For the Republic: A History of the Second American Civil War

[The Angry Observer]

“Wolves at the Heel”​

“Seventy years ago today, John Wilkes Booth shot this man in the back of the brain. It was at the end of the war, after he had triumphed both on the battlefield and at the ballot box. I wish people today had his sportsmanship.” - Al Smith, April 14th of 1935

Al Smith with Franklin Roosevelt at the dedication of the Empire State Building​

President Smith escaped conviction during his impeachment trial just because there weren’t enough Senators left to convict him, allowing those from his native Northeast to hold the line and keep him in office. This fact gnawed at the President’s morale. “There is an army of fascists hours away,” he said, “and the people’s representatives figure the best they can do is get rid of me.” However, he’d survived, and his enemies in Congress had played much of their hand for nothing. Like the Republican armies in the field, Smith was bloodied but unbowed. He faced an astonishing array of enemies both in domestic politics and the battlefield. The Republican Party’s conservative wing controlled Congress again, and the progressive left controlled his own party. Most of the country had decided to leave him at MacArthur’s mercy. The 1936 election was a year and a half away, and nine states could indisputably be called Republican territory. Smith’s closest allies abandoned him during the trial. The defection that stung most of all was John Jakob Raskob, Smith’s longtime donor and a kingmaker in Democratic politics. Raskob was unnerved by Smith’s “wild” embrace of property confiscations, which Republican authorities had begun doing almost immediately against real or suspected Natcorps. Raskob and other conservative Democrats believed that there was very little left to lose by replacing Smith with Vice President Garner. But of course, Smith was still standing, and this emboldened him. “Until March 3rd of 1937,” he declared, “God and Hoover are the only things that can stop me.”

The confiscations spooked business everywhere. They were, Smith insisted, a wartime necessity. The first person it was employed against was William Randolph Hearst, an old enemy of Smith’s. No trial had confirmed Hearst to be a Natcorp, but his papers blasted Natcorp allegations of corruption in the days following the March on Washington, and Hearst himself had quietly slipped onto a freighter bound for D.C. Roosevelt, under orders from Smith, had sent the New York National Guard to confiscate Hearst’s media empire, which only gave him an excuse to cry tyranny. He quickly rebuilt from Washington, and his sneering editorials lambasted the Soviet Rumpublic’s hypocrisy. Smith continued the confiscations, directing them at the assets of known Natcorp collaborators like Morgan and Bush. Had there been a sitting Supreme Court, Smith’s actions may have been ruled illegal, but there was not, and by the time there was, it was composed entirely of Smith’s appointees and there were months of precedent. Attorney General John J. Bennett was totally unable to enforce these actions without interagency cooperation, but still helped mastermind many of the confiscations. Funds were directed to the war effort. Many in the business class found them alarming, if only because it was difficult for Smith’s many opponents to imagine that his personal ambitions weren’t conflicting with his responsibilities. John D. Rockefeller Sr., now ninety five years old, put his hobbies and charitable commitments on hold and pledged the unfathomable resources under his name to the Republic’s cause. Rockefeller was also a lifelong member of the Republican Party (which has generally been referred to as the GOP since the war, to avoid confusion with the American Republic’s cause). He distrusted Smith, viewing him as a creature of urban machine politics. Rockefeller vowed to use whatever life he had left to see the nation to victory, and he believed that a competent conservative GOP at the helm was the best way to do this. No small part of the GOP victory in 1934 was thanks to the wave of resources from the Rockefeller coffers. This was the birth of so-called “Rockefeller Republicans” or “Rockefeller GOP”, which began as the part of the conservative wing that stood for unconditional victory.

The aging John Rockefeller​

This was part of what prompted Smith, right after his hectic acquittal (the Secret Service was accused by his enemies of pressuring Senators to vote nay, a claim that remains controversial), to throw his resources behind the Vandenberg Act. It would only disrupt the Midwests’s plan in name, and would be an excellent way to generate revenue for the war while rebuilding bridges with business. Smith sensed that he was trapped, and needed to strike while the iron was hot or Garner might make his move. The Vandenberg Act was begrudgingly accepted by most of the conservatives in Congress, but was the last straw for the left. The Midwestern progressives bolted, leaving the Democratic Party in ruins and Smith with no reliable allies left in Congress. Surrounded on all sides by the Coward Caucus in the West, radical leftists in the Farmer-Labor Party, conservative Democrats that mostly distrusted him, and the Rockefeller GOP, Smith’s political prospects were bleaker than his military ones. During summer, when it looked as though he was finished, those close to Smith noticed alarming changes in his demeanor and appearance. “He shambles around like a dead man,” wrote Roosevelt. “The skin on his face seems to fall off. He seems like he will crumble like one of those cigars always in his mouth.” The stress of commanding the war gnawed at Smith’s health, too. He had several heart attacks during his term, although none seriously called into doubt his survival, and had to adopt diets he loathed. The DOJ was constantly trying to kill him. Smith recalled that he trusted nobody during that summer other than Katie and the animals in the Central Park Zoo, where he was an honorary zookeeper. He privately doubted he would survive to the end of his term.

Even so, Al Smith lived. To him, the Vandenberg Act was long-term strategy that would pay off for his brand of Democrats later, even if it sacrificed the Midwest in the moment. Smith never doubted Farmer-Labor’s commitment to winning the war, and thus he was confident that if nothing else they would continue to give him the powers obviously necessary to do it. Here, he employed a lesson he learned during his trial: Smith realized that his many enemies hated each other almost as much as they hated him. He understood that the left loathed him for not going far enough, and thus if he acted wisely could secure their support against the right. And in the summer of 1935, it wasn’t Farmer-Labor that kept Smith up at night.

Herbert Hoover, 31st President of the United States​

There was only one living American that could even begin to understand what had been foisted on Smith’s shoulders. That was his predecessor and political archnemesis, Herbert Hoover. After his loss, Hoover retreated to his home in Palo Alto. He wasted no time in laying the groundwork for a third match against Smith. Smith soon became as unpopular as he once was, and Huey Long’s apparent intention to run third party or disrupt the DNC made a Hoover victory seem very possible. Then the War broke out. Hoover had entered national politics to begin with because he was an adept fundraiser and organizer. He put his talents to use rushing aid all across the Republic. But it wasn’t just humanitarian efforts that consumed Hoover’s time. “You know,” Smith said, “if Herbert Hoover had worked this hard at conquering poverty when he was in Washington, I wouldn’t be here now.” Hoover unleashed a vicious broadside on the Smith Administration’s conduct during the war. He attacked him for military incompetence, for failing to negotiate with Congress, for corruption and socialist tendencies. He penned essays articulating his views, attracted the support of legions of powerful donors, and used his considerable political capital to make sure there were no surprises at the 1936 RNC. The New York Times, in Smith’s own home turf, lamented that “Hoover now looks like an elder-statesman.” But Herbert Hoover’s place in the Second American Civil War wasn’t from any of this. He became the most notable proponent of the Peace movement, which outrageously argued that a peace settlement with the Natcorps was possible, and that the war continued because Smith had refused arbitration and hadn’t committed to capitalism. With deep pockets from Smith’s staunchest opponents and backing from the DOJ, the Peace forces buried the Administration in attack after attack, accusing it of prolonging the war to advance socialism. “We are moving,” Hoover warned, “to gigantic socialism under this war.” Hoover penned countless essays and delivered many speeches advancing his views, suggesting that Smith leaving the White House in favor of a conservative would mean a ceasefire, which would be followed by a compromise and restoration of the Republic. Hoover’s allies were many and varied, from senior Western progressives in Congress to protestant nationalists in the heartland to eastern businessmen wary of the war. There is also no question that Peace had support from and collaborated with the DOJ, but the true scope of this is debated.

This was what troubled the embattled President the most. As the Republican armies were whipped time and time again, rationing, conscription, and military law settled across the Republic. Reports of communist militias prowling the countryside were everywhere. Many Americans wondered if Hoover had a point. Peace had very little strength in Congress and mostly depended on grassroots opposition to the war, which was of course strongest in the western U.S. But Peace had a huge following in the Northeast too, especially among rural Protestants. In the 1936 election, Hoover threatened to win whatever was left of America just by having bad faith actors in the west in his corner and making any kind of breakthrough in the Northeast against Smith, including in traditionally Republican states like Vermont or Maine. If that failed, Olson and Farmer-Labor planned to run off with the Midwest, throwing the election to the GOP House of Representatives.

Peace demonstration in Worcester​

Historian Arthur Schlesinger went so far as to contend that Peace’s DOJ connections were “wholly a creation of Democrat propagandists”, and that most of its alleged activities were organic resistance to wartime measures like rations. This school of thought contends that the Peace faction was fairly equally progressive and conservative, organized around figures like William Gibbs McAdoo and Herbert Hoover, and that it was far too disorganized to be the DOJ front it was alleged to be. The Peace forces in the American Republic were certainly eclectic and united around little more than a general loathing of “the Pope’s War”, as one Montana evangelist decried it. While the Western delegations connived to weaken the Administration, Hoover and the Peace GOP prepared to come in from the rear, destroying whatever was left of the Democratic Party and potentially sealing the fate of the American experiment. DOJ memos suggest that the other Hoover was elated by the movement’s progress, and believed it could halt Albany in its tracks within months. This raised what Brinkley called “the most troublesome free speech question in American history.” The Secret Service was certain that the Peace GOP had help from the DOJ, raising a lot of very thorny questions for Smith. Would he arrest his enemies without compelling legal evidence as a wartime necessity?

“They’ve got a goddamned knife at the country’s heart,” said Smith. “MacArthur overthrew our Constitution. He took power for himself like Caesar and Hitler did. He’s bombin’ and killin’ everyone that’s left. And these people, they’re watching it all happen and they’re calling me the aggressor.” On July 4th of 1935, at the nadir of Smith’s credibility, Peace supporters from the Klan to progressive pacifists held massive marches in every major city in the northeast. It was distressing and baffling for Smith, who feared that any moment the Republican armies at the front would shatter if Hoover didn’t eject him from Albany himself. He did not, as his critics leveled, censor them simply for affiliations with the Peace movement. He gave explicit instructions to Attorney General Bennet to leave Hoover alone, and mostly accepted that there was nothing his government could do past the Mississippi. But what Smith absolutely refused to do was show weakness. Using his war powers, martial law was declared in almost all of the Republic. The Secret Service routinely arrested anyone they had reason to believe was undermining the war effort, through overt sabotage or incitement. Prisoners were held without trial, sentenced by military tribunals and the protests of civilian authorities (in the Northeast) were bypassed. The Black Court contentiously expanded on the First Civil War case Ex Parte Vallandigham in Gorman v. Stimson, ruling that military tribunals were universally acceptable during times of war.

These measures triggered massive backlash. William Borah was outraged, and in June the Senate censured Smith. There were riots in nearly every population center at some point or another. Albany itself nearly went up in flames after the arrest of a Peace demonstrator in the city, and insurrection outside of the New York State Capitol was only warded off when Republican regulars opened fire into the crowd and arrested the instigators. Assessing the dead, Smith muttered to Kennedy that the country would be a happier one if he actually censored the Peace movement as they accused him of doing.

The aftermath of anti-war riots in New York City​

The Smith Administration needed to have the war in a winnable position within a year. Both sides thought their status was similar to that of the Union in the First American Civil War. Shortly after the March on Washington, Douglas MacArthur allegedly sketched out his strategy for victory on a napkin. He would bisect the leftists in the Midwest like Floyd Olsen from Smith loyalists in the Northeast, mimicking Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan. Meanwhile, during the spring, the Republic broadly adopted George C. Marshall’s plan for eventual victory: keep the Jackboot at bay through a two-front war, build up the Republican war machine, and then through raw force overpower them and liberate Washington. While Hoover’s candidacy put the Administration on a timetable, there were even more pressing issues. Hugh Johnson had Chicago and Minneapolis hanging on by a thread, and the fall of those cities would free the Natcorps to renew the offensive in the east— where the horrifying carnage around Philadelphia was making mutiny a real possibility. A counter-offensive was needed to prove that the Republic could still win, or all of the War Department’s careful preparations would be for nothing. There would be no room for error in this counter-offensive. By the time that General Patton had captured Ithaca from Leland Hobbs, Smith and Stimson decided that he would be their commander. All of the Administration’s actions for the summer of 1935 were to prepare Patton’s Fourth Army, which was consolidating western New York, for the killing blow. MacArthur was more than aware of the War Department’s intentions, and scaled back the onslaught in Philadelphia to prepare northern Pennsylvania. A courier told Eisenhower: “Mac doesn’t see the point of taking Philadelphia if the Yankees will have an army at our backs when we do.” But before the counteroffensive could be launched, the Administration had to preoccupy itself with the grueling work of building a war machine.

Smith recognized the efficacy of Curtis LeMay’s bombing campaign, while also believing American industry could continue in spite of it. Republicans aimed to eventually rival Natcorp air superiority, along with fielding more armor and artillery. The goal there wasn’t just military superiority, but to bomb the Natcorp state itself into a pulp. This was also doable, but it required enormous sacrifices. This meant rationing and mass public work programs, which were met with resistance. The Administration cooperated extensively with private business to meet its quotas, which further pushed away the left but also mended invaluable fences with conservatives. The Republic practically achieved a full employment economy during the war, with whoever wasn’t on the front put to work in the factories. Americans chafed under the new rules, and more than once the Republic was “close to full-blown insurrection” according to Brinkley. But the vast majority took their new lifestyle in stride. “We can keep at this as long as they can,” one skinny girl on a Vermont farm said to a British reporter, watching their produce rush to the front, “Longer,” said her sister. As previously established, Smith unilaterally stopped enforcing many tariffs. These gestures were greatly appreciated by London and had their desired effect, but infuriated the protectionist lobby and critics of Smith’s uses of executive power. They weren’t even accepted in principle— while economists were divided on whether trade’s benefits outweighed the immediate reduction in duties, GOP stalwarts were not. They accused Smith of weakening the war effort to advance the Democratic Party’s platform, while fringe elements and the Natcorps accused him of hollowing the Republic out for overseas elites. Smith vetoed multiple tariff bills, and if it weren’t for the events of spring he may have been impeached again.

Republican propaganda promoting rationing​

But, as Smith was fond of noting in his darkest hours, they’d tried before and they’d failed. Meanwhile, Smith refined his cabinet. Secretary Kennedy’s selection was received coldly in Albany, but he had a knack for dealing with the British and Soviets. The Boston aristocrat’s personality and political ambitions made him a difficult figure for Smith to manage, but aid and investment from Canada kept flowing. The elderly Henry Stimson, meanwhile, was invaluablehear in the War Department. More complicated was Henry Wallace, the lowly Secretary of Agriculture whose role took on unprecedented importance during the war. Wallace was GOP by label, but also a progressive who supported Smith in both of his elections. He made little secret of his Farmer-Labor sympathies, which the President understood made him valuable. In any event, Wallace was also extremely effective at consolidating the Republic’s dwindling food supply. Armed with Smith’s unprecedented executive power, Wallace energetically toiled at feeding every mouth in America and keeping the Administration’s relations with Midwestern farmers from crumbling entirely. Idealistic to a fault before the war, seeing firsthand the devastation in the Midwest changed Wallace. “We must crush,” howled Wallace before a roaring crowd of leftists, mere miles from Natcorp territory, “the National-Corporate oligarchy under the tank tread of the common man!”

A deeply religious man, Wallace soon became convicted of his own destiny, and as his farm policies kept the troops fed and staved off disaster on multiple fronts, the lowly Secretary of Agriculture understood he had much leverage. Wallace freely communicated with commanders and partisans on the front. The results were gruesome. On June 19th of 1935, dozens of suspected Natcorp sympathizers in Cherokee were rounded up by Republican partisans and executed. To save ammunition, they were clubbed to death. Wallace’s role in the massacre is still intensely debated today, but there is no disputing that he ordered a crackdown, close allies of his participated and this and other killings, and that Wallace did nothing to condemn them. He nonetheless was a cause celebre for the progressive left, and all Republicans felt gratitude for his work in the Department of Agriculture. Whatever Wallace’s moral and political dangers, Smith stood by him, correctly recognizing that he was a skilled administrator determined to win the war. This incentivized Wallace to put his own prodigious ambitions on hold where they might conflict with Smith’s, at least for the time being.

Henry Wallace speaking to supporters​

Thus were the many woes of the Smith Administration. Half the country was under a dictator and the other half hated him. The front was on the verge of collapse in multiple places and the enemy would win 1936 if they couldn’t win there. Congress wanted him gone and international support was dubious. Even so, the Administration continued to hone its tactics and diligently close the gap between the two factions. Smith had reason, as he told the nation on July 4th, to believe that “this nightmare is not forever— that the American Republic stands, and that within our hands are the tools to hold the line and turn the tide. So help us God.”

 

[The Angry Observer]

“The Arsenal of Democracy”​

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers." - Amelia Earhart, Republican aviatrix.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson, architect of the Republican strategy​

The most important component of the Smith Administration’s plan to defeat fascism was attrition. Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s goal was “total victory achieved by overwhelming military superiority, on the land, at sea, and air, leaving the enemy without a single acre of high ground.” This, the Republican high command believed, would assure a sound and thorough victory that would also set the Republic up for whatever came next. Washington D.C itself was not far from the front in Philadelphia, and the border between the National-Corporate Regime and the southern bloc wasn’t much further than that. If this military superiority could be achieved, the regime would fall quickly and swiftly. To do this, the Republic’s considerable industrial reserves had to be harnessed on an unprecedented scale, and enormous resources had to be poured into developing its military technology. Here, the Republic had several advantages observers on all sides originally missed. Unlike the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy was relatively evenly split and while much of it was invested in the Pacific and therefore initially was neutral, the majority had evaded Natcorp control. Even though James Dozier captured Norfolk and other southern ports, the Republicans started off with the powerful shipyards in the Northeast. Thus, while the war on land was marked by a string of lopsided Natcorp victories, the war on sea was far less dramatic. The Natcorps had no advantage to press and the Republicans were focused on playing defense.

Heading the Republican naval effort was Philip Andrews, a senior seaman dragged out of retirement by the Smith Administration. The most esteemed naval commander in America, Andrews was 69 during his tenure and would die in December of 1935. While historians do not question Andrews’s competence today, and praise his leadership in the Jersey Sea campaign, the old admiral did not inspire the confidence in his subordinates he used to. “I cannot tell,” one captain fretted to The New York Times, “when he is commenting in our meetings versus when he is snoring.” The Smith Administration censored the story, successfully arguing in Court that it undermined the war effort. In the chaos, the captain’s name was discovered by naval authorities but is unknown to this day. In Stimson’s hammer and anvil strategy, the U.S. Navy was the anvil. It was to soak up the Natcorp regime’s fury, keeping any surprises from materializing on the coastline, and maintaining the Republic’s lifelines to Europe. As such, they avoided direct conflict as much as possible. The action in south Jersey was the largest and arguably the only naval battle of this phase of the war. MacArthur and Chester Nimitz hoped for a definitive pitched sea battle where the Natcorps could shatter the Republic’s access to Europe and make it a rump state for good. However, even MacArthur could not find a justification for such an action. After all, why opt for a pitched showdown in the north Atlantic when he could find one in the Northeast or Midwest with similar consequences, where the Natcorps were more likely to win?

Admiral Philip Andrews​

So, the two fleets stalked each other in the New England mist for the year of 1935. MacArthur kept his focus on a showdown with Smedley Butler that could shatter Republican resistance in the Midwest. The Republic wanted a stab into the Chesapeake and Nimitz dreamed of a blockade of New York City, but neither side was able to realize their goals. President Smith appointed publisher and soldier Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy, a move that was initially decried as cronyism (Knox had no experience at sea) by his opponents. Knox, a GOP member himself, proved an able organizer and worked well with Stimson. Under his leadership, the Republican Navy continually frustrated Nimitz both by denying him appreciable victories and continuing to grow, which sapped Natcorp resources in an arms race at sea. While the Navy was not the Smith Administration’s first priority, the enormous wartime buildup in the Northeast did not fail to deliver for it. In particular, the government focused on aircraft carriers, newcomers to the naval world that Knox and Stimson correctly believed would come to dominate the seas soon. The Republic’s fleet in the Northeast grew exponentially, as did the Natcorps’ in Maryland, and both sides worked tirelessly to poach resources from the Pacific Fleet under Admiral Reeves. The Northeast, shepherded by the Republican government, embarked on a rearmament program so huge that it was initially presumed to be impossible. Most members of Smith’s circle doubted the Republic could find the resources to generate the industrial output Smith wanted, much less do it in enough time to swamp the Natcorp invaders. At any moment, the situation in Philadelphia could burst into flames and MacArthur would once again be days from capturing New York. But Smith, Vice President Garner, and the other cabinet members, whatever their differences, agreed broadly that the Republic’s industrial war machine needed to quickly grow exponentially. The President was determined to act with or without Congress’s help.

Perhaps here more than anywhere else, Smith was uniquely qualified to take the initiative. His background was in urban politics, and he intended for his Presidency to be that of a reformer that could work with the private sector and alleviate the common man’s suffering. Smith and his underlings scraped money from wherever they could find it, whether it was Natcorp contraband or a fleet of war bonds. They put it to work financing the kind of massive projects any New York governor in the 1920’s had to be familiar with. Except “the only true full employment economy in American history” was not to construct the Empire State Building, it was to massively industrialize nearly the entire Northeast for the singular purpose of building war fodder. Armed with the finest minds in the Republic, Smith and his government orchestrated huge public works programs that dwarfed any previous state efforts at employment. Corporations that created useful material, war or otherwise, were bribed or bullied into the position of junior partners. Firms that didn’t were saddled with war taxes. Americans in the Republic that weren’t on the front and weren’t on a farm were sent to the factories. This created a slough of logistical problems. To provide for mothers, the government used infrastructure from public schools to piece together the first national childcare service in U.S. history— one that was fraught with complications and was a hectic nightmare to administer.

The beginnings of a wartime school erected in New Hampshire​

Even more problematic was rationing. The kind of mass rationing necessary to win the Second American Civil War was something the average American hadn’t gone through, including during the Great War twenty years ago. Nonetheless, it had to be done. Every single scrap of food was needed at the front. Even cigars weren’t safe, as the Republican armies at the front consumed a staggering amount on a daily basis. Not only did this require infrastructure to exact and enforce levies on millions and millions of people, it also required that the Administration and cooperative state governments brainstorm creative solutions to get beef from Augusta to the line of fire in Wilmington. Manned almost entirely by civilians and local officials that had no military experience, the Northeast’s population pushed themselves beyond the brink of ruin to rush food and weaponry to the front. Organization wasn’t just chaotic. With ecological disaster looming in the Midwest and the Northeast facing the full fury of MacArthur’s war machine, the resource situation in the Republic was on the verge of disaster for much of 1935. “They’re demanding things of us we don’t have,” wrote one New York official. “Beef, cheese, salt, cigars, scrap-metal— there’s only so much of it they can bleed us for.” Smith, Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, General Marshall, and the other architects of the scheme were not oblique to this fact. Eleanor Roosevelt, according to one Secret Service agent, couldn’t go “a single morsel” without bringing up the pains that rationing and the food situation was inflicting on her home state.

Even so, while there were exceptions, the push to build Smith and Stimson’s “arsenal of democracy” ground on. There were multiple anti-rationing riots across the Northeast, including in New York City, but scholarship suggests that this was instigated by a small minority and typically was motivated by momentary anger rather than persistent anti war sentiment. These nuances were lost on some participants at the time. Herbert Hoover wrote that “the people have definitively and desperately made clear that they prefer the negotiating table to the Administration’s arbitrary imposition, justified through a rump Congress and hollowed out Supreme Court [the fate of the Hughes Court was not known for certain at this point, and it was popular to suggest that they had never been in the Natcorps’ grasp to suggest with, a disproven conspiracy theory that has adherents to this day] of duties, quotas of men and even women, and indefinite wartime law retained at the pleasure of one man. Heeding their voice is not merely a matter of political wisdom, it is necessity if the American Republic is to persist. The question before us— whether Al Smith prefers his own power or peace.” But Hoover’s political strength was weakest and Smith’s strongest in the Northeast, particularly in cities.

Ku Klux Klan members demonstrating against the war in upstate New York​

New York City was Smith’s home base, and it was one of the few places he could consistently depend on politically and militarily. In the 1930’s, America’s largest city was under the stewardship of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Nominally a member of the GOP, La Guardia was a left wing populist. A blustery and intense speaker, La Guardia knew the City’s politics like the back of his hand. And although nominally a Republican and politically sympathetic to the Farmer-Labor platform, La Guardia was a staunch supporter of Smith’s and did everything he could to mobilize New York City’s considerable resources for the Republic. La Guardia’s management of New York’s shipyards and industry was impressive enough, making the City by far the largest single contributor to the Republican cause. He also was an indispensable player in making the City the terminus through which all aid heading to Philadelphia proceeded. This made New York City even more strategically important than it might be in a vacuum, as would be reflected by future developments. Charismatic and fiery, La Guardia did not share any of the President’s tolerance for dissenters. The New York City Police’s powers dramatically expanded, to enforce wartime regulations and fight DOJ sabotage, but also to crush any potential agitation from Peace supporters. All this was in spite of the fact that La Guardia had staunchly opposed the Espionage Act of 1917. “The question’s one of survival, in this war,” snarled La Guardia, “either you support New York City surviving, America surviving, or you don’t.” NYPD operated with such heavy handed autonomy that it stood out even amongst similar cases of Republican repression in the Second American Civil War, and in more recent years has drawn scrutiny, particularly his management of the City’s ethnic politics. Even so, very few question that La Guardia was a key player in keeping Smith’s base, the City’s Irish, Catholic, and Italian working immigrant community, intact and mobilized for the Republican cause. It also made La Guardia an obvious contender for President in 1936 or beyond, calls the Mayor was not deaf to.

Domestic administration in the Republic was a synthesis of maintaining civilian government (something Smith and his liberal Democrat allies believed was necessary to preserve the American Republic’s values, even if it created inconvenience or even danger— such as the possibility of Herbert Hoover becoming President again) and military necessity. While Smith, against the calls of certain elements on all sides of the political spectrum, refused to suspend American federalism and elections, he also went to extreme lengths to secure the Republic’s domestic position. Alan Brinkley contends that “what the government did during the Second American Civil War is totally unrivaled in the study of American censorship and suspension of normal civilian government, with the obvious exception of the heinous crimes committed by the Natcorp regime. Even similar measures undertaken by the Abraham Lincoln Administration are difficult to compare, in principle but especially in scale.” The hardship Smith’s wartime measures created for everyday people in the Republic prompted resistance, whether this was petty crime, draft evasion, or lying to government inspectors. These were not abstract problems. The fighting in Philadelphia was so savage and miserable that Smith and George Marshall feared at multiple points in 1935 that the Republic’s troops on the ground could simply disintegrate or even mutiny. Harsh deterrence was needed to keep order, which lead to Smith, by executive order, directing the Secret Service to indefinitely imprison anyone undermining the war effort, a sweeping emergency power Smith claimed from Congress’s authorization of suspending habeas corpus, and bolstered by the dubious claim that the entire Republic could reasonably be called a warzone. “And unlike Lincoln,” writes Brinkley, “Smith had no Roger Taney to thwart his aims.” Throughout the war, the Black Court, handpicked by Smith and the staunchest GOP Republicans in the Senate such as Borah, practically gave the Administration license for every single one of its actions. And while Borah protested, the Court wasn’t his to command anymore than it was Smith’s. “Undermining the war” could include anything such as stealing ration material. Detainees were tried before military tribunals and entirely at the mercy of government officials. All prisoners were put to work laboring in Smith’s industrial programs. When state governments didn’t enforce the military’s orders to the extent it seemed necessary, the Secret Service simply bypassed them.

Fiorello La Guardia​

Much more dangerous and more politically troublesome were labor strikes, which were far greater of a complication than petty theft in New Hampshire. They threatened to seriously derail the war effort, and a lot of Smith’s measures to boost the Republic’s industry stepped on laborers as much as management. Hours became longer, pay became less, and quotas got taller. There were many strikes throughout the war, such as the Hartford Shell Strike of August, when workers in Connecticut refused to make shells unless they were given pay that resembled that at the beginning of 1935. Smith acted swiftly, using precedents established by his more conservative predecessors and his own wartime powers to arrest labor leaders. In the Hartford case, the War Department took over and manned the factory by itself, forcing the union to beg for their jobs back— which they were granted with a pay cut, and with many members fired or arrested and forced to serve the Republican war machine without pay. This, of course, infuriated the left. Combined with his refusal to nationalize, it was viewed as blatant and shortsighted favoritism to the same wealthy elites that overthrew the Republic and were still shirking their war duties. However, conservatives in Congress reluctantly praised Smith’s firm hand in the matter, and many historians contend that his good relations with affluent Northeasterners and belief in the ability of government and capital to work together made the War “remarkably free of the strife that defined the Great War,” as one union boss that cooperated with the Administration admitted.

The hazards of building a war machine were not limited to rationing. The Natcorps had similar programs, which were of course fueled by slave labor. Entire communities were walled off in what were practically prison camps, forced to work for almost nothing. This was particularly prevalent in the occupied Midwest, and practiced “systemically” in Ohio. Politically, it was very important that the Natcorps shift the burdens of war onto dissident populations as much as possible, such as heavily unionized industrial workers, African-Americans, and Catholics. Such atrocities are beyond the scope of this chapter to cover. In any event, the kind of total mobilization Smith engaged in was not something the Natcorps were able to do themselves in 1935. Thus, MacArthur sought to destroy the Republic through other means. His favorite was the air war. MacArthur was not only impressed by aviation technology, he interpreted the bombing campaign as a way to maintain the regime’s industrial superiority without exacting the kind of demanding sacrifices from his subjects that could endanger him politically. One DOJ memo, straight from Hoover’s desk, simply reads: “normalcy.” As a result, MacArthur pared back the offensive in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware at the critical moment, counting on LeMay’s planes to give him the edge. MacArthur had accepted total war long before most of the highest ranking Natcorps, and was fond of invoking Sherman and Grant to justify his actions. Natcorp air power hammered every single industrial center in the Northeast. LeMay ordered his pilots to make “no distinction” between Republican regulars on the field and the factories supplying them. He was able to establish a bombing radius that covered basically the entire Northeast, and raids were a major threat for the duration of the war. “It’s all gone,” wrote one family in western Connecticut, “the house, the shop—jackboots brought down the lightning of Zeus.” Families that could afford escape fled to Canada, while the less well off sent their children to the countryside, where they labored on farms. Many were forced to rely on the government’s emerging network of boarding schools, which remain a staple of New England life.

Woonsocket children following a Natcorp bombing​

The Republic’s industrial initiative needed to persevere through a near daily hailstorm of death. Smith believed this was a problem that would eventually solve itself. As war output increased, LeMay’s planes would be needed elsewhere. As the Republic closed the gap on military technology, they would be in a better position to drive off the bombers. Thus, the problem of too many Republican civilians working long hours in treacherous conditions was addressed by “Harder Work”, as one infamous Republican propaganda poster in New York City advised. Meanwhile, the Republican military did its best to alleviate the suffering on the ground through its own ambitious aerial warfare program. The Republic, at least on paper, held many stark disadvantages. The most striking one was in aircraft, where MacArthur’s collaborators seized the huge majority of planes in the war’s opening phase. Of all the factors that spelled death for Republican regulars in the first string of battles, this was perhaps the most important one. As George S. Patton had warned years before the war, the enemy was able to easily thunder through green recruits that hadn’t even faced real bullets before, much less bombs from above. While the psychological factor was important— the Natcorps bombing campaigns became gradually less effective at forcing the enemy to immediately scatter as the Republicans became accustomed to them— Henry Stimson recognized very early into the war that the Republic needed an aerial force of its own. Congress, in the summer of 1934, passed the Air Force Act, establishing a fifth branch of the rump U.S. Military, the U.S. Air Force. Staffing the Air Force while weathering a dire shortage of pilots and planes was a much more complicated matter.

The War Department spared no pains to find airmen, no matter how few actual qualifications they had. Great War veterans were drafted and given particularly attractive compensation. Air schools sprouted out of nothing all across the Northeast, and one of President Smith’s main priorities diplomatically was bringing in more planes, engineers, and pilots. This, recalled the Soviet ambassador, was always the “meat and potatoes” of the Republic’s dealing with radical left: Soviet pilots, who Smith and Stimson continued to put to use even in the face of massive political backlash. Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of men and women in Republican crews slaved through dangerous missions with minimal training and high casualties. To them, the question was not whether there would be bombing. It was whether they’d be bombing the enemy heartland or watching their homes go up in flames. As graffiti on one Tupolev TB-1 read, the American Republic preferred to “bomb on our feet not our knees”.

Soviet aircraft in northern Michigan​

 

[The Angry Observer]

"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.

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:

“I and every other mother in this nation would sooner go to the front ourselves than send our young boys. No nation that does such a thing can be called civilized, and should this government do so, then we will surely deserve it when MacArthur marches us up the gallows.”​

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.

“An amendment means nothing to those who have to force of arms to ignore it. If women in this great land are to ever be free, they must secure their liberty as men have for centuries uncountable–with the blood of their oppressors on their blades.”

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:

Men, many of you are looking around and you are truly shocked to see these women with their guns and their uniforms. You may think to yourselves that there is no way some girl could ever fight in a war. Hell, a year ago, I’d have been right there with you. But let me tell you a story about a young private named Maggie. Little Maggie was nineteen years old and all of five-foottwo, lucky to be a hundred-twenty pounds soaking wet. During the Liberation of Buffalo, Maggie got separated from the rest of her unit and stuck in a house by herself, pinned in by no less than seven jackboots.​

Patton continued:

This young woman held that house, killing five of Mac’s lapdogs before they could even get in through the door, and shooting the sixth in the foyer. The seventh managed to put a bullet in Maggie’s shoulder, and then thought he’d enjoy a little… female company. She sure as shit wasn’t going to take that lying down, and by the time her unit found her again, she was covered in blood, knife in hand, and that seventh fucker’s cock was on the floor, five feet away from the rest of his corpse! So don’t you, for one single second, think that an American woman can’t fight, or that you can take advantage of your sisters in arms, because if you do, I won’t feel a goddamn thing when she makes an American woman out of you!​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“A Girl in the Ghetto”​

Which provisions in the constitution protect the United States from socialism? Check all that apply:

- The right to private property and compensation for its seizure

- The right to bear arms

- Guaranteed elections

- An independent judiciary

- Not having to quarter soldiers

Jeannie Glenn ticked boxes one, two, and four, and hoped that it was correct. School here in Columbus was much different than back in New Concord, and she didn’t quite know what to make of it. Her brother, on the rare occasion that he was home and awake, just called her schooling propaganda and told her that she shouldn’t believe a lick of it.

She missed her father. John Glenn Senior had been called back into the service, this time as an actual soldier, not just a bugler. Still, his letters came back cheery, assuring them that they were whipping the socialists in Minneapolis., which usually made Johnny scoff when he read them. “Then why are they still bombing us?”

Meanwhile, Clara, despite having been a schoolteacher back home, had been left unemployed due to her credentials being considered insufficient to the authorities here, and a recertification course in “proper” education was far too costly for their displaced little family, not to mention that it required getting permission to leave the refugee area. Officially, the few square blocks of tenements were temporary housing and they were kept inside of it for their safety, but John and the other boys he works with at the munitions factory just called it the ghetto.

Things weren’t all bad. Their little apartment was clean and cozy, even if Jean had taken to sleeping with her mother rather than sharing a bedroom with her big brother. They’d even manage to find out that Annie and her parents were alright, settled into the same area as them, and her brother’s girlfriend was over at their apartment all the time. Both she and Jeannie were grateful for having another girl near their age, and they often ran errands for their families together.

Meanwhile, their mother found some income as a seamstress, being more skilled than many of the other women who’d been settled into the ghetto with them, and willing to do it for cheaper rates. After finishing the last of her homework, Jeannie rose from their little kitchen table and stepped out onto the stoop of their first floor brownstone tenement. The streets were busy as the late afternoon sun cast long shadows and the early summer heat was finally abating.

“J-Jeannie!” Someone called from across the street

Annie Castor’s voice was very distinct, both for its alto pitch and the powerful stutter she suffered from. It was so severe that most times, she went without speaking at all, but from the earliest memories Jean had of her, not once had John gotten short with her or tried to put words in her mouth for her. No wonder she was so sweet on him.

“Thank goodness,” Jean sighed, linking arms with Annie as she met her halfway, “My homework was dreadful.”

Annie gave a sympathetic nod and a shrug. Like John, she was old enough to have not been assigned to the government school in the refugee district, instead having found work in a grocery store as a stock girl, though there wasn’t much of anything to stock those days. Things were painfully tight, and food was a luxury for nearly everyone. Most of Clara Glenn’s customers were having their clothes taken in to accommodate for the weight loss they’d all experienced.

The Castors were doing better than most, because Annie’s father, Homer, was a dentist. Dr. Castor’s services were pretty badly needed, and whenever they visited with the Glenns, he would gripe that the rations and what little outside food flowed in were of such poor quality that half the district’s teeth were rotting out of their heads.

Together, the two girls walked down towards the small park their district had, seeing it full to the brim with people trying to get out of their overheated apartments. In the distance, the chain-link fence that bordered the official temporary housing sector stood tall, crowned by razorwire.

“Maybe we ought to go back, I don’t like how many people are here,” Jean remarked.

“Y— y— you want— ed— d— d to,” Annie shot back, making a gesture that roughly equated to ‘What else are we gonna do?’

She deliberated with herself for a moment, before sighing. “Yeah, you’re right. Besides, we can’t just sit inside and read the same old books again and again, I’ll go nuts.”

So the two of them set off to try and find a decent spot to sit and enjoy the cooling of the evening, eventually settling beneath a shady oak with a handful of other kids whose ages ran the gamut from Jean’s ten to Annie’s sixteen. She didn’t really recognize any of them, but the ghetto’s school was so crowded that it was pretty easy to miss people, nothing like back home, where everyone knew each other.

Introductions were made, and the two girls were content to sit and enjoy the setting of the sun, chatting a bit amongst themselves. Just as the golden hour began in earnest, a sound filled the air, one Jeannie was unfortunately far too familiar with–air raid sirens. Seconds later, the fire of anti-aircraft guns shattered the evening air, which is what immediately had the densely-packed park scrambling to their feet, running for whatever cover could be found.

Annie’s hand was tight as a vise around Jeannie’s upper arm, and the older girl hauled her off without a word, moving so quickly that she was practically half-dragged towards the nearest structure, a tall brick building with an outside stairway leading to the basement door. No one else had made it there yet, all of them moving to the street instead.

“Damn,” Annie cried, shaking the door only to find it locked. “G— get down!”

She practically threw herself on top of Jean, burrowing the two of them into a corner of the stairwell and shielding her as best she could. Over Annie’s shoulder, she watched as a plane flew overhead, bound for the east. Johnny’s that way, her mind supplied unbidden, they’re hitting his factory.

Ice filled the young girl’s veins as she listened to the thunderclap of falling bombs and the constant roar of the AA guns, while she and her brother’s girlfriend clung to each other, two frightened children caught in the whirlwind of a war that they had no true stake in. Smoke began to stream across the sky, dimming the setting sun while the siren just kept wailing.

After what felt like forever and seemingly no time at all, the sirens and explosions stopped just as the first evening stars began to twinkle in the sky overhead, and they shakily made their way out of the stairwell to see that no bombs had fallen on the park or even the street it was located on. The Rumpublicans had bigger targets, it would seem, guns fixed on the industrial district. The same one where both of their loved ones lived and worked.

The streets were still almost entirely deserted as they made their way back to the Glenns’ apartment, the two of them clutching each other’s hands like they were the last tether keeping them attached to the ground. There, on the stoop, was Margaret Castor, Annie’s mother, looking utterly stricken until she set her eyes on them.

“Oh, thank you, Jesus,” she said, rushing up to pull both of the girls into her arms before kissing them each on the forehead. “We’re all fine, Johnny’s made it home, and your daddy’s inside with Clara. We were worried about you two, don’t you ever do that to us again!”

“Sorry, Mrs. Castor,” Jeannie muttered, while Annie just gave her mother an apologetic look.

Inside, they were once again subjected to the embraces and scoldings for vanishing like that, while John swept Annie into his arms and kissed her soundly, her parents’ presence be damned. Jean noted the dust and blood that covered her brother’s work shirt, before seeing the ugly gash across his forehead that was still sluggishly bleeding.

“Johnny,” she cried, pointing to the wound.

“Hey, it’s fine,” John said, smoothing her hair, “Doesn’t even hurt, kid. Scout’s honor.”

That’s when the Castors dropped another metaphorical bomb on them–their apartment building was hit in the air raid. They hadn’t lost everything, but the whole structure was compromised until it could be repaired, so they’d be staying there from now on. Jeannie finally noticed the luggage stacked in the kitchen corner just as John offered Dr. Castor his help in getting their mattress out of their building and into the Glenns’ apartment.

Supper was subdued even by the standards of their meager living in Columbus, with little conversation except for requests for someone to pass something. Afterwards, the spare bed that Jeannie gave up was moved into the living room for Dr. and Mrs. Castor to share, while Annie was put up on the couch.

Jeannie wasn’t surprised in the least, as she settled in next to her mother that night, that Clara immediately pulled her tight into her arms and kissed the top of her head. “Thank goodness you’re alright, babygirl,” she whispered. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too, Mama,” Jeannie replied just as softly.

Sleep did not come easily for anyone in the apartment that night.

When she woke up, she wanted out. These were the kind of thoughts that she knew were useless. Somehow, the swamp of ruin she knew wasn’t supposed to be there but never knew anything else bred a war. There were a lot of platitudes that the hard working and God fearing Glenns had for these times— that they couldn’t be avoided, good families stuck together, and any hardship could be endured with the right outlook.

Jeannie’s face felt dirty and those platitudes seemed distant. She thought about the chances of Yankee bombers hitting their home twice. Clara was already busy collecting their things. Jeannie didn’t imagine they were leaving. Her stomach was rumbling. She didn’t imagine Clara was preparing breakfast.

Jeannie wanted to go outside. She wanted to go back to New Concord, and felt the inability to leave acutely. With Clara busy, she slinked out of her apartment building anyway.

Johnny was sitting right outside the building, chin glued in his hands. He seemed to have gotten much bigger since there time here. Soldiers and people alike were quietly scurrying through the ghetto to mend the damage.

“We’ve been bombed,” said John. He almost said it like a joke. “Bombed again.”

They were quiet for what felt like forever. “Makes sense. We’ve got to destroy them, and we’re doing that with these factories.”

Then why did he look so confused?

“The longer this thing goes on, the more they make us work. Makes sense there too. Factories gotta keep moving. Workers gotta keep working. Gotta move more and work more, now that the Yankee attacks are heating up. ‘Course, workers cost money.” He scowled. “Usually.”

She turned to her brother. She knew how useless the question was before it left her mouth. “Does that mean there will be more bombings?”

Johnny thought for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me.”

He’d changed a lot since the firestorm hollowed out New Concord. His arms and chest looked huge, and there was fur all over them. He had hair on his face, too. It didn’t look like a beard but something had changed and now people thought about him as a man. He talked differently, too. He’d picked up a drawl of some kind, Tennessee or Virginia or Missouri. He hadn’t gotten any less sweet and kind, but he often said things dryly. He hated the new world and spent lots of time in his own.

Jeannie wondered if she talked differently now. She had school. John had work. She wondered when he’d be off, and how badly the Yankees wanted to bomb the industrial district.

More than usual, in school she couldn’t have pulled focus out of herself if she tried. Ghetto school had made her stupider. That was what all the teachers at ghetto school told her, and why they failed her on the constitutional question. Nobody missed class. Nobody mentioned the bombings. Nobody mentioned whatever was happening in Albany at all.

At midday, a radio broadcast was played. The General, their General, thundered about rapidly decreasing tracts of land that separated the Army from Minneapolis. The figures he mentioned were as impossible to wrap her mind around as the constitutional ones. She envisioned her father within eyeshot of some shanty so evil its dilapidation had turned its surroundings black.

Neither Jeannie nor Annie tested their limits that night, returning to the Castors’. She forgot everything they said in school other than their General’s broadcast. John liked to say that nothing was ever going to change. On its face, he’d been proven wrong by every single thing that happened in the last year, so she assumed he really meant things were never going to get any better.

Living with the Castors, who she loved, was degrading. Jeannie believed the arrangement was temporary, even though she didn’t know why and had no reason not to take Johnny’s adage to heart. She started assuming she would die in their apartment.

It was this new situation, sleeping in her mother’s bed in someone else’s room that neither of them owned, that made her understand being a girl in the ghetto with electrifying clarity. It stomped on the honest pride of John Glenn Sr.’s plumbing firm in New Concord.

She did no homework that night. And it wasn’t Clara or even school that woke her up that morning— it was soldiers at their doors. They’d never felt like real soldiers to Jeannie. Everything about the war was muted and muffled, whether it was the broadcasts or John Sr.’s letters, but there were too many witnesses to keep the feel of it from children like her. Like the bombs.

That was why round faced Sergeant Mounts, who couldn’t have been over twenty and was littler than Johnny, was hard for her to take seriously. He carried a gun, as did all of his two fellows, but they were still her brother’s toy army men.

Clara stepped out of the kitchen to grab the door, but Margaret Castor stopped her and opened it herself. “Mornin’ folks,” said Mounts. The first time he’d knocked on their door he’d apologized for the disturbance. He didn’t apologize this time. Jeannie couldn’t remember why he was there to begin with. “We understand that some of you’ve been displaced. We’re here for a headcount.”

“Not everyone’s in,” said Mrs. Castor. Everything the grown-ups said to the ghetto soldiers felt like a lie. “Homer’s at the front. He’s a doctor, if you’ll recall, helping the boys in Pennsylvania. John, too, now he’s in Minneapolis—”

“Mmm-hmm.” Mounts had a notepad and an ink pen. He wasn’t writing anything. “See you two are here.” He smiled at Jeannie. “Little Jeannie, too. And where is Johnny Junior?”

Clara’s face died. “Haven’t seen him in a bit. Assumed he was working late or out with Annie. Why, have you heard something about him?”

Mounts shook his head and stuffed his pen and paper into his coat pocket. “Naw, just counting heads. Keep an eye out for Johnny though, would you?”

It seemed to take a very long time for them to file away. When Mounts and his men left, they didn’t knock on any other doors.

There hadn’t been another bombing. Jeannie assumed John was fine. It didn’t seem like him to hurt himself grievously working. For all his protestations and bitter remarks, she had trouble associating American labor with menace.

For the rest of the day, she was infested. Walking was treacherous, inviting the bombs to go off again. Listening too hard to anything made her hear them again right, behind her forehead. She helped Clara and Mrs. Castor around the house for the remainder of the day.

Johnny got off sometime in the evening. The hour varied. Before the visit from Mounts, Jeannie hadn’t really questioned that. But that night, when Annie returned from the grocery store, it was all she could think of.

Clara kissed her right before dinner. It was relatively common for Johnny to miss it. Less so for Annie. Jeannie ate her peas. She remembered thinking they were a step down from home the first night she had them— that Great Depression come straight for the Glenn family. They tasted worse now. The Castors and Clara talked about their days for around two minutes before she decided to brave talking. It took every nerve in her body.

“Have you seen Johnnie?”

Annie shook her head. “He’s at work if he’s not here,” Jeannie’s mother reminded her. She kissed her again. Jeannie changed into her nightclothes shortly after clean up. She stared at her homework for awhile that night but didn’t get a lick of it done.

The entire ghetto went to sleep to the sound of silent bombs. When Jeannie opened her eyes again, she would have thought it was morning if her mother had not still been asleep. But she was.

The door creaked shut. Jeannie, before she was fully awake, assumed it was Sergeant Mounts. But the shadow was far too big, which put her in a panic.

It was Johnny. She almost pulled the blanket over her head and cried. John saw this and realized she was awake. The apprehension in his silhouette vanished. He leaned into his muscles and he went back to cool, sardonic, and imposing.

“What are you doing?” She hissed. She was crying already.

John didn’t see this and put a finger to his lips. He grinned, and she had no idea what he meant by it. “Late night. Just go back to sleep, yeah?”

Then she saw the damage on his side and wailed. Clara was on her feet before her eyes were open. Something terrible had happened to Johnny. He had blood all over his side, but he still walked.

“Johnny,” said Clara. “What are you doing, being out so late?”

John shrugged. “I’m so sorry Ma. Went late and goofed around with some of the boys.” He kissed his mother on the head. That seemed to satisfy her, and he guided her back to their bed. He winced with each step, like it was going to knock her over.

John touched Jeannie on the back. “It ain’t as bad as it looks. Just a scratch. Nobody needs to know.”

“There were soldiers, Johnny.”

He considered that. Then he put his chin on Jeannie’s head. “Go back to sleep, kid.”

She did, and had a bunch of dreams she couldn’t remember. She wasn’t sure, when she heard her mother screaming, if it was one of them or not. Jeannie woke up but didn’t get out of bed. Mounts and one other soldier were back. Both had guns, and were facing something in the Castors’ other room.

Clara was sobbing. “You all know,” Mounts was saying, his voice barely discernible, “you all know the consequences of scabbing. You all know what it means to get in bed with fucking labor, to try and— QUIET DOWN!”

Clara couldn’t and didn’t. It was Johnny, in the corner. He had a different dirty shirt on and it was still bloody. He was sneering, unmoved by the gashes in his side or the bruises on his face.

“You little people,” said Mounts. His face was bright red now. “You just can’t take a good thing, huh?” Clara was only louder. Jeannie’s head only hurt more. “Can’t exceed expectations and just prove you shouldn’t be in fucking ghettos, huh?”

But there must’ve been something under there, something past her mother’s crying, brother’s stoic agony, and captor’s fury. There must’ve been fear of what a shattered mother could do to him, agony in his heart, or greed for what John Jr. could do in a factory without any distractions. Because they dragged him off before Annie could return that night, and thirty minutes before Jeannie realized that he was not coming back.

 

[The Angry Observer]

"Shackles of the Regime"​

“… and as we went to bed, I passed a horrid sight–a boy, lucky to have been thirteen years old, hanging from the gallows, his eyes bulging out of his skull, tear tracts running down his face. Had he cried when he was being strung up, begged for mercy, or had it simply been the strangulation that did it? What crime could a boy have committed to have ended up in this place, let alone to deserve to be hanged? 'How can they do this? Where is God?' A man behind me quietly despaired. ‘He’s right there,’ my mind supplied, ‘Dangling from the gallows, still twitching.’" -Excerpt from John Glenn’s Heartless in the Heartland

Early Natcorp forced labor​

No aspect of the National-Corporate regime under Douglas MacArthur has been the subject of more study, debated, and collective horror than the web of labor, prison, and death camps that spanned its way across Natcorp-controlled America. These places emerged first out of necessity, and then, as the war progressed, out of a growing cruelty, as their functions shifted from detention and slave labor to liquidation of undesirables.

Under the purview of J. Edgar Hoover and the Department of Justice, the concentration camps first started in occupied territory, but, as dissent began to appear in the Natcorp homeland of the Upper South, they could soon be found in the remote regions of North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. By the war’s end, the total number of encampments was forty-two, of which six were classified as death camps.

Of course, the use of slave labor was not restricted to just the camps. Many refugees who were evacuated by the regime from the countryside ended up in ghettoes in the hearts of industrial cities, and those who were able were usually put to work in factories vital to the war effort. Earlier in the war, this was usually compensated work, however, as the war situation deteriorated for the Natcorps, payment was first deferred, and then simply withheld entirely under the justification that payment to the refugees was given in the form of their rations and housing. Never mind the fact that the rations were insufficient and the housing was usually stolen from ethnic neighborhoods that had been cleaned out and their inhabitants put to work farming in the countryside in even worse conditions than the ghettoes.

The first camp was established just outside of Plymouth, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Wilkes-Barre, in response to the Natcorp capture of the city during the early days of the war. There, it held prisoners of war as well as local partisans. At this point, there were no plans for permanent detention, and many of the first detainees in Camp Plymouth were eventually released within weeks.

However, as the war deepened and local resistance to the regime sprung up wherever Natcorp boots tread, the need to contain that resistance proved overwhelming. Initial DOJ memos suggest that there was hope for some rehabilitation of the detainees, but this was quickly quashed, and plans soon shifted to essentially work those held in the camps to death, with certain exceptions. Even the legendarily callous Hoover believed that those who were underage could eventually reach a point where they would be able to be released.

DOJ G-men in 1934​

It is a well-documented fact that the Natcorps pioneered the use of concentration camps in a way that was emulated by the Nazis during the Second World War. Though Dachau was established nearly a full year before the March on Washington, it was a markedly different type on encampment than those used in the United States by the Natcorps, being designed to hold political prisoners and only later becoming a concentration camp in the contemporary understanding of the word.

Throughout the war, nearly two million Americans ended up in the camps, though exact numbers are hard to quantify due to the staff and commanders often destroying records as the Republican Army approached their camps. Of that two million, approximately six hundred thousand people died, a third of which were the result of direct liquidation, while the other twothirds fell to malnutrition, injury, illness, or execution for any number of reasons or even no reason at all.

The six death camps built on Hoover’s direct orders were located in the following:
• Hempfield, Pennsylvania
• Salt Rock, West Virginia
• Akron, Ohio
• Kokomo, Indiana
• Rockfield, Illinois
• Marion, Iowa

Of these, the most brutal, resulting in nearly half of the two hundred thousand liquidations, was Camp Kokomo. Those brought into the camp were subjected to weapons tests and forms of torture that were explicitly designed to maximize human suffering. Under the purview of camp commandant Clyde Barrow, Kokomo became a factory of death that revolted even the most hardened of Hoover’s G-Men, to the point that the camp’s existence was stricken even from the Director’s personal records.

New arrivals to Camp Kokomo​

Barrow and his long-time companion and later wife, Bonnie Parker, have endured in the American psyche as symptoms of the moral rot that pervaded the Natcorps from top to bottom. Indeed, their story is one that is rather unusual, because Bonnie and Clyde started out as petty criminals and the subject of some measure of public adoration. The pair, part of a wider gang, were famous for robbing banks and grocery stores across Texas in the early 1930’s, before moving on to more serious crimes.

By early 1934, the two crooks had death warrants on their heads, and made plans to flee from the newly-empowered Texas Rangers under the quasi-government of Huey Long. They were able to make it as far north as Missouri before being caught at a checkpoint in Jefferson City in March. Rather than attempt to fight against the military, the two surrendered, and soon found themselves presented with a choice–make themselves useful to General MacArthur or face the firing squad.

Initially, the two were put to work processing POWs in central Illinois before being transferred to guarding a refugee filtration center outside of Columbus, Ohio. Barrow and Parker both proved to be able, if sadistic, guards. Parker in particular was found to be useful, as her penchant for writing poetry translated to her transferral into the bureaucratic side of things. In order to prevent their separation, the pair wed in August of 1935.

In September of 1935, the two were moved to Camp Kokomo, then under the management of the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana, Val Nolan. Nolan soon found himself eliminated from the position for his refusal to carry out the sort of industrialized death the camp was designed for, and Barrow was recommended for the job of commandant by his former supervisor in Ohio.

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Marker, 1933-1932​

Under Barrow’s purview, what little camp documentation survives paints an image as stark as those of the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the depravities perpetrated by Japan’s Unit 731. The few survivors of Camp Kokomo, mostly those liberated from the camp following its capture, specifically reference Barrow’s personal sadism.

The role of Bonnie Parker in the running of Kokomo is heavily debated, especially due to the limited number of surviving documents. Testaments vary immensely, some suggesting she had little to do with the actual operations of the camp, and others putting her directly at the center. One survivor alleged that she personally took part in his torture, and this quickly snowballed into a public narrative of Parker as sexually voracious torturer who manipulated her husband and used the camp as her personal playground of horror. This was patently false, but it still exists today in the frequent usage of the slang term ‘Kokomo Queen’ to refer to a cruel, promiscuous woman with little regard for the men she harms.

The tale of Bonnie and Clyde came to its bloody conclusion as the war neared its end. With the Republican military bearing down on Camp Kokomo, the commandant and his wife abandoned their post after overseeing the destruction of most of the camp’s records and the execution of most of the few remaining prisoners. The two were attempting to flee to Canada with falsified documents, but were discovered while attempting to cross a bridge in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Barrow, driving their town car, sped off, but both were killed when the Republican soldiers at the checkpoint riddled the vehicle with bullets.

Beyond the death camps were the work camps, which were often located directly in key industrial centers. At times, free factory workers intermingled with those who were subjected to forced labor, but this practice soon died out as conditions in the work camps decayed and the people enslaved there became too emaciated to be allowed to be seen by the general public.

A Natcorp factory in Springfield, Illinois​

Conditions varied wildly from place to place, depending on the type of work being done and proximity to the fighting, as well as other factors. On average, work camps saw a death rate in the range of ten to twenty percent, with outliers as low as the single digits and as high as more than fifty percent. The largest Natcorp work camp was Camp Vinton, located outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There, as many as forty thousand men and women were enslaved to farm corn and wheat for the regime. Ironically, Camp Vinton saw an excessively high mortality rate due to malnutrition, as virtual none of its produce was kept to feed the people working it.

The first people in the Natcorp concentration camps were prisoners of war and partisans. They were soon joined by political opponents to the regime, and then by a growing list of undesirable minorities. These included Catholics, Jews, the Amish, homosexuals, and any number of ethnic and racial minorities. Unlike Nazi policies, which called for the rounding up of undesirables regardless of whether or not they’d committed any crimes, the regime was mostly content to supervise these groups intently, waiting for even the slightest slip in behavior. When the decision to seize someone was made, it was carried out swiftly and brutally, and collateral casualties often followed the G-Men’s raids.

Special note should be made of the African American population across the Midwest. Prior to the war, the Black population of the United States had been undergoing a process known as the Great Migration, which saw large numbers of Black families moving northward from the South due to economic and social conditions. In the North, segregation was not as direct as Jim Crow in the South, but rather a de facto practice caused by self-sorting and discriminatory housing practices.

This changed with the dawn of the National-Corporate regime. Almost immediately, Black workers saw wages slashed and the number of jobs available to them sharply decreased. Within months of MacArthur coming to power, an even fiercer form of segregation had taken a stranglehold across much of the Midwest due to the Natcorp military occupation. The movement of Black people was heavily regulated, being restricted to their own, separate ghettoes in most cities, and those in the suburbs and rural areas were cleared out, with their properties being transferred to White families.

Even the labor camps for African Americans were segregated, and they were the subject to the regime’s most pointed neglect. Moreover, the regime was much more likely to simply execute a Black offender rather than move them into a camp to begin with, meaning that those in the segregated camps were almost always low-level offenders who otherwise would have been fined or given a limited sentence of supervised, unpaid labor.

Segregation, brought by the Natcorps to Ohio​

Immigrants also suffered unique injustices under the regime. Cultural practices and dress that the regime deemed “un-American” were harshly curbed, and the use of languages other than English was essentially forbidden in public. Many immigrant families could not properly register with the Natcorps due to the forms being only provided in English, which resulted in them being denied rations and resettlement, or even being falsely accused of being subversive agents for the Republic and imprisoned.

As the full scope of the Natcorp atrocities became public knowledge across the United States and the world, outrage bloomed, even in MacArthur’s personal fiefdom in Washington. As the war entered its twilight, the only world governments which had not recognized Albany as the legitimate authority in America were Italy and Germany, but even they had begun to scale down their support for the National-Corporate government by this point.

Historians debate the effectiveness of the concentration camp system in Natcorp America. Brooks argues that the amount of weapons and ammunition produced in the camps made them an effective investment in the eyes of the bureaucratic aspect of the regime despite their horrors, while Rummel counters with the point that many of those imprisoned and killed might have otherwise been willing contributors to the cause had Hoover simply tolerated minor amounts of dissent that would have likely gone nowhere provided those dissenting felt heard and protected by the regime.

The existence of the camps in a large war zone meant that escape was especially rare, and those who few who made it out, already weakened from malnutrition, illness, and injury, found themselves in a desolate landscape of scarce resources and danger around every corner. In just under fifteen hundred escapes, one hundred and seventy four people successfully found their way to safe harbor in the Republic or in Canada.

The official count of survivors liberated from the camps by the end of the war is posted at 1,345,702. These people, many of whom were gravely ill or facing starvation, constituted a full percentage of the prewar population. By 2020, the number of survivors had dwindled to less than five thousand, most of whom had been children during their imprisonment. Among those who survived and went on to become famous were astronaut and politician John Glenn, Star Trek actress Majel Barrett, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson II, and musician Perry Como.

Ultimately, the operators of the concentration camp network made up a large portion of those who were subject to the military tribunals of the Cincinnati Trials, the overwhelming majority of whom were convicted and sentenced to death, meeting their fates in an event that is now subject to intense debate, the infamous Gallows Day.

Anti-fascist demonstrators in New York City​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“Armageddon in the Cradle of Liberty”​

"The men are broken. They will-not can-not resist the next one." - Note found in King of Prussia

Natcorp aerial reconnaissance outside Philadelphia​

The Battle of Philadelphia was, by far, the most expensive single engagement in the Second America Civil War. Even by the standards of that conflict’s vicious frontline in the Great Lakes and eastern seaboard, the Philadelphia campaign was the bloodiest battle in the entire war. It took priority for the Smith Administration, which practically repurposed the entire Northeast to keep the Republican forces there afloat. This was no simple task. Nearly a year previously, in 1934, the National-Corporate assault on the city had failed to take it. As a consequence, the regime’s leadership decided that it would be better in the long term to fight a hideous, extended battle on top of America’s founding city, since victory there could bring an end to the war. On this issue, General Douglas MacArthur and President Al Smith were united: Philadelphia was the backbone of the American Republic. “If we can snap it,” explained MacArthur to Eisenhower, according to what remains of Prescott Bush’s diary, “we’ve broken a hole in the enemy’s lines, which will induce retreat and panic, and put us within days of New York and the whole of New England.” But even so, MacArthur was wary. In the chaos of 1934, when nascent hordes of Republican volunteers were lining up to defend the Keystone State, William Randolph Hearst had very frankly suggested pounding Philadelphia until it couldn’t move, reasoning that rebellions and rump states had to be dealt with harshly and quickly. While MacArthur’s flamboyant habits and the general disorganization in the regime has made discerning his true motives challenging, MacArthur scholarship generally suggests that he was moved by the risks of a prolonged battle, even if he eventually accepted them. The Natcorps’ aggressive push into Philadelphia had largely been successful in 1934, but the Republican lines had not snapped as MacArthur wanted. They’d bent and suffered enormously, but by winter the Natcorps were forced to slow the offensive due to their own weaknesses and Republican resolve. Thus, the Battle of Philadelphia began in earnest. The winter was marked by both sides doing what had been unthinkable a year ago to strengthen their own positions. Aerial and artillery strikes were conducted vigorously against the opposition, with countless civilians caught in the crossfire. Nearly everywhere in America was pinched by a painful food shortage, but in Philadelphia this became an apocalyptic famine. George C. Marshall and his Natcorp opponents seized food, to ensure their respective armies had access to it, and to further force the civilian population of Philadelphia into compliance.

The Natcorps sought to use the winter to strengthen their position in Philadelphia’s western parts, and in the spring launch an even more massive attack on the Republican forces. Indeed, as the Republican enclaves in the Midwest rapidly collapsed thanks to Natcorp recruits pouring west, a stream of new soldiers from the border states closed the vice on Philadelphia. And while the Republicans suffered greatly, the attrition oriented mode of warfare also gave Marshall valuable time to organize. Historians have long debated the merits of these actions. Sensing that time was running out, MacArthur ordered Lloyd Fredendall to press the attack. In February, following a barrage reminiscent of the ones that razed much of Alsace-Lorraine in the Great War, a colossal Natcorp force attacked from the northwest. Stimson’s efforts to coordinate a counterattack from Allentown were swatted off, and the regime unleashed its fury on western Philadelphia. Pottstown, King of Prussia, Willow Grove, Conshohocken, and Springfield were crushed after heavy fighting. Marshall had little choice but to retreat and inflict the maximum amount of casualties possible, something he did through cold blooded strategy. “We did whatever was possible to delay the Jackboot’s advance,” recalled one of his aides. “Which required some pretty expensive counter-attacks. Worse yet, we couldn’t relieve every Battalion caught under fire from Mac. And we acknowledged how useful those types of delaying agents could be.” In Delaware, the Republican cause saw more luck. While the Natcorps surrounded them from all sides, the Republicans in Wilmington were able to grind the enemy offensive to a halt and keep General Mark Clark from entering the city. So long as Marshall controlled the nucleus of Philadelphia, he could use the Delaware River to reinforce the Republicans in Wilmington, which kept the Natcorp armies divided enough to prevent them from dealing a killing blow.

Famine victims in Philadelphia​

Marshall did not believe he could face the entire Natcorp force at once while weathering the kind of destruction he was. Hence, he fought on multiple very tenuous fronts. This shifted Natcorp war aims towards the Delaware River. If Philadelphia was the backbone of the Republic, the Delaware was the backbone of Philadelphia. Fredendall judged that his best bet for seizing it was between Philadelphia proper and Wilmington. The Natcorps leveled their sights against the Chester township. “They’re ferrying the finest Russian war machines down that river,” commented Fredendall. “With me on Chester and Ike from the rear, we can make Wilmington a sitting duck.” MacArthur agreed. In June of 1935, this triggered what was at that point the worst fighting in the war. The III, VIII, and X Corps attacked Chester head-on, following an even more savage aerial bombardment. However, the Natcorps had reached something of a ceiling with these tactics. It was true, they were capable of inflicting much horror on Philadelphia’s defenders. But after the long winter, the Republicans weren’t inclined to shatter just bombing runs alone. Meanwhile, the Republic’s fledgling Air Force did its best to run the assailants off. Republican aviators ran risky missions, flying past Natcorp artillery and through swarms of fighter planes to take the pressure off Chester. Using the Delaware, Marshall rotated troops from New England to Chester. The Republicans’ ferries were under constant fire, and more than a few sunk. Soldiers were told to swim to shore and join the town’s defense. On both sides, they lived off of inadequate rations. The noise of carnage never stopped, not even in the dead of night. Civilian collateral was high, as were the casualties divisions in Chester suffered. Conditions were so thoroughly miserable that the War Department feared mutiny on more than one occasion, and went to great pains to make sure no unit spent more than a few weeks in Chester.

More dangerous than planes were tanks. In Chester, the Republicans held a single, temporary advantage: until the Natcorps razed the entire city to the ground, it would be difficult to penetrate. In south Jersey, the Republican defenders had no such respite. Eisenhower attacked them on a wide and open front, taking advantage of the regime’s superiority in armor. Generals Patton and Butler already demanded armor for their respective campaigns, which put the Republic in an especially vulnerable position. Eisenhower in practice could depend on air support from Washington, even when he couldn’t from LeMay’s Ohio headquarters. Using armor and air to break up infantry formations, Marshall either had to defeat him in the field or retreat to the city’s confines— trapping him in a siege, potentially allowing the Natcorp armies to link up, and leaving Eisenhower unopposed in much of New Jersey. Taciturn and thorough, Eisenhower believed that if he and Fredendall continued to squeeze Philadelphia from both sides, it would collapse. “In history,” he noted, “there are few occasions where an enemy entrapped like the one in Philadelphia triumphed.” And if he could not make the Republicans run, Eisenhower would crush them. He recognized this would be no easy task, and the casualties ahead weighed on the reluctant Natcorp commander. During the Jersey campaign, Eisenhower smoked nearly ten packs of cigarettes a day and couldn’t be found without a mug of coffee in his hand. He also became irritable, and rarely held his tongue when he believed another commander to be making a mistake. Fredendall was liked better by his superiors, but treated his duties with less urgency. There were few organizational reforms in such a massive army already reeling from an administrative vacuum from the Ithaca campaign, the Natcorps leaned on infantry when they didn’t need to, and Fredendall spent lavishly on creature comforts such as a bulletproof cadillac.

Lloyd Fredendall​

The Republicans had roughly the same calculation. Marshall appealed to Smith, warning of the dire straits the Republic would be in if either Natcorp commander was to reach the Delaware, much less both. “Calamity,” said Marshall, “is on top of us if Eisenhower’s progress continues through the summer, even if we shall hold Chester. Much of our positions in Philadelphia would become useless, mandating a messy retreat to New York City that would leave many divisions behind.” Marshall concluded by earnestly begging for more troops, more weapons, or a counteroffensive elsewhere that could take the heat off Philadelphia. Some historians have questioned the truth behind this ominous warning, especially considering that Smith used Marshall’s reports to bludgeon the GOP in Congress. Even so, the War Department certainly saw smoke under the fire. In June, Stimson authorized Operation Tudor, a massive attack on Eisenhower’s northern flank. It was largely ineffectual in seriously compromising Atlantic City and did almost nothing to limit the Natcorp units pouring into Jersey (here, the U.S.N. enjoyed success, albeit by modest degrees), but it did indirectly reinforce Marshall and delayed Eisenhower. This gave Marshall time to reorganize. He turned to the young and bright Brigadier General James Roosevelt, the New York Governor’s son, to be the Republic’s first line of defense. The resulting Hammonton campaign was not promising for the Republic. Eisenhower was not nearly as easy to distract as other Natcorp commanders had proven. A shrewd organizer, MacArthur’s faith in him was vindicated as Eisenhower spent the summer repeatedly outflanking his opponent. “He is my chess-master,” proclaimed MacArthur. “If he has the winning position, he’s never losing it. He knows every hold in the book, and Albany’s little prince is learning the hard way.”

Even so, without Eisenhower at the Delaware, the Republic had a lifeline. Smith and Kennedy’s maneuvering abroad had enough tanks rolling in to stave off disaster. In Hammonton, Roosevelt retreated but didn't route, inflicting considerable damage on the advancing Natcorps and making good use of his armor. The campaign nonetheless cost Smith some political capital, as the GOP used the setbacks to accuse the War Department of nepotism. It also grated the ego of the twenty-seven-year-old general. The campaign in Jersey was enabled by Marshall moving troops from the city’s western front. This weakened the Republicans in the critical moment, and led many in Albany to believe the city was within days of falling. Smith did not take the threat lightly, and proposed drastic action. For both political and military purposes, the War Department was under strict orders from him to prepare a counteroffensive, presumably to be launched in early 1936. “We are all Patton men,” explained one leak in Albany. “All are largely in agreement that the Jackboot must be sent on the run very soon, to keep the public confidence high if nothing else.” Of course, this was easier said than done. As distinguished as Patton’s service was, Smith already had a sense that “Bandito” had trust in his abilities that didn’t match reality. He and Stimson took an active role in the Fourth Army’s preparations, fully conscious that striking too early would make the Republic’s position even more dire and every second delayed could mean collapse in Philadelphia. In July of 1935, Smith told a Congressional delegation that “too much remains underway for Patton to make his move”. Nonetheless, with Eisenhower and Fredendall closing in, action had to be taken. This is why Smith authorized perhaps the single most controversial of his military maneuvers, the Scranton campaign.

Natcorps in the Scranton campaign​

The Sixth Army, under the command of Omar Bradley, feinted at the heart of occupied Pennsylvania. This was not intended to dislodge the enemy, merely to distract him. Smith fully expected high casualties, and even for the Natcorps to reorient and seize previously unmolested territory. Bradley was once again the “patsy”, as he referred to his role. Smith believed losses could be mitigated by the already established defenses in the Adirondack Mountains, and would certainly be worth buying time for the troops in Philadelphia. Bradley and the Sixth, however, shocked the entire world by overwhelming initial Natcorp defenders and carving a path straight towards Harrisburg. If Albany was pleasantly surprised, Washington was apoplectic. As has been the case in many of history’s worst moments, both sides feared the other more than they knew. Just as Albany was buying time in multiple desperate fronts it was ill equipped to support, so Douglas MacArthur had come to feel the walls closing in. The most compelling argument to support the March on Washington, and perhaps the reason that the fifty-five year old General attached his name to it to begin with, was that the government had bloodlessly been decapitated and someone needed to fill that void. This gave the early Natcorps much room to win over a populace that had no idea what to believe in January of 1934. But the illusion of the bloodless National-Corporate state did not endure much further than there. The American Republic fought on, and the Northeast was not the only part of the country that was horribly suffering under its excesses.

A common interpretation of MacArthur’s war leadership is that he was an excellent commander but a poor politician, and he served as nothing more than a front for an oligarchy that shortsightedly looted an entire country. But more recent analysis suggests that however detached from the doings of his subordinates MacArthur was, if nothing else he was excellent at keeping his own power. Brinkley, whose scholarship typically supports the former view, nonetheless contends that MacArthur “very quickly understanding what Hoover’s nucleus of power in the DOJ could do in the tightly centralized federal bureaucracy was an unforced success”. And although it is debated what role he personally played in the economic finagling at the beginning of the year, the price controls and stimulus payouts that he forced the regime’s Old Guard to assent to kept him in power, even if it inflicted financial ruin that part of America still hasn't entirely recovered from. It was a bandage to a much more enduring problem. The War was expensive. It required money the regime didn’t have and couldn’t acquire without severe repercussions. More direct of a problem was the human toll. The fighting in Philadelphia and other fronts was every bit as ferocious for the fascists as the Republicans. Albany had not imploded and the war ground on. While Einsehower may have believed that the capture of New York City was a few months of fighting away, these nuances were lost on average people. “We are blasted and broken,” wrote one minister in Philadelphia, “watching Rumpublican shells fly through our ranks and the greatest city in America razed to the dirt. Morale too is in the pits. It is difficult to get the old-timers to keep their spirits up. The new-timers are unreliable and now it is just as often us that break in the face of danger.” The memo, which was directed to Fredendall and his staff, ominously concludes by noting “chatter about the Department of Justice.”

Republican infantry struggling in Philadelphia​

On top of this, the anarchy the war threw America into unleashed a killer that neither side had the resources to fight off: cholera, or Philadelphia Flu, born from water issues at the frontline. It was “oil on the fire”, and quickly engulfed both armies. It raced outwards, ravaging New England and MacArthur’s D.C. headquarters alike, then spiraling into the south. In the Midwest, cholera was a genuine harbinger of the apocalypse, and the disease had both armies at their breaking point. However, as the attackers, the Natcorps were the ones that lost valuable initiative. The highest estimates put cholera’s death toll throughout the entire war at one million. And the Upper South, where the bulk of Natcorp manpower resided, was no exception. "The hospitals," writes Diarist Mary Dothan, "are stuffed like turkeys were in better times." The disease shook faith in MacArthur’s rule and sapped valuable resources. MacArthur toiled to keep problems from resurfacing, and in a conversation with Bush compared himself to “a lowly servant in the hull of a ship, patching leaks with glue I don’t have.” In May, there had been another payout, a smaller and more targeted one, to ward off these issues and reward Natcorp veterans. Simultaneously, conscription was expanded, as was forced labor, which predominantly targeted ethnic minorities. Neither the problem nor MacArthur’s solutions were received kindly by the regime’s godfather, J. P. Morgan and the Old Guard. They ultimately relented, but their patience was not unlimited. What appeared to have wounded MacArthur most was not the actual threat, but that there was one at all from his own house. Very rarely is MacArthur even recorded mentioning Morgan, but as in his prewar career he expressed a “royalistic” contempt for the “bureaucrats and busybodies” that were not ready to win their own war.

When, on top of all of these things, the Republicans launched the Scranton Offensive, MacArthur snapped. MacArthur knew a counteroffensive (to be commanded by Patton, the only man MacArthur truly seemed to fear) was in the works. Panicked directives flew from Washington to the generals at the front, demanding Bradley’s destruction at once. MacArthur made a show of the issue in his radio address, giving dire proclamations of communist hordes marching through Pennsylvania— and using this as a pretext to continue the conscription, slavery, and mass crackdowns the regime relied on. In the summer of 1935, hundreds of Natcorp bureaucrats and wealthy supporters were dragged to concrete dungeons in D.C. by Hoover's men, which may have weakened the state itself but increased MacArthur’s control over what was left of it. In this way, MacArthur outflanked the Old Guard, securing more power for himself. The situation at the front was less clear cut. As for the Offensive itself, as Smith had grimly predicted, the Natcorps retaliated harshly. By the end of July, not only had the Republic’s initial gains been rolled back, thousands of soldiers were killed and a fresh batch of Anglo-Soviet armor was destroyed. The Natcorps were close to Scranton itself. The stunning defeat was very bad for Smith’s public image, and what polls were available suggested his approval rating fell to the lowest it ever had. Omar Bradley was left a loser again. But the internal damage wasn’t limited to the Republic. While much about the Scranton Offensive backfired, it seems to have (perhaps unnecessarily) drawn fire away from Philadelphia. MacArthur was privately angry with Fredendall, viewing his response as insufficiently quick. “Fredendall,” notes Alan Brinkley, “saw the maneuver as the feint it was. He was slow to communicate this to MacArthur, slow to understand MacArthur’s political considerations, and slow to carry out his overlord’s orders. The peak of the embarrassment was structure dissolving in Fredendall’s mobile headquarters when after much warning he attempted to, as the name suggests, move it westward.” As a consequence, Fredendall got little credit for the action in Scranton.

Anti-war demonstrators in New York​

This provoked another of MacArthur’s infamous command shakeups. Fredendall was moved to Maryland, ostensibly to prosecute the campaign in Wilmington. Meanwhile, more secure in his seat of power, MacArthur transferred his trusted lieutenant Hugh Alosyus Drum from Washington to Philadelphia. While the Battle of Philadelphia would continue to claim more lives than any engagement in U.S. history, MacArthur somewhat pared down the vicious infantry assaults in favor of more air raids. It has been debated whether this was intentional or simply a side effect of the void that followed Fredendall’s departure, and is endlessly debated whether things really were as dire as any side believed. Whatever the case, the Republic did not lose Chester in the summer of 1935. And Drum’s stay in Philadelphia would not be a long one.

 

[The Angry Observer]

“To Make Men Free”​

“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.” - W. E. B. DuBois

Black demonstrators in the March on Washington's aftermath
​

The extent to which the Second American Civil War was fought over race remains contested. Traditional retellings of the War have often relegated its racial aspect to the background, a sideshow in the great American drama. More recently, however, it has become more common to put the brutal racial repression in the three undemocratic American blocs at the center of their stories. “The Natcorp regime,” wrote James Baldwin, “did not incidentally support segregation and Nazi race theories, nor were the programs of Henry Ford and the Director anything less than a straightforward advancement of what it was meant to do. Its conception was in the womb of the Anglo-Saxon cult. It was, on principle, terror and naked violence against human equality.” The most charitable thing that is now said about Douglas MacArthur is that he was often apathetic or emotionally unstable to pay too much attention to what his underlings were doing. The question is a purely academic one. There is no question that where Natcorp armies marched, they brought segregation with them, even to areas where it hadn’t existed before. Directly from Washington, orders flew from Hoover’s headquarters to treat black communities with an especially heavy hand.

The miseries the Natcorp regime inflicted on racial minorities in America were not merely confined to segregation and “Dixifying” the Midwest and border states. As soldiers, the Natcorp elite quickly came to believe that African-Americans were more trouble than they were worth. The prevailing sentiment among Natcorp administrators was that giving them weapons was likely to backfire and that they were far more useful for manual labor than on the battlefield. Some individual commanders, most notably Dwight Eisenhower, did recruit black soldiers, but these were in the minority. All Natcorp commanders and all important figures in the regime, in some form or another, participated “The forced-labour camps all over the Americas,” observed George Orwell, “where blacks, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery.” While the regime’s victims were diverse and countless, its racialization was obvious, as demonstrated by the huge proportion of black Americans confined to what was, for all intents and purposes, slavery by the state. Able bodied men were often sent to the front, if not to fight then to work in some other capacity. Women and children went to the factories. As the war escalated, the regime embraced increasingly despotic and horrifying measures to keep the bottom line out of the red, and black Americans often bore the brunt of its fury.

Black forced laborers in St. Louis​

Natcorp price controls were also a death knell for African-American economic prospects, one whose effects can be felt to this day. To win his war, MacArthur needed massive financial commitments from the financial oligarchy that backed him. To keep this oligarchy happy, MacArthur instituted price controls that effectively monopolized many key industries and raised the prices of nearly everything. Marginalized communities in America were in no position to shoulder these burdens. The stimulus payouts that kept the regime’s subjects from total financial collapse were only for white families. “In the new America,” wrote one black diarist in Missouri, “it is too expensive to be a negro.” With the state actively hostile and the economy impossible to survive in, black Natcorps had few options. Riots were harshly punished and only further encouraged Natcorp racialization. Financial desperation, meanwhile, was answered with state provided “work reform” which was effectively ghetto slavery, like what the family of John Glenn endured.

The regime was fast to embrace race theories. The most notable figure in that is Henry Ford, the creator of the Model T and a man often credited with engineering the assembly line. Ford enthusiastically promoted Nazi Germany’s racial pseudoscience. To him, segregation was another step on the march to progress. As the Natcorp state had ended class conflict by putting both classes to work at gunpoint, so it would end racial conflict in the same way. Ford would eventually become the wealthiest man on earth thanks to the new regime, and his company in Dearborn fanatically practiced and promoted the new orthodoxy. But for Henry Ford, segregation was always a side show. The chief enemy was always the Jew. Aside from the Nazi war criminals, who he associated with closely, Ford is the “public face of antisemitism in the twentieth century” according to a study of Holocaust scholars. Ford conceived of the war as between a coalition of great men determined to lead America into the future and International Jewry, the true master of Albany. As Ford’s influence in the state grew, at least partially because John W. Davis was constantly absent and MacArthur came to distrust Morgan, antisemitism became a dearly held tenet of Natcorp ideology. Violence against synagogues exploded in the aftermath of the March on Washington. Well-off Jews saw their estates seized and fed to Natcorp oligarchs like Ford. And as early as January of 1935, under Ford’s direction, the DOJ began to monitor “all known Jews and Jewish sympathizers.”

Regime propaganda advertising the price controls​

The Natcorp state was not the only bloc in the Civil War that saw a massive uptick in racial discrimination. The southern and western blocs did as well, although in different forms. In the American West, as Alan Brinkley wrote, “Neutrality and racism were two birds of the same feather.” This meant the Neutrality state governments were fast to clamp down on their very small black communities. The Ku Klux Klan flared up as a Neutrality organization, explicitly warning that “surrendering” sovereignty to Albany would mean black “hordes raping their way through Idaho.” The most dramatic example of this was the Klan takeover in Oregon. While state functions remained under the control of a civilian government, it was dominated by a Neutrality Alliance that used the Klan as an official state arm, which terrorized minority communities and western Republicans. This happened in every western state, although with less outright government sanction. Racialism in the neutral west made its Congressional delegations, the so-called Coward Caucus, an easy political target for the embattled Democrats in Albany. The Peace forces under former President Herbert Hoover’s dominance of the Party of Lincoln also severely complicated its credibility with black voters, who they had commandingly won in every single election up to that point.

Racialism in the west was not just limited to black Americans. The collapse of federal authority left America’s fringes vulnerable, low hanging fruits for someone ambitious enough to take them. In the western U.S., the Japanese were well poised to be that ambitious thief. This has forced the western states into something of a rump de facto confederation under the leader of Rear Admiral Joseph T. Reeves, from Hawaii. Reeves would later defend his conduct by arguing that “every step taken was to keep the Japs out of Pearl Harbor”. Whatever the case, deterring Japanese aggression was one of the few things the western governments could pull together on, and was tacitly supported by both Albany and Washington. One tragic byproduct of this was violence and eventually state encouraged discrimination against Japanese people living in America. Land was confiscated by local authorities at their discretion. Mobs attacked Japanese-Americans, including longtime upstanding citizens. More disturbingly still, western progressives, under Reeves’s stewardship, embarked on an organized campaign to “arrest” Japanese culture, moving thousands of Japanese westerners en masse off of their property and further inland. Oftentimes, confiscated land was doled out to white farmers. This process of “internment”, as it came to be called, and its legacy remains an area of active debate. It has controversially been labeled a genocide by some scholars and activists.

Japanese internment in northern California​

The Southern bloc’s relationship with black Americans and racial minorities was far more complicated, because of the character of Senator Huey Long’s regime.

Long was a populist. Unusual among the Southern Democrats that ruled the former Confederacy, Long thought in terms of class first and race second. He was the rival of the old business elites of the South. After the March on Washington decapitated federal authority in Louisiana, Long, who was already in firm control of that state’s political machine, acted fast. He orchestrated the seizure and nationalization of Louisiana’s most important industries. An early alliance with Texas Governor Miriam Ferguson and Oklahoma Governor Bill Murray gave Long a power base in the South. Meanwhile, the uncertain situation made the South’s old hierarchy remarkably unstable. Long, a canny political operator and populist champion, leveraged this into absolute control over his native sector. This combination of pragmatism and populism, according to Alan Brinkley, made Long “the undisputed master” of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. His rule was a tenuous and unofficial one. Scholars of the American South have referred to it as “gangster populism.” Long held the reigns of all the Southern National Guards and a fair chunk of the U.S. Army that was stranded there. This was the hammer Long enforced his rule with, which was characterized by massive public works projects to tighten his control of the Southern economy coupled with naked, brazen brutality to preserve the established order.

Long’s attitude towards the South’s nonwhite population was nuanced. On the one hand, he appeared to see himself as a defender of all poor Southerners, black and white. On the other, Long feared a black uprising. The privileged white class in the South feared it even more, and Long was more than happy to unleash the power of his organization on a host of political punching bags. Many of these were racist nature. The forty two year old demagogue, to tighten his own control and direct his constituents’ anger away from one another, cynically embraced President Herbert Hoover’s campaign against Mexican farm workers, who he argued were debasing Southern wages. Southern militiamen marched through Texas, rounding up Mexicans and suspected Mexicans by the thousands, an enduring element of contention in U.S.-Mexico relations. They were “repatriated” across the Rio Grande. “The dismal economic and cultural legacies of repatriation,” concludes a study from the University of Dartmouth, “endures to this day across the Texan border.” The program, like many of Long’s pet projects, was also probably bad for the South, robbing it of workers in its desperate hour. Whatever the case, as with the campaigns against Standard Oil and the conservative elites in the Southeast, Long’s grip on power only tightened through repatriation.

A woman and child "repatriated" to Mexico by Long​

The lot of black Southerners got worse after the March on Washington. With the entire nation panicking, the South witnessed an uptick in racial violence. Through 1934, Long would restore order, but that order was conditional. Black Southerners were still frequently targets of racialized violence, even more than they had been under the previous “Jim Crow” regime. It is generally thought that Long usually did not go out of his way to persecute black Southerners, but their exclusion from his programs was pivotal to their political strength. Long spent lavishly— and according to most economic historians, disastrously— on public works programs. Like Douglas MacArthur, he funded them by looting corporations that didn’t cooperate. These programs overwhelmingly served the white poor, mostly those in the western portion of Long’s enclave. Blacks were excluded, something Long promoted to strengthen his own power. “South robs Negroes again,” lamented the headline of a Boston newspaper. Long’s wage contracts, negotiated between him and white unions, crushed the black middle class and one of the last ways they could still compete with white labor. Black unemployment reached record levels, which meant high tensions that periodically boiled over in extravagantly brutal racial suppressions carried out by Long's militias.

Long’s legacy, however, is complicated because it was not merely negative for southern African-Americans. In fact, Long exercised caution at multiple points. Long’s militias were managed top-down, and their brutality was often managed by direct communications that moved them elsewhere. Long feared a race war, which made him inclined to preach restraint when there were many in his clique that didn’t have it. While Long’s economic programs were almost entirely for white men, some of their effects trickled down to ethnic minorities in the South. The most obvious example of this was Long’s massive road initiative, which, to this day, connects much of Louisiana and Mississippi, and ultimately worked to the benefit of all racial groups.

Huey Long during a broadcast​

Long’s programs weren’t merely problematic for the racial disparities they enabled or propagated. It is widely agreed that Longism’s economic policies were failures. In the Standard Oil takeover’s aftermath, the business class fled the South or was absorbed into Long’s inner circle. The result was unprecedented corruption and graft at every level in the new Longist state. The income Long dragged in from the South’s wealthy was not nearly enough to pay for his grand ambitions. What income he did have was offset by losses. The wealthy classes in the South scrambled to get their assets out of Long’s tentacles, and the British were more than happy to acquiesce. Nationalization too was a failure. Key industries, most notably oil, were stacked with Long’s cronies. Mismanagement was systemic. Long relied on generous contracts with white unions that left him in something of a bind if labor provided subpar work for whatever reason. Long’s South was inefficient and fiscally reckless in a way that, ironically, mirrored Douglas MacArthur’s Natcorp dictatorship. Corruption and mismanagement alone dealt catastrophic damage to the Southern petroleum industry, for which demand was increasingly high as the great powers of the world prepared to fight the Global Anti-Fascist War, but worse still were the Kingfish’s trade policies. In a foolish and shortsighted bid to raise funds, tighten his control over the South, and stimulate Southern domestic markets (and perhaps, as some scholars have contended, help MacArthur win the Civil War) Long and his oil monopoly hiked tariffs on Southern oil exports. This, in the long term, had devastating consequences for the Japanese Empire’s naval ambitions, and also did permanent damage to the South’s economy.

But Long, seen as the protector of the poor in the South, had an uncanny knack for the politics of power. He made sure that, Japanese or no Japanese, oil workers would be paid, which may have been a waste of money from a purely economic perspective but was politically successful at keeping his popularity with the Southern yeoman. With fear of race wars and economic ruin high, Long, a brilliant orator with an iron grip over the South’s “military”, kept his tenuous but undisputed throne as the South’s boss. And Long as a boss was well positioned, as long as the many systemic problems he was sitting on and sometimes actively inflaming did not boil over under his watch.

Oklahoman oil workers in Long's pay, intruding on Seminole land
​

Black Americans overwhelmingly backed the Republic in the Second American Civil War. While the aggressive white supremacy of MacArthur’s regime contributed to this, it was not the only factor. Black papers throughout the country— and particularly in New England and the manufacturing based Northeast— were skeptical from the get-go of the new regime and its genteel classes. “Hitler Imported to D.C.,” snarled the headline of the Chicago Defender. When New York and New England declared for the Smith Administration and began raising an army to fend off the Natcorps, black northerners were first in line. In New York City in particular, Republican authorities were astonished at black turnout in the Army. Smith’s decision to immediately desegregate the rump military solidified black Americans’ in the Republic’s camp, and it was the newly desegregated units that scored some of the most important, early victories against MacArthur’s forces that kept New York from being overrun.

The absence of Southern Democrats also gave Smith, even after the GOP landslide in 1934, more than enough capital to pass whatever he saw fit on the civil rights front. Since the end of Ulysses S. Grant’s Presidency, racial equality was largely stalled by Southern recalcitrance in Congress. Race relations in America stagnated and actively declined beginning at the end of the 19th century, with the former Confederate states passing aggressive segregationist laws that curtailed black political participation. Even the most milquetoast of reforms were killed in the Senate, and what good they could have done was limited due to the pragmatic concerns of projecting power deep into the South. “Historians widely agree,” writes Brinkley, “that the period between the turn of the century and the March on Washington was the nadir of American race relations.” Smith, however, won a historically significant portion of the black vote in 1932, thanks to the Great Depression and his record as a northern liberal. “I will never support the party of Herbert Hoover again,” flatly wrote one sergeant to his wife in New York, “not as long as I draw breath, and certainly not as long as we are locking rifles with the Jackboot.” Smith scored some quick victories over the GOP in Congress with his civil rights agenda, forcing the GOP to put its money where its mouth was and give him an easy win with one of their key constituencies— and perhaps more importantly, forced the western Coward Caucus and other Peace leaders to make some very uncomfortable decisions that Smith could bludgeon them with. “I think we will win negroes,” he said flatly. When Vice President Garner urged Smith to delay, warning that “attacks on Southern institutions could endanger the war effort” Smith did not heed his advice, eagerly signing and vigorously upholding whatever civil rights legislation Congress passed. His successor in New York, Eleanor Roosevelt, campaigned for civil rights even more visibly.

Eleanor Roosevelt with the U.S.A.F.'s first black aviators​

However, there were also constant attacks from Smith’s other side that threatened to erase the gains he’d won for his Party. The Farmer-Labor Party was born from white progressivism and populism, but had a platform its leadership believed would be attractive to northern African-Americans. Even as Hugh Johnson’s troops bore down on Minneapolis, Governor Floyd Olsen actively exported his revolution. He saw black northerners as natural allies. Many prominent black leaders lined up behind Farmer-Labor, most notably W. E. B. DuBois. “The tocsin is sounded,” wrote DuBois, “the cult of oligarchy has thrown all its cards on the table; its forces are arrayed to utterly destroy human equality on earth. Al Smith is a man of the old order. He is a defender of the nest this serpent slithered from. His head— and that of the entire Democratic Party— is buried in the sand.” Smith’s resistance to nationalization and other progressive measures that posed long-term threats to the capitalist system was an endless headache for him. In 1935, the wide consensus was that the Democrats had failed to fix the ails they were sent to Washington in 1930 and 1932 to fix, to say nothing about the war. Leftist dissatisfaction with Smith’s moderate economic agenda and his devoted institutionalism was particularly strong in the Midwest, but a serious threat to the President’s priorities everywhere. A Herbert Hoover victory in 1936 was “basically guaranteed” if Farmer-Labor siphoned off as many votes in the state of New York as polling suggested it did. This made Northern blacks an important swing vote between Smith and his opponents on the left, a bloc that both sides pursued vigorously.

The war effort itself had an abundance of challenges. The “blank slate” of the Republican military was blank enough to make many sweeping changes without the Administration’s so much as blinking an eye, like desegregation, but tackling discrimination proved immensely challenging despite the efforts of Secretary Stimson and commanders like Patton. In the Army in particular, racism in the bureaucracy endured and contributed to the officer corps being disproportionately white. Many units remained de facto segregated. However, the share of military talent that joined MacArthur created many opportunities in the Republic’s burgeoning middle management class. With so many Northern African-Americans at the frontlines, the Army, whatever its flaws, was a vehicle of progress for thousands of young black men, and following 1934, women. This has lead some historians of American race relations to call the War the “greatest equalizer in American history.”

Racially integrated Republican units in Scranton​

 

[The Angry Observer]

"Mother of the Republic"​

"When the men and women back from the front were presented to me, bearing wounds and haunted eyes, they bowed their heads, clasped my hands, trembled with barely restrained sobs. “Mother,” one boy whispered. “You were our mother out there, the only voice of comfort we had on those dinky little radios.” The others simply nodded. I wanted to scream, to cry, to beg them not to lay their faith at my altar. Instead, I merely pulled the boy in close and pressed a kiss to his forehead. I kissed each of them that day." -Eleanor Roosevelt
​

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was never meant to rise to the heights she did. Rather, she was to have been the wife and political advisor of her husband, a proper society woman and little else. Her strong convictions on notions such as feminism and human rights were to be set aside in favor of whatever ideology her husband wished to fuel his own political future with.

That husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a distant cousin of Eleanor’s. The two married in 1905, and Eleanor was given away at the wedding by her uncle, Theodore, who was President of the United States at the time. Their marriage, which produced six children, was plagued by Franklin’s infidelities and Eleanor’s doubts and issues with motherhood and her place in society

The Roosevelt family in 1919
​

Thusly, the marriage could be more accurately described as a friendship and political partnership more than any loving relationship. Franklin, better known by his initials FDR, was first elected to office in 1910 as a New York State Senator, before becoming Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the First World War. Secretary Roosevelt was then made the Democratic Party’s nominee for Vice President during the 1920 election, running with Governor James M. Cox of Ohio.

In 1921, FDR experienced a still-unknown paralytic illness, though theories include polio and Gullain-Barré Syndrome. Left paralyzed from the waist down, Franklin came to believe that the disability would be the end of his political career. Despite the illness, he successfully waged a comeback with the encouragement of his wife, being elected Governor of New York in 1928. Amidst all of this, Eleanor remained a steadfast supporter of her husband’s ambitions. Her own influence also grew throughout this time as well.

Most infamously, in the highly-contentious 1924 gubernatorial election, she practically terrorized her first cousin and Republican nominee, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., lambasting him in speeches and even riding around in a campaign car with a large papier-mâché teapot on it, reminding voters of Theodore’s connection to Teapot Dome scandal. Al Smith would forever consider himself indebted to Eleanor for his victory in that race, and the two would be close for the rest of their live.

Indeed, Roosevelt’s influence within the Smith Administration could not be overstated. She had been, after all, the closest political ally that Al Smith had had even before the war, the widow of his mentee and successor. Her own ascent to leading the most populous state in the Union was far from certain. Indeed, when Franklin died on November 12, 1931, he was first succeed by his lieutenant governor, Herbert Lehman.

Lehman was unprepared to assume power when he did, mainly due to the ongoing clashes between his predecessor and the New York City political machine known as Tammany Hall, and its boss, John F. Curry. Roosevelt had come from Duchess County and enjoyed political support from the wealthy families in Albany, Saratoga Springs, and Long Island. Lehman, on the other hand, was almost entirely a creature of New York City politics, and his appointment as FDR’s lieutenant has been seen more as a gesture to placate the machine than anything else.

This meant that FDR’s anticorruption Seabury Commission quickly became problematic for the new governor, who lacked his predecessor’s connections to power bases outside the City and was much closer to the infamously corrupt Tammany Hall. Moreover, Franklin Roosevelt was widely viewed as America’s next president in waiting, and his sudden death prompted a great sense of loss among New Yorkers. Lehman, who was a much less inspiring figure, simply did not measure up. His Jewish identity did little to help his cause, particularly among the old money families with their waspish pride.

New York Governor Herbert Lehman
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As spurious accusations of Tammany Hall dominance and too-close connections to big business swam around Lehman and New Yorkers despaired for the loss of their governor, Al Smith stepped in. With Franklin gone, the party had few viable alternatives to nominate for President than the man who lost the previous election. Now, however, the Great Depression had struck, and victory for the Democratic Party seemed all but certain, regardless of their nominee.

Despite this, Smith was deeply paranoid about losing his home state as he had in 1928. Fearing that Lehman would serve as a drag on the party statewide, including himself, Smith personally journeyed to Springwood, the Roosevelt family manor where Eleanor had ensconced herself in widowhood. After what was reportedly days of imploring, arguing, and nearly downright begging, he successfully convinced her to run for governor, provided that Lehman should peacefully step aside.

Toppling Lehman proved exceptionally easy for Smith. Lacking support from his own party and dogged by the accusations of corruption, he seemed almost relieved to end his tenure. This, however, was far from the end of Herbert Lehman’s career in politics. Thus, at the 1932 New York State Democratic Convention, Eleanor Roosevelt became the official nominee for governor, and would go on to win the election in a landslide against Republican nominee William J. Donovan.

Roosevelt’s prewar governorship was mostly marked by efforts to salvage the state from the Great Depression. She reached out to neighboring states in New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey in order to create the North-Eastern Economic Recovery Compact, a first-of-itskind agreement to share funds and opportunity amongst the nine participating states. Results of this agreement were initially mixed, but began to show some promise by the time of the March on Washington.

In the initial aftermath of the March, Roosevelt quickly began organizing the New York National Guard even before Smith’s nighttime arrival in Albany. Fearing unrest would follow with news of the arrival, she activated the Guard in all five Boroughs of the City, as well as in Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester. This initial mobilization is credited with essentially saving the Albany government from the approach of the Natcorp military at Forestburgh on February 7, 1934, as she was able to quickly move several units from New York City to the border town where MacArthur’s advance would attempt to cross.

Governor Roosevelt meets with men of the 4th Army after the Battle of Syracuse, 1934
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As Smith’s loyalists in the House and Senate flocked to Albany to join their president, Governor Roosevelt soon willingly surrendered the New York State Capitol Building to Congress, relocating the state legislature across the street into Albany’s city hall and displacing the city government into the newly-constructed (and ironically named) Alfred E. Smith State Office Building, where both institutions would remain until Congress vacated the capitol building.

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Congress quickly became unwilling to touch legislation that was not, in some way, connected to the war, leaving key aspects of civil rights policy such as employment and housing discrimination out in the cold. Roosevelt, a fierce and vocal champion of the cause, picked up the slack herself. In 1935, she was able to marshall the passage of the Ives Anti-Discrimination Act, named for its author, Assemblyman Irving Ives.

The Ives Act was the first of its kind, establishing a spanning and powerful State Commission Against Discrimination that could take concrete action against both public institutions and private actors. Both the act and the commission were quickly challenged in court, leading to the landmark Supreme Court case Kimball v. State Commission Against Discrimination, in which the Black Court ruled unanimously in favor of the state.

The Supreme Court however, demurred on the issue of whether or not segregation itself was legally permissible. The Virginia NAACP, operating in exile out of New York City due to the MacArthur regime’s ban on the organization, brought suit against the state for its Jim Crow laws. Hugo Black and the other justices declined to take up the case on the merits that there was no legitimate governing authority in Virginia at that time and that the government was unable to enforce any ruling it might have made.

Governor Roosevelt was the first to publicly blast the court for their choice not to take up the case, lambasting the logic as a thin veil to hide the cowardice of the justices for being unwilling to further alienate the Longist South from Albany. Documents made public by the Civil War Records Declassification Act of 2012 would ultimately vindicate her claims.

The quasi-state operating out of Baton Rouge kept up informal relations with Albany, Washington, and Sacramento, all the while managing the American possessions in the Caribbean, including the vital Panama Canal. When proposals for a federal ban on segregation were circulating throughout the Republican capital, Long’s representative to the Republic, former House member and future Alabama Senator J. Lister Hill made it clear that any federal legislative action on the issue would force Long to take drastic action.

“Should this Yankee government, which claims to be the sole legitimate representative of the interests of all forty-eight states, take action which would threaten our way of life, we would be forced to consider reaching an accord with General Mac, or perhaps even reviving the idea of an independent Southern nation.” Hill said to Secretary of State Joseph Kennedy in a closed door meeting.

J. Lister Hill, Huey Long's unofficial emissary to the Republic
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When informed of this, Roosevelt allegedly hissed curses and remarked that, “We beat those cotton-picking hicks once, we can do it again, and that big-mouthed bass of a Kingfish knows it,” but did not further press the idea of federal action, instead pushing for the other Republican state governments to adopt similar legislation to what she had overseen in New York.

Despite her effective stewardship over the Republic’s sociopolitical and economic heart, it was as the face and voice of the cause that Eleanor Roosevelt found her influence growing the most. A talented speaker with her high, transatlantic voice, Roosevelt contrasted the bombastic Smith with his thick New York accent and gruff tone. It took little time at all for the Republic’s public relations people to realize that the governor was much better received than the president by the general public.

It was thus that Governor Roosevelt became the government’s point woman for delivering radio addresses and recorded newsreels. In the war-torn Midwest, civilian communication infrastructure was one of the first casualties, meaning that the only radio broadcasts troops could tune into were those provided by the dueling Natcorp and Republican propaganda machines.

Roosevelt frequently addressed the troops directly, having pored over reports of conditions on the front in order to deliver whatever she felt the most effective message would be. As a result of this care she displayed, Republican soldiers became inordinately attached to her broadcasts, elevating her as a maternal figure, a genteel reminder of home amidst the war’s horrors.

Her reputation trickled out into the civilian populace as men and women came back from the fronts. Mother Eleanor, Ma Roosevelt, or even simply Mother, as she came to be known, quickly garnered millions of listeners. Soon, as it became clear that even the soldiers and civilians of the MacArthur regime were tuning in, Roosevelt began to issue daily addresses to what she referred to as “the oppressed and occupied under the Jackboot, the poor boys forced into service of evil against their wills.”

Initially, MacArthur dismissed Roosevelt’s efforts, but when J. Edgar Hoover, in a rare personal visit to his overlord, warned that her broadcasts were having a serious effect on morale, he quickly scrambled for a way to punch back. At first, this was in the form of slandering Roosevelt, decrying her with sexist nicknames like Smith’s Slut and the Whore of Albany, while the General most frequently grumbled about “that bitch."

When attempts to defame her failed, MacArthur sough to counterpunch with a mother figure for the National-Corporate way of life, hopeful that a woman’s voice might make the bitter flavor of jackboot governance go down a bit easier. Unmarried himself, the General turned to Kate Butler, wife of Vice President Nicholas Murray Butler. Mrs. Butler was a society woman who had, to this point, mostly entertained the other wives of high-ranking Natcorp figures and kept away from the war and politics.

Kate Butler's official portrait as Second Lady of the National-Corporate State
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Her countering broadcasts did manage to gain a following amongst those already loyal to the regime, but Kate Butler found no audience in the Republic. In a society where it was already perceived that the second most powerful person was an unmarried woman and where common women were seizing the public sphere rather than waiting for it to be opened for them, a kept society wife adulating to so-called traditional values went over like a lead balloon. Butler was lambasted in the free press as a symbol of the very worst that an American woman could be, given the nickname Ku Klux Kate and compared to Mary Surratt, one of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, and notorious slave owner and serial killer Marie Delphine LaLaurie.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s rise led to a radical revival of interest in the history of powerful American women, particularly as the average woman gained in social capital with the progression of the war. First Ladies such as Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison, along Anne Hutchinson, Sacagawea, and more recent figures such as labor organizer and IWW founder Mother Jones, who died in 1930, all saw meteoric rises in public interest.

By 1935, as preparations for holding the 1936 presidential election were underway, public speculation began that President Smith might seek to replace John Nance Garner as his running mate with none other than the Mother of the Republic herself, whose reach now seemed to exceed any one else’s, even the president’s. When asked, however, the governor merely shook her head and chuckled.

"I’ll not be replacing anyone, gentlemen,” she told an Albany press gaggle, “To lead one state is challenge enough, let alone forty-eight of them!”

Eleanor Roosevelt's official portrait as Governor of New York, 1934​