Yay Independent California. 
Out of curiosity though, why was the Espejo territory merged into the New Sacramento territory?
Out of curiosity though, why was the Espejo territory merged into the New Sacramento territory?
Union and Liberty: An American TL
- Thread starter wilcoxchar
- Start date
- Status
Wow! So readers get it both ways: California got annexed, and California got independence! That and the formation of the Banana Republic were quite different from OTL decolonization efforts. As always, you made fun ATL use of OTL figures.
I started thinking about cuisine in Union and Liberty this morning and came up with a quick lunch order, say in a diner in western Houston.
The Cattle Drive - One 8 oz. Braunfelschnitzel with verde gravy, Isidreno cornbread, and a slice of our signature Mirage Pie.
Get it with a Belgian coffee or a simple cup of Tadjoura!
Braunfelschnitzel - Chicken fried steak
Verde Gravy - Gravy with green chile
Isidreno Corn Bread - Corn bread with Isidreno chiles (Hatch chiles, green chiles from San Isidro)
Mirage Pie - Cream pie made with Espejo peaches (OTL Palisade peaches)
Belgian coffee - OTL Mocha
Taadjoura - Black coffee, OTL "java" in slang terms, Tadjoura is the main port of French Abyssinia
The Cattle Drive - One 8 oz. Braunfelschnitzel with verde gravy, Isidreno cornbread, and a slice of our signature Mirage Pie.
Get it with a Belgian coffee or a simple cup of Tadjoura!
Braunfelschnitzel - Chicken fried steak
Verde Gravy - Gravy with green chile
Isidreno Corn Bread - Corn bread with Isidreno chiles (Hatch chiles, green chiles from San Isidro)
Mirage Pie - Cream pie made with Espejo peaches (OTL Palisade peaches)
Belgian coffee - OTL Mocha
Taadjoura - Black coffee, OTL "java" in slang terms, Tadjoura is the main port of French Abyssinia
Epilogue Post #5
Epilogue Post #5
Shareholder Democracy and the HBC:
The Hudson Bay Company had long operated in the northwestern wilderness of North America, often with impunity, but the turn of the 20th century and the Great War marked a significant shift in the Company's role. During the closing decades of the 19th century, the influence of the HBC board members exerted more and more influence in the Dominion of Caledonia's government, with board members entrenching themselves in high ranking government roles. By the Great War, the Hudson Bay Company had almost entirely divested itself from finance by London. Wilfrid Laurier, the HBC's governor, had also maneuvered himself into the position of colonial governor of New Caledonia with other board members in similarly high offices in the dominion. With the Great War, the Hudson Bay Company made the final push for independence from Great Britain. Wilfrid Laurier's first sovereign action as President of the Sovereign Incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company was negotiating a treaty of trade and neutrality with President Theodore Roosevelt as the United States entered war with Great Britain. While there were brief raids along the HBC-United States border[1], the treaty held, and trade continued with investments by American companies in the resource rich area owned by the Hudson Bay Company. Following the Great War, the Hudson Bay Company formally reincorporated as a sovereign and independent state, fully integrating the political and corporate structures of the former Dominion of New Caledonia and the Hudson Bay Company with Wilfrid Laurier as President and Chief Executive Officer.
The move from de facto governance by the Hudson Bay Company to de jure governance brought an opportunity to greatly restructure the government of the former dominion. Wilfrid Laurier, Clifford Sifton, Alexander Duncan McRae, and others all met in 1913 to craft the Charter of Sovereign Incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company that would become the nation's constitution. The broad structure of the Hudson Bay Company's board of directors and CEO were transferred to better suit national governance, with the CEO effectively becoming the head of state and government and the board acting as a check on the CEO's power, while other officers served as a sort of cabinet. As well as the corporate government structure, Laurier brought in economist Cliff H. Douglas from Great Britain[2] to help devise the Hudson Bay Company's currency system in one of Douglas's most influential projects prior to his work with the Keynes regime. The currency system the Hudson Bay Company devised forms one of the bases of the corporate sovereigntist ideology that pervades much of the country, known as shareholder democracy. Under shareholder democracy, the currency issued by the Hudson Bay Company acts just as much as shares in the company as it does a national currency. Each citizen of the HBC is a shareholder, and each share amounts to one vote in any local or national elections. To ensure some semblance of a representational democracy, the Sovereign Charter stipulates that the board of directors is only allowed to collectively own 15% of the total issued shares in the Hudson Bay Company, and upon election the CEO must divest interests down to a maximum of five percent of the company's total shares[3]. The consensus among Laurier and the Hudson Bay board was that under this system, as the citizens' incomes and savings were tied to the prosperity of the country, the citizenry would be more invested (in this case literally) in the future of the country. Similarly, by limiting the amount of wealth the leaders of the HBC could accrue, it would allow enough of that prosperity to reach the common people in good times as well as encourage the HBC's leaders to invest in the population as a whole and not just hoard wealth for themselves.
Wilfrid Laurier served as the CEO and President of the Hudson Bay Company for over a decade after its incorporation alongside his prior service as leader of the Dominion of New Caledonia. Laurier is widely considered the single most important founding father of the sovereign Hudson Bay Company and remained in office until his death in 1922. Following Laurier's death, the factionalism among the HBC's board began to show itself and develop into a more formalised party system. During the 1920s, two men emerged as the leaders of the two major parties in the Hudson Bay Company; Clifford Sifton and Alexander Duncan McRae. Sifton and McRae differed on several positions, but the main issue of the time was settlement of the sparse interior of the country and the issue of immigration and foreign investments. Sifton, forming what would become the Liberal Party of the HBC, encouraged immigration to the interior from all across Europe. Sifton tried to encourage Croatians, Ukrainians, and Jews as well as Canadians moving west to settle the eastern plains of the country with cheap land and government grants of shares in the company for homesteading. In a controversial move, Sifton and later Liberals also wanted to raise or even remove quotas for immigration from Asia. However, this immigration and investment in the rail network to the areas east of the Rocky Mountains was considered by Sifton and other Liberals to be the best way to encourage settlement in the area, especially in bringing much needed investment into the Hudson Bay Company after the Great War to get the new sovereign state on its feet financially. Opposing Sifton's policies, Alexander Duncan McRae founded the National Trust Party and opposed Sifton in the first real election for President and CEO of the Hudson Bay Company in 1922. McRae's National Trust Party supported drawing settlers west from Canada and the increasingly troubled Great Britain, but opposed immigration from Eastern Europe or Asia in order to settle the plains. Additionally, McRae advocated a stricter policy on foreign investment in the Hudson Bay Company, especially from American companies. Under the ideology of the shareholder democracy, foreign investment meant a danger of diluting the native voter base. In a similar vein, McRae also opposed a "company income tax" proposed by Sifton, saying that money and votes earned by the hard working farmers and such that built the country should be kept in their hands, not needlessly taken away by the bankers and those issuing the currency. In the 1922 election, the National Trust Party with its emphasis on supporting the smaller working class shareholders and his promise to support a meritocratic promotion system rather than patronage of the board and their friends won the presidential election and made Alexander Duncan McRae the first Chief Executive of the Hudson Bay Company following Wilfrid Laurier. Soon the Liberal and National Trust parties became the core political parties of the unique cross of business and government that would steer the Hudson Bay Company through the 20th century.
The Land of The Young:
As the Hudson Bay Company looked to prosper as it stepped out from under the British shadow after the Great War, so did the land on the land to the north of the United States on the other side of the continent. Long a promised home for the Irish diaspora, Acadia-Tirnanog finally gained true independence from Great Britain after the Great War with the help from American intervention in the war and the covert and overt support from many Irish-Americans. The period shortly after the end of the Great War saw much turmoil in Acadia-Tirnanog as the political vacuum of what would replace the British dominion had not quite been established. After a series of short-lived governments, the country stabilized at least in 1915 when James Michael Curley, the mayor of Halifax, took over leadership of the country after escalating riots ousted the government of Gordon Cunard[4]. Cunard fled to Canada where he had business and family connections, and Curley effectively declared himself the new president of Acadia after securing Halifax and much of the eastern half of the country. Curley exploited the Irish Catholic nationalism that had created the new Acadian identity to quickly cement his presidency, and used his control over the Halifax police and his comradely with many other urban working class communities in Acadia to stabilize the country.
The Curley regime quickly established a friendly relationship with the United States and the Warfield administration. Curley stated he would recognize the 1912 settlement of the border dispute over the Grand Banks, and with the influence of Baltimore in Edwin Warfield's political rise in Maryland, found a friend in the United States during much of the 1910s that helped establish Curley's legitimacy and power. James Michael Curley presented himself as the working man's ruler in Acadia-Tirnanog for both the urban and rural classes. He directed the building of schools in both urban and rural areas, mandated the learning of Gaelic for all schoolchildren in the country up through primary school, established a subsidy for local fishermen during for when stocks were low, and established a strong political machine throughout the country. Curley also couched his regime in the language of Irish and Catholic nationalism. One of his first acts was to append the "Tirnanog" or "land of the young" name to the official name of Acadia becoming Acadia-Tirnanog, and in speeches Curley consistently talked up the idea of Acadia-Tirnanog as a "new home" for the Irish people after the British brutally wiped out their old home. Curley would remain in power in Acadia-Tirnanog for over four decades before his death in 1955[5]. While he always presented a friendly demeanor toward the United States, Curley frequently antagonized neighboring British Canada and later the independent Quebec.
In 1938 shortly after the Quebec War of Independence from Canada, Curley made his most provocative move by seizing the Magdalen Islands and expelling all native French speakers from Acadia-Tirnanog. The justification was not only that the French speakers were from neighboring Quebec, but they were also mainly affiliated with the Pueblan Catholic Church, while most Catholics of Irish descent in Acadia-Tirnanog and the United States followed the Roman Catholic Church. Quebecois leader Andre Laurendeau responded with a declaration of war after an altercation at the international border bridge in Matapedia, resulting in the Restigouche War[6]. With Quebec weary after just winning their independence and more isolated diplomatically, Acadia-Tirnanog won several victories in the brief war. Acadia-Tirnanog soon occupied nearly the entire Gaspe Peninsula and began to advance on the city of Quebec itself after blockading the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. Curley's forces were finally turned back at the some say miraculous victory at Riviere du Loup, and the United States offered to mediate a treaty between the two nations. Curley ended victorious in the Restigouche War, not only winning the Magdalen Islands in the Curley-Laurendeau Treaty but also the area around Lake Temiscouata and the entire region of Bonaventure, giving Acadia-Tirnanog nearly the southern half of the Gaspe Peninsula. The Restigouche War is now seen as James Michael Curley's greatest triumph in establishing the Acadian identity, and his near half cenutry regime in Acadia-Tirnanog shaped the country for decades after his death, not just because he was succeeded by his son James Curley Jr.
[1] The Hudson Bay Company or the HBC becomes the official name of the country after the Great War and the Charter of Sovereign Incorporation, and New Caledonia falls largely out of use in the following decades.
[2] Douglas (in OTL C. H. Douglas) was the main theorist behind the Social Credit movement in OTL.
[3] Corporate nationhood, but with a for all intents and purposes wealth cap! I wanted to try and do a sort of different take on corporate nationhood, and the idea of a "shareholder democracy" came to mind as a really interesting idea that I have no clue how well it would work in practice.
[4] Gordon Cunard was an OTL 4th Baronet Cunard, grandson of shipping magnate Samuel Cunard who founded the Cunard Line.
[5] James Michael Curley died in 1958 in OTL, but he did stay active in Boston politics right up until his death. He finally ended his career in elected politics after being defeated for reelection as mayor of Boston in 1949 and losing a rematch for mayor in 1951.
[6] The name comes from the Restigouche River, which flows through OTL New Brunswick and forms the New Brunswick-Quebec border briefly before it empties into Chaleur Bay.
Shareholder Democracy and the HBC:
The Hudson Bay Company had long operated in the northwestern wilderness of North America, often with impunity, but the turn of the 20th century and the Great War marked a significant shift in the Company's role. During the closing decades of the 19th century, the influence of the HBC board members exerted more and more influence in the Dominion of Caledonia's government, with board members entrenching themselves in high ranking government roles. By the Great War, the Hudson Bay Company had almost entirely divested itself from finance by London. Wilfrid Laurier, the HBC's governor, had also maneuvered himself into the position of colonial governor of New Caledonia with other board members in similarly high offices in the dominion. With the Great War, the Hudson Bay Company made the final push for independence from Great Britain. Wilfrid Laurier's first sovereign action as President of the Sovereign Incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company was negotiating a treaty of trade and neutrality with President Theodore Roosevelt as the United States entered war with Great Britain. While there were brief raids along the HBC-United States border[1], the treaty held, and trade continued with investments by American companies in the resource rich area owned by the Hudson Bay Company. Following the Great War, the Hudson Bay Company formally reincorporated as a sovereign and independent state, fully integrating the political and corporate structures of the former Dominion of New Caledonia and the Hudson Bay Company with Wilfrid Laurier as President and Chief Executive Officer.
The move from de facto governance by the Hudson Bay Company to de jure governance brought an opportunity to greatly restructure the government of the former dominion. Wilfrid Laurier, Clifford Sifton, Alexander Duncan McRae, and others all met in 1913 to craft the Charter of Sovereign Incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company that would become the nation's constitution. The broad structure of the Hudson Bay Company's board of directors and CEO were transferred to better suit national governance, with the CEO effectively becoming the head of state and government and the board acting as a check on the CEO's power, while other officers served as a sort of cabinet. As well as the corporate government structure, Laurier brought in economist Cliff H. Douglas from Great Britain[2] to help devise the Hudson Bay Company's currency system in one of Douglas's most influential projects prior to his work with the Keynes regime. The currency system the Hudson Bay Company devised forms one of the bases of the corporate sovereigntist ideology that pervades much of the country, known as shareholder democracy. Under shareholder democracy, the currency issued by the Hudson Bay Company acts just as much as shares in the company as it does a national currency. Each citizen of the HBC is a shareholder, and each share amounts to one vote in any local or national elections. To ensure some semblance of a representational democracy, the Sovereign Charter stipulates that the board of directors is only allowed to collectively own 15% of the total issued shares in the Hudson Bay Company, and upon election the CEO must divest interests down to a maximum of five percent of the company's total shares[3]. The consensus among Laurier and the Hudson Bay board was that under this system, as the citizens' incomes and savings were tied to the prosperity of the country, the citizenry would be more invested (in this case literally) in the future of the country. Similarly, by limiting the amount of wealth the leaders of the HBC could accrue, it would allow enough of that prosperity to reach the common people in good times as well as encourage the HBC's leaders to invest in the population as a whole and not just hoard wealth for themselves.
Wilfrid Laurier served as the CEO and President of the Hudson Bay Company for over a decade after its incorporation alongside his prior service as leader of the Dominion of New Caledonia. Laurier is widely considered the single most important founding father of the sovereign Hudson Bay Company and remained in office until his death in 1922. Following Laurier's death, the factionalism among the HBC's board began to show itself and develop into a more formalised party system. During the 1920s, two men emerged as the leaders of the two major parties in the Hudson Bay Company; Clifford Sifton and Alexander Duncan McRae. Sifton and McRae differed on several positions, but the main issue of the time was settlement of the sparse interior of the country and the issue of immigration and foreign investments. Sifton, forming what would become the Liberal Party of the HBC, encouraged immigration to the interior from all across Europe. Sifton tried to encourage Croatians, Ukrainians, and Jews as well as Canadians moving west to settle the eastern plains of the country with cheap land and government grants of shares in the company for homesteading. In a controversial move, Sifton and later Liberals also wanted to raise or even remove quotas for immigration from Asia. However, this immigration and investment in the rail network to the areas east of the Rocky Mountains was considered by Sifton and other Liberals to be the best way to encourage settlement in the area, especially in bringing much needed investment into the Hudson Bay Company after the Great War to get the new sovereign state on its feet financially. Opposing Sifton's policies, Alexander Duncan McRae founded the National Trust Party and opposed Sifton in the first real election for President and CEO of the Hudson Bay Company in 1922. McRae's National Trust Party supported drawing settlers west from Canada and the increasingly troubled Great Britain, but opposed immigration from Eastern Europe or Asia in order to settle the plains. Additionally, McRae advocated a stricter policy on foreign investment in the Hudson Bay Company, especially from American companies. Under the ideology of the shareholder democracy, foreign investment meant a danger of diluting the native voter base. In a similar vein, McRae also opposed a "company income tax" proposed by Sifton, saying that money and votes earned by the hard working farmers and such that built the country should be kept in their hands, not needlessly taken away by the bankers and those issuing the currency. In the 1922 election, the National Trust Party with its emphasis on supporting the smaller working class shareholders and his promise to support a meritocratic promotion system rather than patronage of the board and their friends won the presidential election and made Alexander Duncan McRae the first Chief Executive of the Hudson Bay Company following Wilfrid Laurier. Soon the Liberal and National Trust parties became the core political parties of the unique cross of business and government that would steer the Hudson Bay Company through the 20th century.
The Land of The Young:
As the Hudson Bay Company looked to prosper as it stepped out from under the British shadow after the Great War, so did the land on the land to the north of the United States on the other side of the continent. Long a promised home for the Irish diaspora, Acadia-Tirnanog finally gained true independence from Great Britain after the Great War with the help from American intervention in the war and the covert and overt support from many Irish-Americans. The period shortly after the end of the Great War saw much turmoil in Acadia-Tirnanog as the political vacuum of what would replace the British dominion had not quite been established. After a series of short-lived governments, the country stabilized at least in 1915 when James Michael Curley, the mayor of Halifax, took over leadership of the country after escalating riots ousted the government of Gordon Cunard[4]. Cunard fled to Canada where he had business and family connections, and Curley effectively declared himself the new president of Acadia after securing Halifax and much of the eastern half of the country. Curley exploited the Irish Catholic nationalism that had created the new Acadian identity to quickly cement his presidency, and used his control over the Halifax police and his comradely with many other urban working class communities in Acadia to stabilize the country.
The Curley regime quickly established a friendly relationship with the United States and the Warfield administration. Curley stated he would recognize the 1912 settlement of the border dispute over the Grand Banks, and with the influence of Baltimore in Edwin Warfield's political rise in Maryland, found a friend in the United States during much of the 1910s that helped establish Curley's legitimacy and power. James Michael Curley presented himself as the working man's ruler in Acadia-Tirnanog for both the urban and rural classes. He directed the building of schools in both urban and rural areas, mandated the learning of Gaelic for all schoolchildren in the country up through primary school, established a subsidy for local fishermen during for when stocks were low, and established a strong political machine throughout the country. Curley also couched his regime in the language of Irish and Catholic nationalism. One of his first acts was to append the "Tirnanog" or "land of the young" name to the official name of Acadia becoming Acadia-Tirnanog, and in speeches Curley consistently talked up the idea of Acadia-Tirnanog as a "new home" for the Irish people after the British brutally wiped out their old home. Curley would remain in power in Acadia-Tirnanog for over four decades before his death in 1955[5]. While he always presented a friendly demeanor toward the United States, Curley frequently antagonized neighboring British Canada and later the independent Quebec.
In 1938 shortly after the Quebec War of Independence from Canada, Curley made his most provocative move by seizing the Magdalen Islands and expelling all native French speakers from Acadia-Tirnanog. The justification was not only that the French speakers were from neighboring Quebec, but they were also mainly affiliated with the Pueblan Catholic Church, while most Catholics of Irish descent in Acadia-Tirnanog and the United States followed the Roman Catholic Church. Quebecois leader Andre Laurendeau responded with a declaration of war after an altercation at the international border bridge in Matapedia, resulting in the Restigouche War[6]. With Quebec weary after just winning their independence and more isolated diplomatically, Acadia-Tirnanog won several victories in the brief war. Acadia-Tirnanog soon occupied nearly the entire Gaspe Peninsula and began to advance on the city of Quebec itself after blockading the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. Curley's forces were finally turned back at the some say miraculous victory at Riviere du Loup, and the United States offered to mediate a treaty between the two nations. Curley ended victorious in the Restigouche War, not only winning the Magdalen Islands in the Curley-Laurendeau Treaty but also the area around Lake Temiscouata and the entire region of Bonaventure, giving Acadia-Tirnanog nearly the southern half of the Gaspe Peninsula. The Restigouche War is now seen as James Michael Curley's greatest triumph in establishing the Acadian identity, and his near half cenutry regime in Acadia-Tirnanog shaped the country for decades after his death, not just because he was succeeded by his son James Curley Jr.
[1] The Hudson Bay Company or the HBC becomes the official name of the country after the Great War and the Charter of Sovereign Incorporation, and New Caledonia falls largely out of use in the following decades.
[2] Douglas (in OTL C. H. Douglas) was the main theorist behind the Social Credit movement in OTL.
[3] Corporate nationhood, but with a for all intents and purposes wealth cap! I wanted to try and do a sort of different take on corporate nationhood, and the idea of a "shareholder democracy" came to mind as a really interesting idea that I have no clue how well it would work in practice.
[4] Gordon Cunard was an OTL 4th Baronet Cunard, grandson of shipping magnate Samuel Cunard who founded the Cunard Line.
[5] James Michael Curley died in 1958 in OTL, but he did stay active in Boston politics right up until his death. He finally ended his career in elected politics after being defeated for reelection as mayor of Boston in 1949 and losing a rematch for mayor in 1951.
[6] The name comes from the Restigouche River, which flows through OTL New Brunswick and forms the New Brunswick-Quebec border briefly before it empties into Chaleur Bay.
That corporate nationhood scheme is an original piece of work and quite jarring to see in this otherwise "normal" 20th Century. It would be fascinating to see how it pans out 50 or so years down the road.
Your use of that OTL eternal Boston politician as the strongman of Acadia-Tirnanog was fun. Was he ever duly (legitimately) elected during his 40-year reign? Did he start out a force for democracy but than end up like Erdogan in OTL Turkey?
Your use of that OTL eternal Boston politician as the strongman of Acadia-Tirnanog was fun. Was he ever duly (legitimately) elected during his 40-year reign? Did he start out a force for democracy but than end up like Erdogan in OTL Turkey?
@wilcoxchar It'd be great to get a world map of the present/close to the present eventually.
Curley was probably elected legitimately the first few times (as much as you can be elected legitimately in the early 20th century), but yeah most of his elections were very much rigged affairs. Maybe not so much outright ballot stuffing, but more strong-arming, general corruption and bribes with local projects, and keeping opposing parties weak and powerless though Curley's machine does permit them to still exist.
I'm not going to do a present day map simply because I don't have enough planned out that far to be able to even make a good sketch of it.@wilcoxchar It'd be great to get a world map of the present/close to the present eventually.
It might not be unique in TTL though. Paraguay in OTL was a bit of a corporate state in its beginnings, and in TTL it seems to be the first amongst equals in the Mokuguay Federation; it'd be interesting to now how that country works as Uruguay has traditionally been one of the most democratic South American states, while Paraguay (especially in the 19th century) was the exact opposite. But a potential way to meet in the middle would be a corporate-style government.
Other contenders for corporate style governments are the hyper-filibustered Costa Rica, and the Mesoamerican Federation (if Diaz and a few other local strong men have their way).
Epilogue Post #6
Epilogue Post #6
Syndicalism and Catalunya:
During the Great War and shortly after, many thinkers in France were observing the rise of the Spanish Federative Republic with great interest. After the annexation of the Viennese Workers' Republic, socialist thinkers were eager to see a new socialist state form out of the ashes of a former European monarchy. Some of the French socialists such as Jean Jaures and George Sorel observed the Viennese and Andalucian experiments and determined that the socialist model, if it was to be applied on a larger scale, had to come from the democratic participation of the workers and be built from local sources upward, rather than a top-down approach from a dominant city such as in Vienna and later Mexico City. From this philosophy, the syndicalist socialist movement grew in France in the decades surrounding the Great War and as France further industrialized. Syndicalism was most successful in the southern towns such as Toulouse and rural regions around areas like Perpignan and Carcassonne. Syndicalism never reached great political success among the broader left in France. However, some elements of the Spanish Federative Republic adopted the decentralization of syndicalist thinking, though it was derailed when Alejandro Lerroux briefly led an Union Izquierdista government from 1920 to 1921 which attempteed an ill-fated centralization scheme. The Union Izquierdista quickly broke apart after a number of walkouts by members of Lerroux's government in 1917, and by the end of that year Lerroux was out of power and the left was dented for nearly the next five years, having been in power in some form since the Spanish Federative Republic had been created.
Meanwhile, one part of the Iberian Peninsula much closer to France was more receptive to some of the syndicalist ideology. Jaures, born in a small southwestern French village, spent much time following the French invasion of Spain and the creation of an independent Catalunya afterward. Similarly, George Sorel had spent a lot of time in Perpignan and was greatly familiar with the plight of the Catalunyan nationalists under the Spanish kingdom and its liberation by France in the Great War. Men like Sorel and Jaures also commiserated with Marshal Joffre during the Spanish campaign of the Great War and during the post-war erection of an independent Catalan state. While Joffre was Catalan, which is why the French government appointed him as Marshal of Catalunya following the war, he still accepting influence from other Frenchmen sympathetic to Catalunya, and Sorel and Jaures quickly rose in influence in Joffre's circle. Marshal Joffre, still widely revered as the founder and first president of Catalunya, though he never held the title president, ruled and molded Catalunya's government for over a decade following the Great War. Under the leadership of Joseph Joffre, Catalunya's government slowly grew out from under France's shadow and adopted a socialist system similar to that of the Viennese Workers' Republic with Barcelona as the dominant force, but with slight syndicalist trappings to appease the more rural Aragon and western Catalunya proper[1]. After Joffre stepped down at least to let the people of Catalunya decide their own self-government in 1924, the system stuck. The Grans Coalició dels Treballadors, or GCT, a united coalition of urban and rural workers' collectives, led the 1924 Catalan elections and formed a government with Domènec Martí i Julià as the first elected and native president of Catalunya. With the election of Martí i Julià, the Republic of Catalunya finally achieved full independence, no longer under the dominance of either Spain or France. To mark the occasion, Marshal Joffre (who informally kept the title of Marshal for the rest of his life), organized and personally opened the Jocs Florals, or Floral Games. The opening of the game by Joffre in front of Fontserè's Cascada Monumental became an iconic image of Catalan pride as one of the first Catalan events captured in photo and on film.
The End of the Italian Experiment:
Italy was been heavily weakened by the Great War after suffering both the ravaging of its coasts and the invasion of much of its northern industrial region, as well as the territorial losses the country incurred in the Peace of Vienna. While there was some inclination toward a revenge movement by the government of Gabriele D'Annunzio after his election in 1912, the economic situation became dire in much of the country. Inflation was rampant in Italy during the 1910s as the slow recovery of the destroyed Italian industrial capacity created mass unemployment, and poor harvests in rural southern Italy soured farmers toward the D'Annunzio government. Regionalism, which had remained dormant for over half a century, now emerged once again as the government in Rome seemingly flailed in its attempts to right the Italian ship of state.
The first hotbeds of fractious nationalism came in two very opposite but far-flung regions from Rome: Sicily and Veneto. Sicily had already been rocked by revolt before the Great War. As attempts to introduce modern capitalist systems to the largely rural and agrarian communities on the island combined with a global fall in prices for wheat and other agricultural goods, rural communities formed "Fasci" or workers' leagues[2]. The Sicilian organizations were unlike the more traditional workers' organizations in more industrial areas of Vienna, Barcelona, and even northern Italy, in that they were looser communal organizations, possibly having more in common with the early leagues in the Spanish Federative Republic. The First Revolt of the Fasci in 1893 saw widespread violence in western Sicily, especially as socialist intellectuals in Palermo joined with longstanding mafia organizations. While the First Revolt of the Fasci was crushed, the resentment lived on in the Fratellanza Siciliana or Sicilian Brotherhood. As the Sicilian economy worsened even more during the French blockade in the Great War and under D'Annunzio and following governments, the time became ripe for another rebellion. By 1916, after new president Dino Perrona Compagni attempted a violent crackdown on crime in Palermo, the Second Revolt of the Fasci erupted. Led by charismatic socialist Bernardino Verro and an alliance of several mafiosis, the rebellion spread from the inland town of Corleone as a large militia army marched north toward Palermo. Palermo fell to Verro after a fierce battle, forcing the governor of Sicily to flee the island, and soon after Verro and others signed a proclamation of an independent Sicilian Republic. Seeing the rejection of the relatively urban class in Palermo, the capital of Sicily remained in Corleone even after its gained recognition and drove Italian forces entirely off the island.
Veneto, while wealthier than Sicily, had also suffered heavily from the Great War with the German invasion of the region. Many Venetians and nationalists had already adopted a symbol of the neglect that Rome had shown to the region. In July of 1902, the Campanile di San Marco, the bell tower of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, developed a large crack in the north wall. The crack continued to spread, and that same month, the entire bell tower collapsed. Luckily, nobody was killed. Sentiment to rebuild the Campanile was strong among Venetians, but with the outbreak of the Turkish War and the looming Great War, funding from Rome was hard to come by and the Campanile remained unreconstructed for over two decades[3]. The Campanile di San Marco thus joined the Lion of St. Mark as a nationalist symbol of Venice and the entire Veneto region, hence why the Campanile now joins the Lion on the flag of the Venetian Republic. During the 1910s under the governments of D'Annunzio and Compagni, the Leone di San Marco party gained ground in local and national elections in Veneto. Attempts by D'Annunzio to standardize the teaching of Italian throughout the country only enraged Venetians even more, and with ample German funding pouring in (though tellingly not for rebuilding the Campanile until after Venetia's independence), the Leone di San Marco party swept the 1919 governorate elections. Former President Luigi Luzzatti, a Venetian himself, warned Compagni that the situation in Venetia was dire, but the warning fell on dear ears. Veneto's governing assembly passed a declaration of independence in 1920, and with German backing now explicit, the region declared independence. Britain protested, but with it involved in its own internal troubles at the time, could do nothing. Despite his issuing the warning to Compagni, Luigi Luzzatti was elected the first Doge of the new Venetian Republic, reinstated as a ceremonial position to the parliament and Prime Minister, the first of whom was Leone di San Marco founder Italico Corradino Cappellotto[4]. Luzzatti, 70 at the time Venetia elected him Doge, lived for another five years, long enough to see the Campanile restored.
In the face of the secession of the Sicilian and Venetian republics, President Dino Perrone Compagni attempted to clamp down even further on the areas of Italy that remained under control from Rome. Compagni, who had served as a lieutenant in the Italian army in the Great War, declared himself the Generalissimo of the Italian Republic and "Grand Duke" of his native Tuscany, where his largest support base was. Meanwhile, both France and Germany were now supporting regional movements and warlords throughout the country. Some historians and cartoonists at the time declared the rise of gobernadores and the Mexicanization of Italy to a return to the Italian Wars of the 15th and 16th centuries. Sardinia soon broke off from Italy under French backing. Following a referendum in favor of restoring the monarchy, Luigi Amadeo I was crowned King of Sardinia. Other warlords took control in the Piedmont, Lombardy, the Abruzzi, and elsewhere. By 1924, Compagni's control over the country was limited to Tuscany and Lazio. This warlord period dominated Italian history for the following decade as Germany and France covertly backed several warlords for dominance of Italy in effectual proxy wars[5].
[1] This is one of the more half-formed ideas I'd had for the post-end events in Union and Liberty. I wanted Joffre to become a founding father figure for Catalunya, but also for it to become socialist on the vein of the Viennese Workers' Republic as another example of TTL's "socialism can only really work on a small scale in a pseudo-city state context" common thought.
[2] The Fasci Siciliani were short-lived workers' leagues that formed in Sicily in the late 19th century as a sort of reaction to the transition of the region from feudalism to capitalism.
[3] The Campanile collapse in 1902 in OTL as well. However, in OTL the rebuilding of the Campanile was funded almost immediately following the collapse and it was rebuilt with the exact same design by 1912.
[4] Italico Cappellotto also found a Lion of St. Mark party in OTL, in an interwar attempt at Venetian nationalism.
[5] This bit is kind of open ended on how the situation ends up. I couldn't decide if I wanted the ultimate situation to be a return to a lot of small Italian states and a Mexicanization of Italy, or if most of Italy should reunite (maybe except Veneto, Sardinia, and Sicily) but have a two-party system with French-influenced and German-influence parties vying for power.
Syndicalism and Catalunya:
During the Great War and shortly after, many thinkers in France were observing the rise of the Spanish Federative Republic with great interest. After the annexation of the Viennese Workers' Republic, socialist thinkers were eager to see a new socialist state form out of the ashes of a former European monarchy. Some of the French socialists such as Jean Jaures and George Sorel observed the Viennese and Andalucian experiments and determined that the socialist model, if it was to be applied on a larger scale, had to come from the democratic participation of the workers and be built from local sources upward, rather than a top-down approach from a dominant city such as in Vienna and later Mexico City. From this philosophy, the syndicalist socialist movement grew in France in the decades surrounding the Great War and as France further industrialized. Syndicalism was most successful in the southern towns such as Toulouse and rural regions around areas like Perpignan and Carcassonne. Syndicalism never reached great political success among the broader left in France. However, some elements of the Spanish Federative Republic adopted the decentralization of syndicalist thinking, though it was derailed when Alejandro Lerroux briefly led an Union Izquierdista government from 1920 to 1921 which attempteed an ill-fated centralization scheme. The Union Izquierdista quickly broke apart after a number of walkouts by members of Lerroux's government in 1917, and by the end of that year Lerroux was out of power and the left was dented for nearly the next five years, having been in power in some form since the Spanish Federative Republic had been created.
Meanwhile, one part of the Iberian Peninsula much closer to France was more receptive to some of the syndicalist ideology. Jaures, born in a small southwestern French village, spent much time following the French invasion of Spain and the creation of an independent Catalunya afterward. Similarly, George Sorel had spent a lot of time in Perpignan and was greatly familiar with the plight of the Catalunyan nationalists under the Spanish kingdom and its liberation by France in the Great War. Men like Sorel and Jaures also commiserated with Marshal Joffre during the Spanish campaign of the Great War and during the post-war erection of an independent Catalan state. While Joffre was Catalan, which is why the French government appointed him as Marshal of Catalunya following the war, he still accepting influence from other Frenchmen sympathetic to Catalunya, and Sorel and Jaures quickly rose in influence in Joffre's circle. Marshal Joffre, still widely revered as the founder and first president of Catalunya, though he never held the title president, ruled and molded Catalunya's government for over a decade following the Great War. Under the leadership of Joseph Joffre, Catalunya's government slowly grew out from under France's shadow and adopted a socialist system similar to that of the Viennese Workers' Republic with Barcelona as the dominant force, but with slight syndicalist trappings to appease the more rural Aragon and western Catalunya proper[1]. After Joffre stepped down at least to let the people of Catalunya decide their own self-government in 1924, the system stuck. The Grans Coalició dels Treballadors, or GCT, a united coalition of urban and rural workers' collectives, led the 1924 Catalan elections and formed a government with Domènec Martí i Julià as the first elected and native president of Catalunya. With the election of Martí i Julià, the Republic of Catalunya finally achieved full independence, no longer under the dominance of either Spain or France. To mark the occasion, Marshal Joffre (who informally kept the title of Marshal for the rest of his life), organized and personally opened the Jocs Florals, or Floral Games. The opening of the game by Joffre in front of Fontserè's Cascada Monumental became an iconic image of Catalan pride as one of the first Catalan events captured in photo and on film.
The End of the Italian Experiment:
Italy was been heavily weakened by the Great War after suffering both the ravaging of its coasts and the invasion of much of its northern industrial region, as well as the territorial losses the country incurred in the Peace of Vienna. While there was some inclination toward a revenge movement by the government of Gabriele D'Annunzio after his election in 1912, the economic situation became dire in much of the country. Inflation was rampant in Italy during the 1910s as the slow recovery of the destroyed Italian industrial capacity created mass unemployment, and poor harvests in rural southern Italy soured farmers toward the D'Annunzio government. Regionalism, which had remained dormant for over half a century, now emerged once again as the government in Rome seemingly flailed in its attempts to right the Italian ship of state.
The first hotbeds of fractious nationalism came in two very opposite but far-flung regions from Rome: Sicily and Veneto. Sicily had already been rocked by revolt before the Great War. As attempts to introduce modern capitalist systems to the largely rural and agrarian communities on the island combined with a global fall in prices for wheat and other agricultural goods, rural communities formed "Fasci" or workers' leagues[2]. The Sicilian organizations were unlike the more traditional workers' organizations in more industrial areas of Vienna, Barcelona, and even northern Italy, in that they were looser communal organizations, possibly having more in common with the early leagues in the Spanish Federative Republic. The First Revolt of the Fasci in 1893 saw widespread violence in western Sicily, especially as socialist intellectuals in Palermo joined with longstanding mafia organizations. While the First Revolt of the Fasci was crushed, the resentment lived on in the Fratellanza Siciliana or Sicilian Brotherhood. As the Sicilian economy worsened even more during the French blockade in the Great War and under D'Annunzio and following governments, the time became ripe for another rebellion. By 1916, after new president Dino Perrona Compagni attempted a violent crackdown on crime in Palermo, the Second Revolt of the Fasci erupted. Led by charismatic socialist Bernardino Verro and an alliance of several mafiosis, the rebellion spread from the inland town of Corleone as a large militia army marched north toward Palermo. Palermo fell to Verro after a fierce battle, forcing the governor of Sicily to flee the island, and soon after Verro and others signed a proclamation of an independent Sicilian Republic. Seeing the rejection of the relatively urban class in Palermo, the capital of Sicily remained in Corleone even after its gained recognition and drove Italian forces entirely off the island.
Veneto, while wealthier than Sicily, had also suffered heavily from the Great War with the German invasion of the region. Many Venetians and nationalists had already adopted a symbol of the neglect that Rome had shown to the region. In July of 1902, the Campanile di San Marco, the bell tower of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, developed a large crack in the north wall. The crack continued to spread, and that same month, the entire bell tower collapsed. Luckily, nobody was killed. Sentiment to rebuild the Campanile was strong among Venetians, but with the outbreak of the Turkish War and the looming Great War, funding from Rome was hard to come by and the Campanile remained unreconstructed for over two decades[3]. The Campanile di San Marco thus joined the Lion of St. Mark as a nationalist symbol of Venice and the entire Veneto region, hence why the Campanile now joins the Lion on the flag of the Venetian Republic. During the 1910s under the governments of D'Annunzio and Compagni, the Leone di San Marco party gained ground in local and national elections in Veneto. Attempts by D'Annunzio to standardize the teaching of Italian throughout the country only enraged Venetians even more, and with ample German funding pouring in (though tellingly not for rebuilding the Campanile until after Venetia's independence), the Leone di San Marco party swept the 1919 governorate elections. Former President Luigi Luzzatti, a Venetian himself, warned Compagni that the situation in Venetia was dire, but the warning fell on dear ears. Veneto's governing assembly passed a declaration of independence in 1920, and with German backing now explicit, the region declared independence. Britain protested, but with it involved in its own internal troubles at the time, could do nothing. Despite his issuing the warning to Compagni, Luigi Luzzatti was elected the first Doge of the new Venetian Republic, reinstated as a ceremonial position to the parliament and Prime Minister, the first of whom was Leone di San Marco founder Italico Corradino Cappellotto[4]. Luzzatti, 70 at the time Venetia elected him Doge, lived for another five years, long enough to see the Campanile restored.
In the face of the secession of the Sicilian and Venetian republics, President Dino Perrone Compagni attempted to clamp down even further on the areas of Italy that remained under control from Rome. Compagni, who had served as a lieutenant in the Italian army in the Great War, declared himself the Generalissimo of the Italian Republic and "Grand Duke" of his native Tuscany, where his largest support base was. Meanwhile, both France and Germany were now supporting regional movements and warlords throughout the country. Some historians and cartoonists at the time declared the rise of gobernadores and the Mexicanization of Italy to a return to the Italian Wars of the 15th and 16th centuries. Sardinia soon broke off from Italy under French backing. Following a referendum in favor of restoring the monarchy, Luigi Amadeo I was crowned King of Sardinia. Other warlords took control in the Piedmont, Lombardy, the Abruzzi, and elsewhere. By 1924, Compagni's control over the country was limited to Tuscany and Lazio. This warlord period dominated Italian history for the following decade as Germany and France covertly backed several warlords for dominance of Italy in effectual proxy wars[5].
[1] This is one of the more half-formed ideas I'd had for the post-end events in Union and Liberty. I wanted Joffre to become a founding father figure for Catalunya, but also for it to become socialist on the vein of the Viennese Workers' Republic as another example of TTL's "socialism can only really work on a small scale in a pseudo-city state context" common thought.
[2] The Fasci Siciliani were short-lived workers' leagues that formed in Sicily in the late 19th century as a sort of reaction to the transition of the region from feudalism to capitalism.
[3] The Campanile collapse in 1902 in OTL as well. However, in OTL the rebuilding of the Campanile was funded almost immediately following the collapse and it was rebuilt with the exact same design by 1912.
[4] Italico Cappellotto also found a Lion of St. Mark party in OTL, in an interwar attempt at Venetian nationalism.
[5] This bit is kind of open ended on how the situation ends up. I couldn't decide if I wanted the ultimate situation to be a return to a lot of small Italian states and a Mexicanization of Italy, or if most of Italy should reunite (maybe except Veneto, Sardinia, and Sicily) but have a two-party system with French-influenced and German-influence parties vying for power.
I think the Italian national feeling is strong enough that they would reunite.
This is interesting; it seems like "cold war" scenario is already developing between France and Germany, with neither of the two wanting to become the junior partner in their alliance. Tensions in their attempts to influence the continent could escalate into a big mess. I don't think either country really felt the damages of the Great War to prevent a second one if the alliance falls apart. And whatever the result, the picture isn't pretty.
Awesome work Wilcox! Here's to hopping there will be a few epilogues more.
Awesome work Wilcox! Here's to hopping there will be a few epilogues more.
Epilogue Post #7
Epilogue Post #7
The Doomsday Machine:
When the economist John Maynard Keynes took power in Great Britain, the country was in dire straits financially. After years of rationing, debt payments to the victorious powers of the Great War, and the destruction from the conflict that ousted the monarchy, the country needed stabilization and a shrewd hand in government to right itself. As it happened, Keynes was that man. Already a brilliant economist, Keynes and his parliament of loyal Common Wealth party members took control of many important British industries. Coal mines, rail lines, dockyards, and steel mills among other industries deemed vital to national security were seized or their corporate owners bought into loyalty. Britain quickly transitioned from one of the loosest regulated economies of the Western world to one of the most regulated economies. This was facilitated by the fact that many companies had been squeezed into bankruptcy with the years of economic stagnation prior to the British Civil War.
Keynes' policies were primarily those of a tiered command economy centered around a council of management, and embracing autarky in the British Isles as a method to restore British industrial capacity. John Maynard Keynes, or Lord Protector of Great Britain and Guide to the Revolution as he styled himself, was the ultimate authority on production across the British Isles, along with his Council of Management Experts. The Council of Management Experts brought together some of the brightest minds from across the former British Empire, and Keynes was not one to discount the brilliance of the colonies. Bengali statisticians Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and Satyendra Nath Bose both served on the Council of Management Experts, and this became one of the factors in Bengal retaining a closer relationship to Britain and other pro-British states such as Canada and South Africa following the decolonization of the former British Empire. Also on the CME were Canadian economist Cliff H. Douglas, who helped draft the Sovereign Incorporation Charter for the Hudson Bay Company. However, the two most influential members of Keynes's Council of Management Experts came in the field of computing.
The 1930s were an exciting time for advances in what is now known as computing. While the Analytical Engine had been used to calculate artillery trajectories with a fair amount of accuracy during the Great War, new theories on the applications of computing cropped up with varying success rates throughout North America and Europe in the decades following. What Alonzo Church was to the American field of computing and John von Neumann was for Germany, Alan Turing was to Great Britain. Keynes first met Alan Turing through Cambridge, where Turing studied under Keynes's friend the Welsh scientist Charles Eryl Wynn-Williams. Wynn-Williams left Cambridge to be part of Keynes's Council of Management Experts from the beginning, while Turing joined him shortly afterward in 1935 at the remarkable age of just 23. Alan Turing quickly rose through the ranks of the CME due to his brilliance, and as recently uncovered letters reveal, a romantic relationship with Keynes. While Britain under Keynes was one of the more liberal countries with respect to homosexuality, these letters found in the Cambridge University Archives among other documents from Lord Protector Keynes are still a startling revelation, particularly as Keynes had previously fathered two children with Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in a previous marriage[1].
Turing first demonstrated his brilliance in computing during the 1930s with the Council of Management Experts' creation of a tabulation machine that combined a tabulation machine with a difference engine, and became the first programmable machine that we can reasonably call a digital computer. It was an immediate success with the 1935 census in Great Britain, accurately calculating statistics vital to the management of the British economy for both London and Britain as a whole. Since the first use of these machines was to tabulate census data, the Council of Management Experts dubbed the computer the Doomsday Machine[2]. Starting in the 1940s, Alan Turing led a project that would expand the Doomsday Machine's capabilities and truly revolutionize the British economy and the field of computing itself.
By the mid-1940s, Lord Portector Keynes had consolidated his command economy, with a tiered system of national production across the British Isles, regional commonwealths in South England, North England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as major cities including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester. After the regional data was collected, the Council of Management Experts based on aggregate supply and demand and set accordingly at the regional level. To make up for any errors in calculation and to appease the population, Keynes brought back the Roman tradition of Saturnalia[3], which became a week of festivities and "a natural yearly stimulus of demand" for the economy, as Keynes put it in his writings before the next price controls would go into effect. However, Turing's project to expand the Doomsday Machine with the aid of his protege the computer scientist Stafford Beer would revolutionize this tiered command economy. With the new system, the capabilities of the Doomsday Machine were expanded. Instead of inefficient and cumbersome trucks moving around the punch cards, a cross-country teletext network would send the data up a chain of command where it would be printed out on ticker tape and recorded on punch cards to be used in the Doomsday Machines. This alone sped up calculations phenomenally, but additional advances in memory and processing allowed for greater overall control. When the last incarnation of the Doomsday Machine was implemented following the 1960 census, the number of tiers had increased to seven with management council at each level, all the way from the CME at the top national level down to individual municipalities and wards. This system, which Stafford Beer called the Cybernet[4], led to Britain rebuilding its fully functioning economy while allowing for extreme control of imports and exports and movement of goods within Great Britain. When John Maynard Keynes died in October of 1962, the Cybernet continued to function with barely any disruption despite a constitutional crisis that lasted for nearly a month before his eldest son Neville Keynes became the next Lord Protector[5].
The Longest Word:
The longest word in the Columbiad Dictionary at a staggering 31 letters long is neoantidisestablishmentarianism. The term refers to a period in the later years of the John Maynard Keynes regime in Great Britain, during which a renewed effort arose to officially return the former British royal family and the Church of England to the British Isles. Keynes had abolished the Church of England shortly after taking power in 1928, at the same time that he sent the former Albert II and the rest of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha into exile in Denmark. The Church of England, as Keynes and philosopher G. K. Chesterton noted, was seen by the Keynesian regime as a holdout of temporal religious authority, which had gone into a large decline in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Chesterton, for example, approved of the Roman Catholic Church's renunciation of the temporal authority of the Papal States that caused the split between the Catholic Churches in Rome and Puebla.
However, while the Church of England had been disestablished in Great Britain in 1928, many people still effectively remained practicing Anglicans well into the 1930s. Keynes, for his part, had disdain for religion as a whole, especially organized religion, and according to his collected notes in the Cambridge Archives, was predominantly irreligious himself with little attending of services or even private observance beyond his childhood. Religion, in Keynes' mind, was ultimately a private matter, though he publicly considered it a distraction from the more pressing matters of the economic situation of Great Britain and its citizens. "The goal of one's work should be to enable leisure and happiness in one's lifetime, not in appeasing some intangible force or reaching happiness in a supposed next life. Theologians set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that once the storm is past, the ocean will be calm. For in the short run, we can achieve knowable happiness. But in the long run, we are all destined to die."[6] During the early Keynesian regime, Anglican Churches were repurposed as either historical museums and attractions, or kept as community meeting spaces.
However, despite the outward irreligiousness of Keynesian Britain to the point where in the 1950 census Great Britain was 15 percent atheist and 70 percent reporting no religious affiliation, private practice of Anglican, Roman Catholic, and other religions was still allowed. Indeed, it was around this time that the cause of neoantidisestablishmentarianism emerged in force. Initially, it was merely taken up as a call for the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to be permitted return to Great Britain from exile. However, with the Keynesian regime taking little action against religious expression on the matter, the cause grew to additionally call for the restoration of the Church of England with a member of the former royal family as its head. Keynes, who by this time rarely made public appearances, initially tarred the neoantidisestablishmentarianists as a radical reactionary group wishing to restore the British monarchy and send Great Britain back into ruin. The push for reestablishment of the Anglican Church continued, however, and after goodwill visits by the British ambassador to Denmark to Edward, Albert II's son and then current claimant to the British throne, and by the Danish ambassador to Britain as well as the Prime Minister of Denmark making a state visit to meet with Keynes in London in 1954, the Lord Protector announced a momentous decision.
According to the 1954 Proclamation on the Status of the Descendants of Queen Victoria, the Church of England was to be restored in Great Britain and permitted to operate as a public religious organization. The Proclamation made stipulations that despite this, the Anglican Church was not declared the official state religion of Great Britain. Also in the negotiations that led to the 1954 Proclamation, one of the ultimatums Keynes made was that Edward Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was forbidden from being the head of the Church of England. Instead, a member from the minor branch of the family was chosen to lead the church, with the stipulation that they renounce any and all claims to titles nominally in the British Isles. A granddaughter of King Albert II's younger brother George was selected, in part pushed for by Lord Protector Keynes as a praise for women. Despite claims from more conservative supporters of neoantidisestablishmentarianism that the appointment of a woman as the head of the Church of England would destroy the sanctity of the Church and render its renewal pointless, the 28 year old Elizabeth returned to Britain in 1954 with her two sons Charles and Albert Mountbatten, and Elizabeth acceded to the leadership of the restored Church of England.
[1] I had already planned Turing being a protege of Keynes in this, but after finding out Keynes was bisexual, well... it seemed like a natural leap.
[2] The common meaning of doomsday machine didn't come about until the 1960s and the detonation of the hydrogen bomb in OTL. So ITTL it's actually quite plausible that they might name the census tabulation computer after the Domesday Book.
[3] From Am I a Liberal?, Keynes, 1925: "Drug Questions in this country are practically limited to the Drink Question; though I should like to include gambling under this head. I expect that the Prohibition of alcoholic Spirits and of Bookmakers would do good. But this would not settle the matter. How far is bored and suffering humanity to be allowed, from time to time, an escape, an excitement, a stimulus, a possibility of change?—that is the important problem. Is it possible to allow reasonable licence, permitted Saturnalia, sanctified Carnival, in conditions which need ruin neither the health nor the pockets of the roysterers, and will shelter from irresistible temptation the unhappy class who, in America, are called addicts?"
[4] The term Cybernet comes from Stafford Beer's studies of management cybernetics. as the word cybernetics was originally used as a general term to describe the study of all system dynamics. Even earlier, French scientist Andre Ampere used the term 'cybernetique' in 1934 to describe the science of civil government. The Cybernet itself, here, is modeled after Beer's Cybersyn system that was briefly in place in Allende's Chile.
[5] Neville is a fictional son of Keynes, named after his father's middle name.
[6] I hope you enjoyed my variation on the entire quote from Keynes' A Tract on Monetary Reform, Chapter III, page 80, which can be found here.
The Doomsday Machine:
When the economist John Maynard Keynes took power in Great Britain, the country was in dire straits financially. After years of rationing, debt payments to the victorious powers of the Great War, and the destruction from the conflict that ousted the monarchy, the country needed stabilization and a shrewd hand in government to right itself. As it happened, Keynes was that man. Already a brilliant economist, Keynes and his parliament of loyal Common Wealth party members took control of many important British industries. Coal mines, rail lines, dockyards, and steel mills among other industries deemed vital to national security were seized or their corporate owners bought into loyalty. Britain quickly transitioned from one of the loosest regulated economies of the Western world to one of the most regulated economies. This was facilitated by the fact that many companies had been squeezed into bankruptcy with the years of economic stagnation prior to the British Civil War.
Keynes' policies were primarily those of a tiered command economy centered around a council of management, and embracing autarky in the British Isles as a method to restore British industrial capacity. John Maynard Keynes, or Lord Protector of Great Britain and Guide to the Revolution as he styled himself, was the ultimate authority on production across the British Isles, along with his Council of Management Experts. The Council of Management Experts brought together some of the brightest minds from across the former British Empire, and Keynes was not one to discount the brilliance of the colonies. Bengali statisticians Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and Satyendra Nath Bose both served on the Council of Management Experts, and this became one of the factors in Bengal retaining a closer relationship to Britain and other pro-British states such as Canada and South Africa following the decolonization of the former British Empire. Also on the CME were Canadian economist Cliff H. Douglas, who helped draft the Sovereign Incorporation Charter for the Hudson Bay Company. However, the two most influential members of Keynes's Council of Management Experts came in the field of computing.
The 1930s were an exciting time for advances in what is now known as computing. While the Analytical Engine had been used to calculate artillery trajectories with a fair amount of accuracy during the Great War, new theories on the applications of computing cropped up with varying success rates throughout North America and Europe in the decades following. What Alonzo Church was to the American field of computing and John von Neumann was for Germany, Alan Turing was to Great Britain. Keynes first met Alan Turing through Cambridge, where Turing studied under Keynes's friend the Welsh scientist Charles Eryl Wynn-Williams. Wynn-Williams left Cambridge to be part of Keynes's Council of Management Experts from the beginning, while Turing joined him shortly afterward in 1935 at the remarkable age of just 23. Alan Turing quickly rose through the ranks of the CME due to his brilliance, and as recently uncovered letters reveal, a romantic relationship with Keynes. While Britain under Keynes was one of the more liberal countries with respect to homosexuality, these letters found in the Cambridge University Archives among other documents from Lord Protector Keynes are still a startling revelation, particularly as Keynes had previously fathered two children with Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in a previous marriage[1].
Turing first demonstrated his brilliance in computing during the 1930s with the Council of Management Experts' creation of a tabulation machine that combined a tabulation machine with a difference engine, and became the first programmable machine that we can reasonably call a digital computer. It was an immediate success with the 1935 census in Great Britain, accurately calculating statistics vital to the management of the British economy for both London and Britain as a whole. Since the first use of these machines was to tabulate census data, the Council of Management Experts dubbed the computer the Doomsday Machine[2]. Starting in the 1940s, Alan Turing led a project that would expand the Doomsday Machine's capabilities and truly revolutionize the British economy and the field of computing itself.
By the mid-1940s, Lord Portector Keynes had consolidated his command economy, with a tiered system of national production across the British Isles, regional commonwealths in South England, North England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as major cities including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester. After the regional data was collected, the Council of Management Experts based on aggregate supply and demand and set accordingly at the regional level. To make up for any errors in calculation and to appease the population, Keynes brought back the Roman tradition of Saturnalia[3], which became a week of festivities and "a natural yearly stimulus of demand" for the economy, as Keynes put it in his writings before the next price controls would go into effect. However, Turing's project to expand the Doomsday Machine with the aid of his protege the computer scientist Stafford Beer would revolutionize this tiered command economy. With the new system, the capabilities of the Doomsday Machine were expanded. Instead of inefficient and cumbersome trucks moving around the punch cards, a cross-country teletext network would send the data up a chain of command where it would be printed out on ticker tape and recorded on punch cards to be used in the Doomsday Machines. This alone sped up calculations phenomenally, but additional advances in memory and processing allowed for greater overall control. When the last incarnation of the Doomsday Machine was implemented following the 1960 census, the number of tiers had increased to seven with management council at each level, all the way from the CME at the top national level down to individual municipalities and wards. This system, which Stafford Beer called the Cybernet[4], led to Britain rebuilding its fully functioning economy while allowing for extreme control of imports and exports and movement of goods within Great Britain. When John Maynard Keynes died in October of 1962, the Cybernet continued to function with barely any disruption despite a constitutional crisis that lasted for nearly a month before his eldest son Neville Keynes became the next Lord Protector[5].
The Longest Word:
The longest word in the Columbiad Dictionary at a staggering 31 letters long is neoantidisestablishmentarianism. The term refers to a period in the later years of the John Maynard Keynes regime in Great Britain, during which a renewed effort arose to officially return the former British royal family and the Church of England to the British Isles. Keynes had abolished the Church of England shortly after taking power in 1928, at the same time that he sent the former Albert II and the rest of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha into exile in Denmark. The Church of England, as Keynes and philosopher G. K. Chesterton noted, was seen by the Keynesian regime as a holdout of temporal religious authority, which had gone into a large decline in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Chesterton, for example, approved of the Roman Catholic Church's renunciation of the temporal authority of the Papal States that caused the split between the Catholic Churches in Rome and Puebla.
However, while the Church of England had been disestablished in Great Britain in 1928, many people still effectively remained practicing Anglicans well into the 1930s. Keynes, for his part, had disdain for religion as a whole, especially organized religion, and according to his collected notes in the Cambridge Archives, was predominantly irreligious himself with little attending of services or even private observance beyond his childhood. Religion, in Keynes' mind, was ultimately a private matter, though he publicly considered it a distraction from the more pressing matters of the economic situation of Great Britain and its citizens. "The goal of one's work should be to enable leisure and happiness in one's lifetime, not in appeasing some intangible force or reaching happiness in a supposed next life. Theologians set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that once the storm is past, the ocean will be calm. For in the short run, we can achieve knowable happiness. But in the long run, we are all destined to die."[6] During the early Keynesian regime, Anglican Churches were repurposed as either historical museums and attractions, or kept as community meeting spaces.
However, despite the outward irreligiousness of Keynesian Britain to the point where in the 1950 census Great Britain was 15 percent atheist and 70 percent reporting no religious affiliation, private practice of Anglican, Roman Catholic, and other religions was still allowed. Indeed, it was around this time that the cause of neoantidisestablishmentarianism emerged in force. Initially, it was merely taken up as a call for the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to be permitted return to Great Britain from exile. However, with the Keynesian regime taking little action against religious expression on the matter, the cause grew to additionally call for the restoration of the Church of England with a member of the former royal family as its head. Keynes, who by this time rarely made public appearances, initially tarred the neoantidisestablishmentarianists as a radical reactionary group wishing to restore the British monarchy and send Great Britain back into ruin. The push for reestablishment of the Anglican Church continued, however, and after goodwill visits by the British ambassador to Denmark to Edward, Albert II's son and then current claimant to the British throne, and by the Danish ambassador to Britain as well as the Prime Minister of Denmark making a state visit to meet with Keynes in London in 1954, the Lord Protector announced a momentous decision.
According to the 1954 Proclamation on the Status of the Descendants of Queen Victoria, the Church of England was to be restored in Great Britain and permitted to operate as a public religious organization. The Proclamation made stipulations that despite this, the Anglican Church was not declared the official state religion of Great Britain. Also in the negotiations that led to the 1954 Proclamation, one of the ultimatums Keynes made was that Edward Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was forbidden from being the head of the Church of England. Instead, a member from the minor branch of the family was chosen to lead the church, with the stipulation that they renounce any and all claims to titles nominally in the British Isles. A granddaughter of King Albert II's younger brother George was selected, in part pushed for by Lord Protector Keynes as a praise for women. Despite claims from more conservative supporters of neoantidisestablishmentarianism that the appointment of a woman as the head of the Church of England would destroy the sanctity of the Church and render its renewal pointless, the 28 year old Elizabeth returned to Britain in 1954 with her two sons Charles and Albert Mountbatten, and Elizabeth acceded to the leadership of the restored Church of England.
[1] I had already planned Turing being a protege of Keynes in this, but after finding out Keynes was bisexual, well... it seemed like a natural leap.
[2] The common meaning of doomsday machine didn't come about until the 1960s and the detonation of the hydrogen bomb in OTL. So ITTL it's actually quite plausible that they might name the census tabulation computer after the Domesday Book.
[3] From Am I a Liberal?, Keynes, 1925: "Drug Questions in this country are practically limited to the Drink Question; though I should like to include gambling under this head. I expect that the Prohibition of alcoholic Spirits and of Bookmakers would do good. But this would not settle the matter. How far is bored and suffering humanity to be allowed, from time to time, an escape, an excitement, a stimulus, a possibility of change?—that is the important problem. Is it possible to allow reasonable licence, permitted Saturnalia, sanctified Carnival, in conditions which need ruin neither the health nor the pockets of the roysterers, and will shelter from irresistible temptation the unhappy class who, in America, are called addicts?"
[4] The term Cybernet comes from Stafford Beer's studies of management cybernetics. as the word cybernetics was originally used as a general term to describe the study of all system dynamics. Even earlier, French scientist Andre Ampere used the term 'cybernetique' in 1934 to describe the science of civil government. The Cybernet itself, here, is modeled after Beer's Cybersyn system that was briefly in place in Allende's Chile.
[5] Neville is a fictional son of Keynes, named after his father's middle name.
[6] I hope you enjoyed my variation on the entire quote from Keynes' A Tract on Monetary Reform, Chapter III, page 80, which can be found here.
I thought C. H. Douglas was British, at least IOTL? Or is this yet another thing you did ITTL that I've managed to forget?
Nope, just something I managed to forget.
Let's call it American textbooks mistaking Douglas for being Canadian since he was so involved with the HBC and probably lived in Canada for a while because of that. Also I couldn't find any good Canadian economists.Great Britain is run successfully as a socially liberal planned-economy technocracy while Hudson Bay Company creates a successful democratic corporatocacy. How did we end up in a cyberpunk utopia?
On a related note, it seems you managed in this TL to somewhat defang the specter of communism, which is allowing for countries to try socialism and planned economics without igniting irrational overreactions.
On a related note, it seems you managed in this TL to somewhat defang the specter of communism, which is allowing for countries to try socialism and planned economics without igniting irrational overreactions.
Epilogue Post #8
Fast forwarding and extrapolating a lot for this final epilogue post...
AND IT IS COMPLETE!
The Oregon bit is pretty much the only idea I had since early in the Union and Liberty's development for anything coming close to modern day. So I definitely wanted to have a post laying that out, but pretty much everything besides that and the increasing break between state and federal parties a bit like OTL Canada is completely speculative with not too much set in stone in my mind. Especially the presidents and candidates mentioned for this update, I had no inkling of who I was going to use until writing this (thanks to @Usili for helping me come up with the Oregon nationalist candidates!) I'll put up some footnotes a little later, not sure how extensive I want to be with explaining who people mentioned are.
Thank you to everyone who read and commented on Union and Liberty over the years and who stuck with me on this! I'm very happy with how it has turned out!
Now enough of me, here's the update.
Epilogue Post #8
Oregonian Nationalism:
The region of Oregon has long been one of the more neglected regions of the United States. Despite being the hub of Pacific trade for the United States for much of its history, the region has seen comparatively little investment in its infrastructure and economy, especially since the admission of the Alta California states and a lot of Western trade now coming in and out of the country through the Upper San Francisco Bay and Sacramento River ports instead of through Astoria, Tacoma, or Langley. Additionally, the Oregon regions has long been, except for the coasts, much more rural than even the more rural areas in much of the eastern half of the country. With such factors and just the Continental Divide creating such isolation from the rest of the United States, it seems only natural that a regionalist and eventually nationalist sentiment like that in Mokoguay and the Mexican states to arise, even here at home.
Elements of a unique Oregonian nation first arose in the 1920s, when calls for a separate Oregon national football team were submitted to FIFA. The Oregon Football Association was created in 1920, shortly after the foundation of the United States, New England, and Texas football associations. However, when the first World Cup was held in the Netherlands in 1924, only the United States and New England were allowed to participate as teams from North America, despite Oregon submitting a team. At the time it had been decided by FIFA that the United States association was the only "official" American association in FIFA, though New England was quickly grandfathered in in time for the 1924 World Cup when no other team from the continent sought to participate. The fight to bring the Oregon Football Association continued for over twenty years as the Oregon Football League was soon established, and players from Oregon soon found themselves on the United States national team. United States right winger Errol Crossan, who played at the league level primarily for Callister FC[1], sewed a patch of a green "O" with a salmon in the middle onto his jersey right before the last qualifying match for the 1952 World Cup. Crossan, who had helped lead the United States to the semifinal four years earlier in France, was removed from the match by the coach. Many Americans blamed Crossan and his express of the nationalist sentiment for the United States' 1-0 loss to Haiti on a goal from Joe Gaetjens[2] that sent Haiti to Hungary instead of the United States. However, Crossan ultimately had the last hurrah for Oregon. In 1958, Oregon Football Association president Emil Sick organized the entrance of Oregon into FIFA and in 1960, Errol Crossan would captain the Oregon national team to its World cup debut, proudly wearing a modified O and salmon crest during the first match in Saint Louis. Similarly to New England and Cuba, Oregon became a separate competitor from the United States in the Olympics beginning in 1966.
For all such successes for the Oregonian nationalist movement, political success had been much harder to come by. With the continued growth of the Confluence region during the 20th century and the expansion of port facilities in the Alta California states, Oregonian nationalism remained small, and its nationalist movement had several false starts in forming their own parties. One reason for this is that, unlike for example Cuba, there was no existing impetus to form a separate party system at the state level. The other reason was the dominance of the Progressive Party in the region for much of the early 20th century, though at times the Republicans were able to mount strong challenges at the state levels. That began to change, however, late in the 20th century. The region was able to flex its political muscles heavily in 1970, when Oregon (the state, not the entire region) senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson was elected Senate Majority Leader and became the de facto leader of the Progressive Party. Scoop Jackson was certainly a Progressive and loved the state he represented, but while most Oregonian nationalists were Progressive in their ideology, Scoop certainly had no sympathy for the nationalists.
Senator Jackson was able to wrangle the national Progressive Party and Congress to bring some investment into the far northwest of the United States over the next decade. Legislation brought federal funding to dams on the upper Columbia River basin that helped at last bring reliable electrification to large sections of rural Kootenay. The Olympic Canal received a much needed widening to accomadate larger ships and made the port facilities at Tacoma much more competitive with other ports in the United States and California. However, for many Oregonian nationalist activists, this was too little too late. Even among many residents who were ambivalent on the issue of independence, the neglect of the broader Oregon region by the rest of the country had riled them up. The grievances against Washington and the American national party system finally came to a head and resounded like a shock wave across the region in 1984. This had been aided by the primarily state control over party nominations for state and federal offices. While parties on the national level had generally controlled the state conventions and nominations during the first half of the 20th century well into the 1960s, occasionally a state party could buck the national party. That was very much the case in 1984.
During the 1984 Progressive primary, governor Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.[3] and senator Ed Koch of New York resoundingly won the primary in most states and were duly nominated at the national convention for president and vice president, respectively. As with tradition, the state nomination conventions followed the national party's nomination and put Stevenson and Koch on the ballot. That is, except in the Oregonian states. The nationalists had achieved their first major political success four years prior with the election of Paul Schell to Congress[4], and followed it up with the election of Cecil Andrus as governor of Champoeg two years later. Since Schell's first election from Oregon's 3rd district, the Oregonian nationalist faction of the Progressive Party had infiltrated and gained an ever growing influence over many of the state Progressive organizations west of the Continental Divide. In 1984, they were able to first wield their newfound power at the presidential level. In the weeks following the national Progressive convention in June of 1984, the northwestern parties one by one shocked the country and the party by refusing to nominate the Stevenson/Koch ticket. Instead, starting with the Champoeg Progressive Party on July 1, 1984, the Progressive Parties of Champoeg, Oregon, Fremont, Kootenay, and Shoshone placed a ticket of Champoeg governor Cecil Andrus for president and Kootenay Senator Bethine Clark Church for vice president[5]. They announced a united platform of calling for an independence referendum for the Oregonian states.
The national level Progressive Party, needless to say, was furious at the northwestern parties' flaunting of their national nominee. However, they were also shocked into action. It was less than six months before the 1984 election and the Stevenson/Koch ticket had just been dealt a disastrous blow, with the potential of knocking them completely off the ballot in five of their safest states. The Progressives more loyal to the United States and less sympathetic to the nationalist cause in the region sprang to action, aided by the national party. Over the next two months, they quickly organized the creation of a state level "Progressive Unionist Party", and succeeded in placing Adlai Stevenson Jr. and Ed Koch on every state ballot except for Kootenay. However, the quick naming of the "Progressive Unionist Party" had an unfortunate consequence, due to its acronym, the PUP. Cecil Andrus's campaign released many campaign ads attacking the Stevenson campaign calling Stevenson and Koch "puppies" and "lap dogs of Washington" for their alleged complicity in the neglect of the Oregon region. Ultimately, the Andrus/Church campaign showed the force that continuous neglect of one region of the country can produce and demonstrated the slow move toward regionalization of the national parties at the time. Cecil Andrus and Bethine Church won both Kootenay and Champoeg, and came in second in both Oregon and Fremont. Even more of an upset for the national Progressive Party, Congressman Paul Schell managed to narrowly defeat Scoop Jackson for the majority leader's Senate seat. While Schell would remain caucusing with the Progressives through 1990, that year the Oregonian Nationalist Party would formally split off from the Progressive Party after rumors in the northwest claimed the national Progressive Party ignored the Oregon region yet again and blaming the national party for Champoeg voting Democratic in 1988 and helping elect President Jerry Litton[6].
To Progress and Conserve:
However, the Oregonian nationalists were not the only thorn in the side of the Progressive Party in 1984. Again, this thorn sprouted mostly from the western United States, but it soon spread across the country. Along with the perceived neglect of the northwest, the nominations of Adlai Stevenson and Ed Koch echoed similar patterns of Hugh Scott[7] in 1972 and 1976, the previous time the Progressives held the presidency. This was a growing sense of abandoning the western United States in favor of the more urbanized east coast and Old Northwest, while rural regions and even more populous regions such as the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado were being ignored. This alienation of a traditional Progressive stronghold generated much animosity from some of the more independently minded Progressive politicians, especially in the west.
While Oregonian nationalism was the prime force of the alternatives to the mainstream Progressive Party in the northwest, the southwest became the center of a movement claiming to go back to the roots of the Progressive Party, and a return to the ideals of Theodore Roosevelt. In Colorado, where the movement first took hold, it was led primarily by former governor Dick Lamm. Lamm, during his governorship, frequently clashed with Progressives in the state legislature over development projects along the Front Range such as further development on the turnpike between Ororio and the capitol in Ferroplano, and permitting further sprawl and housing development up into the canyons west of the cities on the foothills of the Rockies[8]. Lamm also tapped into the conservationist movement, decrying what he felt was the overpopulation of the urban centers of the United States, and lamenting the more open immigration stances of some of his Progressive colleagues. Dick Lamm believed that the country could not take more people than it already had, and that the preservation of the environment necessitated a reduction of immigration into the United States as well as moves toward "preserving what little natural land we have left" with the expansion of the national park system and the creation of a Department of Urban Development to enact national restrictions on urban development.
Lamm joined with others across the west to create a new party; the Progressive Conservative Party[9], that many felt was taking the Progressive Party back to its original purpose, in 1983 after his term as governor ended. Many had speculated that Lamm would run for the Progressive nomination in 1984, but the creation of the new party quickly moved that speculation to how much support the Progressive Conservatives would get and whether Lamm or someone else would lead them. Soon, the Progressive Party gained a further following in some of the still rural areas of the Northeast and even gained some urban support from anti-development activists. Particularly in New York, the Progressive Conservatives gained membership from activist Jane Jacobs and Congressman Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. Vidal had a strong connection to both the west and to New York. His maternal grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore, who served Calhoun as a Progressive in the early 20th century, and he was a West Point graduate and son of fellow West Point graduate and New York Congressman in Eugene Luther Vidal Sr.[10] Vidal, like Lamm, felt that rural issues were being ignored by the party and risked being co-opted in the long term by the more socially reactionary Democrats. So, in 1984, the Progressive Conservative Party emerged as a new party portraying old values, and nominated Dick Lamm of Colorado for president and Eugene Vidal Jr. from New York for vice president.
While other parties had experienced brief ideological splinters in the past, this was the first time that the Progressive Party had gone through such a splintering. The Oregonian nationalists and the Progressive Conservatives represented a fresh opening of old wounds for the Progressives, that of the battle between the rural Western faction and the more urban Eastern faction of the party. The Populists before them certainly had their problems with internal divisions before the cohesion of the Progressive Party under Roosevelt, what with the 1896 split between Adlai Stevenson and William Jennings Bryan for the vice presidential nomination, but this had not yet happened so openly since Roosevelt consolidated the modern Progressives into a single successful party. Needless to say, this splintering hurt the Progressives badly in 1984. Of course, there was the Oregonian nationalists winning their three states in the northwest. However, the Progressive Conservatives also hurt the Stevenson/Koch campaign in many states that were seen as likely Progressive holds after Hugh Scott's administration. Most notably and possibly clinching the 1984 election was the split of the Progressive vote in New York between Stevenson and Lamm. The extent to which the nomination of Ed Koch and Eugene Vidal Jr., both New Yorkers, for vice president influenced this vote splitting continues to be debate to this day. However, on the ground, what mattered was the winner, and neither party would be the winner in New York. While the Progressive Conservatives earned a respectable 10.4% in New York in 1984, the governor of neighboring Massachusetts would be victorious in New York, and its electoral votes were crucial. As with many previous Republican presidents, it would be that rare victory in New York that pushed Michael Dukakis over the top and into the White House. And like most party splinters, the Progressive Conservatives would perhaps win one or two states, in this case Colorado and Trujillo in 1988, but they would soon fade like so many others. However, the Progressive Conservatives would remain influential at the state level in many northern border states and in the non-Oregon West.
[1] Errol Crossan in OTL is a Canadian soccer player who had most of his career for English clubs in the 1950s, most notable a three year spell at Norwich City. Callister FC is named after Callister Park, a sports facility in East Vancouver from the 20s that hosted a lot of early soccer exhibitions in Vancouver.
[2] Joe Gaetjens was a Haitian-American soccer player who in OTL gained fame for scoring the US's goal in the historic 1-0 defeat of England in the 1950 World Cup. Gaetjens disappeared in 1964, and was possibly kidnapped and killed by the Duvalier regime.
[3] As Adlai Stevenson II does not have a notable career in TTL, Adlai Stevenson III is known as Adlai Stevenson Jr.
[4] Paul Schell was in OTL mayor of Seattle, and was a major advocate of Cascadia-wide cooperation bringing together mayors from the Eugene to Vancouver urban corridor to discuss common issues.
[5] I was originally going to use Frank Church here, but after doing research and finding out his wife Bethine Clark Church was also politically active, decided she would be a more interesting choice.
[6] OTL Missouri Representative Jerry Litton
[7] OTL long-time Republican senator from Pennsylvania Hugh Scott
[8] OTL quote from Dick Lamm: "It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did."
[9] I was always going to name Lamm's party the Progressive Conservatives because of the Canada reference, but it turns out Lamm already beat me to the punch. In his novel 1988 written while he was governor, he posits a former governor of Texas with a lot of similarities to Lamm running for president on a third party and calling himself a "progressive conservative."
[10] I do hope some people caught this reference. Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. is in fact OTL Gore Vidal, who indeed adopted the nickname "Gore" after his grandfather.
AND IT IS COMPLETE!
The Oregon bit is pretty much the only idea I had since early in the Union and Liberty's development for anything coming close to modern day. So I definitely wanted to have a post laying that out, but pretty much everything besides that and the increasing break between state and federal parties a bit like OTL Canada is completely speculative with not too much set in stone in my mind. Especially the presidents and candidates mentioned for this update, I had no inkling of who I was going to use until writing this (thanks to @Usili for helping me come up with the Oregon nationalist candidates!) I'll put up some footnotes a little later, not sure how extensive I want to be with explaining who people mentioned are.
Thank you to everyone who read and commented on Union and Liberty over the years and who stuck with me on this! I'm very happy with how it has turned out!
Now enough of me, here's the update.
Epilogue Post #8
Oregonian Nationalism:
The region of Oregon has long been one of the more neglected regions of the United States. Despite being the hub of Pacific trade for the United States for much of its history, the region has seen comparatively little investment in its infrastructure and economy, especially since the admission of the Alta California states and a lot of Western trade now coming in and out of the country through the Upper San Francisco Bay and Sacramento River ports instead of through Astoria, Tacoma, or Langley. Additionally, the Oregon regions has long been, except for the coasts, much more rural than even the more rural areas in much of the eastern half of the country. With such factors and just the Continental Divide creating such isolation from the rest of the United States, it seems only natural that a regionalist and eventually nationalist sentiment like that in Mokoguay and the Mexican states to arise, even here at home.
Elements of a unique Oregonian nation first arose in the 1920s, when calls for a separate Oregon national football team were submitted to FIFA. The Oregon Football Association was created in 1920, shortly after the foundation of the United States, New England, and Texas football associations. However, when the first World Cup was held in the Netherlands in 1924, only the United States and New England were allowed to participate as teams from North America, despite Oregon submitting a team. At the time it had been decided by FIFA that the United States association was the only "official" American association in FIFA, though New England was quickly grandfathered in in time for the 1924 World Cup when no other team from the continent sought to participate. The fight to bring the Oregon Football Association continued for over twenty years as the Oregon Football League was soon established, and players from Oregon soon found themselves on the United States national team. United States right winger Errol Crossan, who played at the league level primarily for Callister FC[1], sewed a patch of a green "O" with a salmon in the middle onto his jersey right before the last qualifying match for the 1952 World Cup. Crossan, who had helped lead the United States to the semifinal four years earlier in France, was removed from the match by the coach. Many Americans blamed Crossan and his express of the nationalist sentiment for the United States' 1-0 loss to Haiti on a goal from Joe Gaetjens[2] that sent Haiti to Hungary instead of the United States. However, Crossan ultimately had the last hurrah for Oregon. In 1958, Oregon Football Association president Emil Sick organized the entrance of Oregon into FIFA and in 1960, Errol Crossan would captain the Oregon national team to its World cup debut, proudly wearing a modified O and salmon crest during the first match in Saint Louis. Similarly to New England and Cuba, Oregon became a separate competitor from the United States in the Olympics beginning in 1966.
For all such successes for the Oregonian nationalist movement, political success had been much harder to come by. With the continued growth of the Confluence region during the 20th century and the expansion of port facilities in the Alta California states, Oregonian nationalism remained small, and its nationalist movement had several false starts in forming their own parties. One reason for this is that, unlike for example Cuba, there was no existing impetus to form a separate party system at the state level. The other reason was the dominance of the Progressive Party in the region for much of the early 20th century, though at times the Republicans were able to mount strong challenges at the state levels. That began to change, however, late in the 20th century. The region was able to flex its political muscles heavily in 1970, when Oregon (the state, not the entire region) senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson was elected Senate Majority Leader and became the de facto leader of the Progressive Party. Scoop Jackson was certainly a Progressive and loved the state he represented, but while most Oregonian nationalists were Progressive in their ideology, Scoop certainly had no sympathy for the nationalists.
Senator Jackson was able to wrangle the national Progressive Party and Congress to bring some investment into the far northwest of the United States over the next decade. Legislation brought federal funding to dams on the upper Columbia River basin that helped at last bring reliable electrification to large sections of rural Kootenay. The Olympic Canal received a much needed widening to accomadate larger ships and made the port facilities at Tacoma much more competitive with other ports in the United States and California. However, for many Oregonian nationalist activists, this was too little too late. Even among many residents who were ambivalent on the issue of independence, the neglect of the broader Oregon region by the rest of the country had riled them up. The grievances against Washington and the American national party system finally came to a head and resounded like a shock wave across the region in 1984. This had been aided by the primarily state control over party nominations for state and federal offices. While parties on the national level had generally controlled the state conventions and nominations during the first half of the 20th century well into the 1960s, occasionally a state party could buck the national party. That was very much the case in 1984.
During the 1984 Progressive primary, governor Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.[3] and senator Ed Koch of New York resoundingly won the primary in most states and were duly nominated at the national convention for president and vice president, respectively. As with tradition, the state nomination conventions followed the national party's nomination and put Stevenson and Koch on the ballot. That is, except in the Oregonian states. The nationalists had achieved their first major political success four years prior with the election of Paul Schell to Congress[4], and followed it up with the election of Cecil Andrus as governor of Champoeg two years later. Since Schell's first election from Oregon's 3rd district, the Oregonian nationalist faction of the Progressive Party had infiltrated and gained an ever growing influence over many of the state Progressive organizations west of the Continental Divide. In 1984, they were able to first wield their newfound power at the presidential level. In the weeks following the national Progressive convention in June of 1984, the northwestern parties one by one shocked the country and the party by refusing to nominate the Stevenson/Koch ticket. Instead, starting with the Champoeg Progressive Party on July 1, 1984, the Progressive Parties of Champoeg, Oregon, Fremont, Kootenay, and Shoshone placed a ticket of Champoeg governor Cecil Andrus for president and Kootenay Senator Bethine Clark Church for vice president[5]. They announced a united platform of calling for an independence referendum for the Oregonian states.
The national level Progressive Party, needless to say, was furious at the northwestern parties' flaunting of their national nominee. However, they were also shocked into action. It was less than six months before the 1984 election and the Stevenson/Koch ticket had just been dealt a disastrous blow, with the potential of knocking them completely off the ballot in five of their safest states. The Progressives more loyal to the United States and less sympathetic to the nationalist cause in the region sprang to action, aided by the national party. Over the next two months, they quickly organized the creation of a state level "Progressive Unionist Party", and succeeded in placing Adlai Stevenson Jr. and Ed Koch on every state ballot except for Kootenay. However, the quick naming of the "Progressive Unionist Party" had an unfortunate consequence, due to its acronym, the PUP. Cecil Andrus's campaign released many campaign ads attacking the Stevenson campaign calling Stevenson and Koch "puppies" and "lap dogs of Washington" for their alleged complicity in the neglect of the Oregon region. Ultimately, the Andrus/Church campaign showed the force that continuous neglect of one region of the country can produce and demonstrated the slow move toward regionalization of the national parties at the time. Cecil Andrus and Bethine Church won both Kootenay and Champoeg, and came in second in both Oregon and Fremont. Even more of an upset for the national Progressive Party, Congressman Paul Schell managed to narrowly defeat Scoop Jackson for the majority leader's Senate seat. While Schell would remain caucusing with the Progressives through 1990, that year the Oregonian Nationalist Party would formally split off from the Progressive Party after rumors in the northwest claimed the national Progressive Party ignored the Oregon region yet again and blaming the national party for Champoeg voting Democratic in 1988 and helping elect President Jerry Litton[6].
To Progress and Conserve:
However, the Oregonian nationalists were not the only thorn in the side of the Progressive Party in 1984. Again, this thorn sprouted mostly from the western United States, but it soon spread across the country. Along with the perceived neglect of the northwest, the nominations of Adlai Stevenson and Ed Koch echoed similar patterns of Hugh Scott[7] in 1972 and 1976, the previous time the Progressives held the presidency. This was a growing sense of abandoning the western United States in favor of the more urbanized east coast and Old Northwest, while rural regions and even more populous regions such as the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado were being ignored. This alienation of a traditional Progressive stronghold generated much animosity from some of the more independently minded Progressive politicians, especially in the west.
While Oregonian nationalism was the prime force of the alternatives to the mainstream Progressive Party in the northwest, the southwest became the center of a movement claiming to go back to the roots of the Progressive Party, and a return to the ideals of Theodore Roosevelt. In Colorado, where the movement first took hold, it was led primarily by former governor Dick Lamm. Lamm, during his governorship, frequently clashed with Progressives in the state legislature over development projects along the Front Range such as further development on the turnpike between Ororio and the capitol in Ferroplano, and permitting further sprawl and housing development up into the canyons west of the cities on the foothills of the Rockies[8]. Lamm also tapped into the conservationist movement, decrying what he felt was the overpopulation of the urban centers of the United States, and lamenting the more open immigration stances of some of his Progressive colleagues. Dick Lamm believed that the country could not take more people than it already had, and that the preservation of the environment necessitated a reduction of immigration into the United States as well as moves toward "preserving what little natural land we have left" with the expansion of the national park system and the creation of a Department of Urban Development to enact national restrictions on urban development.
Lamm joined with others across the west to create a new party; the Progressive Conservative Party[9], that many felt was taking the Progressive Party back to its original purpose, in 1983 after his term as governor ended. Many had speculated that Lamm would run for the Progressive nomination in 1984, but the creation of the new party quickly moved that speculation to how much support the Progressive Conservatives would get and whether Lamm or someone else would lead them. Soon, the Progressive Party gained a further following in some of the still rural areas of the Northeast and even gained some urban support from anti-development activists. Particularly in New York, the Progressive Conservatives gained membership from activist Jane Jacobs and Congressman Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. Vidal had a strong connection to both the west and to New York. His maternal grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore, who served Calhoun as a Progressive in the early 20th century, and he was a West Point graduate and son of fellow West Point graduate and New York Congressman in Eugene Luther Vidal Sr.[10] Vidal, like Lamm, felt that rural issues were being ignored by the party and risked being co-opted in the long term by the more socially reactionary Democrats. So, in 1984, the Progressive Conservative Party emerged as a new party portraying old values, and nominated Dick Lamm of Colorado for president and Eugene Vidal Jr. from New York for vice president.
While other parties had experienced brief ideological splinters in the past, this was the first time that the Progressive Party had gone through such a splintering. The Oregonian nationalists and the Progressive Conservatives represented a fresh opening of old wounds for the Progressives, that of the battle between the rural Western faction and the more urban Eastern faction of the party. The Populists before them certainly had their problems with internal divisions before the cohesion of the Progressive Party under Roosevelt, what with the 1896 split between Adlai Stevenson and William Jennings Bryan for the vice presidential nomination, but this had not yet happened so openly since Roosevelt consolidated the modern Progressives into a single successful party. Needless to say, this splintering hurt the Progressives badly in 1984. Of course, there was the Oregonian nationalists winning their three states in the northwest. However, the Progressive Conservatives also hurt the Stevenson/Koch campaign in many states that were seen as likely Progressive holds after Hugh Scott's administration. Most notably and possibly clinching the 1984 election was the split of the Progressive vote in New York between Stevenson and Lamm. The extent to which the nomination of Ed Koch and Eugene Vidal Jr., both New Yorkers, for vice president influenced this vote splitting continues to be debate to this day. However, on the ground, what mattered was the winner, and neither party would be the winner in New York. While the Progressive Conservatives earned a respectable 10.4% in New York in 1984, the governor of neighboring Massachusetts would be victorious in New York, and its electoral votes were crucial. As with many previous Republican presidents, it would be that rare victory in New York that pushed Michael Dukakis over the top and into the White House. And like most party splinters, the Progressive Conservatives would perhaps win one or two states, in this case Colorado and Trujillo in 1988, but they would soon fade like so many others. However, the Progressive Conservatives would remain influential at the state level in many northern border states and in the non-Oregon West.
[1] Errol Crossan in OTL is a Canadian soccer player who had most of his career for English clubs in the 1950s, most notable a three year spell at Norwich City. Callister FC is named after Callister Park, a sports facility in East Vancouver from the 20s that hosted a lot of early soccer exhibitions in Vancouver.
[2] Joe Gaetjens was a Haitian-American soccer player who in OTL gained fame for scoring the US's goal in the historic 1-0 defeat of England in the 1950 World Cup. Gaetjens disappeared in 1964, and was possibly kidnapped and killed by the Duvalier regime.
[3] As Adlai Stevenson II does not have a notable career in TTL, Adlai Stevenson III is known as Adlai Stevenson Jr.
[4] Paul Schell was in OTL mayor of Seattle, and was a major advocate of Cascadia-wide cooperation bringing together mayors from the Eugene to Vancouver urban corridor to discuss common issues.
[5] I was originally going to use Frank Church here, but after doing research and finding out his wife Bethine Clark Church was also politically active, decided she would be a more interesting choice.
[6] OTL Missouri Representative Jerry Litton
[7] OTL long-time Republican senator from Pennsylvania Hugh Scott
[8] OTL quote from Dick Lamm: "It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did."
[9] I was always going to name Lamm's party the Progressive Conservatives because of the Canada reference, but it turns out Lamm already beat me to the punch. In his novel 1988 written while he was governor, he posits a former governor of Texas with a lot of similarities to Lamm running for president on a third party and calling himself a "progressive conservative."
[10] I do hope some people caught this reference. Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. is in fact OTL Gore Vidal, who indeed adopted the nickname "Gore" after his grandfather.
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