alternatehistory.com

Well, okay, everyone, sorry for the delays. As you can probably tell, I've been busy retooling and editing what was formerly called The History We Make Today. It's now better written, less jumbled and the plotlines are more well defined. Hopefully, I'll actually be able to update more than once in a blue moon, too. Anyway, enjoy!



- oakvale



Making History


1925







- No one really believes that Henry Ford legitimately won the election of 1924, but the Republican Party is reasonably happy with their new President. After all, Ford did arguably reunite the party, the Progressive faction largely rejoining the Republicans after Ford appointed Wisconsin Congressman—and noted ally of Robert LaFollette—Nils P. Haugen to the Vice-Presidential position on the ticket. [1]

- Ford did not win—or rig—as large a victory as the decidedly more moderate President Coolidge would have. But the death of the President’s son shortly after the Republican convention had devastated Coolidge, and the shaken President had discontinued his campaign. The joy of the Democratic Party—their own faceless nominee, John W. Davis, had looked certain to lose to the popular Coolidge in November—soon dissipated as a certain Michigan industrialist (and prominent Coolidge supporter) took the President’s spot on the Republican ticket. It was whispered in some circles that Ford had paid hefty bribes to Republican officials to ensure that he would replace Coolidge as the nominee, although few took the rumours seriously. The Ford/Haugen ticket ran on a bombastic pledge to ‘make America great again’. The party quickly coalesced around their new nominee, and Republican leaders soon regained their confidence about crushing Davis in November. [2]

-Ford was an elitist who ran a populist campaign—winning the support of racist Dixiecrats like Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo to make up much of the support he lost from some of the more liberal Republicans and Progressives. Bilbo was rewarded with an appointment to the Secretary of State position in the Ford administration—the only way the eminently unqualified Bilbo was confirmed by the Senate was thanks to the President’s… generosity with his considerable wealth. The election was a lot closer than it probably would have been with Coolidge as the nominee, but Ford’s campaign manager, the soon-to-be-infamous Harry Bennett, managed to swing a few crucial, close states to the Ford column, most obviously the state of New York, which Ford ‘won’ by a razor-thin margin. 32 years old, Bennett is a former boxer and ex-Navy man, and, prior to his boss being elected President, head of the Ford Company’s notorious Service Department—effectively, the union-busting arm of the corporation. Bennett arranged to have some local thugs intimidate voters in the most ‘ethnic’ areas of New York, and there were scattered reports of ballot boxes being stuffed by men who threw money around and ambiguously claimed they were “government agents”. Satirist Adlai Stevenson, at the time a young Illinois law student, would write years later in How The Election Was Bought (1951), that “Henry Ford’s flagrant interference in the democratic process—the buying of votes, the stuffing of ballot boxes, the intimidation of voters—in 1924 began a worrying trend whereby the Ford administration began to look at elections as mere frivolities with results that were more guidelines than rules.”[3]

-“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God” Henry Ford had said, gripping the podium on a crisp, cold morning in early March, becoming the 31st President of the United States at noon exactly. Surrounded by dignitaries including President—former President—Coolidge, Senator Bilbo, Senator Nye [4], Vice-President Haugen, Ford’s personal secretary Ernest G. Liebold and campaign manager Harry Bennett, Ford—wearing a heavy overcoat over his suit because he was not a young man, not any more—had delivered an inaugural address which received much acclaim from political pundits and the general public alike, in which he reiterated his campaign promise to “make America great again”. Ford, who’d met with his campaign team and the new, massive Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress over the last few months, held a press conference later on Inauguration Day and announced his selections for his Cabinet. Harry Bennett is appointed to a lucrative ‘advisor’ position in the White House, and will soon become one of the most notorious men in the country.

- On March 21st, the second day of the Ford Presidency, Secretary-designate Bilbo makes a presentation to the President and two men who were his closest advisors on the campaign trail—eugenicists Charles Davenport and Madison Grant—entitled The Link Between Jewish Money And The Negro Problem.

- By the first day of April, 1925, all of Ford’s Cabinet has narrowly been confirmed—the massive Republican majorities in Congress were divided over the confirmation of the Democratic Bilbo for the State Department—and Ford, working as much with Under Secretary of State Frank Kellogg as with Secretary Bilbo, has decided—to no-one’s surprise continued the Harding-Coolidge policy of refusing to recognise the Soviet Union. Ford has also been discussing his tentative Fordlandia idea, which, since Ford is somewhat controversially still serving as President of the Ford Company—although his son Edsel manages day-to-day business—began as an idea for a Brazilian rubber colony, but has evolved into something a little more ambitious. President Ford dispatches Secretary Bilbo on his first diplomatic mission, to meet with the Brazilian government and attempt to hammer out a deal. Ford is not alone in viewing his victory as an overwhelming repudiation of Wilsonian policy, and vows that the United States will never be entangled in a foreign conflict under his Presidency, nor will America join the League of Nations.

- In the nation that the Ford administration refuses to recognise, the long and bitter power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin continues in the wake of Lenin’s death in January, although Stalin certainly seems to have the upper hand…

- Messrs. Davenport and Grant, currently serving as Presidential advisors, working with a large, dedicated staff of fellow eugenicists on the rudiments what will become Ford’s Mississippi Program. In the meantime, Davenport agrees with Ford’s proposal of ‘freeze’ on immigration into the United States. The ‘freeze’ bill passes in a major legislative victory for the young administration, but it’s hardly surprising. This, after all, is the xenophobic twenties, and nationalism—cultural and ethnics—is the norm. It could be argued that the ‘freeze’ bill really only takes the laws passed by Harding and Coolidge to their logical conclusion. In practice, the immigration ‘freeze’ is poorly enforced, at least for the time being, but the publicity campaign that the administration uses to stir up popular support for such a bill uses such blatantly racist imagery—a hook-nosed Jew leering after some young women, for example—that Norman Rockwell, disgusted, begins to talk more seriously to the wild-eyed young men who keep handing him leaflets about socialism. The Ford administration had even originally wanted Rockwell to handle the art for the publicity campaign, and the art used was a shameless aping of his style. Rockwell talks to a greasy little fellow named Giuseppe Zangara, who’s been hanging around street corners protesting the bill…

- The President is greatly impressed with the zeal with which the 29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover goes about his work, although he’s concerned by the persistent rumours of Hoover’s alleged perversions. Harry Bennett doesn’t think much of “that goddamned fag”, but any friend of Henry Ford’s is a friend of his, and Bennett grudgingly agrees to work alongside the Director when Hoover declares the Ford administration’s ‘War on Crime’ in June of 1925. An ardent advocate of Prohibition, Ford is appalled by the easy availability of liquor in American cities, and Hoover’s all too happy to help stamp out the bootleggers, by any means necessary.




[1] Ford’s money doubtless greased the skids a little, since the party establishment had wanted Dawes to stay on. President Coolidge had little respect for Dawes, and quietly let it be known that he would support whatever choice Mr. Ford made.
[2] A strange promise given the fact that Coolidge was hugely popular, although it was probably intended more as a commentary on what Ford saw as the deplorable state of American society in the 1920s—his call for an immigration ‘freeze’ largely prompted by the rate of immigration from Eastern Europe into the United States. Many of them, Ford noticed, were Jewish. Ford frequently vowed while on the campaign trail to “wipe out” the “subversive communist elements infesting our society”, which would later manifest itself as the loose grouping of state-sponsored initiatives popularly called The Mississippi Program.
[3] How The Election Was Bought was light on the jokes, as Stevenson grew more and more bitter about the ‘madman in the White House’. People didn’t take kindly to a relatively serious tome by a comedian, and it sold poorly compared to Stevenson’s other works.
[4] The isolationist Senator from North Dakota, and one of the architects of Fordite foreign policy. Apparently, no-one in the administration thought that the Fordlandia/Americana project was a contradiction of the isolationist philosophy.
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