We begin the journey toward the Great War (WWI). This chapter, "The Hinge of History," describes some of the accumulating social forces that will unleash themselves with the Great War's advent, along with Palmera's involvement in the war itself.
Previously in the timeline:
The Spanish Period to Home Rule. A curious twist of fate results in a British resettlement project for Black freedmen going to the depopulated southern reaches of an alternate Florida named Palmera.
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
To come in the timeline:
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
The Hinge of History, Part One (Unseen Pressures Build): The world could feel the Great War coming long before it happened. Escalating crises in the European system – including revolution in Turkey and attendant instability in the Balkans, and jockeying between France and an increasingly aggressive Germany with crises in Morocco leading to near-war on more than one occasion – were clearly going to lead to a point of no return.
Palmera found herself drawn into the web of intrigue and instability through her relationship with Yohannes IV's government in Ethiopia. The country was active in famine relief after the Mahdist War and the Palmey adventurer Henry Hill – who became Yohannes IV's Dejazmach or “Viceroy” and was nicknamed Addisu or “the newcomer” at court – played a key role in recruiting freebooters to assist the training of Ethiopian troops, a role which put him in contact with Russia, whose Tsar was intent on providing support to a fellow Orthodox power as Italy made a bid for her own colonial empire in the country (based on claims of having a protectorate over Shewa and Tigray and thence, they argued, over all Ethiopia). “Heniri Addisu” was present at Yohannes IV's last great military victory, against a poorly-equipped Italian army at the Battle of Adi Ugri, and personified Palmera's active ties into the wider net of the Anglo-Russian Entente. When Yohannes IV died in 1907, it was his faithful Dejazmach who rallied the cause of his chosen successor, Ras Mengesha Yohannes, and served as a key general in the Successor War—again with Russian aid—to help him win the throne and keep Ethiopia unified as Yohannes V*.
(* The drama of the Italian invasion parallels history, with the attempt at conquest faring even more poorly than in OTL, which is why they get stopped at Adi Ugri instead of Adwa further inland. The Successor War is the product of the questionable legitimacy of Yohannes IV's heir, an issue that ultimately sunk his claim amid widespread revolt after Yohannes IV's actual death IOTL.)
Such dramas convinced the Touladi that sooner or later, Palmera would be called upon to play a direct military role in theatres far afield from the Caribbean, and that she had to modernize and industrialize her still largely-agrarian economy to be able to live up to her “lion's cub” aspirations. Many of the Asian “coolie” workers and convict labourers of the era found themselves working on factory floors, for a small but rapidly-growing sector of the economy that was dedicated to the manufacture of war materials.
As the crises at the centre stage of history built toward the coming conflagration, though, other less widely-known pressures were building on the home front, forces that would be unleashed by the era of the Great War to change Palmey society forever.
1. The Birth of Noireism: As Black immigration from abroad continued to accelerate, a muted discontent was building with the
status quo of Palmey politics. The United Freedom Congress remained the instrument of a largely White, Latino and Creole elite whose few Black members in Parliament were largely perceived to be token window-dressing and who—while professing the cause of universal freedom—still functionally tended to look down on the
“Gitcheys,” as the Black working class came to be known. Granted, it was not a kind of hostility remotely comparable to the entrenched and vicious institutional hostility of Jim Crow, but there was still a kind of glass-ceiling effect on Black Palmeys, especially in the political realm where the interlocking “funny-handshake brigades” of Prince Hall and English Freemasonry called the shots**. It was a proverbial fact of life... and an increasingly resented one.
(** Prince Hall Masonry was founded IOTL, and in this timeline too, as a Black-friendly alternative to White Masonry which would not countenance Black members. It dominated Liberian politics of our timeline in a parallel fashion to the way it dominates Palmey politics in this one, although the Palmey version is disproportionately ruled by Creoles. English Freemasonry remains exclusively White.)
DuBois' Chicuchatty Movement railed against this “Hacktey-Lanney elitism”
(“Hacktey” signified liberal nationalist Whites) from time to time, as would Booker T. Washington—another activist and educator who remained determinedly and defiantly American***—after his visits to the country (which he nevertheless hailed as a “remarkable achievement”). But the really potent opposition would come from Palmey disciples of the groundbreaking Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin, whose seminal
On the Equality of Human Races in 1885 was a great blast of the trumpet against the noxious so-called “scientific racism” of Comte de Gobineau, and became a commonly-seen volume in the hands of Palmey students. It shaped a generation of Black Nationalists in Palmera in ways that would not be fully appreciated until much later.
(*** Booker T. Washington is of course a very famous figure of American history. Here, with a portion of the African-American population beginning to drain out into Palmera, his historical profile is somewhat ironically enhanced. Even more wealthy White liberals feel comfortable supporting him as the beginning stages of the Great Migration out of the Southern states cut down on African-American migration into the North; it means that Black liberation remains a theoretical and abstract proposition for many of them, devoid of actual real-world interaction with Black people and the various fears, insecurities and misbehaviours attending real-life contact.)
Firmin was possessed of some then-radical notions. He pioneered the integration of studies of race with physical anthropology, and his was the first full throated academic defense of the proposition that traditional African religions like “voodoo” were not “superstition” or “witchcraft” but fully functional religions in their own right, with their own theology and moral framework and that were entitled to considerations absolutely equal to those of Christianity or any of the other “great faiths.” He was a formative influence on the great academician Cato Gray**** at the Hillsborough Institute, who founded the Palmey tradition of African Studies in the early Twentieth Century and tutored a generation of young nationalist minds; among them one Marcus Garvey, who attended his classes on a “support and elevation grant” from 1907 through 1910.
(**** Anténor Firmin's pioneering influence is as in OTL, except that it now has an added and much more prominent stage on which to play out. Cato Gray is a fictional figure but an earlier Palmey counterpart of IOTL historical figures like Melville Herskowitz – of whom an unnamed analogue will still exist in this timeline – who pioneered African Studies in our history. Garvey was a self-taught activist with little formal education IOTL; here he becomes a student activist.)
Figures like Firmin and Gray had a powerful influence on the Dustie youth of the era. The first Palmeran Equal Rights Leagues began to appear in the wake of the 1908 crushing of the Droverist movement. They acknowledged Ulysses Newbold's mistakes and those of his followers and they denounced socialism themselves, at least formally, but they continued to support trade unionism in their own way and even more significantly began to push for unrestricted access to the franchise—condemning in very strong terms what they were beginning to frankly call the Lanney establishment's racism—an effort that became a powerful part of the political arsenal of the Liberty & Justice Party to which most of them adhered. One such PERLer was a young Horace Cayton*****, who would go on to play an iconic role in the country's politics.
(***** Horace Cayton is technically a historical figure, but he's different enough here that he should effectively be considered an analogue. I can't resist the wonderful ring of the name, though.)
It was the beginning of a Dustie mass movement called
noireism, which would have profound effects on the culture and politics of the Union.
Noireism was the rallying cry of not a few great novelists and poets of the early Twentieth Century, and inspired foundational works of fiction like
Black Empire, an epic in its scope but a subtle and archly critical disquisition on Palmera's “secondary empire” and her pretensions to being the “Black Zion” by the novelist, poet, and one day Executive Magistrate Shadrack Cromwell******.
(****** OTL's Black Empire was a tongue-in-cheek pulp novel from a much later era by African-American conservative George Schuyler, lampooning the hypocrisies of the Black nationalism of his day [but also betraying a certain sympathy he may not have intended]. The fictional Shadrack Cromwell's effort shares the title but little else, it's a very different and more literary effort along the lines of someone like Zorah Neale Hurston. Noireism is an IOTL phenomenon that will exist in the “Harlem Renaissance” of this timeline too as the American counterpart of négritude.)
It was also the beginning of other, less salutary phenomena; for nationalism, as ever, had a dark side. Some disciples of Firmin were counted among the founders of the Nono Nemo Society (the “Godfather Nobody Society”), the self-appointed heirs of the Buffalo Soldiers of yore. It was a clandestine militia organization—in some opinions an outright terrorist organization—which took upon itself the responsibility of policing the Sutchey community in the wake of the bloody 1908 riots by the Free Workers' Parties, and which quickly accrued a radical following dedicated not just to promoting the rights of Black workers and political figures, but also aggressively terrorizing anyone they deemed not a part of the “true Black Zion,” among them Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Sutcheys, feminists and socialists of every description.
The “Nemoists,” prone to dressing in red robes inspired by African secret societies—and who infamously took to re-enacting the scandalous ritual murders that had bedevilled the Union Mercantile Company's operations overseas in Montserrado—quickly grew into a menacing plague that required a response from law enforcement+. After their early first flowering they seemed, by 1912, to have been driven back into the shadows after aggressive operations by the Secret Service, the Toneys and various police departments working in concert with both. But they had powerful connections and protectors, and their apparent eclipse concealed a base of support that continued to be dedicated to their mission, and that would come to exert a baleful influence across the Caribbean.
(+ Ritual murder was and is a real perennial IOTL issue in Liberia, of which “Montserrado” is the timeline's analogue. The red robes of the African secret societies herein mentioned do in fact look exactly like Klan robes save for the colour, and there are some theories IOTL that the Klan actually borrowed the trope – rather ironically – from Black secret societies. The “Nemoists” are of course the Palmey counterpart of the Klan.)
Both the light and dark sides of the new
noireist nationalism would have their day. But other forces were gathering, too, and preparing to show themselves on the stage of history.
2. Peanuts, Herbs & Religious Ferment: The Shakers—the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing—were a famous self-sufficient artisan movement of millenarian Christians who practised celibacy and frequently provided shelter and upbringings for orphans. Originally an American phenomenon, the Shaker communities of the United States began to die out with the post-Civil War burgeoning of industry and the advent of Federal laws that forbade control of adoption by religious groups.
The Black Shaker communities founded in Palmera in the 1840s – during the group's “Era of Manifestations,” their golden age of expansion and conversion – continued, however, to thrive and to proliferate through the Caribbean, especially the British Caribbean, focused on orchard agriculture and the growth of medicinal herbs. They were a respected but very small feature of the religious landscape; but by the late 19th and early 20th centuries these communities were becoming the nuclei of new religious movements that would take on a far larger place in the life and politics of Palmera and the Caribbean.
There were three parallel kinds of ferment at work. The first had to do with the legal, technological and commercial landscape; the second with questions of race, empire and colonialism and the search for just responses to the ills of the day; the third with questions of sacred inspiration and the emergence of fresh prophets and exotic religious ideas. All of these things were at work in religion all across the Caribbean, of course, but the relative prosperity and self-sufficiency of the Shaker communities gave them a unique (if miniature) stage on which to play out.
The famous Shaker village of New Gilead, in Santa Rosa county, was one such stage. The congregation of New Gilead carried out the original Shaker mission and theology faithfully, and made a tidy profit in their small citrus orchard. But a citrus tariff introduced in Washington to shore up the rising California citrus industry in the 1860s put pressure on their business from early on – it was the kind of headwind that favoured the growth of large producers – and when the “great freeze” of the early Nineties wiped out a year's worth of crops, some of the New Gilead Shakers made the decision to move south, where sunnier climes might obviate the dangers of sudden frosts. Those who remained worked to diversify and became early students of the famous botanist and “father of the peanut industry” George Washington Carver*, the head of Agriculture at the Hillsborough Institute. Several peanut sauce, dip and pesto recipes from the village in turn became staple products of the emerging Carver & Caldwell food products empire, with royalty payments on the products derived from those recipes becoming a major source of the village's income.
(* Much like the historical George Washington Carver, except he strikes out for Palmera instead of the Tuskegee Institute as he did in our timeline. Carver's work in crop diversification, farmer education and the many possible uses of the peanut is as in OTL, except that in Palmera he is also able to derive some profit from his inventions. Carver & Caldwell is a company he founds in partnership with a fictional Palmey counterpart, capitalized by John Merrick's brokerage in Daltonville.)
By 1914, New Gilead had found fresh prosperity. The village even sported its own Patterson** motor wagon. Even in the early stages of this process, village fathers like Esek Dyer wrote of their worries that entering onto this larger stage of investment and profit could corrupt the community's spiritual foundations; a concern that in some views was ultimately borne out, for arguably New Gilead's spiritual prestige began to deteriorate from this point even as its material prosperity grew. The emigrants from New Gilead, meanwhile, encountered far different temptations and challenges.
(** C.R. Patterson was an African-American pioneer in the automotive industry in the late 19th century IOTL. Here he has left a small Patterson Motor Company of his own, being run by his son Taliaferro “Tally” Patterson – a fictional counterpart of his IOTL son Frederick. The Patterson name will be to Palmera's small but doughty motor car industry what the Ford name is to the far larger American one.)
One group of New Gilead emigrants wound up purchasing land in Jamaica and founding the village of Revelation in Portland parish in 1896. They were unpleasantly surprised by the politics of the country they arrived in – a place where colour prejudice and racism were vastly more prominent and blatant than in Palmera – and elected not only to be farmers (they started out farming hemp and marijuana, which were still internationally legal crops), but to become a centre of education and resistance for Black Jamaicans.
It was a mission that triggered a theological transformation, for the pioneers of Revelation developed an interest in other kinds of Christianity than Shakerism – in particular that of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, for the Ethiopian battle against colonialism was capturing the Black imagination – and began to lose their rigidity about celibacy, owing to the relatively remote character of their community. Revelation would eventually become the focal point of a new religion, Yohannism***, that combined Shakerism, Orthodoxy, a transcendental Black nationalism and a commitment to pacifistic virtue, and what some other groups thought was an idolatrous “worship” of the person of Emperor Yohannes V and his line. The pieces of this new faith were already growing visible by 1914.
(*** Ras Mengesha Yohannes, a.k.a. Yohannes V, takes Ras Tafari Makonnen's place as an inspiration for anti-colonial and anti-Eurocentric sentiment in this timeline. The new faith's Shaker roots and inspiration makes it different in many details from Rastafarianism, but it is this timeline's analogue.)
A stranger journey yet was in store for the group of New Gilead emigrants led by Sawney Hustus, who later took the name Solomon ben Solomon. Sawney was a strange young man, a visionary in the true sense who experienced powerful sacred ecstasies, received visits from angels of God and saw visions of the future. He was a prophet, in other words, and one around whom a fresh movement very different from Shakerism – which he soon came to abjure as an error – began to accrue when he arrived in Eleutheria.
Some of Hustus' message was about clear ills of the day: the modernizing world and the way it alienated men from Biblical values, the growing clouds of war on the horizon which would be a mechanized and “Satanic” war more destructive than ever before, the need for a return to simplicity and virtue and a wholesome vegetarian diet. Other parts of it made the authorities nervous: after a few years in Eleutheria he began to proclaim that Palmera was the true Israel, that white skin was the mark of Cain, that polygamy was the natural state of marriage, that the Tribulation had already begun and the anti-Christ was upon the world and that he and his followers were preparing to lead “righteous spiritual combat” against him. His followers began to dress in white robes and turbans and call themselves the Temple, and he finally took the name Solomon ben Solomon in 1902.
He was regarded as an eccentric madman and grifter by most of those outside his religion; but it was his refusal to pay taxes on the commercial endeavours of his followers that eventually led the authorities to attempt to arrest him. He fled to British Guiana in 1904 where he and his followers settled at the town of Spring Garden, comprising what they officially called the Israelite Church of the Tribulation. The Church wouldn't remain in isolation forever, and continued to attract youth from across the Caribbean during the years leading up to the Great War****.
(**** This group is the inspiration for the cult that appears in the Phineas Plumb novels – although fictionalized in that “Plumb” back-dates them to coincide with the Jamaica Exhibition – and is basically the Palmey answer to Mormonism, reflecting many of the same obsessions but from a Black perspective as the Latter Day Saints movement. They are also a nod to the Black Hebrew Israelites of OTL – who traced their earliest foundations to Kansas in 1896 – to which they are a closely parallel phenomenon. The Tribulationists are not the only group of Israelites in Palmera but they will eventually become the most prominent, even as their religion mellows from its early pattern of extremism.)
Religion in general was going through the confrontation with modernity that bedevilled these three very different stories originating in New Gilead. These confrontations, anxieties, and passions—and in some cases these specific groups—would come to play an enormous role in what followed.
3. Reach for the Skies (Anarchism, Feminism & Solidarity): Droverism, the Palmey variant of socialism, had always had different wings—a “right wing” that despite its critique of property and slavery was proud of its gradualism and pacifism and worked to set an example that would encourage change “in collaborative fashion” with the power centres of society, and a “left wing” (much smaller) that didn't hesitate to advocate strike actions or even violence. Leadership of both wings found themselves imprisoned or exiled alongside the questionably-socialist Free Workers' Party agitators in the Forsyth government's infamous crackdown of 1908 (the so-called July Crisis, later nicknamed the “Bolt From Above”), a uniformity of fate that discredited the last vestiges of the “collaborative” approach and began to transform and energise a new progressive generation. The momentum of the future belonged to this new generation of activists—especially student activists—who drew their inspirations from more radical doctrines, and in the years leading up to the Great War their most visible and rock-ribbed representatives would be feminist activists.
Feminism already had a long and storied history in Palmera. The “widows and spinsters” provision that gave a subset of women the vote early in the Home Rule era didn't happen by itself; it had been tirelessly pressed for as a kind of transitional demand by the Interfaith Christian Women's Society under the leadership of Oronooke Devon, precursors of the Allied Mothers of the Nation. The ICWS also pressed for women's rights to property and general suffrage and founded several famous women's colleges, including the Etonia College where generations of famous women were educated. The Allied Mothers of the Nation, founded in the 1880s, had pressed the causes of anti-racism, anti-imperialism and the rights of working women, and counted among their members such famous figures as Joanna Champlin – the so-called “Bethlehem Nightingale” who revolutionized battlefield medicine – and Mina Knowland, who championed co-education of men and women and became the first woman enrolled at Frankham College in 1886. It was by her example and arguments and those of women like her that the Hillsborough Institute had a “women's annex” from the day it opened its doors.
The basic framework of Palmey feminism, however, had hitherto mostly been within the context of nationalism and religion, and had conspicuously exploited certain “traditional” roles of women to make its gains (the name “Allied
Mothers of the Nation” spoke for itself in this regard). It had been only imperfectly integrated with the socialism of the Drovers, which had been a manly enterprise—and though it had supported certain causes in common with the feminists, it had in practice been an inconsistent ally—whose male leadership had looked distinctly askance at foreign female anarchists like Emma Goldman. The new feminism began to challenge these frameworks, to seek new territory, to reject the relative parochialism of Droverism and to take up new causes. Its most famous representatives were a group of women who graduated from Frankham College in or just after the year of the July Crisis; they would go on to be called the Frankham Five* and would be heroines to men and women alike on the Palmey left in the decades to come.
(* The “Frankham Five” are all fictional figures, but some of them are analogues of historical personages, or their ideological commitments sometimes analogues of historical movements.)
The Frankham Five represented the full spectrum of ideologies that would come to identify the new left:
- Rebekah Halder and Violet Grant came from radically different backgrounds: Halder was the daughter of a moderately wealthy Jewish family who had done charitable work for the poor through her faith—though notably without preaching—before attending university, while Grant came of Sutchey stock from the meanest of Daltonville's mean streets. Both were anarchists, disciples of Bakunin and Goldman, and ardent internationalists who consistently championed women's rights to birth control, women's freedom from the “slave roles of Wife and Mother” more generally, supported the rights of working people in general and particularly of working women—specifically including sex workers—criticized the violence of state power, convict labour and “coolie-ism,” regarded cross-racial solidarity as a necessity of justice, and rejected the “beauty industry” and the violence of capitalist fashion on women's bodies (they pointedly dressed in men's clothes to underscore this criticism). They were also an openly lesbian couple who could fairly be called the country's first gay rights activists, or at least its first gay icons**.
(** They're comparable to figures from OTL like Emma Goldman and Audre Lorde – though Lorde hails from a later time period in our history, and the appearance of figures similar to her this early reflects the foundational achievements of Palmey feminists, who have had access to considerably more privilege in this timeline. Fair cop: there's also a bit of autobiographical insertion here, because the couple is based more than a little on a couple I personally know. But you can bracket that out if you prefer using the prior rationales.)
- Benebah “Bennie” Kelty hailed from one of Palmera's countless thousands of small hamlets, the daughter of rice farmers, and advocated a specifically Black internationalist anarchism tailored to the concerns of Black people in Palmera and across the world. She shared many of Halder's and Grant's beliefs—though not all of them, once remarking that she thought the pair sometimes crossed the line into being overtly hostile to men (“Although,” she added wryly, “Lord knows that men have often enough given them cause”)—and often joined them in the forefront of anarchist organizing. In later years she was a pen pal of noted British left feminist Cybele Pankhurst*** and would invite her several times to speak in Palmera.
(*** Cybele Pankhurst is an analogue of the famous feminist Sylvia Pankhurst from this era. Kelty's “Black anarchism” is similar to a movement that found its voice in a later period of American history IOTL.)
- Nelly Coleman was a Dustie, the mixed Cherokee and African-American daughter of a Texas sharecropper who had made the arduous, dangerous trek to Palmera in a small boat with the aid of his local Palmyran Friendship Society in the 1890s, determined that his children would not grow up attending segregated schools****. She was naturally brilliant and something of a child prodigy, just seventeen years of age when she graduated from Frankham in 1909; but though she studied law at her father's behest, her true passion was for flying. She would become the first woman in Palmera to hold a pilot's license, attaining celebrity as a civilian aviator and show flyer as early as 1912, and was the motive force in organizing the first Palmeran Women's Aviator Association. Influenced by Marxism, although she would never actually describe herself as a Marxist, she was fiercely pro-union, anti-imperialist and anti-war, and would go on to become a major figure in the union solidarity movement and a famous advocate of the Industrial Workers of the World—nicknamed “Wobbly Nell”— who began to make inroads in Palmera as the country's industrial infrastructure accelerated.
(**** In her background and her achievements as an aviator, she's an analogue of Bessie Coleman, the first African-American female aviator in our timeline, though “Wobbly Nell” is very different in many ways and will enjoy both a longer lifespan and a higher profile.)
- Emma Shandy was the most committed Marxist of the group and, having witnessed how harsh the “coolie labour” section of the country's agricultural system could be firsthand—her father came to the country as an indentured worker in the 1880s and served in the National Militia Service during the Spanish Crisis in 1897*****—was an ardent advocate of the collectivization of agriculture and how collective community could transform the national soul. Despite her Marxism, she rejected Karl Marx's more authoritarian ideas and in some ways was the most “traditionalist” of the Frankham Five, proud of what Palmera had achieved in the cause of Black liberation (her mother was a former sharecropper who had fled the rise of Jim Crow), committed to the freedom Palmera promised for all races and dedicated to making that freedom fuller and fairer for all. She famously said “I do love Jack, for all his faults; I just want him to love all of his children back.”****** She was ultimately convinced that socialism could be reconciled with the mission of the Black Zion and she would become a pioneer of model collective communities in much the same way Ulysses Newbold had been in his day.
(***** The Spanish Crisis refers to an international crisis in 1897—one of the few grand actions of the Belle Epoque where our spy novelist “Phineas Plumb” did not insert himself—where the Spanish government was caught by Palmera's Secret Service trying to stir up rebellion in Cuba. Palmera informed the American government, which mounted a blockade of Spanish ships to the island and eventually compelled Spain to relinquish her remaining holdings in the Caribbean, as well as the Philippines, in order to avoid all-out-war.)
(****** “Jack” is a reference to Jack Freedom, a kind of symbol of the national soul not unlike Uncle Sam in the United States or John Bull in England; this archetype of “freedom's Union” was an ethnically-indeterminate and muscular young pioneer--usually depicted wielding or holding either a hammer, a machete or a rifle--who reflected the Creole elite's vision of the country's strengths. Shandy is here advocating a movement analogous to the kibbutz movement of our history.)
The Five were all close friends and in the early years of their activism and fame would support each others' efforts unstintingly. They were not the only women of their kind, just the most famous examples of a left that was rising swiftly from the ashes of the Droverist movement to make its own mark on society. At this early stage their full impact was a long way from being felt, and though they were already the subjects of vociferous controversy, they were arguably not taken too seriously yet by Palmey officialdom--perhaps partly on account of their sex--which left them fairly free to operate until the time the Great War came lurching over the horizon.
