The ORRA was and remained under personal orders from the First Chief Consul. Nevertheless, Steele realized it would be useful to appoint an underling to manage the daily affairs. He knew it would have to be someone utterly loyal and willing to follow any order. He saw those traits in native Bostonian Joey Goebbels, who Steele later referred to as an "unquestioning tool of the highest degree but also of unwaveringly loyal to me." Sky Marshal J. Goebbels became the first figurehead leader of the Office of Racial and Religious Affairs.
Upon assuming office, the ORRA head legally changed the spelling of his name to "Gobells," because "I am sick of my men calling me a
gerbil and
constantly misspelling it." It was actually not unusual; many, many people changed or simplified complex foreign names in the Union during this era. Also upon assuming office, Gobells secretly hunted down all evidence that his immigrant father, Fritz Goebbels, had been Catholic. Fritz had never openly professed Catholicism, and Joey joined an AFC church in college, so all he had to do was find his father's diary, which belonged to his brother Hans. In September of 1928, Hans Goebbels experienced a "burglary." Hans was shot in the chest four times and the house was ransacked. The "burglars," of course, where Joey's private mercenaries. They found the diary and brought it to Joey. When the mercenaries asked for payment, Joey personally stabbed both of them, burned the diary, and then buried their bodies in his cellar. Dead men tell no tales, after all. And burned books tell no professions of Catholic faith.
ORRA had a all-seeing network of spies within the Union, tracking down Inferiors and disrupting plots. They also built massive fences costing millions of dollars at the borders and patrolled them in their airships. They also had elite combat units that were considered the best of the best of all the other branches of service. One such elite unit was the "Joseph Steele's Consular Legion," the personal bodyguards of Joseph Steele. It was formerly known as the "George Custer Regiment of Foot." By the mid-1930s, it had been renamed yet again to "Joseph Steele's Own Mechanized Consular Legion," or the "JSO-MCL," due to the advent of landships and armored troop carriers.
The Military Police had essentially become the Union's version of the "national guard" sported by Virginia and Georgia. They not only fulfilled the duties of normal police officers, thereby taking most of the need for city and state police away, but they also were a military force, ready to "carry on the traditions of the Minutemen of Colonial Days" and fight with the borders of the Union if ever invaded. They were considered inferior to the normal Army soldiers and the ORRA units, both of which were ready to go on the offensive against any enemy in the enemy's own territory.
Steele put in Commander William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan of New York to replace the outgoing Samuel Brock as Chief of the Military Police. Chief Donovan was a hero of the Second Mexican War and had been with the 11th Legion at the Siege of Guadalajara, earning a total of 14 medals and decorations. In the late 1910s, he had joined the New York branch of the Military Police "because he was bored in peacetime" and had been shot twice in the line of duty against absinthe smugglers. He had gone up and up in the RUMP ranks since, and Steele knew he was the perfect choice for Chief.
Upon his appointment as Chief of the RUMP, Donovan began using new tactics against absinthe and human smugglers at the border and brought the Port Authorities under the administration of RUMP. Absinthe smuggling plummeted, and human smuggling stopped almost completely. Donovan personally disliked Joey Gobells, but he worked in coordination with the Great Lakes ORRA Airship Squadron to combat the Canadian-American mobs. In a daring assault, on October 7th, 1928, RUMP armored patrol boats engaged a small fleet of smuggler submarines and armored yachts. After capturing them with heavy casualties on both sides, they managed to rough them up enough to learn where the smugglers were basing themselves. Two hours later, the Great Lakes ORRA Airship Squadron was opening up a hellish barrage on a multimillion-dollar Canadian yacht, and they ended up killing Frank Scalleta, and Italian-Canadian mobster who was one of the most wanted men in the Union. For these actions, both Gobells and Donovan were awarded Hero of the Union Medals, the highest possible decoration in the Union military, and were made Colonels.
Two RUMP vessels photographed from an ORRA airship over Lake Superior; to the far left can be seen part of Scalleta's yacht
RUMP Port Authorities posing with captured absinthe taken during the 1928 "Battle of Lake Superior"
RUMP Headquarters, Philadelphia, around 1930
THE CUSTER YOUTH BRIGADE:
"Bringing in the Sheaves, Bringing in the Sheeves..."
Calvin Coolidge was an excellent Headmaster-Marshal, was loyal, and was relatively young, so Steele made sure to keep him. The CYB considered changing its name to the "Steel Youth Brigade," but Steele vetoed it, saying having the deceased Custer's name attached to it made it sort of a memorial to his "father." The CYB was a branch of the military, and Steele and Coolidge decided to press that fact even further, giving more rigorous combat training starting in late 1927. The CYB became Coolidge's little project and private hobby, and he lobbied for more and more money and resources, and in the end the CYB even had its own vehicles and small airships.
In 1929, the CYB finally caught up to the fad in Europe of steel helmets and became the first Union branch to adopt them, creating the CYB M29 Pot. The Army and RUMP thought this was a very good idea, relegating juice squeezer and kepi hats for non-combat duties and adopting the RU M30 Pot. An oddity with the CYB were their "great buffalo hunts" on the Great Plains, which were originally held because of Teddy Roosevelt's idea of "field trip;" "Hey, kids
love shooting animals!" Buffalo fur hand-made "Teddy hats" became a trademark of the CYB under Coolidge and later became a part of the regular Army cold weather combat uniform.
CYB troopers in a propaganda reel, circa 1932, wearing CYB M29 Pots
Depiction of Union troops wearing M30 pot helmets on exercises in Michigania, 1930
Female CYB troopers wearing buffalo "Teddy Hats"
Girls had always been a part of the CYB, but under Steele, their participation sky-rocketed. Taking a move from the playbooks of Russia, Greece, and Ireland, ironically all "Inferior" countries, the Union trained the girls aged 13 to 18 to fight. They were given the CYB M29 pots, Craig-Jordan M1901 rifles, and uniforms and trained to most of the same degree as the boys. Pants were a part of the combat and campaign uniforms, which was shocking by western standards, although skirts still were used for the dress uniforms. The female CYB regiments finally made it possible for the government to brainwash every child year-round, and not letting the little future housewives develop doubt in their summer vacation from public school. Now, every boy and girl would be a perfect little sockpuppet for the state. No parents in their right minds would try to preach subversive ideas to their children for fear of their own kids reporting them to "your friendly local ORRA office." Every non-Inferior Union child's life was surrounded by the CYB. From the time they got to the time they went to bed, every second of their day hinged on what Headmaster-Marshal Coolidge wanted. Most of the parents thought it was great, and many of them had been brainwashed by the CYB when they were young. From the pants, to the combat duties, to the arming of the women, nothing phased the public who looked at Steele almost like he was a god among them.