Brunei is still there on Borneo; nothing major has happened to that place yet.
Other than that, it's an amazing map.
Other than that, it's an amazing map.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Yep, that is supposed to be Araucania. Honestly it was the portion that was the hardest to map, so I have to wait for Jonathan's approval.
Yeah, Brunei has been added. I forgot that is was mentioned in the Aceh update and I just hastily copy-pasted the original borders from Bruce's map (why change something perfectly functionable?).
Italy isn't supposed to have Savoy, correct, I've checked it again. So I've naturally changed that.
Laos has been independent for a while and it caused some trouble during the Indian War of Independence.
I've asked Jonathan, it still is an Ottoman protectorate. You can maybe debate to show it as an Ottoman puppet, but that's about it.
The northern part of Araucania shouldn't have a coastline - the border is a bit east of where Chilean Route 5 is in OTL. Other than that, it looks pretty good.
Protectorate is the right status for Bulgaria: it's an internally self-governing principality which conducts its own diplomacy, but which recognizes nominal Ottoman overlordship, is defended by the Ottoman army, and has treaty stipulations concerning Ottoman trading rights and free movements of people. I wouldn't call it a puppet, given that its internal independence is real and the Porte doesn't interfere with domestic matters.
Anyway, it's a great map, and I look forward to seeing the legend and notes - I'm sure you'll uphold the great Munroist tradition. The only issues I see, besides those already mentioned, are that Hyderabad should be fully independent (I'm not sure if it's already intended to be shown as such) and that Spanish Micronesia should be Japanese (Japan purchased it after the Filipino revolution).
The update will most likely be ready tonight, BTW, after Naomi and I get back from dinner and a movie.
Okay, I've changed it so that Araucania no longer has a coastline in the north. I hope it looks better now. Also Hyderabad is independent, maybe you just have trouble differentiating between the two colours. Micronesia is also now correctly Japanese.
Nah. If I can remember, Germany had a Hansa-like agreement with the Baltic cities making them tied to the German economy while still under Russian control.
Patrick Taylor, The South in Flames: The Civil Rights Amendment and the End of Jim Crow (New York: Universe, 1994)
… Jim Crow had never stood on a secure foundation. The African-American population of the South remembered the freedom of the Reconstruction era, and as long as powerful black communities existed in the Carolinas, Mississippi and Texas, the risk that they would help their brethren was ever-present. The Jim Crow states maintained control only through steadily tightening surveillance and restrictions, which by 1910 had placed most black Southerners under an effective totalitarian regime. [1] With the Eighteenth Amendment, that edifice came crashing down.
The amendment did not, as many had feared, prohibit all classifications based on race: that language had been stripped out to ensure passage. But it did require universal suffrage, prohibit the dodges that the Jim Crow states had hitherto used to keep African-Americans off the voting rolls, and applied the Bill of Rights to the states. No longer could states ban books or newspapers, impose licensing on houses of worship or require permits for social gatherings: the Supreme Court struck down all those practices within a year after the amendment entered into force. And no longer could would-be black voters simply be turned away or kept out by rigged literacy tests and onerous poll taxes. [2]
If the Jim Crow regimes were to cling to power, they would have to use blunter instruments, and they did. The “Camellia primary,” in which white Democrats chose which candidate to support before the official primary or convention was held, became common in many counties across the South. But this dodge only worked where the Democrats were sure of victory in November: in counties with black majorities, or white-majority counties where Farmer-Labor was competitive, a Camellia primary was an exercise in futility, and efforts to rig the Farmer-Labor primaries proved far less successful. So, increasingly, the tactic of choice became sheer terror.
Terror had, of course, always been one of the underpinnings of Jim Crow, with the threat of lynching or convict leasing always present to keep the “uppity” in check. But now it became wholesale rather than retail. Armed groups attacked African-American gatherings, planted bombs in churches and schools, and in some cases occupied courthouses to prevent black voters from registering. The bomb rather than the noose became the Jim Crow weapon of choice.
And the black population fought back. The Jim Crow regime had made them used to organizing in underground cells, and many of them had acquired caches of weapons through the New Underground Railroad. Black terrorists, many of them associated with the churches or the underground Abacarist mosques, joined the white ones, and targeted symbols of the regime: courthouses, city halls, political party headquarters and elite meeting-places. Militias like the Freedom Riders and Crescent Sword became feared throughout the South. And the black and white groups fought each other with quarter neither asked nor given.
In some counties, the struggle took on the character of a pitched battle, as with the Macon County War of 1923-27. Macon County, Alabama, was the blackest of the Black Belt counties, with more than 80 percent of the population African-American, and by 1923 the armed groups were strong enough to register a majority of black voters and elect a black sheriff. The outgoing sheriff and his deputies staged and armed revolt, and the sheriff-elect had to shoot his way into the courthouse. Nor was that the end of the battle: black deputies were ambushed and assassinated, the old sheriff’s allies were likewise ambushed by militias who the new county government armed and supported, and white volunteers came in from other counties and even other states to fight stand-up battles against the sheriff’s forces. Neither side shrank from atrocities, and during the four years the war continued, hundreds of lives were lost. Similar struggles played themselves out in other counties where African-Americans were elected or where they were deprived of office by fraud.
As Laurel Wilson wrote in Alabama Nights, published in 1926 at the height of the troubles:
Birmingham wakes to the sound of guns;
Bombs rock Mobile’s children to sleep.
The school in Tuskegee a fortress-keep;
Selma’s streets drowned in the blood of its sons.
“We own the land,” says the Yellowhammer Knight;
“The land is ours,” the Freedom Rider cries.
“This land lives,” says the mother, as she dies.
“This land burns,” says the son, gone to fight.
Bombs rock Mobile’s children to sleep.
The school in Tuskegee a fortress-keep;
Selma’s streets drowned in the blood of its sons.
“We own the land,” says the Yellowhammer Knight;
“The land is ours,” the Freedom Rider cries.
“This land lives,” says the mother, as she dies.
“This land burns,” says the son, gone to fight.
Opinion outside the South was sharply divided over how the nation should respond. On the one hand, armed black uprisings triggered deep-seated racial fears among even moderate whites. There was also an entrenched strain of cultural racism within conventional opinion: this was shown most notably in a 1925 essay entitled Why Alabama Must Win [4], signed by 23 prominent academics, which argued that Southern whites had a natural right to rule for so long as the blacks remained culturally deficient. South Carolina’s existence made this a harder argument than it would otherwise have been, but supporters of Jim Crow had no shortage of reasons why South Carolina was an alien and backward society, and those inclined to agree with them accepted these reasons willingly.
But there were also many who sympathized with the blacks. It was clear that the whites had started the fight – even the pro-Jim Crow side admitted that, albeit arguing that the violence was necessary to defend the Southern way of life – and the Eighteenth Amendment showed that civil rights were a broad consensus across the country. Liberal essayists condemned the Jim Crow South for defying the law and re-enacting the Civil War. And along with the armed black groups were others who practiced nonviolent resistance as the Javanese and Igbo women had, and when they too were bombed, there was no doubt of where the country’s sympathies lay.
The result of these divided sympathies was indecision: the Federal government prosecuted individual terrorist acts and lynchings, but there was insufficient support in Congress to permit full-scale intervention on either side. President Darrow’s calls for Federal peacekeeping troops in the South were filibustered by a coalition of strange bedfellows, ranging from full supporters of Jim Crow to those who were wary of expanding Federal power or involving the army in a long-term guerrilla war. Southern attempts to declare a state of “black insurrection” failed to win majorities in either house. And the Jim Crow South continued to burn.
What finally galvanized the Federal government into action was the bombing of the Sesquicentennial Parade on July 4, 1926. As the parade marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, several high-powered bombs packed with nails and broken glass detonated at once. More than three hundred people, including four congressmen, were killed. A manhunt unprecedented in the nation’s history was mounted, and the bombs were quickly traced to an Atlanta-based white supremacist militia. The leader of this group was unapologetic when he was arrested, and proclaimed that the bombing was necessary self-defense against a government that planned to make the United States into a “mongrel republic.”
Public opinion swung against the white supremacists virtually overnight, with even many who had previously supported Jim Crow now regarding them as un-American. Possibly the most dramatic recantation was that of Georgia Representative Rebecca Felton on the floor of Congress. Felton had begun her political career as an unabashed white supremacist, and was still inclined to agree with the authors of Why Alabama Must Win about the superiority of white Southern culture. But her long friendship with Harriet Tubman had made her skeptical of the measures by which white rule was sustained. She had come to view slavery and lynching as wrong because of the way they corrupted the South she loved, and had increasingly taken the same view of Jim Crow. [5] With the Washington bombing, her conversion was complete. In a famous speech delivered on July 15, she withdrew her opposition to Federal intervention, saying that “the South cannot survive if America dies, and those that style themselves defenders of the South have now shown themselves America’s enemies.”
Felton was far from the only one who had a change of heart, and on July 22, the Insurrection Act passed both houses and was signed into law. Within weeks, the United States Army began moving into the Jim Crow states, taking over responsibility for enforcing the civil rights laws and quashing terrorist groups. In Alabama, Louisiana and Florida, where the state governments did everything possible to hinder the army, the Federal government virtually took over the administration, and Virginia only avoided the same fate when the cowed legislature forced the governor out of office. Guerrilla resistance would continue into the 1930s, but the elections of 1927 and 1928 were orderly, and for the first time, universal suffrage was enforced throughout the South.
The civil rights movement now shifted from the “political phase,” in which its primary focus was on voting rights and the rule of law, to the “social phase” that would occupy it from the 1930s through the 50s. This phase, which was accentuated by the withdrawal of Federal troops in 1932, concentrated on social equality: desegregation of privately-owned stores and venues, prevention of employment and housing discrimination, and equal development priorities for poor African-American communities. The Supreme Court had already ruled against segregated public schools in 1928, but had stayed its ruling until “the present insurrection is finished and it is practical to integrate the schools without violence;” the civil rights movement now sought to put the ruling into effect and extend it to private actors.
This was when the Citizens’ League and other nonviolent civil rights groups came into their own. Although some armed groups remained in the 1930s, and sporadic attacks on segregated stores and theaters continued, most had laid down their arms or been disarmed after the Federal intervention. Also, even many former terrorists recognized that private businesses could not be fought in the same way as the state, and that the black as well as white citizens craved peace and normalcy. Beginning in 1929 and continuing through the 1930s, the Citizens’ League organized a campaign of marches, sit-ins and teaching sessions against private stores, employers and bus companies that refused to desegregate, combined with lawsuits in the state and Federal courts. Among other things, this campaign sealed the cooperation between African-American churches and mosques that had been building since the Great Rising, and propelled the autonomous Sea Island Muslims into a leading role in Georgia politics; the famous newsreel of marchers in Savannah singing Abacarist spirituals [6] dates from this period.
By the mid-1930s, the social civil rights movement had scored some notable successes. Alabama, once among the most recalcitrant Jim Crow states but now governed by a coalition of black Republicans, moderate white Democrats and the right wing of the state Farmer-Labor party, passed anti-segregation laws in 1936. Georgia did likewise the following year, albeit with exemptions for apartment rentals and house sales. In Virginia and Florida, where the state police brutally suppressed the civil rights marchers, the movement was nevertheless able to win victories in court and call on the protection of Federal law enforcement. The battle for civil rights was far from over, but the former Jim Crow South had changed virtually beyond recognition…
*******
Percent identifying as Black, Colored or African-American, 1940 census:
South Carolina: 71
Mississippi: 53
Louisiana: 41
Georgia: 38
Alabama: 37
North Carolina: 32
Virginia: 27
Florida: 25
Arkansas: 23
Texas: 18
Sequoyah: 17
Maryland: 16
Tennessee: 16
Delaware: 11
Kentucky: 8
Oklahoma: 7
Kansas: 6
Missouri: 6
Illinois: 5
New Jersey: 5
New York: 5
Ohio: 5
Pennsylvania: 5
*******
Emily Kurin, The United States in the Electric Age (San Francisco: New Vision, 2005)
… Among young Americans in the 1930s, to call something “electric” was to declare it the ultimate in style, dazzle and modernism. Electricity in fact affected every part of American life and culture, from city lights and streetcars to appliances to the electric guitars that debuted in Charleston in 1929. But most of all, there was the broadcast radio. The period commonly known in American history as the “Electric Age” could as easily have been called the Broadcast Age.
Even more than the cinema had, the radio united American culture. People everywhere in the country laughed at the same jokes, hummed the same songs and shared lines from the same teleplays. Under the twin pressures of standard radio pronunciation and widespread secondary education, regional dialects declined sharply. Americans learned the news from across the country on an hourly rather than daily basis; one of the reasons the 1926 Washington bombing had such a profound effect on public opinion was that millions of people had been tuned to the radio when it happened and had heard the explosions and screams in real-time. Radio changed political campaigns, allowing candidates to speak to the whole country, and companies made their names by sponsoring popular shows.
But at the same time that it was homogenizing the culture, radio was also bringing regional and minority art forms before a larger audience than they’d ever had before. This was the age when jazzed-up music straight out of Eastern Europe found its way from the New York nightclub scene to musicales in Peoria. This was the time of the Tulsa Renaissance, a literary, musical and artistic movement that drew from four continents and combined the Native American aesthetic with that of Africa. This was when New York, Chicago and Wichita became African-American cultural centers to rival the South, and when the South itself had a renaissance: this was when people throughout the nation danced to the Mento-Congo music of Charleston [7] and when poets such as black Laurel Wilson and white Davis Hanley cried out the pain of burning Georgia and Alabama. This was the time when ordinary Americans became acquainted with the products, music and dance of Tokyo, Stamboul, Rio and Cape Town.
The United States was also emerging from its traditional isolationism, due in part to the efforts of the Peace Party. Jane Addams’ appointment as Secretary of Peace under the Lee administration [8] had widely been viewed as a sinecure and even a joke, but she had made it more than that. During her eight years in the position, she actively promoted an American role in regional diplomacy and negotiated mutual assistance treaties covering law enforcement, education and recognition of civil judgments. Her advocacy of world government – a subject concerning which she wrote several utopian novels – was considered eccentric even by Peace Party standards, but her vision of regional treaty networks was far less so, and the foundation she laid was built on by Progressive and even Republican politicians during the 1930s and onward.
Immigration also contributed to making the United States an international society, albeit more slowly than it once had. The flow of immigrants had nearly ceased during the Great War and had never again reached the level of the early 1890s: Eastern Europeans were now more likely to go to Germany or France, Jews to Salonika or the Ottoman Empire, Hungarians and Southern Europeans to Brazil or the Southern Cone. Some from these nations did still come to the United States, especially those with family already there, but the net annual migration in 1930 was about half what it had been in 1880. Some of the slack, but far from all of it, had been taken up by immigrants from other parts of the world: East Asians, citizens of Central America and the Andean republics, Indians, Africans, and Orthodox Christians from the Balkans and the Arab lands.
All this was, needless to say, not greeted with universal approval. For every American who welcomed the cosmopolitanism of the Electric Age, there was another who felt that the country’s way of life was under attack. The shift to a predominantly non-European immigrant stream was particularly worrying to many who had ended up on the losing side of the civil rights struggle and believed that more Asian and African immigrants would mean more unrest and erosion of privilege. For the first time since the 1880s, a wave of nativism swept through American politics, and while attempts to ban non-European immigration outright were rejected, laws requiring financial security and sponsorship were tightened. The educated elite could come to the United States as freely as ever, but the poor who lacked family or prospective employers to sponsor them were effectively barred.
Still more culture shock was caused by the Congo fever epidemic. Although the disease was relatively rare in the United States during the 1930s, it was already leading to a frankness about sexual matters as it had done in Europe. Public health agencies also surveyed sexual behavior to aid in prevention efforts, and their reports revealed the then-shocking truth about how common certain sexual practices actually were. Previously unacknowledged topics such as sexual abuse by authority figures and same-sex relationships became integral to the debate over Congo fever prevention, with some going so far as to argue that “Turkish marriages” – long-term relationships between same-sex couples – should be recognized in order to combat the ill effects of bathhouse culture. This led to vigorous pushback from religious conservatives, who saw in the Congo fever debate a threat not only to traditional morality but to their own authority.
But even the argument over Turkish marriages paled beside that over condoms. In 1930, contraceptive devices were illegal in about half the states, and several also banned the dissemination of information about contraception. Although these laws were rarely enforced, they stood in the way of public health campaigns centered on condom use, and when the subject of repeal was broached, a firestorm broke out in the South and the Catholic Northeast. On the one side were those who believed passionately that contraception was sinful, and on the other were those who maintained that it was necessary to stop a deadly epidemic, and each side viewed its opponents as would-be murderers or even worse. As civil rights had divided America during the 1920s, contraception did in the 1930s, pitting neighbors and even family members against each other and causing lasting bitterness.
It was almost to be expected that many on both sides would take solace in religion, and by the mid-1930s, a Fourth Great Awakening was under way among a people yearning for civil peace. This Awakening would be different from previous ones, though, in that it was not a Christian-only affair. There was indeed a resurgence of Christianity, both of the back-to-basics, conservative fundamentalist sort and the experimental modernist variety, but there was also a newly prophetic ethos in the established religions of Judaism and Islam, and an emerging interest in Eastern spirituality, yoga and meditation. This became yet another cultural cleavage, with conservatives condemning yoga as a path to idolatry and sexual immorality and bemoaning the foreign influences that had brought it to American shores. [9]
As the curtain fell on the 1930s, the United States was at the height of the Electric Age, a rich and cosmopolitan country that expressed its confidence with skyscrapers and highways, but as it had always been, it was also a nation divided…
*******
Bill Boustany, “American Politics at Mid-Century,” American Studies 22:157-70 (Spring 1972)
… The 1920s are often called the high-water mark of American multiparty politics. The nation was deeply divided over economic policy, foreign relations and civil rights, and a quarter-century of coalition governments gave small parties hope that even a few electoral votes could be the key to concessions and cabinet posts. In the 1920 election, which saw the Andrew Lee-Clarence Darrow administration returned to office, no fewer than seven factions won electoral votes. The established Farmer-Labor, Republican, Democratic, Progressive and Peace Parties – the last of which had repurposed itself as an internationalist faction – were joined by the Socialists, who broke into the electoral column for the second time, and the American Party, making its debut as a Northern party bitterly opposed to civil rights and immigration. The three governing parties combined for a bare majority of electoral votes, and the pundits wondered if four or even five-party coalitions might be the rule in future elections.
Where once elections had been thought of as horse races, coalition bargaining was now seen as an immutable fact of life, and multiparty politics found its way into the deepest recesses of the culture. A businessman might describe contentious negotiations as “like an electoral college,” and the junior partner in a joint venture would often be called “the Progressive candidate.” The hit of the 1921 Broadway season was a musical comedy called A Profusion of Parties, which centered on an election where different parties carried every state and where the White House ultimately went to the winner of a dance marathon.
But the seeds of the Great Reversion were already being planted. In hindsight, they can be seen as early as the 1924 election, which shaped up early on as a referendum on civil rights. Darrow, who saw it as critical that the reformist vote not be split, announced that he would seek both the Progressive and Farmer-Labor nominations. That year’s Farmer-Labor convention was split, with many delegates opposed to nominating a Progressive with no history in the party, but Darrow had spent the past four years as the popular adjunct to a Farmer-Labor President, and he proved persuasive enough to win the nomination and keep the party together afterward. On election day, he won a near-majority of electoral votes as a fusion candidate, carrying most of the marginal states against a divided opposition, and went to the White House with Peace Party and Socialist support.
Darrow’s win did not result in a merger of parties: the Farmer-Labor and Progressive organizations remained separate, and the coalition negotiations in Congress were as difficult as ever. A deeper alliance would, however, soon form on another part of the political spectrum. By the mid-1920s, the Democratic and Republican parties were no longer competitors in most of the country. Outside Boston and Providence, the Democrats were the party of conservative Southern whites, while the Republicans were the center-right party in the North and West. The Republicans did maintain a presence in the South as the party of the older and more conservative black voters, but outside the Carolinas and Mississippi, this constituency was a small one; in most Southern states, the main rivalry was between the Democrats and Farmer-Labor. As a result, Republicans and Democrats increasingly found common cause on the national stage.
This cooperation would not reach the presidential level in 1928: the two parties were still too far apart on civil rights to nominate a joint candidate. By 1932, though, many moderate Democrats had come to see civil rights as a done deal, and while they opposed further expansion, they no longer sought a return to the Jim Crow era. A majority of Democratic convention delegates that year were from the moderate camp and, eager to return to the White House after sixteen years in the wilderness, agreed to run jointly with the Republicans. Their support of Republican fusion candidate Paul Altmaier lost them votes to the “Real Democrats” (who ran slates of unpledged electors in six states) and the American Party, but the ticket won 288 of 565 electoral votes, and for the first time in forty years, the presidential selection process actually ended on election day.
This alliance would prove permanent, and by 1940, the Republicans and Democrats were effectively one party at the Federal level. The two parties maintained separate state-level organizations, and the Democrats were generally more conservative than the Republicans, but there would be only one occasion after 1932 when they nominated separate presidential candidates, and they functioned as a partnership in Congress although the Republicans were decidedly the senior partner. The 1936 election would see them adopt not only a joint candidate but a joint platform, and in 1938, they agreed to form a joint caucus in the House and Senate.
And in the meantime, the minor parties were beginning to fade. With electoral majorities once more becoming the rule, the prospect of coalition negotiations had become more uncertain, and the odds of a minor-party vote being wasted had increased. The 1936 election saw Altmaier increase his share of electoral votes, but so did Farmer-Labor, with all other factions declining or falling out of the electoral column altogether. This election would be the last until 1964 in which the Socialists would win electoral votes – that party’s emphasis on doctrine had never worked well in the American milieu, and many of its voters found a new home on the left flank of Farmer-Labor – and the Peace Party had begun its shift toward being a nonpartisan foundation. Only the Progressives, whose base in the urban elite was ill-served by either the Democratic-Republican or Farmer-Labor blocs, were able to hold their own as a party capable of influencing presidential races and electing governors and senators.
In 1940, the days of A Profusion of Parties seemed far away. Politics in general had entered a less contentious period: the nation was exhausted by two generations of battle over civil rights, cultural change and social insurance, and it craved normalcy and rule by consensus. The apparent calm was a false one, because sharp divisions over these and other issues still existed, and their temporary withdrawal from the political arena would make the cultural struggle all the more bitter. But it was a calm the country felt it needed, and one that was reflected across the political spectrum.
The two major candidates struck a remarkably similar tone during the 1940 campaign, and while centrist Farmer-Labor candidate Sanford Wallace was swept to the White House with 352 electoral votes, his time in office would see broad cooperation on industrial policy and economic growth. The chaotic Fourth Party System was giving way to the orderly Fifth, and the fruits of the Progressive Era – social insurance, universal suffrage, works-council management and a commitment to public goods – would now shape a new epoch…
_______
[1] See post 3365.
[2] See post 3324.
[3] See post 1234.
[4] With no apologies whatsoever to William F. Buckley.
[5] See posts 1234, 2002 and 2941.
[6] See post 23. Yes, I planned all along to tie it in.
[7] See post 4462.
[8] See post 3324.
[9] This happened in OTL, believe it or not: yoga was not always considered the harmless form of exercise/spiritual practice that it is today.
Sulemain
Banned
That was, in all aspects, an amazing update J.E. I wish I wrote half as well as you did, then I would write twice as well as I already did.
In OTL, the decision to send in the Army to NI has been called one of the most courageous by a Post-War British Government. Here, it seems the American Army deployment is seen in the same way.
America, and in fact, this world, would be a great place to visit.
In OTL, the decision to send in the Army to NI has been called one of the most courageous by a Post-War British Government. Here, it seems the American Army deployment is seen in the same way.
America, and in fact, this world, would be a great place to visit.
I'm sad to see the coalition government era end--it might be back later though. ITTL a solid precedent of more than 40 years of complicated Presidential administrations and no single party dominating Congress exists and so third party organizers will seem less Utopian and quixotic for generations to come, no matter how comfortable a two-party system may seem in the interim. If important enough issues arise to complicate things, everyone knows coalitions are an option.
A big surprise to me is the rise of global, non-European immigration to the USA. I suppose the suppression of it OTL until after WWII was a consequence of the shared ideology of the two parties and the far less questioned racist consensus; had there not been active banning of Asian, African and Latin American immigration we might well have naturally seen a lot more of it. But I have tended to see the influx of people from all over the world as a reflection of US dominance of the world and assume that if the USA stays out of interfering overseas, relatively few people will come here, whereas if we do intervene, we create channels and claims in justice to encourage streams of immigration here. People follow the power lines; here the USA does not project global power so having large numbers of emigrants choose the USA as their destination so early in the century seems odd to me.
Of course the USA is not powerless, it just chooses not to develop hard power; it has soft power galore!
And it is very gratifying to see Civil Rights triumph without the need for African-Americans to be entangled in a shared project of world power projection. I still think that OTL shame and the embarrassing inexpediency of attempting to dominate a world of nominally independent nations on a nominally anti-colonial platform while maintaining a racist order formally at home were major factors in Civil Rights having opportunities and leverage within the system. Here instead a high price in blood had to be paid. But the justice won seems on a more solid foundation. And the cause and effect I allege for OTL can work in reverse; having been transformed into a less bigoted and parochial nation via internal struggle, the USA is now more attractive to peoples of diverse origin, and this multiplies our soft power and moral authority globally. If OTL Los Angeles is the second-largest Iranian and Korean city in the world (after Teheran and Seoul, respectively) largely because US interventions in Korea and Iran opened up pathways to America for Koreans and Iranians, and in the latter case compromised the ability of many Iranians to continue to live safely in their homeland, here large settlements of people from various regions will open the door for American influence through private channels on the places they came from.
The immigration from Orthodox Southern Europe and Christians from the Arab world is interesting and a possible flash point; these are clearly at least to some extent Christians disgruntled with the Muslim-dominated Ottoman system; they sort of replace much of the Jewish emigration from Russian-ruled lands OTL. Will they then lead to a strong anti-Ottoman constituency in US politics? That would probably be contingent on a strong Ottoman state that somehow seems in conflict with or a threat to broad US interests and it is very hard to see how that comes about, at least until we get to an era where the Ottomans are still sitting on a lot of the world's oil and the Americans are getting very greedy about it. Since the oil is being exploited earlier, it seems rather more likely to me that Ottoman oil supplies will hit peak considerably earlier than OTL--US reserves will be badly depleted by then too of course--but if oil is a culprit in generations to come I fear we might be fighting over some other oilfield completely! Possibly one not known to OTL yet since all the major oil regions we normally worry about seem to already be making money selling it by 1930--except of course there has as yet been no mention of Nigerian oil, nor of course North Sea deposits that will require a major upgrade in exploration and drilling tech.
But clearly this is a world if anything more addicted earlier to black gold than ours; it is not only Americans and Europeans who will be wanting fiacres* to drive. I expect the mid-century to be quite a distinctly richer world across the board, but for crises involving anticipated or actually imminent shortages to arise even earlier.
Perhaps by then between a broader global balance of power and generations of development of post-Westphalian transnationalism and global justice institutions, more creative responses than maneuvering to fight over what is left will be forthcoming.
Anyway--if the Ottoman Christians take the place of Eastern European Jews in this timeline, I don't expect them to have anything like the distinct role the latter do OTL. They will find it easier to spread out into the general US population and be assimilated and to forget any grievances their first generation may carry against the Ottomans; meanwhile it's hard to imagine any contingency that would bring Washington, or Wall Street, into conflict with Stamboul. So fifty years later the origins of a substantial strand of USAians in Ottoman lands will be just another quaint patch in the American quilt, of no great political consequence.
----
*As with radio, the development of motor vehicles and Jonathan's decision that what are called OTL "automobiles" or "cars" will here be called "fiacres" is one of those early developments of the Great War that we were told about but haven't actually seen many examples of. Come to think of it, let me look at how the Sesquicentennial Parade with its catalytic terror attack is described...nope, no mention of "fiacres" there either!
Although I briefly posted here long speculations about how and why broadcast radio might have been slower to take root than technology alone allowed for, then removed them and sent them as a PM to the author instead, the simplest theory is that fiacres and radio broadcasts have been developing apace but our story never happens to focus on them. I was able to weave a fancy web of speculation about radio, but I won't do it again for cars--the fiacres are there, but why focus on them?
I just wanted to take this opportunity then to remind everyone, "cars" are "fiacres" here. We just happen to have been more focused on stories with "riders" (OTL tanks) instead.
So sure enough, Jonathan starts this post with a burning bus! Is it called a bus here? It might well be, "omnibus" is a term from long before the Great War of TTL and less likely to be butterflied than "automobile."
But I have to say, that bus sure looks futuristic for a 1920s American make--even if we grant that the general state of the art is more like OTL 1930s.
I guess French Futurism had a deep impact on American design sensibilities, eh?
A big surprise to me is the rise of global, non-European immigration to the USA. I suppose the suppression of it OTL until after WWII was a consequence of the shared ideology of the two parties and the far less questioned racist consensus; had there not been active banning of Asian, African and Latin American immigration we might well have naturally seen a lot more of it. But I have tended to see the influx of people from all over the world as a reflection of US dominance of the world and assume that if the USA stays out of interfering overseas, relatively few people will come here, whereas if we do intervene, we create channels and claims in justice to encourage streams of immigration here. People follow the power lines; here the USA does not project global power so having large numbers of emigrants choose the USA as their destination so early in the century seems odd to me.
Of course the USA is not powerless, it just chooses not to develop hard power; it has soft power galore!
And it is very gratifying to see Civil Rights triumph without the need for African-Americans to be entangled in a shared project of world power projection. I still think that OTL shame and the embarrassing inexpediency of attempting to dominate a world of nominally independent nations on a nominally anti-colonial platform while maintaining a racist order formally at home were major factors in Civil Rights having opportunities and leverage within the system. Here instead a high price in blood had to be paid. But the justice won seems on a more solid foundation. And the cause and effect I allege for OTL can work in reverse; having been transformed into a less bigoted and parochial nation via internal struggle, the USA is now more attractive to peoples of diverse origin, and this multiplies our soft power and moral authority globally. If OTL Los Angeles is the second-largest Iranian and Korean city in the world (after Teheran and Seoul, respectively) largely because US interventions in Korea and Iran opened up pathways to America for Koreans and Iranians, and in the latter case compromised the ability of many Iranians to continue to live safely in their homeland, here large settlements of people from various regions will open the door for American influence through private channels on the places they came from.
The immigration from Orthodox Southern Europe and Christians from the Arab world is interesting and a possible flash point; these are clearly at least to some extent Christians disgruntled with the Muslim-dominated Ottoman system; they sort of replace much of the Jewish emigration from Russian-ruled lands OTL. Will they then lead to a strong anti-Ottoman constituency in US politics? That would probably be contingent on a strong Ottoman state that somehow seems in conflict with or a threat to broad US interests and it is very hard to see how that comes about, at least until we get to an era where the Ottomans are still sitting on a lot of the world's oil and the Americans are getting very greedy about it. Since the oil is being exploited earlier, it seems rather more likely to me that Ottoman oil supplies will hit peak considerably earlier than OTL--US reserves will be badly depleted by then too of course--but if oil is a culprit in generations to come I fear we might be fighting over some other oilfield completely! Possibly one not known to OTL yet since all the major oil regions we normally worry about seem to already be making money selling it by 1930--except of course there has as yet been no mention of Nigerian oil, nor of course North Sea deposits that will require a major upgrade in exploration and drilling tech.
But clearly this is a world if anything more addicted earlier to black gold than ours; it is not only Americans and Europeans who will be wanting fiacres* to drive. I expect the mid-century to be quite a distinctly richer world across the board, but for crises involving anticipated or actually imminent shortages to arise even earlier.
Perhaps by then between a broader global balance of power and generations of development of post-Westphalian transnationalism and global justice institutions, more creative responses than maneuvering to fight over what is left will be forthcoming.
Anyway--if the Ottoman Christians take the place of Eastern European Jews in this timeline, I don't expect them to have anything like the distinct role the latter do OTL. They will find it easier to spread out into the general US population and be assimilated and to forget any grievances their first generation may carry against the Ottomans; meanwhile it's hard to imagine any contingency that would bring Washington, or Wall Street, into conflict with Stamboul. So fifty years later the origins of a substantial strand of USAians in Ottoman lands will be just another quaint patch in the American quilt, of no great political consequence.
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*As with radio, the development of motor vehicles and Jonathan's decision that what are called OTL "automobiles" or "cars" will here be called "fiacres" is one of those early developments of the Great War that we were told about but haven't actually seen many examples of. Come to think of it, let me look at how the Sesquicentennial Parade with its catalytic terror attack is described...nope, no mention of "fiacres" there either!
Although I briefly posted here long speculations about how and why broadcast radio might have been slower to take root than technology alone allowed for, then removed them and sent them as a PM to the author instead, the simplest theory is that fiacres and radio broadcasts have been developing apace but our story never happens to focus on them. I was able to weave a fancy web of speculation about radio, but I won't do it again for cars--the fiacres are there, but why focus on them?
I just wanted to take this opportunity then to remind everyone, "cars" are "fiacres" here. We just happen to have been more focused on stories with "riders" (OTL tanks) instead.
So sure enough, Jonathan starts this post with a burning bus! Is it called a bus here? It might well be, "omnibus" is a term from long before the Great War of TTL and less likely to be butterflied than "automobile."
But I have to say, that bus sure looks futuristic for a 1920s American make--even if we grant that the general state of the art is more like OTL 1930s.
I guess French Futurism had a deep impact on American design sensibilities, eh?
Was expecting more of a struggle between pacifist and violent factions in the civil rights struggle, not the federal troops coming in to do reconstruction 2.0. Excellent work none the less. The Electric Era is a cool name, and the demographic shift, religious revival, and "Turkish Marriages" are going to be interesting to say the least in comparison to OTL in this period.
And it's looking like the US will have a proper leftist party.
And it's looking like the US will have a proper leftist party.
I just compared the 1940 black percenteges ITTL to OTL, and it was interesting. As expected, South Carolina and Sequoya were the only states much blacker. However, so is most of Deep South (excluding Florida, which is 1% less black). The North doesn't seem any less black than IOTL at this point - Kansas is 6% instead of 4%, and New York has an extra percent perhaps, but no appreciable difference anywhere else. The only part of the U.S. which has lower black percentages is the border states/interior south - Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia (was 6% IOTL, obviously under 5% here), Maryland, and Delaware.
The numbers suggest to me that unless the amount is "stolen" from really white states that IOTL had 1-4% black people, and don't ITTL (unlikely, given racial animosity is lower) there are substantially more black people - or at least people who identify as black but didn't IOTL. Is this immigration only? Lower mortality due to better social outcomes? Less immigration to the North making the black population there look larger than it is? People who "passed" IOTL deciding not to? Just more mixed-race people overall? Probably some or all of these, huh?
The numbers suggest to me that unless the amount is "stolen" from really white states that IOTL had 1-4% black people, and don't ITTL (unlikely, given racial animosity is lower) there are substantially more black people - or at least people who identify as black but didn't IOTL. Is this immigration only? Lower mortality due to better social outcomes? Less immigration to the North making the black population there look larger than it is? People who "passed" IOTL deciding not to? Just more mixed-race people overall? Probably some or all of these, huh?