This specific subject will get a pretty detailed review in the next couple of days.
For the Republic: A History of the Second American Civil War
- Thread starter The Angry Observer
- Start date
"Signs of the Times" (Chapter 23)
"Signs of the Times"
"Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root." -Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman (center right, standing)
When reflecting on the social consequences of the Second American Civil War, the city of New York is as good a microcosm as is to be found. The beating heart of the Republic, New York swarmed with a wide variety of political opinions that stretched the spectrum from center-right to the furthest fringes of the left. It was, even before the war’s outbreak, a hotbed of radical social ideals. Here, the heavily moralist Progressives clashed with Free Lovers, and feminists and civil rights activists began to lay the foundations of their movements. The war, however, would change everything.
Emma Goldman (center right, standing)
As the men were swept off to the front lines, women soon found work in traditionally masculine fields, becoming police officers, firefighters, machinists, and countless other professions. Then, as it became clear that the alternative was to start conscripting child soldiers, the women joined the fight themselves. The decision to allow women into combat roles can be traced back to two individuals specifically. The first was New York’s own governor, Eleanor Roosevelt, who abhorred the notion of boys potentially as young as twelve being slapped with machine guns and told to kill, saying:
The second was the anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman. Few figures have been more colorful in American history than Goldman, who was the first woman to have her citizenship stripped from her and subsequently restored. Deported to Russia for her radical ideals in 1919 during J. Edgar Hoover’s manufactured Red Scare, Goldman had been a longtime agitator for the feminist cause. She had joined forces with birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, helping to establish the organization today known as Planned Parenthood, and was among the most prominent voices for the Free Love movement that advocated for minimal interference in sex and marriage from the state.
Goldman had been exiled for thirteen-and-a-half years when she was permitted to return to the United States as part of a speaking tour. She had been slated for a February arrival, but only two weeks before her planned return, the March on Washington occurred. Goldman’s arrival was delayed nearly a month, however. Firstly, by her own allies, who feared for her safety amidst the outbreak of war, and secondly by the Smith Administration.
Ultimately, however, she was allowed to enter the United States after assuring the government that she came as a “fierce friend of democracy and fiercer foe of MacArthur and Hoover,”. On March 9, 1934, Emma Goldman arrived by ship to New York City, greeted by an adulating crowd who longed to hear one of the greatest orators of the day at a time when they most needed inspiration.
Goldman’s speech, today known as the Dockside Rallying Cry, was a thunderous call to action for the citizens of the Republic, especially its women. She urged the feminists who, a decade prior had fought so desperately for their right to vote, to take up the armed struggle of liberty.
The speech was a hit, and soon was distributed first in newspapers, and then being read over the radio across the free territories of the United States. Emma Goldman’s triumphant return was not one of anarchist agitation, as had been feared, but one of the high-minded defense of liberty. She would go on to give dozens more speeches, including in Albany, Hartford, and Boston. Her efforts were a resounding success, as by May, nearly a quarter of the rapidly swelling Republican military was composed of women in active and support roles. These women often served in mixed-sex units, alongside male servicemen and fighting exclusively against male units, many of whom couldn't even conceive of their newfound role. Joining the military was an unimaginable risk for the Republic's women, exposing them to rape, violence, and more traumas that are still being unpacked to this day. For most, that risk was a worthy one.
A group of young women taking their oaths upon joining the military, April 1934
The first woman to receive a command was Corporal Margaret Chase Smith, a political organizer from Maine who joined the military early on, whose commanding officer was killed during the Battle of Syracuse. Smith was given a field promotion to the rank of Sergeant, which was followed by a confirmation of the rank of First Sergeant after her unit demonstrated a high degree of valor throughout the Finger Lakes Campaign. Smith would go on to earn the Silver Star and several other medals by the end of the war. First Sergeant Smith would ultimately embark on a long and storied political career that would culminate in her becoming President of the United States.
Margaret Chase Smith, circa 1916
It was not just women whose contribution to the war effort marked a turning point in their struggle for civil and personal liberty. Prior to the outbreak of the war, a nascent gay subculture was developing in many American cities, particularly New York and Chicago. Anti-sodomy laws and frequent police raids on popular gay gathering spots prevented these scenes from growing the size they did compared to similar phenomena in Europe before the rise of fascism.
The United States Military had possessed a formal ban on homosexuality since 1921 and had dishonorably discharged men accused of sodomy long before then. This policy, like those excluding women and mandating segregated military units, soon withered in the face of necessity as manpower shortages made themselves known. President Smith initially issued an executive order that birthed a policy known as Willful Blindness, whereby suspected homosexuals would be left undisturbed in the military so long as no concrete evidence of their orientation emerged.
However, the news of the National-Corporate regime’s atrocities in the Pink Scare soon reached domestic audiences, and thousands of openly gay men and a smaller but still notable number of lesbians flocked to join the service. They stated fully their wish to avenge their brethren under the jackboot, but their brazenness in their orientations ran directly afoul of the spirit of Willful Blindness. Debate over the issue reached all the way to Al Smith’s desk, where the more conservative elements of his cabinet strongly advised that he hold fast to his initial policy.
Among those in favor of opening the service were Eleanor Roosevelt and General Smedley Butler, and more surprisingly, Secretary of State Joseph Kennedy. When asked why, he simply demurred on the issue, but kept his convictions on the matter. It would finally come down to a meeting where both Butler and General George Patton were present to settle the matter.
Butler’s impassioned argument was that they were "asking to fight for us at a time when we desperately need just that. If we are to disqualify these men for such a trivial thing, then we might as well call up General Mac and offer him Albany here and now, rather than lose this war because we spent it nitpicking over whose aid we will accept.”
Meanwhile, Patton, true to crass form, said only, “I don't care how many cocks a man's sucked, I care how many fascists he's killed!”
A compromise was ultimately crafted. Open homosexuals would be permitted to serve, but only in segregated units. Congress passed the measure under the innocuous name of the Emergency Service Eligibility Act of 1934, with little debate and even less public discussion on the matter. By the time of the war’s peak, approximately twenty thousand homosexuals, fifteen thousand men and five thousand women, constituted two whole divisions of only out gay men and women. The press referred to these all-gay divisions, rather mockingly, as the Fairy Brigades. It became another point the Smith Administration was attacked on, both by contemptuous Natcorps and the Herbert Hoover forces seeking to win next year's election.
The first, the 27th Infantry Division of New York, was given to the newly-promoted Brigadier General Ralph C. Smith, and was under the command of General Marshall, who promptly placed the division in Philadelphia, where fighting was the fiercest. The 27th suffered stiff casualty rates, but Smith’s reports to the military command attested to the professionalism and determination of the men and women fighting there, and the soldiers of the 27th soon began to collect commendations at an impressive rate.
The other, the 7th Armored Division, was placed under Major Robert Hasbrouck, who himself was under the command of none other than General Patton. As an armored division, the 7th was mostly composed of tank operators and artillerymen, and though their achievements were much less impressive than their counterparts in the 27th Infantry, the 7th was proudly a part of Patton’s campaign across Western New York and beyond. By the time the war was fully in swing, the derisive name impressed upon them by the press, the Fairy Brigades, had been fully embraced by the men and women of the 27th and 7th, who proudly called themselves the Fighting Fairies.
The situation for the gay community improved markedly at home, as well. Al Smith’s Attorney General, John J. Bennet Jr., quietly issued a directive to the states under Republican control to cease enforcement of anti-sodomy laws and to curb raids on known homosexual gathering places. This happened after the Boston Globe ran a headline in October of 1934 which read THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE? SALLIES BLEED ON THE FRONT, GET ARRESTED BACK HOME, describing a situation in which a number of men from the 27th were on leave from the fighting in Philadelphia, only to be taken into police custody after a raid on Crawford House, a hotel and bar popular with Boston’s underground gay community.
Bisexual and gay members of the 27th Infantry Division
Wartime material shortages rapidly affected every aspect of life in the Republic, from the inability to acquire nearly anything new made from metals to much more… salacious things. Officially, the Comstock Act banned the distribution of obscene materials, but this did nothing to stop a thriving culture of pornographic magazines, novels, and even some films from emerging, one which was participated in by every level of American society, however discretely.
Paper shortages made producing magazines and books extremely difficult, and adult film theaters were few and far between, mostly in the seediest parts of major cities. Something most American households did have, however, was the radio. By the 1930’s, hundreds of unregulated amateur radio stations had sprung up across North America, and the war, with its incredible stress, turned the American public towards whatever distractions it could. By June of 1934, a number of these pirate radio stations had begun offering adult programming after hours, varying from what was essentially audio burlesque to extraordinarily graphic broadcasts.
Mae West, an early sex symbol famous for her bawdy works, used her extremely distinct voice to frequently read salacious stories over the airwaves
Indeed, newsreels from the front brought back bloody images of the war, and even those who stayed away from such showings could not avoid the constant stream of wounded men and women coming back into safe harbor to heal. This sudden exposure to the graphic realities of war came as a systemic shock to the heavily moralized society of the day, a phenomenon that would eventually be repeated much more strongly decades later when the Siam Crisis was broadcast to the millions of television screens in American households.
All of this contributed to making the Republic, seemingly overnight, become a much more libertine place than it had been before the war. The average person’s tolerance for talk of sex and violence was much freer, while fabric shortages yanked women’s hemlines up and plunged their necklines down. Stockings and ties fell out of fashion entirely, as nylon was more much precious for parachutes and uniforms than for hiding the legs that every human woman marched around upon or needlessly decorating men’s necks.
One material’s absence, more than any other, challenged the sexual mores of Americans as they experienced the war–latex. Nearly all forms of rubber production went towards the war effort, making condoms prohibitively expensive for almost everyone. This, however, certainly did nothing to stop Americans from having sex, it just meant that there were more conceptions, many more. The spike in documented pregnancies from December of 1933 to January of 1935 amounted to a roughly sixty percent increase.
Many of these pregnancies were among particularly young and often unmarried women, which proved scandalous. Soon, however, a very common excuse of the unwed mother was that her child’s father had gone off to war and been killed in combat, turning her from harlot to tragic widow and patriot. Certainly, this scenario occurred often enough, but even at the time, one satirical article in Look Magazine noted that “Based on the number of women claiming to have had the fathers of their children killed on the front, Mac and his Jackboots must be trembling before the sheer virility of our boys!”
An unnamed girl, aged 17, seven months pregnant-- when asked about the child's father, she reportedly said he was fighting somewhere in Wisconsin
Corresponding to the pregnancy boom was a number of changes in obstetrics and medicine writ large. Hospitals, loaded to bear with wounded soldiers, became favored targets for Natcorp bombers even deep into Republican territory. To protect mothers and their newborns, the government began a push to encourage home births unless absolutely necessary, a reversal of the trend of giving birth in a hospital throughout the 20th century thus far. This was made easier by the mass training of midwives and doulas, who would join in aiding the home births.
Critical shortages of materials suitable for bandages and sutures led to a sharp drop in socalled “preventative” surgical procedures such as the routine removal of tonsils and adenoids, along with, most infamously, circumcisions. Promoted by the Progressive Movement throughout the early 1900’s for both moral and hygienic reasons, War Department propaganda posters in the few maternity wards still open urged new parents to “Say No to the Knife!” and “Stitch our Soldiers, NOT our Sons!”, and the practice’s decline continued even after the war’s end.
The suture shortage threatened to become a massive issue, as even organic stitches such as catgut and certain plant fibers became ever more illusive. The solution would come from the Minnesota-based 3M Company, the inventors of masking tape and scotch tape. Despite their proximity to the war, with headquarters in Saint Paul, 3M remained a critical provider of adhesives to the Republican war effort.
Searching for easily manufactured materials to combat the suture shortage, 3M chemists combined the skin-safe adhesive usually used on their scotch tape first with gauze, and then with a water-resistant paper. This new adhesive strip was improved to be waterproofed and then sterilized prior to packaging, birthing “Steri-strips”, which were easily made and could hold together many minor wounds that otherwise would have required conventional stitches. Steri-strips revolutionized Republican medical care in the field, so much so that they were eventually mimicked by Natcorp medics later in the war.
If women and minorities saw decades’ worth of progress within a matter of months in the Republic, those under the jackboot saw decades’ worth of progress lost in the same timeframe. Many women found themselves out of work, as their pre-war jobs were no longer “appropriate” to the National-Corporate ideal of the American woman, and segregation became harshly enforced even in areas where Jim Crow laws had never been on the books.
Much of this was in direct response to the liberalizations seen in their enemies’ lands. Regime mouthpiece Prescott Bush declared, “They have jezebels and faggots fighting for them! They have women daring to exercise the law against men! What manner of topsy-turvy world do you think the Rumpublicans mean to inflict on us? How long before a man must ask his wife for permission to leave the house?!”
The extent to which MacArthur personally believed in these policies, especially on the issue of race, is subject to heated debate. Howard Zinn posits in A People’s History of the United States that MacArthur was more than willing to permit whatever policies would allow him to balance the various players around him, whilst William Manchester in American Caesar argues that Mac, while aware of the racial policies of his administration, lacked knowledge of how widespread they were and how brutal their enforcement was.
With their larger share of the pre-war military, the Natcorps lacked the need to build an army, and therefore did not end up using women to anywhere near the scope that the Republic did, while also allowing them to avoid leaning so heavily on conscription in the early stages of the war. This allowed many men to initially remain in their normal lives and occupations, but as more and more were called into service, gaps emerged in the Natcorp war machine.
Filling these gaps came in several forms, the first and most prominent being forced labor of convicts and prisoners of war. Conditions varied dramatically depending on location and the type of work being performed, but the number of industrial accidents reported to Mac’s gutted and toothless Department of Labor spiked dramatically throughout 1935. The second, and most infamous, was the extensive use of child labor. The Washington government rolled back countless labor protections, especially for children. Boys as young as ten years old could be found in factories, and their rate of accidents was even higher.
A boy, age eleven, working at a factory in Louisville, Kentucky
The social conditions under the Natcorp regime deteriorated quickly. Although freedom of religion nominally remained, Catholics, Jews, and various minority religions quickly found themselves first sidelined, and then subject to active hostility from the state. This would soon trickle down to the general populace. Among the most infamous incident was the lynching of Michael Joseph Curley, Archbishop of Baltimore following a condemnation of the MacArthur regime by Pope Pius XI.
Religious conflict continued even amongst various Protestant denominations, particularly those with mostly black adherents. As the war marched on and religious tensions continued to increase, the rates of attacks on churches and members of the clergy rose dramatically. The NAACP, officially banned by the regime and operating in secret throughout Natcorp territory, noted a record number of church burnings throughout the entirety of the war, spiking highest in the summer of 1935.
A Catholic Church burning in Richmond, Virginia, 1935
Ultimately, the social changes inflicted on both sides of the war would only serve to deepen the severity of the conflict, as two competing visions of national identity had formed and diverged by late 1935. The war was no longer a debate on governance and economics, but on the very nature of what the United States of America would be when the conflict came to its close, if the states ever could be united again. There is perhaps no greater indicator of just how much the face of American society had suddenly changed than the opening of General Patton’s welcome speech to a number of mixed-sex units in the Fourth Army just before one of the war's most important battles:
Patton continued:
I want to give full credit to @GaysInSpace for writing this banger of a draft!
Hmm...Will Thre be Conservatives remaining after the Civil War?
I see the Republicans have been reading up on the Sacred Band of Thebes and how they were recruited.
There certainly will be! As Angry and I have said throughout this project, a huge part of our efforts will be focused on national reconciliation and how to rebuild a nation in the aftermath of such a personal and ideologically-driven conflict. That means these libertines in the Northeast will have to remember they share a whole country with others who have very different views.
How far right will it go? Reagan / Goldwater levels?
How will you guys approach butterfly effect especially births of otl famous people?
I mean, considering Long and the Pacific coast are still sitting pretty and neutral, there still being Socially Conservative elements after the war is a given.
The North-East is probably going to be a bastion of social liberalism for a long time to come (even the conservative person from the region is probably going to be Fiscally Conservative more so than socially) but that doesn't mean the whole US will become simply the North-East.
-edit-
And yes, an absolute banger of an update indeed.
The North-East is probably going to be a bastion of social liberalism for a long time to come (even the conservative person from the region is probably going to be Fiscally Conservative more so than socially) but that doesn't mean the whole US will become simply the North-East.
-edit-
And yes, an absolute banger of an update indeed.
This was utterly fantastic. Great to see.
But yeah. There'll still be conservatives, and many won't be entirely happy with how things have gone recently - I could see in TTL's US, things going ironically different by the West Coast being 'Red' states in the modern day.
For sure (though speaking militarily, one wonders how Long will go long(lol)-term - if the Republicans manage a convincing win over the NatCorps will he go 'Yep, I've always been a loyal Republican, I'll help you mop the tyrants up!' or will he be another enemy to fight...)
But yeah. There'll still be conservatives, and many won't be entirely happy with how things have gone recently - I could see in TTL's US, things going ironically different by the West Coast being 'Red' states in the modern day.
Indeed.
Just caught up with this! Absolutely love it!! The part of LGBT+Women participation in the Republican war effort is inspiring.
With the extreme right of the upper south, the radicalization of the abused populist of the Midwest, alongside the extreme denialism of the Pacific West.
The United States is gonna far more culturally and politically decided. To a point that I even doubt an electoral college can survive
Remind me, the electoral college stood in the way of the Republic? Because if the Electoral College didn't align with NatCorps, or something like that, there probably won't be a lawsuit from people demanding it be removed.
Long is nothing if not a canny bastard (though not exactly as canny in reality as alt-historians like to make him) so he'll hold on until the NatCorps are on the ropes, and then sell his services to the Republic at a high price before jumping in and bringing the deathblow around.
I could see a serious push towards the US being less federalized than it was OTL by virtue of Long's territory and the Pacific States being willing to rejoin, but naming their prices to do so.
Whether they like it or not, the Republicans can no more make the entire thing into the "old" US than anyone else can.
I mean, Oregon is not anyone's idea of a liberal paradise until very recently, and even then that's strictly the Portland greater area. Ditto for Washington and Seattle. California has always been rather more conservative the further away you get from LA or San Francisco. It would be very easy for the Pacific to be the Conservative stalwart of the US, especially if the, to use OTL terms, "counter-culture" types instead of going to California go to the more liberally minded North-East.
Hell, if not for the weather I could see South-Side Boston ITTL being what Haight-Ashbury was to San Francisco OTL
Loving this look at the social effects of the war.
And gotta say, Patton seems spot on here.
And gotta say, Patton seems spot on here.
I will say to everyone that a number of things seem to be missed. The first, and overwhelmingly most important, is that the Overton Window has been so drastically shifted that there is basically no longer any ideological overlap in social ideals between the two warring governments, which is extending down to their peoples, a fact which the victor will have to contend with, essentially deradicalizing the vanquished civilian populace.
The other is that even if the West is not actively involved in the fighting, many of them are still nominally aligned with Albany and give credence to at least some of their policies. As for any expectations of serious armed resistance to the victors by the West, I would simply remind you guys that when the fighting between Albany and Washington is done, the winner will be standing with an enormous army that is fully loaded to bear and a war machine running on all cylinders, compared to a large number of mostly empty states who’ve been contending with refugees and holding order together with volunteer militias and state National Guard units. The neutral Pacific Fleet will be of precious little help in a ground war in any situation where the West has to resist.
The other is that even if the West is not actively involved in the fighting, many of them are still nominally aligned with Albany and give credence to at least some of their policies. As for any expectations of serious armed resistance to the victors by the West, I would simply remind you guys that when the fighting between Albany and Washington is done, the winner will be standing with an enormous army that is fully loaded to bear and a war machine running on all cylinders, compared to a large number of mostly empty states who’ve been contending with refugees and holding order together with volunteer militias and state National Guard units. The neutral Pacific Fleet will be of precious little help in a ground war in any situation where the West has to resist.