to the towering spires of the new skyscrapers downtown. For some wealthy Ottoman landowners that had ruled the Balkans for centuries, the appeal to transfer to the Confederacy was evident. Many did go to the fertile agriculture grounds of the Carolinas and the Mississippi Delta, buying up struggling plantations and turning them around. Others, mainly merchants, rose to prominent positions in trading houses from New Orleans to Charleston. The Ottoman Diaspora to the Americas shaped the two republics for decades to come.
Even within the borders of the American republics the populations shifted, attracted by the appeal of warmer and sunnier weather. In the United States, the populations of California, Lower California, New Mexico and Monterrey boomed from the 1940s onward. The Gulf of California, an American lake for decades but long neglected by any significant population centers, became the site of extensive real estate deals. The area became a popular destination spot for tourists, wealthy individuals and retired workers who could afford the trek. A sleepy coastal city on the eastern shore of Lower California, Las Verdades, grew in the 1950s as a glittering center of casinos and show business. The population of “Sin City” as it became popularly known, grew from a few thousand in 1930 to nearly a hundred thousand by 1970 with no signs of slowing down. The burgeoning motion picture industry blossomed in Southern California’s Los Angeles, particularly in Hollywood. In the Confederate States, the state of Florida’s southern coastline experienced further growth in development and growth as dozens of expensive resorts were created. The area, which was sparsely populated, soon became the fastest growing in the state and Florida became the third-most populated state in the country by 1960 after Virginia and Georgia. Cuba and Puerto Rico, Confederate state and American territory, respectively, also benefited from the growth of the republics’ real estate, construction and tourism interests. The Spanish-speaking islands became prime tourist destinations for the English-speaking mainland.
In 1944, the United States faced its first competitive election in many years. After the so-called Secret Pocketbook Scandal of the late 1920s had forced President Woodruff out of office by not seeking the nomination and the subsequent revelations that the whole embarrassment had been a Democratic plot, the party of Jefferson, McClellan and Deveraux had been stained. The Democrats had lost the 1936 and 1940 elections by fairly wide margins, as the Republicans ran on “stability and scandal,” alluding to the damaging “Gang of 49” scandal of 1931. Throughout the 1930s and during the war, the Republicans’ laissez-faire, pro-business policies led to tremendous growth among industries by the gap between rich and poor grew wider than it had ever been before. Labor, which had been the strongest opposition to the Republican policies during the 1930s, regularly agitated against Woodruff and Everett’s ignorance of the lower classes’ struggles. In 1940, the presidential election was closer but the Democrat, veteran statesmen Donald L. Littleton of Wisconsin, fell dramatically short because of the finely tuned Republican campaign tactics tying Littleton to the “gang of 49.” In 1942, however, a small postwar economic slump fueled resentment toward the ruling party and the Democratic Party captured control of Congress for the first time since 1930. In 1944, the Democrats faced an exciting primary (the first of its kind, as opposed to the convention system) that pitted Columbia Governor Kenneth C. Minton against West Virginia Senator Oscar N. Sawyer. Minton was ultimately victorious and chose Sawyer, a handsome and charismatic former small town lawyer, as his running mate. The incumbent, President Everett Glenn, had been weakened by the economic downturn and his seeming inability to combat it. Still, Minton had to contend with wealthier Republican opponents and their personal attacks against he and his record in Columbia. The race was close. Minton swept the labor-friendly Great Lakes region and agrarian Western States while Glenn retained his bastions of support in New England and New York. The election was decided in the Far West, where the growing states cast their lot with Minton and he became the first Democrat to be president in 12 years.
President Kenneth C. Minton of the United States of America signing legislation to improve the lives of millions of Americans.
The Minton Administration brought broad-based reform and positive changes to American life. Buoyed by strong Democratic majorities in Congress and the popularity of the ASRRA programs, Minton embarked on a campaign that he called the “Fair Shake,” but was officially known as the American Dream Project (A.D.P.). It consisted of numerous welfare programs to assist the poor, needy, and the elderly, federal projects to enhance public spaces including roads, highways, railroads, parks, and waterways, and the creation of specific guidelines to streamline and improve the American education and health care systems. Under President Minton, the federal government grew and expanded. The Department of Education, Health and Welfare formed, along with the popular Bureau of Social Protection (formed from the Social Protection Act) that guaranteed income to retired Americans after a certain age. In addition, Minton authorized several projects to bring about electricity to rural communities across the country, from the Dakotas to Monterrey. The various projects in the A.D.P. were, of course, not free and the country’s coffers, though buoyed by prosperity, growth and a booming international trade, were soon also filled with taxes from the wealthiest citizens. Respected or reviled, these men had enjoyed the various Republican administrations since the turn of the century by their anti-tax attitudes; some of these “robber barons” paid nothing at all. The disparity between rich and poor slowly decreased, primarily because the legions of poor soon found themselves aided in their dire straits by a friendly and proactive force in Washington. The popularity of Minton’s programs were manifested in his landslide re-election in 1948. During his second term, Minton continued overseeing these programs and advocated for further funds to be used to help women and minorities across the country gain access to more education, earning him the nickname the “Schoolhouse President.” While he faced opposition from Republicans and conservative Supreme Court Justices, the 1947 Supreme Court ruling Warren v. Roberts found Minton’s policies to be constitutional and broadly expanded the power and scope of the federal government.
Not so, in the Confederate States. Long a bastion of conservatism and state autonomy, the country entered the 1940s victorious but less prosperous than the United States. Indeed smaller and with a less impressive industrial base, the war had been more of a drain on the country than it was worth for many citizens. Although the Confederacy continued dominance of the Caribbean and even parts of Latin America, many voters (which, beginning in 1940 included women, a full 30 years after the United States) had had enough with the foreign interventions. The Confederacy soon turned inward despite its winning status as a world power. Whig President Bates, who should have, by all accounts, become increasingly popular as a victor against Japan and the authoritarian governments in South America, became unpopular among the still-powerful wealthy planter class and in 1946 they supported the National Party’s nominee, Governor Olin B. Riley. Ironically, the National Party had moved to become the party of limited federal government, the position once held by the Whig Party. Riley won the election with a plurality of the vote in a sort of last hurrah for the old planter class, now doomed to be in the ideological minority. The Freedom Party had an impressive showing and its candidate took the state of Sumter. A radical party, the Anti-Constitutionalists, which advocated for a much more centralized and authoritarian regime, made a strong showing in its debut election, drawing a hundred thousand votes from disgruntled white workers.
Meanwhile, the class issues in the country remained rocky. While returning veterans from Japan and South America benefited from various state programs ensuring pensions and even subsidies for higher education, many men found themselves unemployed or underemployed as Confederate factories shifted their attention to commercial goods. In the 1930s, thousands of unemployed blacks had left the country, many to Mexico and Central America, where their skilled labor in agriculture and manufacturing contributed to those countries’ growth. For the remaining blacks in the Confederacy, still numbering around 12 million, life was harsh as second-class citizens, often remaining in urban ghettos or in abject poverty in rural areas. Many worked for small wages in the fields as sharecroppers. Hundreds of thousands of black men were arrested regularly across the Deep South states and impressed into convict-labor units, often for the paltriest crimes – if there was any crime at all. White workers, meanwhile, had been allowed to form unions, but during the mid 1930s and across 1940s – with a brief break during the war – the white laborers had been at odds with management across the board, particularly in the larger manufacturing centers in Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Birmingham, among other cities.
These men and few women comprised the backbone of the Anti-Constitutionalists’ support in the 1946 election. The Confederacy had always been comprised of men and women who most of the times rejected national government support and relied on various state governments’ actions. Indeed, the thirteen states’ politics were much more fluid and turbulent, with various factions and sub-factions of various parties aligning and forming coalitions for or against a governor or legislator. The government in Richmond since President Jackson’s administration’s abolition of slavery had done very little in the way of domestic policy and particularly in forging any new paths for the betterment of the population. That was the work of the states. But when the state governments in the 1930s and 1940s became inadequate for many voters’ demands – for a number of reasons, including but not limited to, a growing population, demands for a higher standard of living, and the growing restlessness of the extremely poor black millions – more and more white voters looked to the Confederate national government. Unfortunately for them, President Riley, riding a wave of elite support that wished to maintain the status quo, was not the president for activism from Richmond. The government activist to the north in Kenneth Minton did certainly not help Riley’s political situation. Riley, for six undistinguished years, sat in the Gray House and stuck to his limited federal government principles and signed a record low number of laws. Meanwhile, his countrymen’s standard of living plummeted, whites workers began to slip into poverty once known only to blacks, and blacks, always at the short-end of the Confederate hierarchy, emigrated, starved, or eked out a poor living into the 1950s.
In the 1948 midterm elections in Confederacy, the Anti-Constitutionalists elected their first representative and drew a quarter million votes. Sanford Tarbell, a steelworker from Birmingham, raised hell in the 43rd Confederate Congress. The Anti-Constitutionalists were a unique brand in Confederate political philosophy. For many years, the Whig and National Parties had dominated politics, the latter advocating for more federal intervention than the former, but still within tight constraints as the Confederate Constitution allowed. The Freedom Party of the twentieth century, liberally radical in its advocacy of civil rights for all citizens, took the traditional local approach and attempted to change the conversation among the states. The Anti-Constitutionalists were new in that they looked to Richmond for change. More radically, they looked to changing the Confederate Constitution to increase federal power. The party was also unique in that they were in part inspired by the federal advocacy of the American Democrats under President Minton, who took federal government intervention to a new level. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, white Confederate workers looked enviously at their American counterparts as their standard of living increased, buoyed by the help of the central government. The Confederate state governments could do little with their smaller budgets and limited reach to help the millions of disgruntled whites. In 1950, voters sent five more Anti-Constitutionalists to the Confederate Congress and made big gains in various state houses. Clearly, the movement was growing as the Confederate economy stagnated.
Congressional candidate Sanford Tarbell on the campaign trail in Alabama, giving a speech in favor of a stronger national government to a crowd of disgruntled white workers.
The new party did hold one Confederate tradition near and dear: subjugation of the country’s vast black population. Unlike the Freedom Party, the Anti-Constitutionalists appealed only to whites, who, after all, made up Confederate voters. The situation for the oppressed minority grew worse in the 1950s, spawning a number of alternative solutions to their plight. Previously, some had escaped to the United States but were limited in a series of harsh laws passed in the 1920s and 1930s. Others left for Latin America or Africa but many more stayed. Thousands more fled into the deep swamps in the wetlands in the Carolinas, Georgia, Louisiana and Florida where they formed independent communes, under the radar of state law enforcement. While highly illegal, officials who knew about these communities turned a blind eye because in some ways they alleviated the strain on resources present in so many large towns and cities with large black populations. In some rural areas, blacks were able to form loose alliances with poor whites who were traditionally averse to the Confederate government, such as the regions in Appalachia and eastern Tennessee. Unfortunately, the vast majority of blacks remained stuck in desperate urban ghettos or impoverished rural communities, working low-paying jobs or not at all, hardly helped by the overstretched state agencies and ignored by wealthier whites. They viewed the Anti-Constitutionalists with some sort of favor; after all, decades of Whig or National control had brought scant improvement in their way of life. Still, something had to be done for the millions of blacks living in poverty. The class divide in the Confederacy, between rich and poor, black and white, was growing too stark.
The Federated Indian Tribes of North America prospered due to its oil wealth, stable government and non-interventionist foreign policy. Although American and Confederate speculators dominated the nation’s oil reserves, the twenty million inhabitants of FITNA enjoyed the economic benefits of the resource. A broad expansion in public services, primarily education, arrived in the early 1940s, pre-dating Minton’s Fair Shake. The nation’s Chiefs continued to rule for two years at a time over a loose confederation of tribes, deferential to the colorful Council of Chiefs and the democratic House of Representatives. The Council of Chiefs consisted of the largely elected heads of the numerous Native American tribes and served as both a governing and advisory body to the Chief of the Federated Tribe, chosen every two years from among the Council. In the 1920s, there was an effort to give more power to the House of Representatives but the more conservative Council shot the idea down. In a sense, the country remained fairly undemocratic at its top levels, but among the forty tribes in the country, traditional mechanisms of governance existed and thrived. The government outlawed a brief foray into the growing gambling industry, citing its damaging social consequences and observing that their Anglo neighbors, particularly in Las Verdades, provided plenty of opportunity for such a vice. The neutral country entered the mid-twentieth century wealthy and prosperous, friendly to its neighbors and at peace.
Kitiem3000
Donor
Awesome to see an update. I'll make it special. I'm going to re-read the whole story to properly enjoy this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9o_mtkHSqM
That said, my predictions of a Third World War erupting in the 1950s were clearly...off.
That said, my predictions of a Third World War erupting in the 1950s were clearly...off.
Well, thank you everyone for the gleeful responses to this post! In the next week or two, you'll see updates on (in order!) Latin America, Western Europe, the British Empire and its Dominions and Russia and it's sphere of influence. Then I'll have to write some on the Far East, Middle East and Africa, the latter, of course, is the most ignored among many Western-centric timelimes so that will be a little difficult!
In the next week or two, you'll see updates on (in order!) Latin America, Western Europe, the British Empire and its Dominions and Russia and it's sphere of influence. Then I'll have to write some on the Far East, Middle East and Africa, the latter, of course, is the most ignored among many Western-centric timelimes so that will be a little difficult!Good update, and I'm glad to hear that more are going to come soon.
Poor Confederates, they still haven't sorted out basic rights. And the update does not exactly paint a pretty picture for the future. Well, let's hope it turns out all right anyway.
Poor Confederates, they still haven't sorted out basic rights. And the update does not exactly paint a pretty picture for the future. Well, let's hope it turns out all right anyway.