alternatehistory.com

As a brief introduction: This timeline begins in 1933, with the successful assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Giuseppe Zanigara. It's an exploration of possible trends in regional American politics and society given the breakdown of central authority during the Great Depression, and will try to avoid being overly dystopic or utopic - the US and the world are, in the long run, different but not necessarily better or worse. Simply by necessity, the timeline will be very US-centric - I may flesh out the rest of the world later, if time permits.


"There has been a real tendency, among pop-historians particularly, to portray Zanigara as a romantic figure: an anarchist who struck at the American government with well-planned intent, a mad flamboyant radical who 'bent the arc of history with his bare hands' in the words of Mussolini. In reality, despite his famous last words ('You bastards are stuck with Cactus Jack now', a clear reference to Gaiteau's 'Arthur is president now!'), he was a much better analogue to Leon Czologz. Zanigara was a broken man sick in mind and body, with no plan beyond violence towards the government - his earlier plan to kill Herbert Hoover, his intentions unchanged by the election, should show that he was no grand schemer.

In addition, it is ludicrous to claim, as so many do, that the American Dissolution was caused by Roosevelt's assassination. The nation had survived presidential assassinations and incompetent presidents many times, and the crisis of the Great Depression was too much for any president, let alone a posthumously lionized limousine liberal, to handle. The crises of the '30s cannot be blamed on any single man, no matter how satisfying such a claim would be to Pan-Americanists..."

- 200 Years of Presidential Assassins, Li Jian and Leonid Ostroff, SUNY Press, 1976.

"It was a heck of a thing, you know. Here we were a couple weeks before Inaguration day, and the President-elect dead. Thank God we had the Twentieth Amendment to go by, less than a month old, or we would have had a real succession crisis on our hands. As it was, everyone agreed that Garner would take Roosevelt's place, even if nobody was all that happy about it."

- Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (personal recollection)

"My fellow Americans, there are those who say that our system has failed, that the economic situation of today requires a new definition of Americanism. But all we really need is, to quote another man who ascended to leadership in a time of great crisis, a return to normalcy. President Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation is a step in the right direction, and a policy I will continue to advance. And, as promised, I will work for the repeal of Prohibition - after the times we've been through, the whole country needs a drink! (pause for cheers) This is not a time for radical, dangerous experiments. The wise policies of our forefathers will see us through this crisis far better than the untested ideas of fuzzy-minded intellectuals."

- Excerpt from John Nance Garner's Inagural Address, March 4, 1933.
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