Divided We Stand
- Thread starter Steve Brinson
- Start date
The University of the United States - Klamath Falls Campus is a public research university under the aegis of the University of the United States, although seven of the fifteen members of the Board of Trustees are appointed by the Oregon Government. Established in 1947 under the terms of the Higher Education Act, it was originally planned for the state capital of Salem, but the intervention of Senator Harry Boivin moved it to its current site northwest of Klamath Falls, Oregon.
It currently has the highest enrollment of any individual university campus in Oregon, although the Oregon University System as a whole has approximately 15,000 more students.
Just a little look forward. Also wanted to note that the first update is no longer full canon - while I do intend to follow it in broad strokes, I feel that it ties my hands too much as an author of a changing work, and any future update may override it.
In a fireside chat early in the year, President Roosevelt stated that "We and the other United Nations are committed to the destruction of the militarism of Japan and Germany... If there is to be an honorable and decent future for... any of us, that future depends on victory by the United Nations over the forces of Axis enslavement."
But not all Americans were on board with Roosevelt's rhetoric. Many Americans, such as Senator Gerald Nye, saw the idea of intervening to topple governments that had only attacked when provoked as foolish - they believed, or at least professed to, that the best thing to do would be to immediately sign whatever treaties were needed to bring American boys home as quickly as possible. Others saw it as hypocritical. Stetson Kennedy, then an editorial director for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (led by John L. Lewis), wrote in a letter that "It seems to me that there's not much air between Nazism and the southern caste society... If FDR wanted an evil to fight, there's one much closer to home."
At the time, he worked in Alabama, where the governorship had passed from Democrat to Democrat in an unbroken chain stretching two thirds of a century. And nobody was predicting that that chain would break - even in a state where Pat Harrison had won in 1936, the Democratic party appeared strong.
Part of the reason that appeared to be true was the candidate. Alabama's incumbent Governor, Frank Dixon, was ineligible for re-election because of term limits. But his predecessor, Bibb Graves, had already come back from the wilderness to win a second non-consecutive term, and seemed on track to win a third one.
But for many Democrats skeptical of the White House, Graves was suspect. His commitment to the New Deal was unquestioned and popular, but on racial issues he was seen as dangerously liberal, at least by Alabama standards. Like fellow Alabamian and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Graves had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan - but he had publicly resigned from it in 1928, denouncing its violence. And since then, he had been regarded as relatively progressive, supporting the interests of labor unions and attending the opening meeting of the 1938 Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which was desegregated and contained many African-American members.
On the second day of the SCHW, though, any attendee would have seen another towering figure in Alabamian politics. Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene "Bull" Connor informed attendees that they were forbidden to "segregate together", forcing them to reluctantly separate their attendee's seats along the color line. Connor had come to that moment by an unusual route - he had begun his career in politics as the play-by-play announcer for the minor-league Birmingham Barons. In 1934, he entered the primary for a seat in the Alabama House of Representatives, and been nominated on name recognition alone despite not campaigning. In that office, he had opposed an anti-sedition bill that would have stifled union activity, but regardless the CIO opposed him staunchly for his tireless defense of segregation and vote to extend the poll tax. After a single term there, he had returned home to run for and win the office of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety, overseeing the fire department and police. In that office, he worked tirelessly as the steel fist in the velvet glove of the Southern system, defending racial segregation and arresting civil rights activists and innocent people who could be made into examples. And he saw Bibb Graves as unwilling to do what needed to be done to defend white supremacy, probably even in league with Communist agitators and people who, to censor his terminology, needed to be put in their place.
One could say that Connor was hoisted by his own petard in the Democratic primary. He had made himself into a public advocate of (white) working-class Alabamians in his current office, but he was also an uncompromising advocate of the racial order, and a key plank of that, the poll tax, also kept out an awful lot of poor white voters. Part of it was the fact that Connor's name recognition didn't extend much outside Jefferson County, and Graves was a former Governor with all the connections that implies. However it happened, Connor didn't take it lying down - within the week he was on the ballot as a candidate of the American League of Alabama.
Even with that, it seemed certain that former Governor Graves would cruise to re-election. That was, at least, until he did one of the few things he could do to prevent that - he died of kidney failure in August. While newly-minted candidate "Big Jim" Folsom did his best to win the election, but it wasn't enough.
But not all Americans were on board with Roosevelt's rhetoric. Many Americans, such as Senator Gerald Nye, saw the idea of intervening to topple governments that had only attacked when provoked as foolish - they believed, or at least professed to, that the best thing to do would be to immediately sign whatever treaties were needed to bring American boys home as quickly as possible. Others saw it as hypocritical. Stetson Kennedy, then an editorial director for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (led by John L. Lewis), wrote in a letter that "It seems to me that there's not much air between Nazism and the southern caste society... If FDR wanted an evil to fight, there's one much closer to home."
At the time, he worked in Alabama, where the governorship had passed from Democrat to Democrat in an unbroken chain stretching two thirds of a century. And nobody was predicting that that chain would break - even in a state where Pat Harrison had won in 1936, the Democratic party appeared strong.
Part of the reason that appeared to be true was the candidate. Alabama's incumbent Governor, Frank Dixon, was ineligible for re-election because of term limits. But his predecessor, Bibb Graves, had already come back from the wilderness to win a second non-consecutive term, and seemed on track to win a third one.
But for many Democrats skeptical of the White House, Graves was suspect. His commitment to the New Deal was unquestioned and popular, but on racial issues he was seen as dangerously liberal, at least by Alabama standards. Like fellow Alabamian and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Graves had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan - but he had publicly resigned from it in 1928, denouncing its violence. And since then, he had been regarded as relatively progressive, supporting the interests of labor unions and attending the opening meeting of the 1938 Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which was desegregated and contained many African-American members.
On the second day of the SCHW, though, any attendee would have seen another towering figure in Alabamian politics. Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene "Bull" Connor informed attendees that they were forbidden to "segregate together", forcing them to reluctantly separate their attendee's seats along the color line. Connor had come to that moment by an unusual route - he had begun his career in politics as the play-by-play announcer for the minor-league Birmingham Barons. In 1934, he entered the primary for a seat in the Alabama House of Representatives, and been nominated on name recognition alone despite not campaigning. In that office, he had opposed an anti-sedition bill that would have stifled union activity, but regardless the CIO opposed him staunchly for his tireless defense of segregation and vote to extend the poll tax. After a single term there, he had returned home to run for and win the office of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety, overseeing the fire department and police. In that office, he worked tirelessly as the steel fist in the velvet glove of the Southern system, defending racial segregation and arresting civil rights activists and innocent people who could be made into examples. And he saw Bibb Graves as unwilling to do what needed to be done to defend white supremacy, probably even in league with Communist agitators and people who, to censor his terminology, needed to be put in their place.
One could say that Connor was hoisted by his own petard in the Democratic primary. He had made himself into a public advocate of (white) working-class Alabamians in his current office, but he was also an uncompromising advocate of the racial order, and a key plank of that, the poll tax, also kept out an awful lot of poor white voters. Part of it was the fact that Connor's name recognition didn't extend much outside Jefferson County, and Graves was a former Governor with all the connections that implies. However it happened, Connor didn't take it lying down - within the week he was on the ballot as a candidate of the American League of Alabama.
Even with that, it seemed certain that former Governor Graves would cruise to re-election. That was, at least, until he did one of the few things he could do to prevent that - he died of kidney failure in August. While newly-minted candidate "Big Jim" Folsom did his best to win the election, but it wasn't enough.
The time zone situation in the United States - a mess of overlapping state and federal mandates, conflicting laws, and intentional obfuscation - is a source of constant and consistent confusion to Americans and foreigners alike. In a world where nations as large or larger than the United States - the Soviet Union, for instance - handle their time situation with far fewer headaches, the United States looms large as a symbol of willful inefficiency. That inefficiency manifests itself in ways large and small alike, from missed meetings and screwed-up schedules to the recent collision of a Pan Am flight (using Washington Mean Time) and a Braniff-Texas International Flight (using Texas Standard Time) at Austin's Ann Richards Airport.
In total, according to the RAND Corporation, the end result of America's hodgepodge of state, local, and federal time zones is a productivity loss of more than 500 billion dollars and several dozen deaths (as a result of accidents, sleep deprivation, and stress) every year. Why, then, does it persist? Why maintain the system as it is?
A fuller treatment of the matter would go all the way back to the chaos and failures of railway time, to the conflicts between the Naval Observatory and Greenwich and the International Meridian Conference. But that would be superfluous. One only has to go back to the anti-Charter movement of the late 1940s to see how it happened.
After the end of World War II - the coup in Germany and the negotiated installation of Wilhelm III, the civil war in Japan between the surrendered Imperial government and radical holdouts - the world came together to ensure that there would never be another war like it. President Wendell Willkie, newly inaugurated after the death of President Roosevelt three days after declaring the war officially at an end, was very much a supporter of American participation in the new world order. Indeed, the National Union Party as a whole stood foursquare behind the notion. Different figures within the party supported it for different reasons, with liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt seeing it as a way of ensuring a lasting peace and moderates like Willkie and Secretary of State Averell Harriman seeing it as a way of creating a global market for American companies. Two major organizations were born out of the movement - the Global Trade Alliance and the United Nations.
But despite the major American role in the founding of both, with the United Nations actually being officially founded in San Francisco, the United States never officially joined either organization. There were several reasons for that, but it mostly came down to domestic political opposition. Isolationism in the United States was far from killed by the entry into World War II. Indeed, it was perhaps only strengthened, as American involvement in the affairs of other nations was blamed for sending thousands of American servicemen to their untimely deaths far from home. To people like Senator Gerald Nye, chair of the Senate Agrarian Justice Caucus, the United Nations was nothing more than a Trojan Horse for forcing America to participate in more such wars, wrapped in a blanket of coastal elitist liberal do-goodery. The Global Trade Alliance was also something to be avoided at all costs, as it would irreparably damage the American economy by making monetary policy beholden to the whims of faraway European bankers and taking away America's right to protect domestic industry through the power of the tariff.
Wendell Willkie was not a politician. He was a businessman, used to being accountable to his stakeholders, but not to having to convince millions of Americans to follow him. He did not remember, or ignored, the lessons of his predecessor Wilson, and he did not take the advice of Speaker Rayburn or Secretary of State Johnson to go about it more slowly. Instead, he was obstinate and bullheaded.
During that political fight, certain Longite politicians noticed an obscure section deep in the text of the Global Trade Alliance Charter. That section authorized the GTA to "establish a standard system of time in all areas under its jurisdiction in order to facilitate the intercourse of trade". Conspiritarians within the movement - who made up quite a large proportion of it - suggested that the Global Trade Alliance could use that power for various nefarious purposes, ranging from destroying American political independence one step at a time to compelling the world to accept the Mark of the Beast. Many came to see Greenwich Mean Time itself as a foreign plot to undermine the American economy.
The fight over the twin charters - the San Francisco-signed United Nations Charter and the Global Trade Alliance Charter, signed at John Maynard Keynes' farmhouse despite his deep objections to several of its provisions - consumed Willkie's presidency. Indeed, it consumed Willkie himself. After cutting back on his tobacco and alcohol habits by the time of his election on the advice of his doctors, he returned to them with a vengeance to deal with the stress of the Presidency, a Presidency which seemed Sisyphean in its nature. Some more paranoid historians have blamed Secretary Johnson for the resumption, alleging him of convincing President Willkie to return to his old habits in the hopes of opening a promotion opportunity. Those theories are not considered likely to be true by more sober-minded historians, but it is nevertheless true that President Willkie did, in fact, exit his office feet-first about eighteen months into his Presidency.
Lyndon Johnson inherited a country divided against itself. One of the more obvious ways in which it was divided was in time. Municipalities from Medford, Oregon to Milledgeville, Georgia had decided to pass laws setting local civil time at a different time to the official federal time zone, or merely authorizing the town in question to keep its current time system even after a government change to it. The Calder Act didn't allow this, but it was practically unenforceable, and President Johnson knew better than to send in federal troops to reset clocks.
Instead, he decided that the best solution would be a compromise - to appease the wingnuts without giving up federal power. The Standard Time Act of 1947 replaced existing time zones - all based on Greenwich Mean Time - with new ones, demarcated by state lines and set by reference to Washington Mean Time, to be measured by the Naval Observatory. This allowed people afraid of foreign interference to rest easier without putting too many barriers in the way of commerce and without giving up the federal government's power to regulate time zones. And while there was no provision in the law that mandated that wayward municipalities couldn't keep their odd time zones on an unofficial level, sheer practicality ensured that almost all of them did, although some - like Alliance, Nebraska and Winnfield, Louisiana - kept their old time zones out of local pride and gimmickry.
That state held for the remainder of his presidency, and while Jimmy Roosevelt squandered many things that his predecessor gave him, this was not one of him. But there was one chink in the armor, and that was an unforced error relating to the state of Alaska.
Alaskan territorial politics was widely regarded as a can of worms that would only be busted open by statehood, while others worried about how much longer Alaskans would take "taxation without representation". By Leverett Saltonstall's second term, it was simply no longer tenable to keep Alaska as a territory. But extractive industry titans worried about what would happen if the vast resources of Bush Alaska - outside the major white-settled areas of the Mat-Su Valley, Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the Panhandle - were given total home rule.
Territorial Governor Frank Heintzleman had a compromise solution. Alaska would become a state - but only the Panhandle, the Kenai Peninsula, and the Mat-Su Valley. Outside that, the territory of Bering would be formed, free to be fished, logged, and drilled. The solution was not popular in Alaska itself, but that was a minor wrinkle as a pliant Congress rammed through accepting a lobbyist-written state constitution.
But the final insult was this: while Bering would remain on its old time zone of -5 WMT, Alaska would move two hours forward, just enough to coincide with the time zone of the Seattle shipping magnates and resource interests who had already turned it into a virtual colony. This was a bridge too far.
Newly elected Alaska Governor Wally Hickel was not a man afraid to thumb his nose at the federal government, nor one afraid to make a grand statement. He led a campaign of mass disobedience to the time zone change, lobbying municipalities across Alaska and Bering to switch to the new Polar Standard Time of -4 WMT, a deliberate challenge to Washington's power to regulate time and to its power over its faraway territories.
Across the country, people took note of Alaskans' protest efforts, and of the fact that the federal government still had the power to set time. The state of Louisiana, with its cherished tradition of individuality, paranoia, and Cajun pride (despite the fact that Huey Long himself had come to power through ginned-up outrage at the "Frenchmen" who had left Louisianans to drown in the 1927 floods), was the first to change its time zone in solidarity, with a commission led by Governor Blanche Long setting it briefly at "Winnfield Standard Time" (two minutes and eighteen seconds behind the previous time zone), then moving it a full fifteen minutes to -1:15 WMT.
After that, the dam broke. Southern states - motivated to thumb their nose at the federal government by the botched implementation of desegregation busing - switched en masse to "Dixie Standard Time", -0:30 WMT. The Territory of Pacifica - incensed by the "racist" refusal to grant it statehood and the fact that islands as far apart as Palau and Hawaiʻi were legally given the same time, which, combined with federal control of territorial education, meant that the Palauan school day began at the equivalent of four in the morning - reset its clocks to new zones based on Greenwich Mean Time, with the furthest-west islands even unofficially crossing the International Date Line.
That was a bridge too far for many. Those islands housed a major share of the United States Navy Pacific Fleet and a number of major airbases, and allowing such open defiance of federal authority seemed to many commanders to be the beginning of a slippery slope to open secession. One particularly jumpy captain ordered Kwajalein put under martial law, while fears of the same happening on Guam sparked several days of rioting and protests. In response to the crisis, President Saltonstall ordered the "enforcement" of the Standard Time Act of 1947. No longer would the federal government turn a blind eye to this sort of thing.
Governor Daniel K. Inouye didn't take this lying down, openly defying the President's order as "illegitimate and illegal". When he was officially removed from his post and replaced with Bill Daniel, the brother of Senator Price Daniel and a former member of the Texas House of Representatives who was fairly universally seen as a figurehead, Governor Inouye chose to continue claiming the Governorship, with his rioting supporters blocking traffic in Honolulu and forcing Governor Daniel to do his governing from commandeered offices at Hickam AFB. Within the year, Governor Daniel handed in his resignation out of sheer weariness at dealing with a territory that flatly did not recognize his legitimacy (indeed, he sympathized with his predecessor, and corresponded with him regularly after leaving his office until his 2004 death), and a chastened federal government appointed Inouye ally John Burns as a temporary placeholder until a special election in November returned Inouye to power.
Pacifica was not the only place where there was backlash. In Texas, Governor John Connally - who had only recently broken with the Unionists and founded the Texas National Party - blocked the Capitol doors as workmen set the clocks to the newly-defined Texas Standard Time. California flexed its muscles by not only switching its own time zone, but also convincing five other Western states to switch to its time zone. Maine moved its clocks eight minutes and sixteen seconds forward to coordinate its time with its northern neighbors. Even in DC itself, pro-statehood activists hung their clocks upside down, showing their solidarity while submitting to the reality that Washington Mean Time made a whole lot of sense to use in Washington itself.
Years passed. The open rioting of 1965 turned into quiet but steely defiance by a decade later, and President Unruh had gotten to where he was by knowing how to deal with regionalists. The Standard Time Act of 1975 was a fig leaf to both sides, allowing the federal government to claim that it had authority over time while allowing states and municipalities to get away with openly scoffing at the law. For a few weeks it appeared that President Jackson's reintroduction of Daylight Savings Time in response to the War in Iran would be another flashpoint that broke the peace, but in the end it was observed with a minimum of fuss in states with Unionist governments and not observed at all in states where Regionalists ruled. There were slow, quiet changes - Cascadia moved back fifteen minutes, meaning that one whole time zone was observed by no state in the Union, while Arizona and New Mexico chose to switch their time zones to facilitate cross-border trade. Utah officially moved to a new time zone that just so happened to coincide with the official neutral time zone of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the remainder of New England shifted to match Maine, parts of South Texas and South Florida moved to match their neighbors' time zones, despite Texas state law in the former case - the Raza Unida Party and the federal government found an unusual point of agreement in sticking it to Austin. Indeed, the most radical shifts happened abroad, as decolonizing nations across the world found that moving to new time zones was a relatively easy way of showing independence from their former colonial masters.
To understand the modern status quo, it is instructive to look at an example. Edinburg, Texas is a mid-sized city in the Rio Grande Valley, about twenty miles away from the Rio Grande and the United States of Mexico. According to the federal government, it observes Central Standard Time, two hours behind Washington. According to the government of the State of Texas, it observes Texas Standard Time, legally defined as the mean solar time of the Texas State Capitol - although if you actually measure it, you'll find that it's a second or so off from that, about in line with the former location of the University of Texas Observatory. And according to the Hidalgo County Clerk's Office located in Downtown Edinburg, it observes Zona del Golfo de México, the same as Reynosa just across the border.
You arrive there on the TexRail R600 train from El Paso, which arrives at 8:54 according to the schedule, but your phone still says it's 8:17 unless you've jailbroken it to accept time zones that aren't hardcoded into it. But the Inter-American train that's just now arriving at the platform next to yours will say that it's arriving at 8:25. And if you look around, you'll see more than a few people who are running late for their own trains because of the time confusion.
The clock in the station is on Texas Standard, but the moment you leave the station you'll see a large city-owned clock with the ZGM time. As you exit the station you see students rushing to make their 9:00 classes at the University of Texas-Pan American, but if you went into the elementary school across the street you'd find that the clocks in there all say that it's twenty-nine minutes earlier than that. If you go back to the college and walk into the ROTC office, the people there would all say that it's eight minutes earlier than the elementary school would. You might hear one of the students complaining that the baseball game against Lamar State and the women's soccer game against UNM are awkwardly staggered - the Texas Intercollegiate Athletics Commission schedules its games by Austin time, but the NCAA is wall-to-wall based on Washington Standard. After all, it'd have to be, to receive all those grants from the National Cultural Center, and isn't that an awfully authoritarian name, as the sophomore with the red Solidarity button would say.
If you want to pay your electrical bill you're going to have to hand it in to the Hidalgo County Power Cooperative by five o'clock sharp, and if you want to get your bills for that accident you had the other day taken care of you're going to have to turn those in by five o'clock as well. But you'd better be able to tell that if you try to turn in the second one when the first one is due, you're going to be about half an hour late. And when your power bill gets there, it'll help pay for power from the WPA-built dam up near Zapata and the wind farms way up north in the Panhandle - and if those don't have your bills marked as coming in at 4:52 and 5:29, respectively, the whole county is going to be investigated for fraud.
To distract yourself from all the shenanigans, you decide to turn on the television. But you can't escape the politics of time even there - the news on the ABS and the shows on all the ABC channels begin thirty-seven minutes before the ones on the Lone Star Public Network and the Bluebonnet, and the local news and the telenovelas broadcast from Reynosa and Matamoros are twenty-nine minutes behind those.
In the end, though, it's not just a matter of spite, of thumbing one's nose at the federal government, or the states, or whoever you want to thumb your nose at. It's not just a matter of convenience, either. It's something that is, in its own way, even worse.
It's a game of chicken. Nobody really likes the situation as it is. Even the people who make use of it - to ensure that Regionalists buy their products, that Unionists shop at their stores, that Tertium-Quiddists work in their businesses - don't like it. They would all unify under a single time system if they could.
But to do that would mean backing down. It would be an act of surrender. And to surrender is the one thing that they could never do.
So they sit, stuck on the wrong side of the Prisoners' Dilemma, waiting for a solution to come about by some kind of miracle.