AHC: H.P. Lovecraft as a successful politician

With a POD no later than 1905, the year Lovecraft was 15, make Lovecraft one of the most famous and outspoken politicians in the U.S. He doesn't have to become president, but if he does become that or vice president, bonus points.

Good luck!
 
Be afraid, be very afraid!

As a campaign slogan? Dynamite. you could say, if it was not an ASB by the way.
 
Funny you should post this, I considered a literature/culture WI about Lovecraft becoming a widely praised and mainstream writer, affecting at least the philosophy of the era to a greater extent.

Not sure how his Cosmicism would turn out in an election though... "Why voting for the lesser evil" comes to mind.
 
There was a thread about something like this over a year ago.
They pointed out that he would be a good fascist american leader (racist, anti-democratic, glorifing the past, WASP background).
It was not entirely serious (L. Ron Hubbard was his vice president :rolleyes:) but interesting.

I think about including a slightly different version of him in my current timeline.
 
Not really ASB. But at least somewhat bemusing.

If Lovecraft's life and personality was so different that he would be a successful politician, its likely that he would not have written as he did, or corresponded so voluminously, and its likely his ideas and attitudes would have been quite different. Lovecraft the politician butterflies away much of Lovecraft the writer.
 
1905 isn't too bad. If he avoids the nervous breakdown he suffered in 1908, he'd probably be able to graduate with a high school diploma. Lovecraft intended to use that diploma to go to Brown and become an astronomer, though; he turned to writing after high school, starting with poetry. If he's at Brown, I imagine he ends up dropping his original goal of becoming an astronomer; he's likely to get frustrated with the advanced math (as he did in high school in OTL). Not sure what he'd go for, or if he'd just drop out; for the purposes of this scenario, he should probably go for political science, so that he gets interested in politics, rather than writing.

Potentially, he could've volunteered for the military around 1917; a bit of war heroics would do him well. Alternatively, or just after the war, he could've gotten involved in Rhode Island politics, which would've meant Republicanism. He ended up being a New Deal Democrat, but only after the Depression started; before then, he was likely a solid Republican. As long as he finds solid employment, his racism would be moderated, if Houellebecq's thesis is right.

If he turned on the GOP in '32 and ran as the Democratic candidate for Governor of Rhode Island, he'd likely have won - Theodore Green did in OTL. He could've followed Green's political career and become a US Senator in '36, and his health would probably have been much better, so I imagine he could've lived into the '60s (as Green did, despite having been born in 1867).

This Lovecraft is pretty much unrecognizable, but it doesn't seem implausible to me, particularly given how early the PoD is in his life.
 
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