Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Other places I'd like to see at some point: Ireland, the Trucial States (or equivalent thereof,) Vienna or (as always) Australasia.*
Actually: what with our discussion of the different dynamics of the US melting pot and given that we're coming up to the end of the sixties- can we see this timeline's equivalent of The Godfather? For some reason I'm quite taken with the idea of Ottoman- or perhaps Lebanese- crime families in "Little Stamboul" being the mob stereotype of choice for altHollywood...
*I'm a parochial bugger.
Actually: what with our discussion of the different dynamics of the US melting pot and given that we're coming up to the end of the sixties- can we see this timeline's equivalent of The Godfather? For some reason I'm quite taken with the idea of Ottoman- or perhaps Lebanese- crime families in "Little Stamboul" being the mob stereotype of choice for altHollywood...
*I'm a parochial bugger.
TFSmith121
Banned
It's entirely stupid, but I have a song called
Mr. Male Rising running through my head.
By Jomo Morrison and Los Puertos, or whatever...
American popular music would be interesting in this reality.
Best,
Mr. Male Rising running through my head.
By Jomo Morrison and Los Puertos, or whatever...
American popular music would be interesting in this reality.
Best,
As part of me getting to know about the international system ITTL, I saw the diagram that you've made and I noticed the 3 global deliberative bodies that you've put there:
1. Consistory
2. ?
3. ?
Will they be in the next updates? Is this a WTO or World Bank equivalent or something?
How about the other bodies mentioned there:
Regional Federations - I guess the All-India Development Union is one of them anyway.
Cross-Border Regions: I guess Egypt?
Treaty Agencies: The one over the Nile?
Legatum Trusteeships: Venice and Mecca I guess, but what are they really? Is this separate from the concept of Free Cities?
Free Cities: Yeah, that one.
Autonomous Provinces: What kind of international powers do these entities have? The Ottoman provinces? Is that them?
Autonomous Collectives....: I guess there would be a modern and international version of the Council of Four Nations in the case of Jews?
I don't know but this sounded like one of the finales of this timeline that you might post about, but I guess you can just say a little bit of something about them, as they look in the 1955-70 part of this timeline right now.
Thanks for bothering anyway. Hehehe.
I guess it's because the international system is a bit complicated for me to fully comprehend... I'm a bit embarassed about it. Sorry.
1. Consistory
2. ?
3. ?
Will they be in the next updates? Is this a WTO or World Bank equivalent or something?
How about the other bodies mentioned there:
Regional Federations - I guess the All-India Development Union is one of them anyway.
Cross-Border Regions: I guess Egypt?
Treaty Agencies: The one over the Nile?
Legatum Trusteeships: Venice and Mecca I guess, but what are they really? Is this separate from the concept of Free Cities?
Free Cities: Yeah, that one.
Autonomous Provinces: What kind of international powers do these entities have? The Ottoman provinces? Is that them?
Autonomous Collectives....: I guess there would be a modern and international version of the Council of Four Nations in the case of Jews?
I don't know but this sounded like one of the finales of this timeline that you might post about, but I guess you can just say a little bit of something about them, as they look in the 1955-70 part of this timeline right now.
Thanks for bothering anyway. Hehehe.
I guess it's because the international system is a bit complicated for me to fully comprehend... I'm a bit embarassed about it. Sorry.
I'd like to see how TTL's *Rock turned out at some point; it might not be called that, of course. But it would still exist in *some* form: all the essential basic ingredients that led to it's birth IOTL, were already there in 1840. What I'd wonder, however, is if the African influence may possibly be notably greater here than it was in our reality(not that it wasn't notable IOTL of course).
Houston, October 1968
Jeff Haddad picked up the royalty contract on his desk and focused his eyes on the front page. It didn’t work: whether on the desk or in hand, the contract stubbornly refused to make sense at three forty on a Friday afternoon. He looked again at the owners’ percentage and the clause about how net profits would be figured, and then gave up and put the agreement down. The hole wouldn’t go dry if he waited until Monday, and it wouldn’t kill the boss if an eight-to-four job actually ended at four once in a while.
He was getting ready to leave when Dan Garcia knocked on the open door. “You and Linda still coming over tonight?”
“Long as you’ll have us. I’m actually getting ready to head home.”
“Good call. Where’re you parked? I’ll walk you over.”
“It was raining this morning, so I took the metro in.”
“Chickenshit.” Dan grinned broadly. “Give you a ride home?”
Jeff thought about it for a second. His fi was parked at the metro station, but Linda could take him to pick it up in the morning, and at this time of day, he probably wouldn’t get a seat. “Count me in.”
Dan nodded and waited for a moment as Jeff got his briefcase, and they walked down to the elevator together. The door was closing, but Caroline Daniels was already inside and she held it open.
“Half a day, gentlemen?”
“Speak for yourself, Carrie,” Dan answered. “I’m an engineer. I always leave at four, unless I’m out in the field.”
“When you’re in the field, you’re in front of a bar by one-thirty?”
“What can I say? I work fast.”
The elevator decanted them into the lobby, with its gusher sculpture that someone in the thirties had thought was a good idea, and Jeff nodded to the security guard as they walked out. As always, his gaze was drawn upward: the oil barons had built tall back when the downtown was being reconstructed, and the office towers were higher than any others in the South. Across the street was the downtown metro terminal, built in the triumphant Farmer-Labor style of the forties, with its tiered roof and five-story glass panels and flight of bronze wings suspended over the main concourse. And three doors down to the right, the garage where Dan’s fi was parked.
Caroline made her farewells and turned left – she lived in the Third Ward, like most of the black professionals did, and was close enough to walk home. Black people who’d done well were just starting to move out to the suburbs – as Caroline had put it once, “if you were black in a white neighborhood in the twenties, you had a target on your back, and we’re just now getting a generation that didn’t grow up with that.” The thought made Jeff remember all the conversations he’d had with Linda about leaving the city, and how her Third Ward parents hadn’t cared for it a bit…
The light changed and they crossed the street, stepping carefully over the streetcar tracks, and they threaded their way through crowds past the station and the jerk chicken stand to the garage. Dan’s fi was a ’54 Panther, one of the more beloved machines to come out of Charlotte in the past decades, and he’d made a project of keeping it on the road. “I’ll give this to my kid one day,” he always said when he gave Jeff a ride, and like clockwork, he did so this time. And the machine didn’t disappoint: Dan put the key in the ignition and it purred, running more smoothly than Jeff’s later-model fi could manage.
“Mind turning on the radio?” Dan asked as they pulled out onto the street, and Jeff complied. A song was just ending, one of those new cowboy-blues numbers with a Jamaican beat, and a couple of cheery newscasters took over.
“Ready for the Roughnecks game tonight?” said the voice on the radio. “If they beat St. Louis, they’re in the semis.”
“No way they’ll lose, with Zoabi on the mound. Guadalajara better get ready.”
“Not a chance,” Dan said. His family was from down by Guadalajara, but that was a hundred years ago, and his loyalty was to the Roughnecks. Dan’s folks had lived in Houston longer than Jeff’s family had; his English sounded exactly like Jeff’s, and so did his Spanish. “Texas is like China,” he’d said once when Jeff remarked on that. “Everyone who comes here turns into a Texan sooner or later.”
Jeff wondered if that would hold true for the actual Chinese who were spilling over from the West Coast and Sequoyah these days. Could Texas out-China China? Of course, being Texan wasn’t the same thing it had been in Sam Houston’s days either, and the Chinese might have something to say about that…
“Meantime, Charleston beat Philly this morning to get a berth in the eastern half of the semis, opposite Caracas.”
“The Rising against the Revolution, huh? How about that.”
“Yeah, well, whichever one gets to the Series won’t know what hit ‘em when the Roughnecks get done with ‘em…”
The chatter dissolved into another song, this one a Spanish lament about a lost love from Laredo, and Dan sang along. They were on the expressway now, another Farmer-Labor project from the free-spending forties, and it was taking them south and a bit east, toward the oil terminals in Butler City and San Leon and Shoal Point. [1] Houston was boss, but it was pretty much wall-to-wall industrial cities all the way to Galveston – the Galveston Bay Strip, people called it.
They hit the outer ring road just before the Butler City exit and swung west toward the southern suburbs. The traffic was unaccountably light for a Friday afternoon. “We’re making good time,” Dan said unnecessarily.
“Maybe we’ll beat Linda home.”
“She’s working now?”
“Yeah, she got a job at a doctor’s office a month ago when Marian went to school. Said she had to get out of the damn house a few hours a day.”
Dan just nodded. Susana worked too – she always had, and Dan had actually been the one to stay home for two years when their youngest was born. He’d had to fight all the way to the boss, but he’d convinced them that he could design just as easily in his spare room as at the office. He’d only come back when they’d promoted him to a job where he had to be in the field twice a week. That was something only Dan could get away with, though – if you were as good at your job as he was, you could get by with a lot, but most people still thought what he’d done was more than a bit strange.
“You know,” Jeff said, changing the subject only slightly, “Linda’s folks have been talking about moving out by us.”
Dan laughed out loud. “For real? What could get them out of the Third Ward church pews?”
“They say there are too many Jamaicans moving in lately.”
Dan nodded again. The Jamaicans had moved in during the Imperial troubles, and they’d practically taken over the fishing and shrimping business, but they also ran that part of the contraband trade that Mexicans didn’t, and there’d been a few shootouts between posses. The old-line African-Americans and the more recent West African arrivals were scared of them – scared enough, evidently, that even some of the older ones were taking a second look at the suburbs.
“They’re as scared as my folks were over what would happen when Linda and I got married,” Jeff muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing worth repeating.” He rephrased: “I think some people are more scared of Jamaicans moving in than they ought to be. The ones who are moving from Butler City to Third Ward aren’t the ones to be afraid of.”
“Give it twenty, thirty years. It’ll straighten itself out like last time.”
“Last time we had sixty thousand dead,” Jeff said, but without much conviction: like all the catchphrases from the forties and fifties, that one was getting a bit old.
They got off the expressway by the Sienna metro station and the local commercial strip, and into the suburb proper. That, too, was a forties Farmer-Labor thing – subsidized tract developments, yards and swimming pools for skilled workers and white-collar families – but the Democrats had put their hand on it as well. Lots of parks and lakes and streams and hiking trails – let’s stay healthy and be good stewards of the earth, like they said in church – and clubs and charities and amateur societies everywhere.
Many of the houses had yard signs up for the election. There were some for Farmer-Labor, and one or two for the Progressives, but most of them read “Margaret Mallory” or, as a variation on the same theme, “Maggie Magnolia.” And why not? This was exactly the kind of place Governor Mallory came from: she was evangelical, from a social church, and her values were exactly those of the suburbanites who held backyard prayer meetings and sang in the community theater.
“Not me,” Dan commented as they passed yet another of the signs. “Farmer-Labor this time, Farmer-Labor forever.”
“Linda’s thinking about voting for her.”
“Linda? Voting for a Democrat from Alabama?”
“Mallory’s church was on the right side of things in the twenties and thirties, and so was her family – they took heat for it, in fact. And she’s always been a D-R – she says Farmer-Labor wants to build everywhere and pave everything.”
“And you?”
“I’m a D-R too, but I like it better when the Republicans are in charge. Putting a Democrat in the driver’s seat…”
“Did you expect anything different, with the way they ran their own candidate last time?” Jeff didn’t need to be told: the 1964 election had been the most chaotic in recent memory, with the Democrats running separately from the Republicans for the first time in decades, the Progressives, Socialists and the new Reconstructionists all getting electoral votes, and the American Indian Movement splitting the ballot in five states. Nominating one of their own had been the Democrats’ condition for coming back to a joint ticket, although the Republican leadership had had enough clout in the negotiations to make sure the candidate didn’t come from the reactionary wing of the party. But with the consensus of the forties and fifties broken, who knew how it would turn out…
They pulled into the Garcias’ driveway at last and Dan got out to open the garage door. Jeff looked over to his own house – they were next-door neighbors – and he saw that Linda’s fi was in the driveway: he hadn’t beaten her home. The kids would be home from school by now too, so he didn’t have to fear for his latecoming laurels.
“Come over in two hours,” Dan said. “I’ve been waiting to try that new grill.”
“You bet.” Jeff cut across the yard to his front door, and accepted Marian’s enthusiastic greeting and Andrew’s more restrained one. He heard a familiar voice call his name, and found Linda in the family room, with her parents there too.
“I wasn’t expecting you tonight.”
“They called me at work a couple hours ago,” Linda said. “They wanted to come over. I figured we could take them with us to Dan and Susana’s, and then we can all do something tomorrow.”
Jeff was suddenly all concern. “Did something happen?”
“You might say that,” Linda’s father answered drily.
“Sharon’s getting married…” Linda began.
“… to a Jamaican shrimper who we never heard about before today.” The older man looked hard at Linda and then at Jeff, as if deciding which one was to blame for setting the example of unconventional marriages.
After everything Jeff had had to listen to from Linda’s parents about the Jamaicans, he couldn’t help himself. He started laughing, and even when Linda’s father gave him another old-fashioned look, he couldn’t stop.
He knew he’d have to make it up to them, but right now he didn’t care, especially since he could see Linda was on his side. “Give it twenty, thirty years,” he said, in a voice as close as he could manage to the one Dan had used in the fi. “It’ll straighten itself out like last time.”
_______
[1] Respectively: League City, San Leon and Texas City.
Jeff Haddad picked up the royalty contract on his desk and focused his eyes on the front page. It didn’t work: whether on the desk or in hand, the contract stubbornly refused to make sense at three forty on a Friday afternoon. He looked again at the owners’ percentage and the clause about how net profits would be figured, and then gave up and put the agreement down. The hole wouldn’t go dry if he waited until Monday, and it wouldn’t kill the boss if an eight-to-four job actually ended at four once in a while.
He was getting ready to leave when Dan Garcia knocked on the open door. “You and Linda still coming over tonight?”
“Long as you’ll have us. I’m actually getting ready to head home.”
“Good call. Where’re you parked? I’ll walk you over.”
“It was raining this morning, so I took the metro in.”
“Chickenshit.” Dan grinned broadly. “Give you a ride home?”
Jeff thought about it for a second. His fi was parked at the metro station, but Linda could take him to pick it up in the morning, and at this time of day, he probably wouldn’t get a seat. “Count me in.”
Dan nodded and waited for a moment as Jeff got his briefcase, and they walked down to the elevator together. The door was closing, but Caroline Daniels was already inside and she held it open.
“Half a day, gentlemen?”
“Speak for yourself, Carrie,” Dan answered. “I’m an engineer. I always leave at four, unless I’m out in the field.”
“When you’re in the field, you’re in front of a bar by one-thirty?”
“What can I say? I work fast.”
The elevator decanted them into the lobby, with its gusher sculpture that someone in the thirties had thought was a good idea, and Jeff nodded to the security guard as they walked out. As always, his gaze was drawn upward: the oil barons had built tall back when the downtown was being reconstructed, and the office towers were higher than any others in the South. Across the street was the downtown metro terminal, built in the triumphant Farmer-Labor style of the forties, with its tiered roof and five-story glass panels and flight of bronze wings suspended over the main concourse. And three doors down to the right, the garage where Dan’s fi was parked.
Caroline made her farewells and turned left – she lived in the Third Ward, like most of the black professionals did, and was close enough to walk home. Black people who’d done well were just starting to move out to the suburbs – as Caroline had put it once, “if you were black in a white neighborhood in the twenties, you had a target on your back, and we’re just now getting a generation that didn’t grow up with that.” The thought made Jeff remember all the conversations he’d had with Linda about leaving the city, and how her Third Ward parents hadn’t cared for it a bit…
The light changed and they crossed the street, stepping carefully over the streetcar tracks, and they threaded their way through crowds past the station and the jerk chicken stand to the garage. Dan’s fi was a ’54 Panther, one of the more beloved machines to come out of Charlotte in the past decades, and he’d made a project of keeping it on the road. “I’ll give this to my kid one day,” he always said when he gave Jeff a ride, and like clockwork, he did so this time. And the machine didn’t disappoint: Dan put the key in the ignition and it purred, running more smoothly than Jeff’s later-model fi could manage.
“Mind turning on the radio?” Dan asked as they pulled out onto the street, and Jeff complied. A song was just ending, one of those new cowboy-blues numbers with a Jamaican beat, and a couple of cheery newscasters took over.
“Ready for the Roughnecks game tonight?” said the voice on the radio. “If they beat St. Louis, they’re in the semis.”
“No way they’ll lose, with Zoabi on the mound. Guadalajara better get ready.”
“Not a chance,” Dan said. His family was from down by Guadalajara, but that was a hundred years ago, and his loyalty was to the Roughnecks. Dan’s folks had lived in Houston longer than Jeff’s family had; his English sounded exactly like Jeff’s, and so did his Spanish. “Texas is like China,” he’d said once when Jeff remarked on that. “Everyone who comes here turns into a Texan sooner or later.”
Jeff wondered if that would hold true for the actual Chinese who were spilling over from the West Coast and Sequoyah these days. Could Texas out-China China? Of course, being Texan wasn’t the same thing it had been in Sam Houston’s days either, and the Chinese might have something to say about that…
“Meantime, Charleston beat Philly this morning to get a berth in the eastern half of the semis, opposite Caracas.”
“The Rising against the Revolution, huh? How about that.”
“Yeah, well, whichever one gets to the Series won’t know what hit ‘em when the Roughnecks get done with ‘em…”
The chatter dissolved into another song, this one a Spanish lament about a lost love from Laredo, and Dan sang along. They were on the expressway now, another Farmer-Labor project from the free-spending forties, and it was taking them south and a bit east, toward the oil terminals in Butler City and San Leon and Shoal Point. [1] Houston was boss, but it was pretty much wall-to-wall industrial cities all the way to Galveston – the Galveston Bay Strip, people called it.
They hit the outer ring road just before the Butler City exit and swung west toward the southern suburbs. The traffic was unaccountably light for a Friday afternoon. “We’re making good time,” Dan said unnecessarily.
“Maybe we’ll beat Linda home.”
“She’s working now?”
“Yeah, she got a job at a doctor’s office a month ago when Marian went to school. Said she had to get out of the damn house a few hours a day.”
Dan just nodded. Susana worked too – she always had, and Dan had actually been the one to stay home for two years when their youngest was born. He’d had to fight all the way to the boss, but he’d convinced them that he could design just as easily in his spare room as at the office. He’d only come back when they’d promoted him to a job where he had to be in the field twice a week. That was something only Dan could get away with, though – if you were as good at your job as he was, you could get by with a lot, but most people still thought what he’d done was more than a bit strange.
“You know,” Jeff said, changing the subject only slightly, “Linda’s folks have been talking about moving out by us.”
Dan laughed out loud. “For real? What could get them out of the Third Ward church pews?”
“They say there are too many Jamaicans moving in lately.”
Dan nodded again. The Jamaicans had moved in during the Imperial troubles, and they’d practically taken over the fishing and shrimping business, but they also ran that part of the contraband trade that Mexicans didn’t, and there’d been a few shootouts between posses. The old-line African-Americans and the more recent West African arrivals were scared of them – scared enough, evidently, that even some of the older ones were taking a second look at the suburbs.
“They’re as scared as my folks were over what would happen when Linda and I got married,” Jeff muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing worth repeating.” He rephrased: “I think some people are more scared of Jamaicans moving in than they ought to be. The ones who are moving from Butler City to Third Ward aren’t the ones to be afraid of.”
“Give it twenty, thirty years. It’ll straighten itself out like last time.”
“Last time we had sixty thousand dead,” Jeff said, but without much conviction: like all the catchphrases from the forties and fifties, that one was getting a bit old.
They got off the expressway by the Sienna metro station and the local commercial strip, and into the suburb proper. That, too, was a forties Farmer-Labor thing – subsidized tract developments, yards and swimming pools for skilled workers and white-collar families – but the Democrats had put their hand on it as well. Lots of parks and lakes and streams and hiking trails – let’s stay healthy and be good stewards of the earth, like they said in church – and clubs and charities and amateur societies everywhere.
Many of the houses had yard signs up for the election. There were some for Farmer-Labor, and one or two for the Progressives, but most of them read “Margaret Mallory” or, as a variation on the same theme, “Maggie Magnolia.” And why not? This was exactly the kind of place Governor Mallory came from: she was evangelical, from a social church, and her values were exactly those of the suburbanites who held backyard prayer meetings and sang in the community theater.
“Not me,” Dan commented as they passed yet another of the signs. “Farmer-Labor this time, Farmer-Labor forever.”
“Linda’s thinking about voting for her.”
“Linda? Voting for a Democrat from Alabama?”
“Mallory’s church was on the right side of things in the twenties and thirties, and so was her family – they took heat for it, in fact. And she’s always been a D-R – she says Farmer-Labor wants to build everywhere and pave everything.”
“And you?”
“I’m a D-R too, but I like it better when the Republicans are in charge. Putting a Democrat in the driver’s seat…”
“Did you expect anything different, with the way they ran their own candidate last time?” Jeff didn’t need to be told: the 1964 election had been the most chaotic in recent memory, with the Democrats running separately from the Republicans for the first time in decades, the Progressives, Socialists and the new Reconstructionists all getting electoral votes, and the American Indian Movement splitting the ballot in five states. Nominating one of their own had been the Democrats’ condition for coming back to a joint ticket, although the Republican leadership had had enough clout in the negotiations to make sure the candidate didn’t come from the reactionary wing of the party. But with the consensus of the forties and fifties broken, who knew how it would turn out…
They pulled into the Garcias’ driveway at last and Dan got out to open the garage door. Jeff looked over to his own house – they were next-door neighbors – and he saw that Linda’s fi was in the driveway: he hadn’t beaten her home. The kids would be home from school by now too, so he didn’t have to fear for his latecoming laurels.
“Come over in two hours,” Dan said. “I’ve been waiting to try that new grill.”
“You bet.” Jeff cut across the yard to his front door, and accepted Marian’s enthusiastic greeting and Andrew’s more restrained one. He heard a familiar voice call his name, and found Linda in the family room, with her parents there too.
“I wasn’t expecting you tonight.”
“They called me at work a couple hours ago,” Linda said. “They wanted to come over. I figured we could take them with us to Dan and Susana’s, and then we can all do something tomorrow.”
Jeff was suddenly all concern. “Did something happen?”
“You might say that,” Linda’s father answered drily.
“Sharon’s getting married…” Linda began.
“… to a Jamaican shrimper who we never heard about before today.” The older man looked hard at Linda and then at Jeff, as if deciding which one was to blame for setting the example of unconventional marriages.
After everything Jeff had had to listen to from Linda’s parents about the Jamaicans, he couldn’t help himself. He started laughing, and even when Linda’s father gave him another old-fashioned look, he couldn’t stop.
He knew he’d have to make it up to them, but right now he didn’t care, especially since he could see Linda was on his side. “Give it twenty, thirty years,” he said, in a voice as close as he could manage to the one Dan had used in the fi. “It’ll straighten itself out like last time.”
_______
[1] Respectively: League City, San Leon and Texas City.
I've only lived in Texas for about 8-10 odd years, but from my perspective your take on the state in general (and Houston in particular) is dead spot-on! Even the bit about Texas and China seems about right, whether it be about immigrants from other countries or folks from every corner of the USA (even military folks seem to be susceptible to this phenomenon). Of course, I'm not complaining!
About the Jamaican shrimper community; would you say they're more concentrated by modern day in the Galveston/Outer Bay area, or further into Trinity Bay/upland into Houston proper? I ask as someone who fell in love with H-Town a looong time ago
. Great work!
About the Jamaican shrimper community; would you say they're more concentrated by modern day in the Galveston/Outer Bay area, or further into Trinity Bay/upland into Houston proper? I ask as someone who fell in love with H-Town a looong time ago
. Great work!Great election day update!
I really liked the hint of problems in the last election as we enter yet another period of strange party politics with the new international system forming around the same time. Nice bit of parallelism.
What exactly is the platform of the Reconstructionist party? Given the name, I suspect it's got something to do with the South, perhaps a party focused on dealing with residual racial and cultural issues primarily? I'm not sure.
And as I just got done with my shift of electioneering, I'd like to post some thoughts about the Midwest and their political parties if you don't mind.
The Left
Under the Left, I'd say the Midwest is going to suffer from some divided ticket issues occasionally, but will likely be fairly commonly leftist without as much white flight or relocation of jobs to the sunbelt.
Farmer-Labor is likely the dominant force in the overall region and probably most times shares a national ticket with the Progressives. In the Midwest it will likely be leftist in economics, but on social issues such as prohibition, female and gay rights, and multiculturalism it probably varies a lot candidate to candidate and seat to seat. In the region, though, I think the "farmer" part of Farmer-Labor will be more dominant and so they will likely be seen as leftists economically but centrist/rightist socially, which in some states such as Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan may mean they take the backseat to Progressives in state politics even as they dominate the federal level. The "Yankee" leftists, (nevermind that a lot of Anglos in cities will vote Progressive)
The Progressives, on the other hand, are probably the largest "true left-wing" party by OTL American standards. They're probably more urban in outlook and are both leftist in economics and liberal socially. I'd expect a lot of focus on education and cultural understandings with the progressives. That said, they might not be as interested in environmental issues and come off as too socially liberal to many people. Given La Follette, probably pretty isolationist, though welcoming, as well. I'd expect they'd be the main leftist party in a couple of states closer to the Great Lakes and more heavily urbanized. The "German" leftists(nevermind that a lot of traditionalist Catholics and Protestant Germans will definitely side with F-L.)
The Socialists would probably be the farthest to the left and thus the smallest of the leftist parties. Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Gary, Minneapolis, etc. The largest cities would likely have sizeable Socialist minorities and at times would be governed by Socialists. Occasionally might lock in state and national level positions but that might be more of a candidate thing than a platform issue.
The Right
The Republicans are top dogs now and forever. The huge amount of manufacturing business owners, traditionalist rural folk, and and nationalists will stay with the Republicans as they always have. Here, the Republicans will likely be very similar to their Civil War days: "We are one nation, we succeed when business succeeds, and we must honor our traditional values." Again, it'll vary candidate to candidate but the Republicans won't be vicious plutocrats demanding tax cuts and the abolishment of the minimum wage. I imagine them as sort of a "law and order"/individualism party that plays pretty well against the various leftists. Many will have long since acknowledged that unions and certain leftist labor trappings are the law of the land and seek to make those situations work well and keep businesses going. At many times, they'll act as policemen for government overreach and overspending. I'd guess they're more "Rockefeller Republicans" ie potentially centrist or center-right socially while they are right economically.
I imagine there will be other, smaller social conservative parties as well. The Democrats may have a presence in some states like Indiana and Ohio, there may be a few others as well that are more consistently right-wing socially and economically, but I have a hard-time imagining them being great competition for the Republicans in this area.
The others
The American Indian Movement may very well have a one-county majority in Menominee County, Wisconsin and could potentially be a vote splitter in other places. They'll be strongest in the Great Plains, of course, but along Lake Superior they'll definitely make a showing.
Not sure about the Reconstructionists yet.
I really liked the hint of problems in the last election as we enter yet another period of strange party politics with the new international system forming around the same time. Nice bit of parallelism.
What exactly is the platform of the Reconstructionist party? Given the name, I suspect it's got something to do with the South, perhaps a party focused on dealing with residual racial and cultural issues primarily? I'm not sure.
And as I just got done with my shift of electioneering, I'd like to post some thoughts about the Midwest and their political parties if you don't mind.
The Left
Under the Left, I'd say the Midwest is going to suffer from some divided ticket issues occasionally, but will likely be fairly commonly leftist without as much white flight or relocation of jobs to the sunbelt.
Farmer-Labor is likely the dominant force in the overall region and probably most times shares a national ticket with the Progressives. In the Midwest it will likely be leftist in economics, but on social issues such as prohibition, female and gay rights, and multiculturalism it probably varies a lot candidate to candidate and seat to seat. In the region, though, I think the "farmer" part of Farmer-Labor will be more dominant and so they will likely be seen as leftists economically but centrist/rightist socially, which in some states such as Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan may mean they take the backseat to Progressives in state politics even as they dominate the federal level. The "Yankee" leftists, (nevermind that a lot of Anglos in cities will vote Progressive)
The Progressives, on the other hand, are probably the largest "true left-wing" party by OTL American standards. They're probably more urban in outlook and are both leftist in economics and liberal socially. I'd expect a lot of focus on education and cultural understandings with the progressives. That said, they might not be as interested in environmental issues and come off as too socially liberal to many people. Given La Follette, probably pretty isolationist, though welcoming, as well. I'd expect they'd be the main leftist party in a couple of states closer to the Great Lakes and more heavily urbanized. The "German" leftists(nevermind that a lot of traditionalist Catholics and Protestant Germans will definitely side with F-L.)
The Socialists would probably be the farthest to the left and thus the smallest of the leftist parties. Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Gary, Minneapolis, etc. The largest cities would likely have sizeable Socialist minorities and at times would be governed by Socialists. Occasionally might lock in state and national level positions but that might be more of a candidate thing than a platform issue.
The Right
The Republicans are top dogs now and forever. The huge amount of manufacturing business owners, traditionalist rural folk, and and nationalists will stay with the Republicans as they always have. Here, the Republicans will likely be very similar to their Civil War days: "We are one nation, we succeed when business succeeds, and we must honor our traditional values." Again, it'll vary candidate to candidate but the Republicans won't be vicious plutocrats demanding tax cuts and the abolishment of the minimum wage. I imagine them as sort of a "law and order"/individualism party that plays pretty well against the various leftists. Many will have long since acknowledged that unions and certain leftist labor trappings are the law of the land and seek to make those situations work well and keep businesses going. At many times, they'll act as policemen for government overreach and overspending. I'd guess they're more "Rockefeller Republicans" ie potentially centrist or center-right socially while they are right economically.
I imagine there will be other, smaller social conservative parties as well. The Democrats may have a presence in some states like Indiana and Ohio, there may be a few others as well that are more consistently right-wing socially and economically, but I have a hard-time imagining them being great competition for the Republicans in this area.
The others
The American Indian Movement may very well have a one-county majority in Menominee County, Wisconsin and could potentially be a vote splitter in other places. They'll be strongest in the Great Plains, of course, but along Lake Superior they'll definitely make a showing.
Not sure about the Reconstructionists yet.
There are many ethnic mobs in TTL's United States, and their strengths vary from state to state... but I think I may have an idea for the 1970s.
Or it could be that the elements are all there, but they're part of different genres. At a guess, the style that comes closest to rock will have more direct West African and Caribbean influence, similar to some of the Afro-Atlantic genres that have been mentioned here but with more of a country-bluegrass base.
The Consistory, the Court of Arbitration and one other that will come into existence later. It won't be a *World Bank, though; there are already international banks and there will be more, but they'll fall under the "treaty agency" category.
The Ottoman Union, arguably the Commonwealth and the Zollverein; there will be more that come into being during the 1970s through 2000s.
Egypt is an independent state; the cross-border regions are areas like Alsace-Lorraine that have formal ties to more than one state.
The Nile Authority is a treaty agency, yes. The trusteeship concept overlaps somewhat with the free cities, but the latter are purely territorial entities while the former are in large part cultural and have widely varying levels of sovereignty.
The autonomous provinces include the second tier of the Ottoman Union, as well as many others: the basic qualification for such a a province is that it is (a) part of a larger state, but (b) has some capacity to conduct international relations. Their levels of autonomy vary widely from place to place.
Autonomous collectives are non-territorial bodies, such as the international governing body of the Roma.
Not entirely - there's oil and Tex-Mex food and evangelical religion. But yeah, an early civil rights revolution, more evangelical emphasis on social action, different party system and demographics, and a more developed welfare state will do that.
Civil rights is forty years old at this point, and Texas was never one of the really bad Jim Crow states ITTL; by this time, the black middle class in Houston is several generations old (and, as can be seen, has acquired some elite prejudices of its own).
At a guess, mostly the former, but with some presence right up to Houston, and many of the second generation are moving to the city.
It's centered around opposition to the second-wave civil rights struggle, and it isn't just in the South. It's a minor party, but it played spoiler in a few states in 1964, and might do so again in '68. We'll see more of how it plays out when we get to the academic updates.
That sounds about right to me. The Republicans would definitely be the senior partners of the Democratic-Republican coalition in the Midwest, with the Democrats having very little organization at the state level (except maybe in the southern parts of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio). As you say, they're a party of business, but they tend to view labor-management relations similarly to the Christian Democrats in OTL Germany - Rockefeller Republicans seems like a good description.
Farmer-Labor and the Progressives are mirror images to an extent: F-L is to the left on economic issues but can sometimes be socially conservative, while the Progressives are socially liberal but have an elite base and are more skeptical of populist economics. The Socialists are reliably left-wing in both respects, but are strong mainly at the city level where they practice something akin to Milwaukee sewer socialism.
Both slightly higher than OTL, I'd guess, with lower birth rates not quite compensating for uninterrupted immigration. The immigrant stream has slowed down somewhat, but the lack of a quota system made a lot of difference in the 1920s and 30s.
I think I'll put the 1969 update somewhere in Latin America, which had the most support; for those who requested other places, I'll work them in during the final two cycles.
TFSmith121
Banned
Good question for the author, I'd think
Good question for the author, I'd think - it is his universe.
Best,
Good question for the author, I'd think - it is his universe.
Best,
Naturally, I like this post very much! (Didn't post earlier due to being a tad busy and having a little trouble organizing my thoughts)
I did like the little notes that hit on both points of commonality--the Third Ward (which, technically, is where I live right now!) is still black, there's still a Beltway and a Gulf Freeway (even if they're not called that), oil's still big business--and the points of differences--a metro (a metro!), Roughnecks instead of Astros, Spanish being as common as English (though of course it's still very common IOTL, I for example can barely speak any, and only because I took it in high school). Just like always in this timeline, of course, but it's closer to home when it's, well, closer to home, and you live and work pretty close to everything in the book.
And...about that metro...one thing I wondered when I read it was whether it was underground or overground? From what I understand, Houston is a lousy city to dig in between its high water table and clayey soil (not to mention the vulnerability to flooding from hurricanes), and certainly there's not much underground in reality; only big buildings have basements, and while there's the underground tunnel system downtown (and was anything similar built in the '20s or '30s ITTL? It seems to have started with private builders connecting nearby buildings to economize on air conditioning and attract patrons, so there's a good chance something similar exists ITTL, if most likely smaller scale and not really a connected network), there just isn't much underground anywhere else. Certainly all the rail proposals from the '80s onwards have been surface or elevated routes. Does it hook into commuter rail for the more far-flung areas? I expect there's also a pretty substantial bus network along side it, yes?
Incidentally, being from the OTL where about 1% of Houston's population is Chinese, I can say that Texas certainly out-Chinas China Though most of the Chinese people I work with are just graduate students and don't really count (and being a Texan who has been to China and kinda likes the place, I'd say it's more that both have their own gravitational wells).
Incidentally, what sorts of higher education are present in the city? I'd expect at least one private school paralleling Rice to have popped up at some point, given the amount of oil money sloshing around, but I'm curious as to the overall landscape and how many public institutions there are; might the University of Houston be a branch of the University of Texas, instead of an independent institution? (or not even exist?)
Also, what does Houston's health care system look like? I don't really expect us to have anywhere close to the network of hospitals and facilities that we do OTL, but I'd expect a fair number of hospitals and institutions to have popped up from that oil money and public spending.
And, on that note, what sorts of industries does Houston have? Petrochemical and its supporting industries are obvious from the snippet, but how about shipping, which I would imagine to be fairly important? Does it have many industries not linked to oil in some way or another? (or, in other words, is it a petro-city vulnerable to falls in the price of oil, like IOTL during the 1980s?) I certainly don't imagine it's an aerospace center in any way, shape, or form...
Gosh, I just keep finding questions to ask...
(Didn't post earlier due to being a tad busy and having a little trouble organizing my thoughts)I did like the little notes that hit on both points of commonality--the Third Ward (which, technically, is where I live right now!) is still black, there's still a Beltway and a Gulf Freeway (even if they're not called that), oil's still big business--and the points of differences--a metro (a metro!), Roughnecks instead of Astros, Spanish being as common as English (though of course it's still very common IOTL, I for example can barely speak any, and only because I took it in high school). Just like always in this timeline, of course, but it's closer to home when it's, well, closer to home, and you live and work pretty close to everything in the book.
And...about that metro...one thing I wondered when I read it was whether it was underground or overground? From what I understand, Houston is a lousy city to dig in between its high water table and clayey soil (not to mention the vulnerability to flooding from hurricanes), and certainly there's not much underground in reality; only big buildings have basements, and while there's the underground tunnel system downtown (and was anything similar built in the '20s or '30s ITTL? It seems to have started with private builders connecting nearby buildings to economize on air conditioning and attract patrons, so there's a good chance something similar exists ITTL, if most likely smaller scale and not really a connected network), there just isn't much underground anywhere else. Certainly all the rail proposals from the '80s onwards have been surface or elevated routes. Does it hook into commuter rail for the more far-flung areas? I expect there's also a pretty substantial bus network along side it, yes?
Incidentally, being from the OTL where about 1% of Houston's population is Chinese, I can say that Texas certainly out-Chinas China
Though most of the Chinese people I work with are just graduate students and don't really count (and being a Texan who has been to China and kinda likes the place, I'd say it's more that both have their own gravitational wells).Incidentally, what sorts of higher education are present in the city? I'd expect at least one private school paralleling Rice to have popped up at some point, given the amount of oil money sloshing around, but I'm curious as to the overall landscape and how many public institutions there are; might the University of Houston be a branch of the University of Texas, instead of an independent institution? (or not even exist?)
Also, what does Houston's health care system look like? I don't really expect us to have anywhere close to the network of hospitals and facilities that we do OTL, but I'd expect a fair number of hospitals and institutions to have popped up from that oil money and public spending.
And, on that note, what sorts of industries does Houston have? Petrochemical and its supporting industries are obvious from the snippet, but how about shipping, which I would imagine to be fairly important? Does it have many industries not linked to oil in some way or another? (or, in other words, is it a petro-city vulnerable to falls in the price of oil, like IOTL during the 1980s?) I certainly don't imagine it's an aerospace center in any way, shape, or form...
Gosh, I just keep finding questions to ask...
I was imagining it as underground downtown and surface everywhere else - Houston doesn't sprawl quite as much in TTL as in OTL, but it's spread out enough that there's plenty of room for surface rail. Given what you say about the soil, there are probably only a few underground stations.
The metro is an urban-suburban system that combines with a commuter network at its outer reaches - the whole thing, both urban and commuter, was built during the 40s when Farmer-Labor was building trains and highways everywhere. There's also a bus and streetcar network, and outside the high-density areas, most people have private cars.
I hadn't thought about that, but the office buildings are in a dense enough cluster that it would be possible to connect many of them, and the same reasons to do so would exist.
I like that - I'll have to steal it sometime.
There are several public schools - both Farmer-Labor and the Democrat-Republicans like to throw money at higher education, so there would be an elite branch of the state university and a couple of research institutes. And with the oil barons competing for charitable laurels, there would definitely be something like Rice.
There would be represented by a flagship hospital and a network of local clinics operated by the Texas branch of the national health care system (it's primarily a state responsibility, as in Canada) and a separate group of private hospitals and doctors' offices. There would be at least one medical school involved in research, although the city wouldn't be as much of a research center as IOTL.
You're correct that there's no space center, which is why the baseball team is named for oil workers rather than astronauts.
But yeah, oil and gas (which are somewhat stabler than OTL, with the greater number of industrialized countries driving up demand, but still vulnerable to shocks), petrochemicals, shipping, somewhat more banking and insurance than OTL (piggybacking on the oil money), light manufacturing and the beginnings of a modern service sector. The United States may be more social-democratic ITTL, but Houston is an unashamedly capitalist city.
BTW, for Margaret Mallory, think Jimmy Carter. Kinda.
So we've got a good breakdown of the difference between Farmer-Labor (left-wing populist economics and moderate-to-conservative social views), the Progressives (social liberalism and center-left economics), and the Socialists (left-wing both socially and economically) within the left-wing coalition. The Republicans, meanwhile, are pretty much OTL's Rockefeller Republicans, trying to reform the left-wing social programs and make them more efficient rather than overturn them entirely, while taking a hands-off approach to social change (don't force it, but don't try to stop it either) and a "law and order" attitude to crime, while also having a sizable African-American base. And the American Indian Movement's goals are both right there in the name and were shown to us in a prior update.
If I may, I'd like to figure out how the Democrats relate to the Republicans in the center-right D-R coalition. From what I've gathered of both their Southern base and their skepticism of suburbia and other Farmer-Labor development projects, they seem to resemble OTL's paleoconservatives, viewing industrial modernity as a threat to traditional values. This explains why a right-wing party seems to have such a strong environmentalist plank; they did, after all, lay the foundations for what people in OTL would call "smart growth" in Houston's suburbs. They're aligned with the Republicans in viewing big government as an agent of the sort of change that they wish to prevent, but they also hold the same poor opinion of big business, and thus, their economic platform probably trends more towards either center-right moderation or the radical center.
As for the Reconstructionists, I have bad feelings about them going by their name alone, but JE hasn't given any detail on what they represent.
I also noticed that Charlotte seems to be a center of automobile production. If so, then this probably means that Detroit doesn't dominate the American auto industry like IOTL. There are likely to be other centers of the auto industry beyond just those two; IOTL, Studebaker was based in South Bend, Indiana, and Nash was based in Kenosha, Wisconsin, up through the '50s.
If I may, I'd like to figure out how the Democrats relate to the Republicans in the center-right D-R coalition. From what I've gathered of both their Southern base and their skepticism of suburbia and other Farmer-Labor development projects, they seem to resemble OTL's paleoconservatives, viewing industrial modernity as a threat to traditional values. This explains why a right-wing party seems to have such a strong environmentalist plank; they did, after all, lay the foundations for what people in OTL would call "smart growth" in Houston's suburbs. They're aligned with the Republicans in viewing big government as an agent of the sort of change that they wish to prevent, but they also hold the same poor opinion of big business, and thus, their economic platform probably trends more towards either center-right moderation or the radical center.
As for the Reconstructionists, I have bad feelings about them going by their name alone, but JE hasn't given any detail on what they represent.
I also noticed that Charlotte seems to be a center of automobile production. If so, then this probably means that Detroit doesn't dominate the American auto industry like IOTL. There are likely to be other centers of the auto industry beyond just those two; IOTL, Studebaker was based in South Bend, Indiana, and Nash was based in Kenosha, Wisconsin, up through the '50s.
If I were a resident of the U.S. ITTL, I bet I'd be a Progressive, if anything.
True, and Kenosha was also, IIRC, the home of American Motors up until they disbanded in 1987.
Indianapolis was once the home of Marmon, another one of the former great luxury car makes. Pierce Arrow was from Buffalo, N.Y., and Franklin from Syracuse. Preston Tucker's operation was from Chicago; Moon Motors from St. Louis; and the Stanley Steamer was from Newton, Mass.
Even California once had a notable carmaker call it home; the Doble company, famous amongst enthusiasts even today for its steam cars(despite having been extinct for almost 80 years now) was from Emeryville.
So, yeah, the American auto industry really didn't have to be as centralized as it had been IOTL.