Josip Broz the American

In the course of researching a paper on Josip Broz Tito, I came across this interesting fact in Jasper Ridley's Tito: A Biography:

Franjo [Tito's father] decided to send Josip to the United States as a soon as he could raise the money. But as usuall he was too optimistic. After a few months he told Josip that he could not afford to buy his ticket to America.
What if Tito's father manages to raise enough money to send his son to America? What would the teenage Tito do in the new country? What will happen to Yugoslavia without Tito?

EDIT: Ack, this should be in Post-1900, might someone please move it?
 
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In the course of researching a paper on Josip Broz Tito, I came across this interesting fact in Jasper Ridley's Tito: A Biography:

What if Tito's father manages to raise enough money to send his son to America? What would the teenage Tito do in the new country? What will happen to Yugoslavia without Tito?

EDIT: Ack, this should be in Post-1900, might someone please move it?

Well, say that this happened in the 19th century, for starters.

Now, 19th-century America might not be the friendliest of places, however it was receiving immigrants by the boatload. In order for this to work, then we'd have to use any date later than 1840, since that's when a lot of immigrants from Southern Europe, including many Russian Jews, began arriving. If he gets a job in New England, it will most likely be in textiles, meaning that he'd have to learn French fast (in addition to English), since this is also the decade when many French-Canadians (principally from Québec) began arriving in New England in droves (principally to areas like northern Rhode Island, the Merrimack River Valley, and northern New England), and many of the jobs that French-Canadians were in involved textiles. Who knows, he might end up supporting the Democrats, and if he got lucky might work his way up the ladder in the Democratic Party.

Yes, I'm getting ahead of myself here, but that's if he managed to find his way into New England. O, and there are also a fairly decent Orthodox population - primarily Greek Orthodox in my hometown in Pawtucket, but more of a mix outside of it. Example. As for Catholicism - it's alive and well, however he'd have to choose between either an Irish church or a French(-Canadian) church.
 
Well, say that this happened in the 19th century, for starters.

Now, 19th-century America might not be the friendliest of places, however it was receiving immigrants by the boatload. In order for this to work, then we'd have to use any date later than 1840, since that's when a lot of immigrants from Southern Europe, including many Russian Jews, began arriving. If he gets a job in New England, it will most likely be in textiles, meaning that he'd have to learn French fast (in addition to English), since this is also the decade when many French-Canadians (principally from Québec) began arriving in New England in droves (principally to areas like northern Rhode Island, the Merrimack River Valley, and northern New England), and many of the jobs that French-Canadians were in involved textiles. Who knows, he might end up supporting the Democrats, and if he got lucky might work his way up the ladder in the Democratic Party.

Yes, I'm getting ahead of myself here, but that's if he managed to find his way into New England. O, and there are also a fairly decent Orthodox population - primarily Greek Orthodox in my hometown in Pawtucket, but more of a mix outside of it. Example. As for Catholicism - it's alive and well, however he'd have to choose between either an Irish church or a French(-Canadian) church.

His father's attempt to send him to America was around 1907. I doubt he would send him earlier, since Tito was born in 1892.
 
I just came across another reference in Richard West's Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia, in which he relates Tito saying that after being freed from a POW camp in the Urals during the Russian Revolution, he fled to Finland for the purposes of escaping to the United States.
 
Broz anglicized is Ambrose I believe so Joseph Ambrose will probably be Tito's American moniker as he goes about living in the States. Illinois IIRC has a fairly large Balkan population as does Pennsylvania and other industrial states. My bet is Tito heads there and gets a job in one of the steel mills. He eventually gets the attention of the local Union and becomes a prominent Union official eventually getting in with the Democrats and becoming governor of whatever state he's in sometime around the New Deal.

Meanwhile the effects in Yugoslavia aren't felt till WWII. The lack of Tito means that Yugoslav resistance to the Nazi's is weaker and more decentralized. Come the end of WWII, I don't see Yugoslavia surviving intact. I'd wager Stalin will set up a bunch of Stalinist puppet states in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia. These states all join the Warsaw pact and suffer greatly after the fall of Communism.

Following the fall of communism a unification campaign begins across the ex-Yugoslavian states and eventually grows large enough to convince the struggling states to unify and form a Yugoslavian Confederation in the 1990's to facilitate their recovery from Communism. Though this last part is a bit of a stretch I'd say no Tito leads to a more stable Balkans in the long run.
 
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