April 1940.
ADOLF HITLER is planning his great assault on western Europe. There hasn't been any incriminating plane crash in Belgium, so it's all going to happen a week or two earlier... but otherwise it's almost exactly as in OTL. The distant and isolationist United States concerns him not at all. Hitler is
about to meet with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass to finalize their agreement.
HUEY LONG has just checked into a *very* private spa in Hot Springs Arkansas. Long has been confined to a wheelchair since the near-successful assassination attempt in 1936. He'll never leave it -- the second bullet fired by a man who was already dying, shattered Long's spine -- but he hope to break the morphine addiction that he picked up during the endless months in the hospital. This is his third attempt. He knows that he'll never be able to return to politics unless he can get the monkey off. Which does he want more, a second chance at power or the sweet kiss of the needle? Soon he'll find out.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT has a syndicated column -- "My Day" -- that runs in two hundred newspapers nationwide. Peripatetic and endlessly energetic, she pops up everywhere, from boardrooms to mineshafts. She has become a tireless crusader for liberal causes. Everyone is very sympathetic to the wife of the martyred President; she's so selfless, so tireless, so endlessly curious... It's universally agreed that Eleanor could never have had this life if she'd been tied down to the stuffy ceremonials of a First Lady.
ROBERT GODDARD is doing rather well. In OTL he was afflicted by a fairly miserable string of bad luck during the '30s; his rockets kept exploding whenever a major sponsor (like John Guggenheim) was present. In this TL that hasn't happened, perhaps because Garner's education bills have put a bit more money in Goddard's pocket (he was a professor at Clark) and let him cut fewer corners. This increased success has allowed him to be a bit less paranoid and defensive than in OTL.
Goddard's latest rocket has finally cracked 10,000 feet, travelling more than five miles downrange. He has plans for one that will go higher, and very much further.
German intelligence has been paying close attention to Dr. Goddard's work: Werner von Braun is usually reading a report on each new launch within 72 hours. "If only we had a Goddard," he tells Hermann Goering, "we could have rockets striking Paris and London within two years!" The Reichsmarschall nods, and pats him on the back...
* * * * *
Meanwhile, events in Mexico reach a crisis. In OTL, Mexico was fairly calm in the early 1940s, but in this TL the country has been destabilized by a 1938 confrontation with the US over nationalization of American companies -- a potential major crisis that OTL was smoothed over by FDR.
Conservative elements in the ruling PRI attempt a pre-emptive coup against President Cardenas. They are promptly attacked by radical military officers, who execute them and seize the capitol. The surviving PRI leadership forms an alliance of convenience with the Mexican fascist movement -- the Gold Shirts, who are rather stronger than in OTL. The coup/countercoup/not-quite-civil-war lasts for six weeks. At the end of it, the PRI is battered but supreme, having manipulated the Gold Shirts into using themselves up as shock troops against the military. When the Gold Shirt leadership attempts to claim a share in ruling the country, the PRI -- now firmly back in control -- have them purged.
The Mexican episode has repurcussions to the north. The US public gets a scare from having seen a fascist party briefly form part of a ruling coalition in their southern neighbor; the fascistic American Revival Party is embarrassed when correspondence between ARP supporters and the Gold Shirts is discovered and published.
Despite the absence of a Walcheren incident, the Germans go through much the same sequence of internal wrangling over their western strategy, and arrive at much the same conclusion: a strike through the Ardennes.
* * * * *
One other event of that spring passes unnoticed at the time: publication of a paper by Enrico Fermi, on the capture of neutrons by carbon.
In OTL, this paper was caught before publication and suppressed by Leo Szilard, working on behalf of FDR's Uranium Committee -- the ancestor of the Manhattan project. But in this TL, there is no Committee, and Fermi's paper is published for the world to read. The world -- or at least, certain very interested parties in central Europe -- reads it, and thereby gains a lead of several months over OTL in the design of a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.
Commerce Secretary Wendell Willkie has been keeping an eye on the fission issue. Late in April, Willkie arranges a private meeting with Szilard and Harold Urey (a fellow Hoosier). Szilard and Urey are worried: about Fermi's paper, about the continued lack of interest in the military potential of uranium, about the total absence of security for fission research, and about the situation in Norway.
"Why Norway?" asks Willkie. The physicists pause.
"Mr. Secretary... have you ever heard of something called 'heavy water'?"
By the end of the conversation, Willkie is seriously alarmed. Where to go, though? President Garner has made it clear that he's not interested in Buck Rogers schemes to split the atom. So there's no way to discuss it with any fellow Cabinet members. And Willkie's personal contacts are with business and industry, not the military...
It takes him a week. Then the Secretary reaches for his black rotary phone.
"I need a line to Detroit. I want to talk to Big Bill Knudsen."
* * * * *
Sixteen-year-old GEORGE BUSH is a junior at Andover prep school; he's just finishing his applications to college. Gosh! George wants to be a pilot but his folks insist that he go to school, preferably Yale. That's where DEAN ACHESON is just finishing his first year as a law professor, and his first book -- _The Wolf and the Ostriches_, a scathing critique of American isolationism.
36-year-old GEORGE KENNAN feels the same way. He was in Prague for the Munich crisis and Warsaw for the siege, and he has become an ardent interventionist. Frustration with isolationism almost causes him to quit his job at State... and then in March he receives great news: he is being sent to Moscow as second to Ambassador Bullitt. At last he'll have a chance to use his Sovietological expertise! And no Nazi bombs are likely to fall on _that_ city...
BYRON "WHIZZER" WHITE is still in London. A Rhodes scholar, he has decided to put off Yale Law School for a year or two. Things in England are so... interesting... right now, and the economy back in the States isn't so good. He'll find something to do here in England.
Eleven-year-old MARTIN LUTHER KING is hungry. His family were moderately prosperous middle class blacks in OTL, but in this TL there have been no color-blind New Deal programs, and no sops thrown to African-Americans by the Democrats; Jim Crow is stronger, and the black middle class is smaller, and the promised land seems very far away indeed. Mama and Papa have been talking about moving North; things are picking up there, people say...
29-year-old RONALD REAGAN is having a very good year; after his triumph in _Mr. Smith Goes to Washington_, he's won the part of Tom Joad in the upcoming production of Steinbeck's _Grapes of Wrath_. The critics are already talking Oscar. Reagan, a loyal Democrat, is sure that life just doesn't get any better than this.
ISAAC ASIMOV is in his second year at medical school; more anti-Semitism and a weaker economy have nudged him into following a more traditional path for bright young Jewish boys. He's been threatened with expulsion once already for his loud and "difficult" personality (one professor has refused to admit Asimov into his lab ever again, after the dozenth or so bad pun), but his good grades have kept him afloat. So far.
STANLEY G. WEINBAUM's third novel is out. In OTL, Weinbaum died young, of throat cancer. In this one, the sharper Depression left him with no pocket money for cigarettes, and saved his life. He's writing some crackling good science fiction, and a fair amount of mainstream adventure-pulp too. He has an idea for a future history...
Weinbaum's not the only one to have found a silver lining in the very black cloud that is this TL's Depression. NORMA JEAN BAKER is in ninth grade, having just skipped a grade forward. In OTL she was bounced from foster home to foster home (more than a dozen in ten years) and grew up desperately needy and starved for love. However, in this TL Upton Sinclair was elected Governor of California in 1934. In his single, tumultuous term, Sinclair managed to institute several major reforms... including a complete overhaul of the state's miserable child care system. In 1935 nine-year-old Norma Jean ended up on a small farm with a childless Quaker couple in the far north of the state; she has been there ever since, surrounded by love and security.
At 14, she's already drop-dead gorgeous, and many of her classmates say she'll be a movie star. Her parents think she could go to college, though. "Goodbye, Norma Jean" her mother waves as she walks to school each morning; in winter, when the sun sets early, Mom sets a candle in the window to bring her home again.
Hundreds of miles to the south, another Quaker is eagerly preparing for his new job. RICHARD NIXON missed the first Sinclair campaign; he'd gone east, to attend law school at Duke. But he was in the thick of the brutal, no-holds-barred campaign that swept Sinclair out after one term. Young Nixon caught the eye of several powerful anti-Sinclairites, including conservative millionaire William Randolph Hearst and movie mogul Darryl Zanuck.
Nixon spent two years working for Hearst. A full-time job and then some, it left him no time to visit the little community theater where young Patricia Ryan was working, and so he has remained single. But last month he was hired away from Hearst... by Darryl F. Zanuck. A director-producer needs sharp minds around, and Zanuck sees that Nixon is one of the sharpest: clever, hard-working, and with a curious sort of brooding paranoia that will fit right in in the movie business.
"Just one thing, kid," says the great director. "You can't dress like a Quaker in this game. Here's five hundred bucks. Spend it on a couple of new suits, and don't take any change."
Now the 27-year-old lawyer is looking at himself in the mirror. He looks... different... sharp... new. Perhaps he should grow a mustache? "A New Nixon," he says to himself, out loud, liking the sound of it.
Meanwhile, in France...
Doug M.
ADOLF HITLER is planning his great assault on western Europe. There hasn't been any incriminating plane crash in Belgium, so it's all going to happen a week or two earlier... but otherwise it's almost exactly as in OTL. The distant and isolationist United States concerns him not at all. Hitler is
about to meet with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass to finalize their agreement.
HUEY LONG has just checked into a *very* private spa in Hot Springs Arkansas. Long has been confined to a wheelchair since the near-successful assassination attempt in 1936. He'll never leave it -- the second bullet fired by a man who was already dying, shattered Long's spine -- but he hope to break the morphine addiction that he picked up during the endless months in the hospital. This is his third attempt. He knows that he'll never be able to return to politics unless he can get the monkey off. Which does he want more, a second chance at power or the sweet kiss of the needle? Soon he'll find out.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT has a syndicated column -- "My Day" -- that runs in two hundred newspapers nationwide. Peripatetic and endlessly energetic, she pops up everywhere, from boardrooms to mineshafts. She has become a tireless crusader for liberal causes. Everyone is very sympathetic to the wife of the martyred President; she's so selfless, so tireless, so endlessly curious... It's universally agreed that Eleanor could never have had this life if she'd been tied down to the stuffy ceremonials of a First Lady.
ROBERT GODDARD is doing rather well. In OTL he was afflicted by a fairly miserable string of bad luck during the '30s; his rockets kept exploding whenever a major sponsor (like John Guggenheim) was present. In this TL that hasn't happened, perhaps because Garner's education bills have put a bit more money in Goddard's pocket (he was a professor at Clark) and let him cut fewer corners. This increased success has allowed him to be a bit less paranoid and defensive than in OTL.
Goddard's latest rocket has finally cracked 10,000 feet, travelling more than five miles downrange. He has plans for one that will go higher, and very much further.
German intelligence has been paying close attention to Dr. Goddard's work: Werner von Braun is usually reading a report on each new launch within 72 hours. "If only we had a Goddard," he tells Hermann Goering, "we could have rockets striking Paris and London within two years!" The Reichsmarschall nods, and pats him on the back...
* * * * *
Meanwhile, events in Mexico reach a crisis. In OTL, Mexico was fairly calm in the early 1940s, but in this TL the country has been destabilized by a 1938 confrontation with the US over nationalization of American companies -- a potential major crisis that OTL was smoothed over by FDR.
Conservative elements in the ruling PRI attempt a pre-emptive coup against President Cardenas. They are promptly attacked by radical military officers, who execute them and seize the capitol. The surviving PRI leadership forms an alliance of convenience with the Mexican fascist movement -- the Gold Shirts, who are rather stronger than in OTL. The coup/countercoup/not-quite-civil-war lasts for six weeks. At the end of it, the PRI is battered but supreme, having manipulated the Gold Shirts into using themselves up as shock troops against the military. When the Gold Shirt leadership attempts to claim a share in ruling the country, the PRI -- now firmly back in control -- have them purged.
The Mexican episode has repurcussions to the north. The US public gets a scare from having seen a fascist party briefly form part of a ruling coalition in their southern neighbor; the fascistic American Revival Party is embarrassed when correspondence between ARP supporters and the Gold Shirts is discovered and published.
Despite the absence of a Walcheren incident, the Germans go through much the same sequence of internal wrangling over their western strategy, and arrive at much the same conclusion: a strike through the Ardennes.
* * * * *
One other event of that spring passes unnoticed at the time: publication of a paper by Enrico Fermi, on the capture of neutrons by carbon.
In OTL, this paper was caught before publication and suppressed by Leo Szilard, working on behalf of FDR's Uranium Committee -- the ancestor of the Manhattan project. But in this TL, there is no Committee, and Fermi's paper is published for the world to read. The world -- or at least, certain very interested parties in central Europe -- reads it, and thereby gains a lead of several months over OTL in the design of a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.
Commerce Secretary Wendell Willkie has been keeping an eye on the fission issue. Late in April, Willkie arranges a private meeting with Szilard and Harold Urey (a fellow Hoosier). Szilard and Urey are worried: about Fermi's paper, about the continued lack of interest in the military potential of uranium, about the total absence of security for fission research, and about the situation in Norway.
"Why Norway?" asks Willkie. The physicists pause.
"Mr. Secretary... have you ever heard of something called 'heavy water'?"
By the end of the conversation, Willkie is seriously alarmed. Where to go, though? President Garner has made it clear that he's not interested in Buck Rogers schemes to split the atom. So there's no way to discuss it with any fellow Cabinet members. And Willkie's personal contacts are with business and industry, not the military...
It takes him a week. Then the Secretary reaches for his black rotary phone.
"I need a line to Detroit. I want to talk to Big Bill Knudsen."
* * * * *
Sixteen-year-old GEORGE BUSH is a junior at Andover prep school; he's just finishing his applications to college. Gosh! George wants to be a pilot but his folks insist that he go to school, preferably Yale. That's where DEAN ACHESON is just finishing his first year as a law professor, and his first book -- _The Wolf and the Ostriches_, a scathing critique of American isolationism.
36-year-old GEORGE KENNAN feels the same way. He was in Prague for the Munich crisis and Warsaw for the siege, and he has become an ardent interventionist. Frustration with isolationism almost causes him to quit his job at State... and then in March he receives great news: he is being sent to Moscow as second to Ambassador Bullitt. At last he'll have a chance to use his Sovietological expertise! And no Nazi bombs are likely to fall on _that_ city...
BYRON "WHIZZER" WHITE is still in London. A Rhodes scholar, he has decided to put off Yale Law School for a year or two. Things in England are so... interesting... right now, and the economy back in the States isn't so good. He'll find something to do here in England.
Eleven-year-old MARTIN LUTHER KING is hungry. His family were moderately prosperous middle class blacks in OTL, but in this TL there have been no color-blind New Deal programs, and no sops thrown to African-Americans by the Democrats; Jim Crow is stronger, and the black middle class is smaller, and the promised land seems very far away indeed. Mama and Papa have been talking about moving North; things are picking up there, people say...
29-year-old RONALD REAGAN is having a very good year; after his triumph in _Mr. Smith Goes to Washington_, he's won the part of Tom Joad in the upcoming production of Steinbeck's _Grapes of Wrath_. The critics are already talking Oscar. Reagan, a loyal Democrat, is sure that life just doesn't get any better than this.
ISAAC ASIMOV is in his second year at medical school; more anti-Semitism and a weaker economy have nudged him into following a more traditional path for bright young Jewish boys. He's been threatened with expulsion once already for his loud and "difficult" personality (one professor has refused to admit Asimov into his lab ever again, after the dozenth or so bad pun), but his good grades have kept him afloat. So far.
STANLEY G. WEINBAUM's third novel is out. In OTL, Weinbaum died young, of throat cancer. In this one, the sharper Depression left him with no pocket money for cigarettes, and saved his life. He's writing some crackling good science fiction, and a fair amount of mainstream adventure-pulp too. He has an idea for a future history...
Weinbaum's not the only one to have found a silver lining in the very black cloud that is this TL's Depression. NORMA JEAN BAKER is in ninth grade, having just skipped a grade forward. In OTL she was bounced from foster home to foster home (more than a dozen in ten years) and grew up desperately needy and starved for love. However, in this TL Upton Sinclair was elected Governor of California in 1934. In his single, tumultuous term, Sinclair managed to institute several major reforms... including a complete overhaul of the state's miserable child care system. In 1935 nine-year-old Norma Jean ended up on a small farm with a childless Quaker couple in the far north of the state; she has been there ever since, surrounded by love and security.
At 14, she's already drop-dead gorgeous, and many of her classmates say she'll be a movie star. Her parents think she could go to college, though. "Goodbye, Norma Jean" her mother waves as she walks to school each morning; in winter, when the sun sets early, Mom sets a candle in the window to bring her home again.
Hundreds of miles to the south, another Quaker is eagerly preparing for his new job. RICHARD NIXON missed the first Sinclair campaign; he'd gone east, to attend law school at Duke. But he was in the thick of the brutal, no-holds-barred campaign that swept Sinclair out after one term. Young Nixon caught the eye of several powerful anti-Sinclairites, including conservative millionaire William Randolph Hearst and movie mogul Darryl Zanuck.
Nixon spent two years working for Hearst. A full-time job and then some, it left him no time to visit the little community theater where young Patricia Ryan was working, and so he has remained single. But last month he was hired away from Hearst... by Darryl F. Zanuck. A director-producer needs sharp minds around, and Zanuck sees that Nixon is one of the sharpest: clever, hard-working, and with a curious sort of brooding paranoia that will fit right in in the movie business.
"Just one thing, kid," says the great director. "You can't dress like a Quaker in this game. Here's five hundred bucks. Spend it on a couple of new suits, and don't take any change."
Now the 27-year-old lawyer is looking at himself in the mirror. He looks... different... sharp... new. Perhaps he should grow a mustache? "A New Nixon," he says to himself, out loud, liking the sound of it.
Meanwhile, in France...
Doug M.