Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
He’s here, he’s queer, and you’d damn well better get used to it.
You sir may very well be one of the greatest Human beings alive.
You sir may very well be one of the greatest Human beings alive.
Hahahaha
JE, I take it you have taken the necessary precautions and engaged several discreet bodyguards, in anticipation of the inevitable protests from OTL's TR fanboys?
You sir may very well be one of the greatest Human beings alive.
Jonathan, I'd complement you, but Iori beat me to it.
Very distracting week for me, more this weekend I hope.
I confess that I've been planning the TR part of this update for several months.
My original intention was not to include him in this timeline at all - his parents were from different states, they married more than a decade after the POD, and they could easily have married other people from their respective social circles. But then I noticed the high regard in which TR is held in this forum, and the way that he is guaranteed to appear, and to be a badass, in any timeline that covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I thought of several decidedly non-badass versions of TR before deciding that this was too easy, and that the real challenge would be to create a TR who still is a badass but in a way that totally transgresses the meme. Hence what you see here.
This timeline's TR has many of the traits that made his OTL counterpart what he was - athleticism, sense of adventure, forceful personality, charisma, bursts of creativity. He's a badass. Trust me, if you lived in TTL, you wouldn't want to get in his way. But as you may have noticed, he's also a gay pacifist who likes to dress up as the dowager empress of France. This timeline gives a whole new meaning to "roughrider" and "Bull Moose."
This means that his badassery (wow, that passed the spell-checker) is, of necessity, turned in a different direction. He can't go into politics - his social position protects him from something like OTL's Ariston Baths raid of 1903, but a public scandal could still ruin him. Instead, he would naturally gravitate to literature and the theater, which at the time were havens for members of the Turkish-bath scene. And he would gain and exercise power indirectly, as an opinion-shaper and the center of a network, rather than through direct authority.
In any event, he'll have a few more cameos during and after the war. Whether he succeeds in keeping the United States at peace remains to be seen, but I will mention that he's encountered Belloism during his travels.
The next update will finish the visit to the prewar United States, and will focus on the South and African-Americans - pride of place will of course go to South Carolina, but trends elsewhere will also be noted, and there will be a cameo by one Bass Reeves.
My original intention was not to include him in this timeline at all - his parents were from different states, they married more than a decade after the POD, and they could easily have married other people from their respective social circles. But then I noticed the high regard in which TR is held in this forum, and the way that he is guaranteed to appear, and to be a badass, in any timeline that covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I thought of several decidedly non-badass versions of TR before deciding that this was too easy, and that the real challenge would be to create a TR who still is a badass but in a way that totally transgresses the meme. Hence what you see here.
This timeline's TR has many of the traits that made his OTL counterpart what he was - athleticism, sense of adventure, forceful personality, charisma, bursts of creativity. He's a badass. Trust me, if you lived in TTL, you wouldn't want to get in his way. But as you may have noticed, he's also a gay pacifist who likes to dress up as the dowager empress of France. This timeline gives a whole new meaning to "roughrider" and "Bull Moose."
This means that his badassery (wow, that passed the spell-checker) is, of necessity, turned in a different direction. He can't go into politics - his social position protects him from something like OTL's Ariston Baths raid of 1903, but a public scandal could still ruin him. Instead, he would naturally gravitate to literature and the theater, which at the time were havens for members of the Turkish-bath scene. And he would gain and exercise power indirectly, as an opinion-shaper and the center of a network, rather than through direct authority.
In any event, he'll have a few more cameos during and after the war. Whether he succeeds in keeping the United States at peace remains to be seen, but I will mention that he's encountered Belloism during his travels.
The next update will finish the visit to the prewar United States, and will focus on the South and African-Americans - pride of place will of course go to South Carolina, but trends elsewhere will also be noted, and there will be a cameo by one Bass Reeves.
He’s here, he’s queer, and you’d damn well better get used to it.
You're meddling with powers you cannot possibly comprehend.
He’s here, he’s queer, and you’d damn well better get used to it.
So. Much. Win.
We need a new category in the Turtledove Awards - most imaginative, yet true to life co-option of OTL figure into ATL
or something
or something
Have we talked at all about the influence of a more successful reconstruction on Africa? ISTM that you could see a strong argument that South Carolina is proof that if you just try hard enough, you can make Africans into good Gauls.
Mmm. IIRC segregation was implemented in DC fairly late, and I can't imagine not letting a US Senator into an event.
This, though, I buy.
Oh my. Two thoughts:
1) Rough rider creates some hilarious connotations in gay sex.
2) I'm a bit surprised that they are talking about this openly in 1978.
As we'll see in the next update, there's a great deal of mythmaking about South Carolina from all sides, with many white supremacists arguing that they aren't good Gauls. A Frenchman or Englishman reading about SC in 1892 wouldn't necessarily get the straight goods, any more than someone during the same period reading about Reconstruction in OTL.
With that said, South Carolina will affect Africa, both through example and through direct links, and some of those effects will be shown in the coming update.
This is private segregation, not public - the hall was privately owned, and its refusal of entry to African-Americans was company policy, not law. DC doesn't have de jure segregation at this point and, in TTL, never will.
Reconstruction-era black congressmen had this problem in OTL - several were refused service at restaurants, hotels or privately-owned streetcars. It's no different in TTL, where if anything, the federal government has less power to enforce civil rights and (as will be seen in the next update) attempts to ban discrimination by private actors are likely to be struck down as unconstitutional. In the Capitol and to much of DC's high society, Smalls is a senator; to the owner of the reception hall, he was an uppity nigger. Not everyone in DC feels this way by a long shot, and there are plenty of places where Smalls or Marietta Jones could go for a meal, but enough do that it's a problem.
Oh, they aren't talking about it casually - the 1978 article showcased a side of TR that hadn't been much talked about before, and would have been considered daring and titillating by contemporary readers. But there was a visible gay rights movement in the 1970s in OTL, so even if the gay community wasn't accepted in the way it is today, people were certainly aware of and talked about it. I don't think TTL would be much if any more advanced in that regard, but I also don't see any reason why it would be less so.
Someone really needs to write a good history of the gay rights movement. It's kinda weird that it's been so successful in taking something that's been on the margins of Western society for centuries and making it normal.
Okay, thanks to "Gay Teddy Roosevelt" I have seen everything except a man eating his own head.
Seriously, this timeline is just getting more and more awesome. It is already excellent and now it turns into something... ascended...
Also: I am not sure to expect when it comes to the "Fourth Party System". Would it be too much of a spoiler to tell us what's up with that?
Seriously, this timeline is just getting more and more awesome. It is already excellent and now it turns into something... ascended...
Also: I am not sure to expect when it comes to the "Fourth Party System". Would it be too much of a spoiler to tell us what's up with that?
OTL the Fourth Party system was the Progressive era. I suspect that this is something similar. The stresses of the Great War are probably the catalyst for the changes. We might see the full replacement of one of the political parties, as opposed to OTL's attempts at Progressive and Populist parties.
It really is impossible to imagine the mindset. In the 1965 book Hotel, the protagonist (a hotel manager) expects to be fired for letting a black (?dentist?) with a reservation stay in the hotel - where the dental convention is meeting. He expected to be fired FOR DOING what the law REQUIRED!!!! The only reason he wasn't, was a bit of a deus ex machina.
That's in the 60's. AFTER civil rights legislation had passed.
At a guess - possibly an uninformed one - I'd say this is part of the greater individualism and license of Western societies in general, which in turn is an artifact of industrial modernity and the breakdown of established authority structures. Sexual mores were already starting to break down at the turn of the twentieth century, and with a few periods of reaction excepted, they've done so ever since, with sexual morality realigning to emphasize respect for individual autonomy. This may be well-nigh inevitable in a modern urban society, in which case something like it will happen in TTL too.
Ah, the Roosevelt Award. So if I work Turtledove into the timeline somehow, am I guaranteed one of those as well?
And now, for an encore...
What imperialaquila said, pretty much. American political historians classify each fundamental realignment as a party system; the consensus is that we're currently on the sixth, although there's some buzz about the 2008 and 2012 elections possibly heralding a shift to a seventh.
In OTL, the third party system was the alignment that held sway from the Civil War until the end of the nineteenth century, and the fourth coincided with the progressive era, from roughly 1896 to 1932. In TTL, the post-Civil War order is also eroding - 1896 will be a big election here too - but it's playing out a bit differently, with progressive and populist factions carving out places within the established parties rather than challenging them from outside. Part of this is due to different personalities, part to the Republican Party's greater dominance during the 1860-84 era, which made changing it from within seem a more viable option than fighting it from without.
This state of affairs won't last forever - as seen in the update, the various factions within each party are already forming ad hoc alliances across party lines, and majorities on controversial issues are often dictated by factional politics rather than party politics. This tendency will be accentuated during the war (whether or not the United States joins the fighting), to the point where one or even both of the major parties may splinter.
Again I say, "indeed!"
And it prompts me, now that I think about it, to ask about another American Badass of the time...one Samuel Clemens.
Sam Clemens, when not writing as Mark Twain, was among other things one of the more prominent champions of anti-imperialism (almost a decade later OTL, of course, during and after the Spanish-American War). I forget if his birth was actually pre-POD (so I checked-he was born in November 1835, so his conception would have been not long after the OTL Malê revolt started in January--but the actual POD is I believe a bit later when things go differently). Obviously Missouri was pretty far from the more direct and immediate effects. It's so close to being pre-POD his conception seems almost assured in fact.
OTOH Clemens's OTL biography is so haunted with childhood deaths all around him--his siblings, and his children--the butterflies could easily kill him off before he reaches adulthood. But they don't have to, one hopes.
Aside from sheer chaos eliminating him or turning his life aside, I don't see any reason why he wouldn't make the same choices and go to the same places and wind up a rising star of American letters.
If he followed the inclinations he did OTL he'd have been unlikely to be playing Russian Roulette in the Civil War, since OTL he very briefly joined a Missouri Confederate unit, then split to go west after a couple weeks.
Reading up on him now I'm learning all kinds of things about him I never knew.
I'd think that come the 1890's, he'd be a name to reckon with. While I can only guess at his reactions to TR's persona ITTL, I'm thinking he'd get along well enough with him.
The TR-Twain Team-Up for Peace!
Wouldn't that be badass!
Kaiphranos
Donor
Hmm... or by some "law of conservation of pacifism," Sam Clemens ITTL ends up as a jingoistic supporter of American imperial ambitions...