The was a great update!!! I can’t wait to see what comes next. I wonder where the borders between North and South China would be located?
The Footprint of Mussolini - TL
Honestly, my guess is that ITTL anybody using the term "Red Scare" in public will be labeled a commie symp and hounded out of public life. Top members of the cabinet were actual communist spies and the President handed the bomb to the USSR. The most lurid public theories regarding communist infiltration will have understated what later comes out as the actual truth.
The Day of Three Presidents
Plenty of you have probably been waiting for this one. My apologies for its being a little short; the next update will focus on the First Arabian War and I wanted to give that full focus because its sort of what the actual title of the TL is about (I honestly hadn't even thought about a Wallace Presidency until I started typing but it was so much fun to imagine the chaos). My apologies for not writing as much recently; if I told you my schedule you'd probably wince from pain by the description alone, but I'm grateful for these little moments of writing. Thank you for still reading!
On March 10th, the bombshell hit national headlines: Ethel Rosenberg publicly testified that she had been in contact with Alger Hiss to facilitate the transfer of American nuclear technology to the Soviet Union and that she believed only Wallace could have given the clearance that they had been permitted. Though she didn’t outright call Wallace a spy (as indeed he wasn’t), to the ears of most Americans it was a confirmation of the worst fears of all: their own President had been a Communist double agent. By the end of the day, photos of FBI agents storming the White House and dragging out Alger Hiss in handcuffs were being sent around the world. To most of the world, having long seen America as a quiet haven in a political sense, were shocked to see the political carnage that was being wreaked across the country. There was, of course, real carnage too. On March 12th, four days of rioting ripped Chicago to pieces. The Polish-American community was incensed that the atomic bomb that had murdered their brethren (in many cases their literal families and not just of their race) in their homeland had been given wholesale to the Communists from President Wallace and his team. Again, black Americans bore the brunt of this violence as they were seen as closet Wallace supporters. [2] It’s hard to tell at this point who hated Wallace the most: the Italians, the Poles, the Southern WASPs or whatever other group. But there is one thing for certain – almost no one liked him. On March 17th, Gallup recorded a 4% approval rating for Wallace. This remains the lowest rating ever recorded by a professional pollster in the history of the United States for the American President.
By now, with the Secretary of State languishing in a jail cell, the Republicans believed the time had come. While they were content to let Wallace continue to implode the Democrat Party, it was believed that the country’s suffering was too destructive to allow it to go on for another second. Finally, impeachment was put on the table. Impeachment had been tried once before against Andrew Johnson, but it had failed. This time, no one was in any doubt about the outcome. The Republican domination in the North combined with the Freedom Party’s domination in the South coalesced into an almighty axis. The Democrat Party was divided, with more moderate members stressing the need to ditch the horrendously unpopular Wallace, while true believers such as Vito Marantonio continued to vigorously defend against ‘the creeping march of Fascism in Washington’. While the Freedom Party didn’t care if Wallace was simply shot out of hand, the Republican’s East Coast Establishment worried about the effect an impeachment would have on the United States as a whole. It was agreed in secret meeting between Republican and Democrat senators that Wallace would be pardoned for his actions if he resigned the Presidency without fuss.
Senate Majority Leader Wallace White and Democrat Senator Carl Hatch would meet with Wallace on March 25th to push for this option. White remembered, “I looked at Wallace and he was as pale as a sheet – he’d barely left the Oval Office since Ethel Rosenberg testified. He already looked like a dead man – he knew what he did, and he knew the situation he was in.” An hour-long meeting ensued, where the two senators desperately tried to convince Wallace to resign for the good of the country. Though Wallace did not commit, he stated that he would consider, in return for certain assurances by the Republicans about what they would do when they won power in November (which no one doubted). Another meeting was set up for March 28th. Unfortunately, General Patton gave a speech on March 27th to a crowd of some 10,000 in Richmond, Virginia. Patton had a habit of going off-script on multiple occasions to rile up the crowd – which Republican coordinators had generally been fine with. Patton, however, had heard about the attempts of Republican leaders to let Wallace off the hook. His rage of Wallace clouding him from anything else, he decided he would never let that happen. He told the crowd, “If the politicians in Washington let him get away with what he’s done, then God strike me down if I lie to you right now, I’ll chase him inside the Kremlin to put him to justice myself if I have to!”
Fearing the Republicans had betrayed him, Wallace cancelled all negotiations and swore to fight to the end against all hope. Though the Republicans and Democrats tried to convince him otherwise (including Truman), Wallace was unmoved. There was no choice. On April 1st 1948, freshman Congressman Richard Nixon approached the House of Representatives [3] and began the process of impeachment against Wallace. The House would vote 390 – 32 (with thirteen Democrats not voting) to impeach Wallace, with the entirety of the Republicans and Freedom Party throwing their weight against the President. Due to the fears Wallace would attempt something in co-ordination with the Soviets, the process was rushed to the Senate and blasted through every committee (mostly dominated by the Freedom Party) where the higher hurdle of a two-thirds majority was required. In the end, of course, it made no difference. On the afternoon of April 27th, ninety senators voted for Wallace’s conviction on the grounds of providing classified nuclear material to the Soviets and obstruction of justice in firing Hoover, thus covering up the investigation. Within an hour, Wallace was escorted out of the Oval Office by federal marshals thirty minutes later and was taken to a secure location in rural Iowa. Photos taken of him showed a pale-faced, shattered man who had lost a significant amount of weight being escorted into a windowless transport. Wallace was so unpopular that the location was kept from the public to stop him from being assassinated.
Amazingly, that wasn’t the only act of insanity that happened on April 27th in Washington. With Wallace out, Harry Truman had officially become the President of the United States. However, having been locked in the middle of the most brutal political crisis in American political history, multiple suspected Soviet spies still in the administration and his name having been thoroughly dragged through the mud through Wallace’s association, to say he was unenthusiastic was an understatement. At sunset on April 27th, Truman shocked his associates by saying that he didn’t want to be President and resigned. Thus, the first successful Presidential impeachment and resignation occurred on one day, which would become known in American history as ‘The Day of Three Presidents’. Truman was later affirmed to have been President by subsequent court decisions, which paved the way for the 22nd Amendment. His seven-hour reign is the shortest duration of a US President in history, and likely will be for a long time. He was also the last President to represent the Democrat Party.
Joseph Martin, the Republican House Majority Leader, was sworn in that night as the 35th President of the United States, though he would only last in power for less than a year before once again running for his Massachusetts constituency in the fall of 1948 in what was an amusing sight for the media. Ultimately, the sight of President Martin campaigning to return to his little seat brought him favourable views from all across the country. More importantly, however, were his rapid actions in the field of foreign policy. At Patton’s insistence (or rather by the need of keeping up with Patton’s uproarious public speeches), Martin got the US army booted up. They would soon be going back to Asia, although it wasn’t Japan that was the enemy this time around. America went from a neutral party to the most rabidly Anti-Communist country on the planet in a single night. The effects that would befall the world at large were incalculable.
Before that, again due to Patton’s rabble-rousing, the Soviet Embassy was shut down and all Soviet diplomats were expelled on May 1st 1948, a symbolically chosen date due to its resonance in the labor movement. Martin announced that the United States no longer recognised the Soviet Union, due to their ‘hostile invasion of the highest halls of America’. Within a week, Stalin had reciprocated and expelled all American diplomats from the Soviet Union, denying that there had ever been a spying operation in the first place. Of course, Stalin’s denial only made Americans more animated. By now, multiple Senate and House Committees (aided greatly by the re-instated Hoover) had sprung up to investigate the Wallace administration. Hiss was quickly joined in his jail cell with people who had only weeks ago been among the most powerful people in the most powerful country on Earth. Abt, Dexter-White and Kramer were singled out for their involvement in the Ware Group and put under intense scrutiny behind bars. Unfortunately, almost every member of the Wallace Administration, guilty or not, was viewed through the same lens. No one wanted to touch them, even other Democrats. Working with Wallace meant your name was tarnished forever. Even Morgenthau would find himself narrowly avoiding arrest, and this only due to his strong denunciations of the Soviet Union following the dictatorship’s actions to her Jewish subjects following the end of the First Arabian War. Truman was dragged even more thoroughly through the dirt, with Fielding Wright, Governor of Mississippi and a leading member of the Freedom Party saying, ‘even if he weren’t a spy he should be hanged for being so danged stupid to work with that jack in the box’. Truman would attempt for all his life to deny charges that he was a Communist agent but it wasn’t until close to his deathbed that passions had cooled to the point a historical appraisal was possible and people could realise how horribly he had been treated by all sides. Even still, he had a far better fate than other members of the Wallace Adminstration.
[…]
However, in both the popular and academic world, the Wallace Presidency is considered the most catastrophic in the history of the United States with the possible exception of James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson’s terms (though in popular polls Wallace is considered by far and away the worst). Wallace’s term was marked by economic free-fall, an immense long-term blow to America’s reputation in international affairs, significant increases in racial strife, the shattering of his century-old political party (a feat not even the Civil War could accomplish), the direct empowerment of the Extreme Left and the indirect empowerment of the Extreme Right and the total loss of faith of Americans in their government and institutions. Wallace was perhaps lucky that he never lived long enough to see the full condemnation he would receive from history.
[1] Ultimately, this testimony would indeed be enough to save the pair from execution, even though Julius never forgave his wife while she was alive. Both would die in prison in May 2003, with Ethel dying on May 2nd and Julius on May 6th - many believe Julius’s death was due to hidden grief.
[2] - Indeed, blacks uniquely began to hate Wallace because of how much he had cost them politically – Storm Thurmond would privately speak with joy about how Wallace ‘set back the desegregationists a hundred years’ (which he was, of course, quite wrong about).
[3] – Having earned the role through his service in getting Patton on the ticket and being seen as a guy who could win the general over. The Establishment have their eyes on him.
The Day of Three Presidents
The Dark Decade: America in the 40s by Wendy Walters
The Dark Decade: America in the 40s by Wendy Walters
On March 10th, the bombshell hit national headlines: Ethel Rosenberg publicly testified that she had been in contact with Alger Hiss to facilitate the transfer of American nuclear technology to the Soviet Union and that she believed only Wallace could have given the clearance that they had been permitted. Though she didn’t outright call Wallace a spy (as indeed he wasn’t), to the ears of most Americans it was a confirmation of the worst fears of all: their own President had been a Communist double agent. By the end of the day, photos of FBI agents storming the White House and dragging out Alger Hiss in handcuffs were being sent around the world. To most of the world, having long seen America as a quiet haven in a political sense, were shocked to see the political carnage that was being wreaked across the country. There was, of course, real carnage too. On March 12th, four days of rioting ripped Chicago to pieces. The Polish-American community was incensed that the atomic bomb that had murdered their brethren (in many cases their literal families and not just of their race) in their homeland had been given wholesale to the Communists from President Wallace and his team. Again, black Americans bore the brunt of this violence as they were seen as closet Wallace supporters. [2] It’s hard to tell at this point who hated Wallace the most: the Italians, the Poles, the Southern WASPs or whatever other group. But there is one thing for certain – almost no one liked him. On March 17th, Gallup recorded a 4% approval rating for Wallace. This remains the lowest rating ever recorded by a professional pollster in the history of the United States for the American President.
By now, with the Secretary of State languishing in a jail cell, the Republicans believed the time had come. While they were content to let Wallace continue to implode the Democrat Party, it was believed that the country’s suffering was too destructive to allow it to go on for another second. Finally, impeachment was put on the table. Impeachment had been tried once before against Andrew Johnson, but it had failed. This time, no one was in any doubt about the outcome. The Republican domination in the North combined with the Freedom Party’s domination in the South coalesced into an almighty axis. The Democrat Party was divided, with more moderate members stressing the need to ditch the horrendously unpopular Wallace, while true believers such as Vito Marantonio continued to vigorously defend against ‘the creeping march of Fascism in Washington’. While the Freedom Party didn’t care if Wallace was simply shot out of hand, the Republican’s East Coast Establishment worried about the effect an impeachment would have on the United States as a whole. It was agreed in secret meeting between Republican and Democrat senators that Wallace would be pardoned for his actions if he resigned the Presidency without fuss.
Senate Majority Leader Wallace White and Democrat Senator Carl Hatch would meet with Wallace on March 25th to push for this option. White remembered, “I looked at Wallace and he was as pale as a sheet – he’d barely left the Oval Office since Ethel Rosenberg testified. He already looked like a dead man – he knew what he did, and he knew the situation he was in.” An hour-long meeting ensued, where the two senators desperately tried to convince Wallace to resign for the good of the country. Though Wallace did not commit, he stated that he would consider, in return for certain assurances by the Republicans about what they would do when they won power in November (which no one doubted). Another meeting was set up for March 28th. Unfortunately, General Patton gave a speech on March 27th to a crowd of some 10,000 in Richmond, Virginia. Patton had a habit of going off-script on multiple occasions to rile up the crowd – which Republican coordinators had generally been fine with. Patton, however, had heard about the attempts of Republican leaders to let Wallace off the hook. His rage of Wallace clouding him from anything else, he decided he would never let that happen. He told the crowd, “If the politicians in Washington let him get away with what he’s done, then God strike me down if I lie to you right now, I’ll chase him inside the Kremlin to put him to justice myself if I have to!”
Fearing the Republicans had betrayed him, Wallace cancelled all negotiations and swore to fight to the end against all hope. Though the Republicans and Democrats tried to convince him otherwise (including Truman), Wallace was unmoved. There was no choice. On April 1st 1948, freshman Congressman Richard Nixon approached the House of Representatives [3] and began the process of impeachment against Wallace. The House would vote 390 – 32 (with thirteen Democrats not voting) to impeach Wallace, with the entirety of the Republicans and Freedom Party throwing their weight against the President. Due to the fears Wallace would attempt something in co-ordination with the Soviets, the process was rushed to the Senate and blasted through every committee (mostly dominated by the Freedom Party) where the higher hurdle of a two-thirds majority was required. In the end, of course, it made no difference. On the afternoon of April 27th, ninety senators voted for Wallace’s conviction on the grounds of providing classified nuclear material to the Soviets and obstruction of justice in firing Hoover, thus covering up the investigation. Within an hour, Wallace was escorted out of the Oval Office by federal marshals thirty minutes later and was taken to a secure location in rural Iowa. Photos taken of him showed a pale-faced, shattered man who had lost a significant amount of weight being escorted into a windowless transport. Wallace was so unpopular that the location was kept from the public to stop him from being assassinated.
Amazingly, that wasn’t the only act of insanity that happened on April 27th in Washington. With Wallace out, Harry Truman had officially become the President of the United States. However, having been locked in the middle of the most brutal political crisis in American political history, multiple suspected Soviet spies still in the administration and his name having been thoroughly dragged through the mud through Wallace’s association, to say he was unenthusiastic was an understatement. At sunset on April 27th, Truman shocked his associates by saying that he didn’t want to be President and resigned. Thus, the first successful Presidential impeachment and resignation occurred on one day, which would become known in American history as ‘The Day of Three Presidents’. Truman was later affirmed to have been President by subsequent court decisions, which paved the way for the 22nd Amendment. His seven-hour reign is the shortest duration of a US President in history, and likely will be for a long time. He was also the last President to represent the Democrat Party.
Joseph Martin, the Republican House Majority Leader, was sworn in that night as the 35th President of the United States, though he would only last in power for less than a year before once again running for his Massachusetts constituency in the fall of 1948 in what was an amusing sight for the media. Ultimately, the sight of President Martin campaigning to return to his little seat brought him favourable views from all across the country. More importantly, however, were his rapid actions in the field of foreign policy. At Patton’s insistence (or rather by the need of keeping up with Patton’s uproarious public speeches), Martin got the US army booted up. They would soon be going back to Asia, although it wasn’t Japan that was the enemy this time around. America went from a neutral party to the most rabidly Anti-Communist country on the planet in a single night. The effects that would befall the world at large were incalculable.
Before that, again due to Patton’s rabble-rousing, the Soviet Embassy was shut down and all Soviet diplomats were expelled on May 1st 1948, a symbolically chosen date due to its resonance in the labor movement. Martin announced that the United States no longer recognised the Soviet Union, due to their ‘hostile invasion of the highest halls of America’. Within a week, Stalin had reciprocated and expelled all American diplomats from the Soviet Union, denying that there had ever been a spying operation in the first place. Of course, Stalin’s denial only made Americans more animated. By now, multiple Senate and House Committees (aided greatly by the re-instated Hoover) had sprung up to investigate the Wallace administration. Hiss was quickly joined in his jail cell with people who had only weeks ago been among the most powerful people in the most powerful country on Earth. Abt, Dexter-White and Kramer were singled out for their involvement in the Ware Group and put under intense scrutiny behind bars. Unfortunately, almost every member of the Wallace Administration, guilty or not, was viewed through the same lens. No one wanted to touch them, even other Democrats. Working with Wallace meant your name was tarnished forever. Even Morgenthau would find himself narrowly avoiding arrest, and this only due to his strong denunciations of the Soviet Union following the dictatorship’s actions to her Jewish subjects following the end of the First Arabian War. Truman was dragged even more thoroughly through the dirt, with Fielding Wright, Governor of Mississippi and a leading member of the Freedom Party saying, ‘even if he weren’t a spy he should be hanged for being so danged stupid to work with that jack in the box’. Truman would attempt for all his life to deny charges that he was a Communist agent but it wasn’t until close to his deathbed that passions had cooled to the point a historical appraisal was possible and people could realise how horribly he had been treated by all sides. Even still, he had a far better fate than other members of the Wallace Adminstration.
[…]
However, in both the popular and academic world, the Wallace Presidency is considered the most catastrophic in the history of the United States with the possible exception of James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson’s terms (though in popular polls Wallace is considered by far and away the worst). Wallace’s term was marked by economic free-fall, an immense long-term blow to America’s reputation in international affairs, significant increases in racial strife, the shattering of his century-old political party (a feat not even the Civil War could accomplish), the direct empowerment of the Extreme Left and the indirect empowerment of the Extreme Right and the total loss of faith of Americans in their government and institutions. Wallace was perhaps lucky that he never lived long enough to see the full condemnation he would receive from history.
[1] Ultimately, this testimony would indeed be enough to save the pair from execution, even though Julius never forgave his wife while she was alive. Both would die in prison in May 2003, with Ethel dying on May 2nd and Julius on May 6th - many believe Julius’s death was due to hidden grief.
[2] - Indeed, blacks uniquely began to hate Wallace because of how much he had cost them politically – Storm Thurmond would privately speak with joy about how Wallace ‘set back the desegregationists a hundred years’ (which he was, of course, quite wrong about).
[3] – Having earned the role through his service in getting Patton on the ticket and being seen as a guy who could win the general over. The Establishment have their eyes on him.
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Good riddance to Wallace. Time to attempt to repair the US’s entire international standing
Oh boy, this line here has my full attention. Looks like Wallace’s presidency here might’ve hurt the Democrats more than we thought.
Okay, I am fully aware that TTL’s Wallace was a massive fuck-up, but you can’t expect me not to feel bad for the guy here. He’s a genuinely good guy, but he REALLY shouldn’t have become President.
Well, it’s good to know that not EVERYTHING is horrible in TTL’s USA. Hopefully the Civil Rights Movement will still gain traction and possibly still succeed in its goals.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Little comfort to the people know forced to endure decades of communist domination.You don't need to be a member of the John Birch Society to understand that his actions brought real harm to people, and that can't really be forgiven.
Maybe, considering the ammo that racists have know, I imagine there will be a lot more blood shed before that day can come.
I feel really horrible for Truman. He was perhaps one of the best Presidents, and one of the most decent people to BECOME President. But now he has become ITTL little more then a sad footnote of history.
Well, what a shocking flip of events in the US. But it was a very outstanding chapter.
Arriving to even disregard the existence of the Soviet Union diplomatically... That's quite a very harsh burn towards Moscow, even for the most anticommunist government. I don't think there isn't another TL where the US took such a decision. And now we are going to have a Korean war x10 in China.
But again, I guess Warsaw really marked a red line the USSR shouldn't have crossed. In a certain way denying the legitimacy of the USSR would be a strong signal - not to Stalin, because won't give a damn, but for the bunch of sycophants around him. The problem is for how much far the dictator pushed the Union, would be hard for their eventual successors to reverse the damage done. Besides the USSR resisted OTL after the process of destalinization. Here there may not be even a denounce...
Arriving to even disregard the existence of the Soviet Union diplomatically... That's quite a very harsh burn towards Moscow, even for the most anticommunist government. I don't think there isn't another TL where the US took such a decision. And now we are going to have a Korean war x10 in China.
But again, I guess Warsaw really marked a red line the USSR shouldn't have crossed. In a certain way denying the legitimacy of the USSR would be a strong signal - not to Stalin, because won't give a damn, but for the bunch of sycophants around him. The problem is for how much far the dictator pushed the Union, would be hard for their eventual successors to reverse the damage done. Besides the USSR resisted OTL after the process of destalinization. Here there may not be even a denounce...
Where is Donald Maclean? And Kim Philby?
(We know where our favourite sottish sodomitic Soviet slob Guy Burgess is, in some bar full of those people, utterly out of it.)
*Opens bomb-proof umbrella* Brace yerselves, a storm be on th’ horizon!
I dunno, the damage may be irreparable at this point. The best thing to do is for America to just reinvent its standing from square one, such was the damage Wallace has done to America's international standing.
Yeah, Wallace, for as bad as Buchanan was, wasn't so bad he literally killed the entire party, of which mind you, I thought would've endured Wallace. Turns out I was wrong, unsurprisingly.
Problem is, I don't see the Freedom Party's chances lasting too long either, so who will become the rivals to the Republican Party now?