And the failures of the Great War to bring about changes as well as the PTSD.
Crimson Banners Fly: The Rise of the American Left
- Thread starter PyroTheFox
- Start date
- Status
And the failures of the Great War to bring about changes as well as the PTSD.
What percentage of the population served in the war? If even a fraction of them radicalize, (which, given the state of things, a lot more than a fraction will) any socialist militia movement is going to be well organized and well trained.
War-weary veterans aren't automatically revolutionary.
There's a lot of ways that the soldiers can go, and most of those paths are into the arms of the fascists.
The reactionary organizations are going to want muscle in the future.
You might see a lot of soldiers joining them, or the police, or the Klan.
But, I do think this is somewhat of a given for the Black Americans to be radicalized. Whether they becomes socialists is up in the air, but it's assured that they will not have their sacrifices vindicated.
Good points. And any major protests by Black activists can give fuel to a counter movement ala the ‘stabbed in the back’ myth. ‘If only those Blacks had been more patriotic, more willing to fight the enemy than their own country, so many of your brothers wouldn’t of had to die’ and so on.
I’m sure all sorts of hate groups will spring up in the aftermath. A lot of angry 20-somethings will return from the front to find no economic opportunity, their families overworked and without food, a more authoritarian and corrupt state, and no prosperity in sight. Depending on who they talk to, they can come to blame capitalism, or (insert minority group here).
Problem is that they are on the winning side. They entered the war and basically won. That means that it is gonna be more difficult than in that regard.
Like, the US was on the winning side and thinking a fascist or something like it will rise because they didn’t win hard enough is... pretty freaking difficult.
It happened to Italy. But there's no parallel here to the Vittoria Mutilata.
On another note, I'm very curious as to how Canada's politics will evolve. There's absolutely going to be a movement - let's call them the "Dominionists" - calling for Canada to rejoin the Empire, but how popular will it be? Will most Canadians see being cut loose from Britain as something forced on them by the Americans, or a betrayal by Britain?
I see three possibilities. One, the Dominionists gain massive support. Canada doesn't become a Dominion again immediately, but returns to a pro-British foreign policy, and eventually rejoins the Empire once America is distracted.
Two, the Dominionists not only go in for pro-British rhetoric, but they also call for taking revenge upon the Americans and punishing traitors (ie minorities, probably the French-Canadians). This discredits the movement.
Three, the Dominionists do the above, but with some intelligent leaders, and become a fascist movement with genuine support, possibly leading Canada down a very dark path.
The mistake here is thinking that Fascism is just a response to mass trauma/disappointment. The US is primed for reaction, especially against Blacks and unpatriotic leftists. And winning in a war is no more reason to contain that impulse than anything else.
Hell, the Red Summer happened in OTL, with far less US death and destruction from the war. Here, you're going to have a lot of the population (especially with the propaganda machine still going and Americans being fairly media-naive) that will buy into a narrative of ungrateful and dangerous subversives and undesirables who want to "Deny the worth of your sacrifice," or want to "Destroy the peace/prosperity/country you fought for."
The country/state is becoming a very sensitive fetish object for the most popular strains of US politics (the Right Progressives, especially) and socialists and pacifists are already seen as a threat to it in a way that must be actively suppressed, attacked, and so on. It won't take much to get Black people to be equated with either in the popular imagination as "Negros" are already subject to mass suspicion and cultural paranoia.
All it took in OTL for a pogrom to start was word of mouth and some phone calls. And that was in a far more docile United States than this one.
Fascism is already here in this TL, the only questions are what spheres of life it will be limited to, how broad based the reaction will be, how much of the government becomes directly involved, etc. And most importantly, how discriminate will the crackdown be?
This. Fascism doesn't just emerge in countries that lost World Wars. Though I'm not an expert on it's development, I think many of it's causes can be seen here. The US went through a national tragedy (hundreds of thousands of deaths for a pointless war that got them nothing), is in an economic slump, has large amounts of unemployment, and has numerous political and minority groups to blame those problems on. The kind of rabid nationalism that fascism is bred from is already there for large segments of the population. Many already believe that in order to save the country they have to adopt increasingly authoritarian measures.
OTL America was already happy to lynch Black Americans for simply existing. Here, I think the sad truth is a lot people will want to do a lot worse.
Fascism rose up primarily in nations that had leanings toward authoritarian government from the get-go. Germany itself was an outlier that was caused by a large myraid of conditions enforced on it. Over the grander picture, most of the nations that fell to the mentality were monarchies like Spain and Italy or former monarchies like Portugal.Heck, all of these nations were also big with the Catholic Church, that undying beacon of order, regularity and conservatism, with the Pope being the authority figure people should listen to.
It also explains why authoritarianism was the style of nations like Russia/USSR and China (just replace Catholic church with Orthodox Church and Mandate of Heaven respectively). It's culturally built in there the need for a powerful authoritarian figure. Same with Japan even with the Emperor's divinity. In Spanish, they're called caudillos these strongmen and the cultural link is why they presist in Latin Ameica.
Meanwhule in the US, there really isn't much like that. There is no real centralized thing like that. You'd have to convince weary veterans that it was the fault of citizens rather than their commanders who spewed propaganda. In the war that was infamous for being the war that broke the romanticism of war and embittered alot of people. If it's the minorities and socialists who are actually trying to help the veterans compared to the loud-mouth politicians who got them in war in the first place... Yeah, who are veterans and their families gonna listen to? And then when the economy worsens because politicans are too busy trying to blame minorities, won't take long for people to realize they're full of BS.
Additionally, in OTL, the US did not undergo as much conflict or strife compared to their European counterparts regarding the after-effects of the war. As such, you could say they were still naive. Not here though. That sort of naivety with war is kinda gone. While one could equate with how the US being like Germany, that was heavily circumstantial and Germany being the biggest loser was a massive part of that. Pyrrhic victories are pretty different.
Jim Crow is pretty authoritarian. So are the lynchings and social regimentation that comes along with it.
There are millions of people in the United States who are held under a near constant threat of death, torture, or deprivation that can occur on a whim at a moment's notice.
A society that maintains that sort of caste system has all the physical and psychological practice to expand the circle on who isn't allowed to speak and breathe freely.
Fascism is the marshalling of preexisting social forces to combat parts of society that either are themselves seeking a change to the social order, or who are endangering that order by way of a perceived negligence or weakness . A social order that the in-group (those who hold some privilege/interest in the current state of things that is somehow jeopardized by the weakness of the state or the dissident elements of their society)* wish to maintain at any cost. Strangely enough, even to their own detriment, most often.
* As an aside : This is why fascists find a lot of support in the middle classes. They're privileged enough to have something to lose, and weak enough to have something to gain by building up their own means of projecting force outside the bounds of the state.
That's why paramilitaries show up, because a nascent fascist movement tends to have some distance between themselves and the traditional leadership class of the country and as such does not have open access to the state's means of violence.
In Germany that would be junkers, in the United States that would be the more established owners of industry, old planter families in the south, the political leaders of the more established parties, etc.
The culture is the center. Whiteness is the center. The Republic is the center.
The order of their society is the lynchpin for their worldview.
There's no need for a new institution, the nation itself already serves that purpose.
Negros aren't citizens. Whatever the law may technically be, the idea of who is a part of society is an incredibly limited thing and it's certainly limited when one asks the question of "Who deserves to be a part of society, Whose rights and security are taken for granted and whose rights/social validity/whatever you want to call are under question?"
White women are under question, politically at least.
Negros are perpetually under question.
Ethnic European minorities are under question.
Catholics.
Jews.
Pacifists.
Militant Trade Unionists.
Any Trade Unionists. Depending on how the wind is blowing.
You don't have to convince anybody of anything. You just have to move their thinking from considering those undesirable people, whose loyalty is already suspect, to be potential problems to being proven agitators. And not even in whole, just in part. And the proof for that is at every peace rally that happened across the country.
Subversives are in their midst, that is already a fact of life. There's no dial that needs to be moved. The only questions left are what exactly should be done about it.
There can be good ones and bad ones in the popular conceptions of these groups, but that doesn't stop the hammer from dropping.
It doesn't stop people from ending up dead.
You seem to have a very easy time recognizing the authoritarian institutions for foreign societies, yet have some blind spots for what I can only assume is your own.
I don't know if you're American, but I think a harder look at how force is applied and where it's applied in the United States might change how you perceive things.
You would think that, but it's not clean cut.
I don't think you're wrong that some soldiers are going to have that sort of thought process. But I don't think it will be a majority, not with the society they're going back into being so hostile to those same interests. Soldiers tend to be very alienated by their societies, but that doesn't mean they're not still a part of it and subject to the same forces of propaganda and culture that affect everyone else.
I would bet on the soldiers being a very messy mixed bag. They're not superheroes who'll see the war for what it is and turn on their masters.
Sadly, people don't seem to be that clear-headed/sighted about these sorts of things. If wars made men wise, I don't think we'd be here.
TL;DR: It's very easy to piss people off about things they're sensitive about. And one thing that Americans are very sensitive about is their country and how they perceive to be. If you offset their notions, seek to change things, etc. They will absolutely kill you for it.
There doesn't have to be some long slide into madness and paranoia. They're already paranoid, and they're already mad. The only thing that needs to change is whether they think things are under control, or not.
Last edited:
This is also a fairly different United States than the one that is based on OTL and given how the timeline is about the rise of the American left. And fascism is a " far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy". There has to be an enemy outside of it, the other. Meanwhile, if the economy worsens while people blame minorities.
The British didn't go fascist and neither did the French. I actually remember a quote on someone comparing the Irish blue shirts with the fascists: "Paul Bew has also argued against the term "fascist" being applied to the Blueshirts, instead labelling them as "angry rural conservatives" engaged in populism, with the views of the average member being closer to that of the Irish Parliamentary Party or the Irish Land League than Italian Fascism.[26][5] On the same line, Alvin Jackson has stated that while some of the Cumann na nGaedheal leadership "flirted with paramilitarism and the trappings of fascism", in his view "O’Duffy’s fondness for outrageous rhetoric and elaborate uniforms was more O'Connellite than Hitlerian".[27][28] Historian John Joseph Lee has remarked that "Fascism was far too intellectually demanding for the bulk of the Blueshirts"
And honestly, we already have goons like the KKK or so on with that. Fascism would be too intellectually demanding for some of these guys and would be the "angry conservatives" engaged in populism.
We'll have to see what the timeline holds, but the fact the timeline is preparing to go toward a certain point means it's about the journey.
Last edited:
I would say that I'm shocked that someone would so flippantly minimize the threat and organizational (political, social, and intellectual) capacity of the KKK. But I'm not surprised.
There's a lot ways to say you're wrong. But I don't think you want to hear that in the first place. Otherwise you wouldn't be comfortable saying that, especially concerning this period in American history, at that. You know, the one where in OTL they had a membership in the millions?
The KKK aren't a bunch incestuous rebel yelling yokels. They are dangerous, have always been so. I should hope that threat would be more respected.
Last edited:
No need to be disrespecful and I don't want either of us to get in trouble, so we should probably move on from the subject matter.
Canada being freed from the Anglo-Sphere may actually have them get closer to the French-Canadians, given how France and the UK fought alongside each other during the war.
Last edited:
I'm not really well-versed in that type of thing, but if someone wants to create that I'd encourage it
Part 7: Chapter XXV - Page 164
Men and women of the United States eagerly awaited the new year, a step out of the darkness of war and into an era of de-escalation. The fighting had come to an anticlimactic close after four tumultuous years, setting the stage for what appeared to be renewed prosperity. Once again, as was the case in the Spanish-American and Philippines wars, the United States emerged unambiguously victorious. Seeing as this particular conflict was, at least for the U.S., a brawl over economic hegemony, spheres of influence, and freedom of overseas trade, financial speculators assured the public that a glorious, newfound Pax Americana was waiting just beyond the horizon. A secure and orderly economy, one unimpaired by arbitrary blockades and international restrictions, was precisely what President Roosevelt pledged. Nevertheless, instead of bringing about unprecedented growth and riches to the children of the empire, 1918 brought about uncertainly the likes of which had not been seen for decades.
Virtually all industries in the United States enjoyed splendiferous profits during the Great War. Some owners doubled or tripled their workforces, and in times of heightened demand it was hardly a tough decision to cede minor concessions to an increasingly class-conscious working class. They sprinkled in more wages here, dripped in limited recognition of their unions elsewhere, but never once indicated that these wonderous benefits were limited time offers. Yet, that was the plan. Quite literally on Armistice Day at peace's declaration, calculative and conniving robber barons made a collective decision to rein in working conditions they viewed as expensive and superfluous. It was an infamous choice that robbed millions of exhausted Americans of their hard-earned pay and eight-hour work weeks (claimed as luxuries), but the verdict was most certainly inevitable given the lack of federal protections or owner integrity.
Benjamin McIntyre, The Workers' Struggle: The Birth of a Columbian International, 2018
Shackled by a combination of swell-sounding, albeit temporary concessions by factory managers, a lack of interest or initiative, and accusations of disloyalty in the face of war, the labor movement was somewhat paralyzed. Underlying tensions which had been totally unearthed in the labor conflicts of the early 1900s found mixed results, but as a whole the unionized section of the American working class was dramatically expanding and empathy with both skilled and unskilled workers stretched far and wide. Organizers discovered a loosening of these shackles upon Armistice. The U.S. economy ground to a halt with news of the sudden drop in demand, thus dissipating, overnight, quotas for steel, coal, iron, and munitions. January and February saw the country rattled by soaring inflation, and with it a sudden leap in the urgency for higher wages. Workers now teetered on the brink of poverty. However, from the perspective of Eastern American Steel Corporation President Elbert H. Gary, the company required significant downsizing to remain solvent.
Eastern American issued its call in conjunction with Dallas Steel Corporation and Western Steel. The entire metalworker’s industry plotted gradual, weekly layoffs to accommodate for the ongoing postwar recession, in addition to a steady rollback of wage hikes and a quiet prohibition on trade union meetings. The latter measure was not written in any formalized company statute, per se, but their continuous denial of assembly permits and under-the-table arrangements with meeting hall property owners clearly indicated an orchestrated effort - Not to mention, the stealthy employment of private agencies (SA or Pinkertons) to intercede in organizing efforts. Union representatives requested an open floor to negotiate, but to no avail. Newly appointed Labor Secretary William J. MacDonald (P-MI), a proponent of moderate arbitration, referred to Gray's measures as "dutiful and fair," and therefore did not opt to intervene.
It is important to note that steelworkers chiefly belonged to one of two labor unions. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, a conservative AFL-affiliate, held a majority stake. Its bureaucratic leaders, all shaped in the mold of the inoffensive Samuel Gompers, were on splendid terms with the steel corporations. The AA led calls for a peaceful settlement with assistance by the federal government, even after MacDonald made his disinterest clear. Secondarily had been the Sons of Vulcan, a splinter of the AA formed at the time of the McKees Rocks strike in 1909. SV members were predominantly based in the Western states, and a sizable portion were second-wave European immigrants. Following the conclusion of that railcar manufacturing strike, the SV cemented its separation from the AFL and voted unanimously to join with the IWW. Syndicalist William Z. Foster, head of the Sons of Vulcan, was less so interested in toying with the whims of an uncaring Labor Department.
Abiding by the results of a strike referendum, one passed decisively at an IWW-sponsored national steelworkers conference, the Sons of Vulcan declared its intent to engage in a work stoppage if its demands were not met. Elbert Gary and fellow cohorts did not respond. AA leaders clamped down on their own workers under instruction from Gompers himself, insinuating expulsion should any of their members join in the radical motion to strike. The AFL simply could not afford to drown one its greatest weapons. A massive loss threatened the very existence of the Amalgamated Association, just as the Pullman Strike functionally ended the American Railway Union. "[The AFL] tried it all," remarked labor historian Henry Mavis Kyer, "from threats to coercion and blackmail. Gompers prepared to name all strikers Bolsheviks. Nothing was out of bounds."
SV Steelworkers, once the union's deadline passed, abided by the referendum. Beginning May 1st, 1918, International Workers' Day, over a fourth of the entire steel industry shut down. From the massive plants in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to the swathes of mills in Pueblo, Colorado, work stoppages suddenly plagued the country. Impressed by the actions of their fellow metalworkers, desperate to take command of the situation, and perhaps encouraged by the might of the IWW thus far, workers belonging to the AA stunningly joined with the call to strike in an act of flagrant disobedience. Gompers and the AFL had lost control of their own members and incidentally handed their rival union a tremendous win. With about three-quarters of the industry dead quiet by May 4th, the promise of Pax America seemed a quaint memory.
Oooo. Lemme guess, the government is going to try and crack down on it, the entire IWW will go on a solidarity strike, and things will spiral out of control from there.
I don't think we're at that point yet. This seems like the strike will end, and the impact will be that the steel industry is another one where the IWW is the dominant union.
- Status