Divided We Stand

[Steve Brinson]

Arizona Republic - Former President McCain Admitted To Hospital​

PHOENIX - The former President isn't out of the woods yet.
That's the takeaway from a press release put out by McCain's office, who stated that the former President was returning to the Mayo Clinic Hospital due to "complications" from the craniotomy he underwent last month.
McCain, who served as President from 2001 to 2009, was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, a rare and aggressive type of brain tumor, shortly after the surgery. Patients with the cancer typically live around 14 months, even with treatment.
Outpourings of support for McCain have come from many sources, including President Kaine, who referred to McCain as "a statesman, a fighter, and a hero", and Governor Barry Goldwater, Jr., who stated that McCain "led the country through some of its toughest times".
McCain is best known for pushing through airline deregulation, overseeing American military action in the Second Indo-Pakistani War and Greek Conflict, and helping to negotiate the Jackson Hole Accords between Canada and Western Canada...

Chicago Tribune - OPINION: Three out of four Americans want our troops out of Persia. Why are we still there?​

As of today, if the Persian Intervention were a person, it would be old enough to drink in every state in the country. Since President Richards ordered the first troops into Tehran in 1994 to protect American business interests in the country, a generation has gone from watching their fathers go off to fight and die propping up a repressive monarchy to watching their brothers and sisters go off to do the same thing and fearing that their sons and daughters will suffer the same fate. The polling is clear - a recent Gallup poll showed that 77% of Americans desire the reduction of troop levels in Persia. So why are we still there?
There was real reason for hope last year. Scott Walker had - at least when it comes to Persia - none of the nation-building impulse of Richards, the hawkishness of McCain, or the sycophantic support of business of Kasich. Indeed, his victory at the National Union Convention over Rodham and public support for reduction in troop numbers in favor of pursuing "strategic, specific, goals" was viewed as at least a qualified success. But Walker has not yet been elected - and may well never be. In place of a President, we have Acting President Tim Kaine - another opponent of the Persian war lobby, but one who suffers from a perceived lack of legitimacy, and who lacks both bilateral appeal and cachet with Unionist elites. And that invites gridlock.
That same Gallup poll noted that a majority of Americans between the ages of 18 and 26 - in other words, those adults too young to remember the beginning of the war - believe that American troops will still be in Persia in 2030, and a plurality believe that they will remain until at least 2040...

Los Angeles Times - WSA Announces Two More Astronauts For Lunar Program​

PALO ALTO - The Western Space Agency, the combined space agency of twelve Western states, recently announced the names of two more of the five astronauts who will make up the crew of its first lunar mission, scheduled to launch from Edwin Hubble Field in 2019.
Jessica Watkins, a Maryland-born Coloradan geologist who until recently worked on the Harmony Mars rover, and Dr. Jonny Kim, a Californian former Navy SEAL, will join Major Anne McClain and engineer Jeannette Epps on the crew of the Mount Rainier. The Mount Rainier will land at one of three landing sites near the Moon's South Pole in June 2019 and establish a research outpost there, before returning to Earth in September after being relieved by the crew of the George Ellery Hale...

Houston Post - OPINION: Gridlock is hurting the country. Just look at Houston.​

In a year, Mickey Leland Intercontinental Airport in Houston records an average of 50 inches of rain. By next Thursday, it will have accomplished that in a week. Hurricane Harvey has hit Southeast Texas with all the sudden, arbitrary, force of boulders falling off a truck. It has turned the streets and freeways of Houston into rivers and the bayous and neighborhoods into seas. In times like this, one expects some kind of action.
But that action is not forthcoming, at least, not on the state or local level. Governor Barton and the rest of the Lone Star government in Austin is fighting Mayor Garcia over local control. The conflict between the two has already led to consequences. The fact that neither one wants to exercise the authority to restrict construction in wetlands means that neither did it, and the wetlands which drain Houston were destroyed. And politics did not stop at the water's edge. On Monday, the Governor blasted the Mayor for his then-reasonable directive for Houstonians to shelter in place. Mayor Garcia blasted back by accusing the Governor's long-term skepticism of manmade climate change of contributing to the general unpreparedness for Hurricane Harvey.
The federal government is not much different. To their credit, Acting President Kaine and Speaker Brooks pledged to put aside their differences and plan to visit the affected area. But history does not bode well for their efforts. From the 2010 Arkansas floods to the Moore tornado in 2013, disaster relief under the Kasich administration was watered down or simply killed in Congress. While that situation did break (the federal government's response to Hurricane Matthew in 2016 was widely praised), the current governmental situation, with no President elected and no Cabinet confirmed, bodes ill for the future, as does the litany of Northeastern Representatives grousing about Texan no votes in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
It is worth going back to the beginning of our party system to try to determine where things went wrong. It is worth going back to 1936...

 

[Steve Brinson]

On Saturday, September 7, 1935, Dr. Carl Weiss confided in his father-in-law, Judge Benjamin H. Pavy, that Weiss planned to assassinate Governor Huey Long. Luckily for Long, Pavy managed to talk him out of it. Unluckily for Pavy, Long still gerrymandered him out of a job the next day.

A month before, Long had announced that he was running for President. A former supporter of Roosevelt, Long had fallen out with him for both political reasons (Long believed Roosevelt was a sellout to big business) and personal reasons (Long wanted his job). Later in the year, Long founded his own political party, so as both to support his run and to create a support network for his political allies in other states, whose support could help him win any future elections. He called his party the American League.

Long's electoral strategy was an unusual one, predicated on his unusual goals. He wasn't running to win - he was running to garner support for a challenge to Roosevelt in four years. He wasn't focusing on any states in particular - he criss-crossed the nation, hoping to find allies who might go to the convention in four years who might remember a stump speaker. He didn't choose a single running mate - he chose dozens, reasoning that he wasn't going to win anyway, and he needed to make a lot of friends real fast.

Iowan radical Milo Reno, Mississippian Senator Pat Harrison, and North Dakotan Governor William Langer got nods. Long aimed for popularity, not coherence - so Pappy O'Daniel, a conservative Texan radio host and flour salesman, and Upton Sinclair, a socialist Californian author, both got on the ballot in their respective states.

Ironically, Long might not have gotten as much support as he did had the economy not been better in late 1935. As a result, conservatives in Congress - with the support of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau - got the blessing of the President to cut millions from programs like the Works Progress Administration, in order to allow the economy to stand on it. It didn't exactly go well - the decline in unemployment that had begun in 1933 abruptly reversed.

The economy recovered by the middle of the year, as the President - on the advice of more liberal advisors - decided to revert to his previous policies. But the damage to his campaign was done - Long, previously thought to be limited to his home state, was now polling even with, or better than, Roosevelt in much of the Midwest and South.

He didn't get the chance to capitalize on his success. On June 6, 1936, Adam Stanton - the brother of a woman with whom Stanton believed Senator Long was having an affair - shot Long while the Senator was visiting Louisiana on official business. Long died in the hospital the next day.

It is common to ask why Long's campaign didn't die with him. In many places, it did - Marion Zioncheck, Long's Washington running mate, endorsed Roosevelt, while Royal Copeland of New York simply ended his campaign. But others fought on. And while they didn't defeat Roosevelt, in the end, they did scare him.

(thanks to @Oppo for wikibox help)

 

[Turquoise Blue]

Ooh. So that's how America becomes what it is now.

 

[Sithlent]

Looks pretty cool! Will this be a collaborative TL?

 

[Steve Brinson]

Looks pretty cool! Will this be a collaborative TL?

Not as such, but if you have any ideas or want to write anything (particularly regarding events and politics outside the United States), PM me and I'll tell you to post or alter it as the case may be.

 

[Sithlent]

Not as such, but if you have any ideas or want to write anything (particularly regarding events and politics outside the United States), PM me and I'll tell you to post or alter it as the case may be.

Sure, I'd be pretty interested! I'll PM about my ideas

 

[Wendell]

This is good.

 

[Turquoise Blue]

@wolfram: I wonder how it goes from Huey Long's anti-establishment coalition to a general regionalist sentiment. I guess that's planned for the next update?

 

[Steve Brinson]

@wolfram: I wonder how it goes from Huey Long's anti-establishment coalition to a general regionalist sentiment. I guess that's planned for the next update?

The beginnings of that. The next update focuses on the Midwest from the 1936 election to 1939.

 

[Steve Brinson]

The Midwest has long been home to third parties. In the 1870s, the Greenback Party arose there to oppose monopoly and the gold standard. In the 1890s, Populists like Nebraska's William Jennings Bryan and Iowa's James B. Weaver (a former Greenback) supported bimetallism, an income tax, and nationalized utilities. The Non-Partisan League held onto power in North Dakota and the Farmer-Laborites in Minnesota. Wisconsin's own Robert LaFollette ran as a Progressive several times.

The American League capitalized on that history, and the remnants of it that still remained. Philip LaFollette, Governor of Wisconsin and son of Robert LaFollette, ran as Long's running mate in Wisconsin, former Governor "Wild Bill" Langer of the NPL ran in the Dakotas, and Governor Floyd Olson of the Farmer-Labor Party ran in Minnesota.

This had some repercussions.

One major effect was that several politicians who ran for Vice President - and then President - were hence either legally or practically prohibited from running for other offices. Philip La Follette, while technically eligible to be elected to the Governorship, decided to focus instead on campaigning for the Vice Presidency.

This was not as counterintuitive as it sounds, even knowing - as both Long and La Follette did - that the American League didn't have a snowball's chance in New Orleans of winning the Presidency. La Follette had ambitions of forming a national Progressive Party, combining the reach of his father's Presidential runs with the depth of the Wisconsin Progressive Party that Philip and his brother Robert Jr. had built. Leaving the Governorship allowed La Follette to have influence in a future third party - the one Long planned to build, according to La Follette - while demonstrating that the Wisconsin Progressives had members other than the La Follette family.

There were a number of candidates in the primary, but by far the top dog was Ralph Immell, the Adjutant General of Wisconsin, in which capacity he commanded the Wisconsin National Guard. Immell was a family friend of the La Follettes who had served as Adjutant General for more than a decade. He had first gained fame for enforcing Governor John Blaine's order for the Wisconsin National Guard not to participate in a series of "defense tests" in 1924. More recently, in 1933, he had worked to end a strike carries out by Wisconsin dairy farmers. In doing so, he worked alongside Milo Reno, then president of the Farm Holiday Association.

Immell won a solid victory in the primaries and went on to the general election. He would be facing both a Democrat and a Republican there. The Democrat was State Senator Edward Carroll, a leader of the conservative faction in the legislature who had won plaudits for defeating a 209-million-dollar public works bill supported by La Follette. Conservative former Chippewa County District Attorney Alexander Wiley, meanwhile, was the Republican.

In the end, it wasn't even close. Immell had the support of a popular Governor and the de facto endorsements of both Huey Long and Franklin Roosevelt. Meanwhile, the two conservatives split the vote between them.

Milo Reno, meanwhile, was both a presumptive candidate for Governor of Iowa and very, very, sick by the time Ralph Immell was inaugurated. He eventually passed away in April of 1937.

His death left a power vacuum in the Iowan branch of the American League. They needed a candidate for the Governorship desperately. Governor Clyde Herring, considered a conservative Democrat, would not be standing for re-election, and the expected candidates of the two main parties were Guy Gillette, a Democratic member of the House who had helped defeat several New Deal bills, and George Wilson, a Republican former state senator who had run previously in 1936.

Meanwhile, Agriculture Secretary and native Iowan Henry Wallace was growing disillusioned with the slow pace of New Deal improvement, a pace made slower by many pro-New Deal members of Congress being outflanked by more left-wing candidates. His proposed farm bills were watered down by conservatives and put down by liberals. He wanted an out.

On a visit to his home state, he found one. The precise details for how the "Draft Wallace" movement arose are lost to the ages. What is known is that in late August of 1937, Wallace met with farm leaders, including Roswell Garst. And by early September, Roswell Garst was President of the Draft Wallace Organization.

Wallace initially declined the nomination of the American League, in an effort not to burn his bridges with the President, who saw the American League as a concord of impractical idealists hell-bent on destroying his administration for ideological reasons and Wallace as a potential running mate in 1940. Instead, Wallace decided to run in the Democratic primary. The defection of many leftists to the American League hurt his chances there, though, and Guy Gillette won in a squeaker of a result.

Wallace pressed on, with the support of his President (whose distaste for the American League did not outweigh his preference for a pro-New Deal governor in the archetypal farm state). During the campaign, he wrote dozens of telegrams to the President, working out a strategy to defeat the American League even as he was surrounded by its leaders. On Election Day, 1938, Henry A. Wallace, a Republican appointed to the Cabinet by a Democrat, was elected Governor of Iowa as a member of the American League.

Wallace planned to leave the American League shortly after his election. Despite everything, he still believed in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. There's a legend I can't confirm that states that Wallace planned to announce this on December 9, 1938.

The reason this is significant is that on December 8, conservatives in Congress went to President Roosevelt with the Agricultural Normalization Act. The bill repealed several portions of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and cut several programs of the Department of Agriculture. If the bill were not passed, the conservatives who came to the White House alongside the bill said, they would filibuster any and all other major bills the President tried to get through Congress.

Roosevelt was caught between a rock and a hard place. When he chose the rock and signed the bill, Wallace reconsidered his options. So did a lot of Governors, Senators, and Representatives from across the Midwest. Six Democrats from the Farm Belt - from Oklahoma to Iowa - left the party in the Senate alone over the ANA.

In late 1939, a number of senators - the reported list is Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, George Norris of Nebraska, Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota, Robert LaFollette Jr. of Wisconsin, and Tom Berry of South Dakota - were talking about the upcoming 1940 election. Eventually, the topic came to the question of who would run for the Presidency.

Before too long, the senators had decided that the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, the Progressive Party of Wisconsin, and the various "American League" organizations that filled the Midwest should nominate a joint candidate for President, and that the senators from those parties should officially form a caucus to increase their power. While those members of Congress were informally referred to as the "Farmers' Bloc", somebody remembered the title of a Thomas Paine pamphlet.

And so fourteen Senators from ten states formed the Agrarian Justice Caucus.

The next year, hundreds of delegates gathered under clear skies at the Iowa State Fairgrounds to elect a Presidential nominee. Contrary to popular belief, while the party started in the Midwest, a number of delegates came from other states - including California, whose delegation included folk-singer Woody Guthrie and author John Steinbeck, both of whom would go on to high office. The California delegation wasn't the only place where rising stars could be found - a certain pharmacist, originally from South Dakota, who had just returned from a year at LSU was a member of the Minnesota delegation. Hubert Humphrey's story, however, is a story for another day.

By the third ballot, the nomination had come down to two candidates - the "gentle knight of progressive ideals", who could lend the party legitimacy, or the young buck who had risen through the ranks in three separate parties, who could give it energy. Henry Wallace withdrew his candidacy before the fourth ballot, and the rest was history.

 

[Turquoise Blue]

The next year, hundreds of delegates gathered under clear skies at the Iowa State Fairgrounds to elect a Presidential nominee. Contrary to popular belief, while the party started in the Midwest, a number of delegates came from other states - including California, whose delegation included folk-singer Woody Guthrie and author John Steinbeck, both of whom would go on to high office. The California delegation wasn't the only place where rising stars could be found - a certain pharmacist, originally from South Dakota, who had just returned from a year at LSU was a member of the Minnesota delegation. Hubert Humphrey's story, however, is a story for another day.

I like this update very much.

The quote here reveals that it's not quite Regionalist yet, even though it's very much rural-y and agrarian. It still has national ambitions, something that'll likely dwindle over time.

I guess the next update is about the South, given that's the other major region with a regionalist party listed as the successor of the American League.

Go Norris and Wearin!

 

[Steve Brinson]

The Western United States have a shorter history of independent political movements, partly because it has a shorter history in American politics. Of the eleven states that either contain some part of the Rocky Mountains or are to the west of that range, the first one to be admitted - California - predates only seven eastern states. Arizona - the most recent state to be admitted - had only been a state for twenty-four years in 1936. In 1936, both of Arizona's Senators had served in Congress since Arizona became a state.

Its politicians did tend to be independent, though. William Borah - the "Lion of Idaho" - answered to the voters of a state with less than half a million residents. Consequently, he was elected five times, and spent those thirty years in office as one of the most independent-minded thinkers in the Senate.

He was up for re-election in 1936. However, in addition to running for Senate, Borah chose to run as Huey Long's running mate in five states. Borah had several reasons for doing so - in addition to being Long's good friend (Long had called Borah "the greatest lawyer since Daniel Webster"), Borah thought that adding his name to Long's run would help Long in his next campaign. But he didn't want to lose the seniority that he had painstakingly accrued over three decades.

Into this situation strode Glen Taylor. Borah and Taylor were not dissimilar in politics - both were progressive, although Taylor was well to Borah's left - but in temperament, they were polar opposites. Borah was conservative, austere, patrician, and deeply rooted in the Senate's traditions. Taylor was a flashy, working-class, populist who would later be called "Idaho's Huey Long". He worked as a painter's assistant, sheet-metal worker, cowboy entertainer, and country singer, but his real love was politics - after reading King Gillette's The People's Corporation and Stuart Chase's A New Deal, Taylor became an ardent leftist - some would say socialist - who worked to establish Farmer-Labor Parties in Nevada and Montana.

Taylor's campaign was the first serious challenge to Borah since 1903. He criss-crossed the state on his horse, Nugget, criticizing Borah's conservatism on issues like civil rights and the nature of the Senate. Borah, confident of his re-election, paid little attention.

On the one hand, he was right - Taylor didn't win, nor even really come close. But he did demonstrate the schism, opening even before the party was born, between progressives and conservatives in what would become the Frontier League.

Another demonstration of the schism, this one with significant repercussions, came in California.

Francis Townsend was a World War I medic and real estate agent. His fame, however, came from his advocacy of an old-age pension proposal called the Townsend Plan. The plan would give two hundred dollars every month - $5,000 in today's money [IOTL it would be closer to $3,500] - to retired people over 60 with the proviso that they had to spend it within the month to stimulate the economy. Social Security was considered the ideological child of the idea, but Townsend was not satisfied - he wanted to implement the idea in full, first in California and later in the whole United States.

But Townsend was not the only leftist radical in the race. Culbert Olson was a former journalist and lawyer who had served in two different state legislatures - the Utah Senate in the 1910s, where he advocated government control of utilities, a ban on child labor, and old age pensions. That last one he mentioned quite a bit. After moving to California in the 1920s, he campaigned for Upton Sinclair's gubernatorial campaign in 1934. That year, he himself ran for and won a seat in the California Senate.

Their opponent was the incumbent Governor, Frank Merriam. Merriam, like Olson, had previously served in another state's legislature - namely, Iowa. Unlike Olson, though, Merriam was an ardent conservative, one who had deployed his power as Governor to help crush a strike at the Port of San Francisco - and not only an ardent conservative, but one who had alienated his core constituency by raising taxes.

Under normal circumstances, Merriam's unpopularity would have made the election a total blowout. But Olson and Townsend struggled to differentiate themselves from each other. Olson had the superior resume, as well as the backing of the Democratic Party of California. Townsend, though, had better name recognition and the backing of the Frontier League, an organization of Western state American League organizations dedicated to Western-specific issues such as correlative water rights and Native American policy.

In the end, Marbletop made it through.

However, the late 1930s were not all bad for the leftist tendency of the Frontier League.

At the age of 13, Frank J. Hayes began working in the coal mines of Illinois. He joined the United Mine Workers and began rising through the ranks, achieving the vice presidency of the union at the age of 29. In that office, he helped to organize strikes, including one which took place in Colorado from 1913 to 1914. During the course of that strike, the Colorado National Guard and company guards at the mine attacked a crowd of 1,200 striking miners in Ludlow, killing between nineteen and twenty-six of them.

Around this time, Hayes ran for Governor of Illinois as a Socialist. He ascended to the presidency of the UMW in 1917 when incumbent John P. White was appointed to the National Fuel Commission. However, his tenure as leader was not a success, partly due to his declining health, and two years later he turned most of his duties over to John Lewis. Shortly thereafter, he retired to Colorado.

When Huey Long called on Hayes in 1936, it was a surprise. Hayes had been retired for a decade and a half, spending most of his time writing poetry about the Ludlow Massacre. He had been preparing to run for the Lieutenant Governorship, certainly, but a Vice Presidential run was something very different.

Still, Hayes threw his efforts into the race, particularly once it was a Presidential race. While he narrowly lost in 1936 - a margin of less than a thousand out of more than half a million votes - it was obvious that in an election that wasn't against a President viewed as the greatest friend to labor ever to sit in the Oval Office, he could pull it off.

That opportunity came two years later. Alva B. Adams was the son of a former Governor, a graduate of Philips, Yale, and Columbia Law. He had been appointed to the Senate in 1923, and lost an election that year - but returned to the Senate eight years later. There, he was an opponent of the New Deal, ardently supporting the Agricultural Normalization Act and a number of anti-labor measures.

And he was up for election in 1938. Hayes crossed the state dozens of times, building on his previous runs. He not only had to maintain his almost monolithic support in mining towns - he had to appeal to ranchers in the west, farmers in the East, and workers in the cities.

He was, however, by far the candidate with the best chances. Not only did he win around 36% of the vote in the 1936 election, he was endorsed by the candidate who won another 36%. His victory was hardly assured, but neither was it any kind of David-over-Goliath situation.

Hayes served for one term. By 1944, his health had declined quite severely, and he chose not to seek re-election.

The liberal wing of the Frontier League was a minority faction of a minority party. But that didn't mean it was insignificant - not in the Thirties, and not later.

Thanks to @Oppo for wikibox assistance.

 

[Turquoise Blue]

Great job so far, @wolfram!

I wonder when the NUP will become a thing. Clearly the Dems and GOP seem to be somewhat healthy-ish, so there's that. Maybe a sort of electoral fusion thing or "parties-within-party" like with the NY thing in the original timeline, where Democrats represent one faction, Republicans represent another or something.

 

[Hunter W.]

What of Germany?

 

[Steve Brinson]

Going into the 1938 Texas gubernatorial election, Wilbert Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel was heavily favored to win.

Two years previously, Huey Long had asked him to serve as his running mate. That campaign - and the campaign to carry that campaign on after Long was killed - had won Texas's 23 electoral votes by a healthy margin of some two hundred thousand votes. That had raised his profile in Texan politics, to the point that he was seen as a likely future Governor even before the election.

O'Daniel was also what many would call a "natural politician". He had gotten his start as a salesman for Burris Mills, a flour manufacturing company in Fort Worth. In 1927, he got into the radio advertising business, sponsoring a band called the "Light Crust Doughboys" - and when the Doughboys' announcer was unable to appear, O'Daniel worked in his place, and discovered he had a knack for the job.

Before long, he was no longer advertising flour. The Doughboys no longer sang about flour - they sang about Texas, and motherhood, and old horses, and this and that and the other thing. But by 1936, the main part of O'Daniel's show's appeal was "Pappy" himself. And he was ready to capitalize on that.

Part of O'Daniel's appeal was the way he was viewed as "outside politics". In 1933, he had released a song called "On To Victory, Mr. Roosevelt", but since then he had been steadfastly apolitical. Even when campaigning for President, he had kept his platform to the Ten Commandments and vague support of some kind of Townsend-esque pension.

On April 10, 1938, he declared his intent to run. The first Belden poll to include him put his support at over 75%, although pure name recognition probably inflated his chances. Still, the mood in Washington was that O'Daniel was destined to win.

One man thought differently.

It was 1938. Lyndon Johnson was a freshman Congressman from the Texas Hill Country. He had no seniority and very little influence - and almost all of that influence came from his relationship with Sam Rayburn.

Yet he still did what nobody thought was possible. He raised tens of thousands from oil tycoons and garment unions alike. He set up a campaign headquarters in Austin, staffed it with some of the best people in Texas politics, and criss-crossed the state himself. All of this was to support a man who, as late as July, most Texans had never heard of.

But Ernest O. Thompson won the election in a squeaker of a result. And he, and the President who saw the result as a partial vindication, knew who to thank.

 

[Gentleman Biaggi]

Yes! I've been waiting for this.
Shame LBJ lost though, is there a future for him anywhere else?

 

[Steve Brinson]

Yes! I've been waiting for this.
Shame LBJ lost though, is there a future for him anywhere else?

LBJ is still in the House and is still rising. He campaigned for Thompson, not for himself. There's a future for him, all right.

 

[Gentleman Biaggi]

LBJ is still in the House and is still rising. He campaigned for Thompson, not for himself. There's a future for him, all right.

*re-reads it*
Shit.
Well, I'm glad to hear that LBJ is still rising

 

[Steve Brinson]

Despite its history as the only region to outright take up arms against the United States, the South was one of the later regions to experience regionalism. This sounds surprising to modern ears, but Southerners had a good reason at the time - even with Roosevelt's baby steps toward civil rights, the heart of the Democratic Party was the South, and that party held the reins of the government. It would take more than Huey Long for Dixie to leave the Democratic Party.

Still, any observer would have had premonitions of what was about to happen, even if they ignored the national situation. There were bubbles of independence, where the fact that Yankees and Republicans had burned Atlanta to the ground could no longer hold a one-party state in place, or where machine politics could seamlessly replace one party with another.

One of the latter places was Louisiana. Huey Long's homeland was shocked by his assassination, and when his seat was filled it would be by another American League member - his widow, Rose Long. When Huey was alive he had counseled against his brother succeeding him to the Governorship, saying that it would lead to challenges of nepotism. But in the special election to succeed him, Lieutenant Governor Earl Long won handily.

The 1938 Senate elections saw John H. Overton, a Long ally, win re-election. Meanwhile, anti-Longite Dudley LeBlanc lost handily to incumbent Governor James Noe. In short, the three most ostensibly important offices in Louisiana were held by allies of the late Huey Long.

The anti-Longist wave was coming.

On New Years' Eve, 1939, a group of anti-Long politicians led by New Orleans Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley (derided by Long as "Turkey Head") met at the home of Judge Harmon Caldwell Drew. What happened there would change the course of Louisiana history.

 

[Turquoise Blue]

@wolfram: The Parti Cadien, an unionist party? That's... different.

And I wonder what the Louisianan regionalist party will be called.