As I work on the last subsection of HoH Pt. 1, please enjoy a treat from @HowAboutThisForAName -- a map! It's a pleasure to have someone with actual design skills take pity on my maplessness and he's produced a lovely map of the Union in 1914 to which he added a few of his own ideas for town names, too. Thanks mate! Check it out at the threadmark for Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot.
Palmera (An African Resettlement AH)
You can now see the threadmark for "The Hinge of History, Pt. 1" to read about the last of the "unseen pressures" of the early Twentieth Century, telling the tale of a new generation of leftist and particularly feminist activism through the lens of the "Frankham Five." That's it for prelude; the new chapter coming soon will cover the war itself.
In case you haven't figured out from all the times I hit the "like" button, I'm really enjoying this timeline. I love the "Caribbean" Florida, the depth of cultural and linguistic detail, the plausible and well-imagined social conflicts - this is a true heterotopia and an amazing wealth of detail in just a few posts. I look forward to more.
Thanks so much for the interest! It means a lot coming from the author of that amazing Malê timeline. If this one comes even close to measuring up I'll consider myself well happy.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2
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.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
To come in the timeline:
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, Pt. 2 (“We Shall Do What Must Be Done”): Prime Minister Isaac Forsyth, “Big Ike” as he was commonly known, was as famous for his larger-than-life personality as he was for his outsized twenty-one-stone frame. He had a passion for horse racing and came north to take his vacations during the National Cup Festival at Hillsborough, held at the first-class Fenhalloway Park just outside the city limits. Aside from his fondness for the occasional flutter, it was an opportunity to burnish his salty man-of-the-people image (Forsyth could often be seen with doubles* in one hand and a beer in the other as his booming laugh filled the ministerial box), and to remind people of his commitment to the ideals of the Black Zion. After all, many of the best racers on the track were ex-American jockeys whose jobs in segregated America had evaporated, and it was Forsyth who had championed the Racing Corporations Act that was shoring up and growing their industry in Palmera.
Of course, it was also a chance to occasionally to take a public victory lap of his own, for example in the wake of having just won his second government with a majority mandate (notwithstanding that the opposing party had just taken control of the Council of Executive Magistrates for the first time, which Big Ike tended to wave off as a minor detail). It was particularly sweet on the sunny twelfth of July in 1914 to be celebrating that victory while watching celebrity jockey Jimmy Winkfield on Navigator, who'd toured Russia and Europe after being effectively frozen out of the Kentucky Derby after three wins there, and whose coming to Palmera was a coup. The ministerial box was packed with notables keen to watch Big Ike cheer the great Winkfield to victory... and of course to attend one of Forsyth's legendary Nation Day fetes afterward, where champagne would flow instead of beer, fireworks would welcome in the latest anniversary of Home Rule, and the legendary “King of Ragtime” Scott Joplin was on the cards for entertainment**. It was one of those days, at least if you were in Forsyth's circle, when all had seemed right with the world.
In part this was because the world as a whole was breathing a sigh of relief after another near-miss with war in what seemed to be the ever-accelerating round of European crises. There had been sleepless nights in government palaces round the world when the word had first come that a Serbian assassin had tried for Austrian Prince Maximilian's life during a tour of Sarajevo. Thankfully, the assassin had failed.
The sighs of relief weren't just on account of the prospects of peace. The Prince was genuinely well-liked around the world in his own right for his liberality, charisma, sense of humour and adventuresome exploits. He'd explored jungles, hunted game and scaled mountains on four continents, was noted for having found time in all this to mount a capable reorganization and strengthening of the Austro-Hungarian navy (in which he'd served as a younger man), and was even rumoured to have once been approached by a coalition of Mexican conservatives and French diplomats to rule Mexico in a contemplated intervention in the Mexican civil wars of the middle 19th century (a mad-sounding rumour he always denied... though with a wistful twinkle in his eye at what might, perhaps, have been). His relationship with his elder brother the Emperor was cool by all accounts, but he still had his uses as a dignitary and a symbol of his house and his own miniature court at Trieste was a glittering centre of Belle Epoque high culture. He had clearly been thought to be the perfect choice as both show of force and olive branch to Austria's subjects in the Balkans.***
The Black Hand clearly hadn't agreed, or perhaps had feared that the strategy might work well enough to interfere with their own plans. The bomb that bounced off the hood of the prince's Daimler hadn't deterred the royal – famously intrepid even as an octogenarian – from continuing his tour. His courage or recklessness had very nearly cost him dearly when a backup assassin had caught sight of him thereafter and squeezed off a shot at him. The bullet struck his collarbone and for days afterwards it had been touch and go, since even for a younger man there was no guarantee of surviving such a wound. There had been general relief when the word came down on the fifth of July that Prince Max was recovering and was expected to pull through.
All was well... until the next crisis came along, anyway, but there was no point worrying about that. There was sabre-rattling from the Austrians, as one might expect, but it wasn't anticipated to amount to much. In fact at the very moment of the afternoon—just before Winkfield and Navigator were set to take to the track—when one of his functionaries brought the Prime Minister an urgent phone call, all the talk around him was of peace. One of his companions in the box, the noted citrus magnate and rising star of Palmey industry named Felix Gandel, had just returned from the opening of a symbolic Peace Palace in Belgium to which he'd been one of the benefactors. As Forsyth took the phone, Gandel was holding forth about his conversations with the great American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie**** and relating their agreement on how the sinews of business and trade and the general demands of rationality would force men of substance on every side to forgo anything so mad as a general war, and that the tribunals of the Peace Palace would tame crises and stabilize the European system. It was so obviously in everyone's interests that he couldn't see any other outcome.
Forsyth set down his beer and took the call. He was smiling when he took it; he wasn't smiling when he finished. His face ashen, he got up and excused himself and, to the considerable shock of his companions, left the box at speed. Big Ike never walked out on a race. Never, until now.
The reason was simple: the news had come in over the wire. Prince Max had taken a bad turn and had died in the small hours of the morning. The Black Hand had gotten their man after all.
1. “Jack Freedom Wants You!” Big Ike might have seemed frivolous about certain things, but war was never one of them. He'd served in the Third Border War as a younger man, had seen the Kitchener Camps firsthand. One of the primary reasons that the Militia had never been deployed en masse in foreign conflict—excepting the brief interlude of the Spanish Crisis, where they had at any rate not seen combat—was that figures like Forsyth had argued passionately against the proposition in Parliament. He couldn't pretend to anticipate the full horrors the coming war might have in store, but horrors he knew they would most certainly be.
For all that, he also knew that Palmera could not continue to aspire to being a “lion's cub” if she sat out the war. Her national pride and profile, which related directly toward her national survival, were at stake. As the July Crisis unfolded and war emerged with nightmarish rapidity—at least he would have the miserable consolation of knowing his own “July Crisis” would be thoroughly eclipsed in the pages of history—he promised stolidly to follow Britain's lead and urged Palmeys to be united in doing the same. When Britain declared war in August, Forsyth stood up in Parliament to declare – only a fraction shy of his usual ringing bravura – that “we shall do what must be done.” Perhaps it was less enthusiastic than Canada's cry of “ready, aye, ready!” but the action that followed was no less decisive.
The National Conscription Act of the Seven Year's War days had always been unevenly and somewhat lackadaisically enforced; now it became serious business and Forsyth pressed magistrates hard to treat draft-dodging as a crime to the maximal extent the law allowed. He was sure that when the British saw the first Palmey regiments in action, they would demand more, and he didn't want the stick of the courts to be the only incentive to sign up. Palmera needed to mobilize manpower from her largest city to her smallest hamlet as never before, and could leave nothing to chance. The “lion's cub” needed, as never before, to roar.
An Expeditionary wing of the National Militia Service was formed in haste, and before the month of July was out, Forsyth was propagandizing urgently to get young men to volunteer instead of waiting for their draft card to appear in the mail. The Dustie painter Horace Pippin* found his first steady work as an artist for the Service, producing stark images of Jack Freedom, rifle in hand, demanding solidarity from all his children. “Jack Freedom Wants You!” was the cry of the day, along with such slogans as “When the Nation Calls... Her Sons Will Answer!” and “God Save the King!” and “The Hun Brute Rampages – Enlist!” Posters and handbills went out in a blizzard across the nation and summoned forth a response that almost swamped the militia's processing offices; young Palmey men were enthusiastic, almost disturbingly so, about the chance to show the world their nation's mettle.
The Expeditionary Service wasn't just preparing to go to Europe, or North Africa, or wherever in the main theatre of the war they might be called. They were also preparing to defend the Caribbean in the event the war should come home to Palmera herself, or that the Germans should have designs in the Western hemisphere. They thus mustered up three regiments, one designated for trans-Atlantic service – the First Expeditionary Regiment – another designated for service in the “near abroad,” the Second Expeditionary Regiment, and the Third a reserve. The“firster” and “seconder” experiences of the Great War would be drastically different. The reservists, or “thirders,” at first despaired of ever seeing action, while the “regulars” who continued to serve on the home front would have another experience again. In officers' (and eventually soldiers') parlance they came to be “Alfas,” “Bravos,” “Charlies” and “Deltas.”
The further one's assignment was from at least the prospect of fighting on a European front, the less prestige it held. The gulf swiftly became bitter enough to alienate family members from one another, as was born witness by the letter that one young recruit, Frank Heyland from the tiny hamlet of Quamina (in Kingsland county), sent to his grandmother:
“Dearest Ajee**,
“I hope you are well. We are all bearing up fine here and eager to be in the fight. Tustenuggee*** is a harsh place but I am very inspired by the severity and bravery of our training officers who I am sure are doing the best they can to prepare us to face up manfully in the trials to come. I am eating well and the camp is suprisingly [sic] healthful, and I am feeling more vigorous than ever. I suppose when I come home that I shall trouble you even more than I have ever done with my runnings-about!
“Jack is not speaking to me and is in pretty persistant [sic] sulks. Its [sic] a shame. I think it is on account of his having been assigned the Second Force instead of the First which has been my fortune. I hope he comes round but if the truth be told I am glad he shall be here in the Sunny Nation whilest [sic] I go into the maw of the Hun. The prospect seemed almost romantic when we enlisted but the closer we come to shipping out the darker my thoughts grow. I should like Jack to be spared whatever is to come although my squad-mates are all capitol [sic] fellows and I am reassured that they will stand beside me through whatever valleys of darkness we may encounter.
“I wanted not to speak of such things in this letter but I do not suppose you have any allusions [sic]. You never did. At any rate I know that you are proud of us for doing our duty. I think perhaps we may never see fighting at all as it happens for the Brits and the Canucks are already making a fine brest [sic] of it and gave the Hun a good pasting at Vimy as you have probably heard.
“I am getting along well with my Enfield and feel we shall be fast friends by the end of the buisness [sic]. I do miss little Cassie and do tell her I hope she is keeping up with her letters and that I would very much like to hear her reade [sic] some verses when I am back again. Mister McKay's poetry has been speaking to me of late and I am sure you know the one****. Maybe do not have her read that but some of his verses about the sun on the waters. I am confidant [sic] you know best.
“I must get about things as it is about time for dinner. Until next time Ajee. Write back soon and know that if the Hun ever does come over the horizon in the near abroad or the far one that the Heyland boys stand reddy [sic] to give them what for! Lay a flower for Mama for us. I will write again soon.
“Your loving grandson,
“Frank”
Frank Heyland would never see home again after he shipped out. Most of the First Regiment never did.
2. The Price of a Vineyard: It wasn't just from Palmera that men of the region came to answer the call to war. They came from points across the Caribbean, too, forming up at Tustenuggee by pre-arrangement with the British War Office, and a full British West Indies Regiment would ship out alongside the First Expeditionary Regiment in November of 1914, under the joint command of Palmera's Colonel Tapley Pendergrass and Colonel Jardine Hopewell from Jamaica. Pendergrass was de facto senior of the pair and would effectively control the two regiments as a combined force.
He was a glamourous looking Lanney, a solid old Service hand and one of those curious individuals who seemed never to age visibly past a certain point (for all that he was sixty you wouldn't put him a day over forty). Mainly he was thought qualified for the duty on account of having been a freebooter in his younger days – legend had it he had met his wife, and most such tale-spinners described her as his “beautiful White wife,” while raiding pirate ships in the Sea of China* – and thus having seen actual combat. Saving his wife, who was deceased now, Pendergrass didn't view that era of his life with the romanticism his men did; since joining the Service he'd come to regard mercenaries as mostly vicious, shameful curs and was ashamed to have been one of them. But his journeys had at least prepared him for one reality that his men were about to face: the full force of European racism.
There were years of high-level lobbying by Palmey officials behind the fact that Britain's War Office had called on Palmera and the West Indies at all. Most of the British bureaucracy of the day was opposed to the use of Black soldiers in any capacity, and had only agreed to it because the King – owing to an old friendship with Micajah Dalton, who appealed to him quietly as all the behind-the-scenes bargaining played out – had personally interceded. Even thus, Pendergrass had been privately briefed before embarking that it was likely the British would try to push his men into support and labour roles; when Palmera's multiracial First Expeditionary arrived, and the mostly-black British West Indies Regiment beside them, getting into the fight at all would be the first fight they faced.**
In truth just getting a tent proved a challenge. Hundreds of the troops came within a whisker of dying of exposure at Sussex; Pendergrass had to raise Hell at the highest levels of command to avert the disaster***. It was hard to say whether it was good fortune or ill that this attracted the attention of an old “friend” of Palmera, Herbert Lord Kitchener, now the Secretary of State for War; alerted to their plight, he not only vouched for the Palmeys' fighting spirit and leadership, but also suggested their force as a participant in a scheme he had in mind for “opening up” the war.
The Western front had already become an infamous meat-grinder. There were two competing schemes for launching an assault on Turkey that would essentially flank the Central powers and hopefully produce an Arab revolt into the bargain. One involved an assault on Constantinople through the Dardanelles; while Kitchener's scheme suggested a landing in Syria at Alexandretta. The French eventually refused the Syrian option—nervous at the prospect of having British troops landing and fighting in their sphere of influence—and a direct assault on the Turkish capital had tantalizing war-winning potential. The end result, after a massive British naval task force failed to force the straits on its own, was the Palmera and West Indian contingent being joined to a combined force of Brits, ANZACS, French colonials and Indians in an amphibious landing at Gallipoli****.
The Palmeys and the West Indians found themselves in the fight directly as part of the landing force at Cape Helles—proving their bravery and mettle to everyone's satisfaction in short order—but the assault stalled due to indecisiveness up the chain of command, giving the Turks time to rally the defense. The grinding trench warfare that characterized almost every front of the war began.
By the time the August offensive came, there was no longer any question of the Palmeys and West Indians having to win anyone's respect. They fought for months beside British and French colonial troops who had learned to rely on their bravery; men of every colour dug the same trenches, sang the same songs, went over the top together. It was a brotherhood forged at an awful price in blood and fire, and when the order came to go over the top once more in a “diversionary action” for the main force at Sari Bair, it would be among the most lethal and futile actions of the entire war. The First Expeditionary Regiment was virtually destroyed as a fighting force when it was enfiladed by Turkish machine guns, and the British West Indies Regiment was decimated, Col. Hopewell falling along with his men. The vineyard was the only piece of territory they managed to gain in exchange.
Pendergrass left Gallipoli a shell-shocked and broken man, haunted forever after by how eager he'd been to get his boys into the fight, by survivor's guilt and by a dark suspicion that British commanders held his men's lives cheaper than White men's. “Cape Hell,” as it came to be known, claimed the lives of over 3,500 of the four thousand officers and men who'd embarked from Palmera*****, most of the remainder being evacuated due to sickness. More than half of the British West Indies Regiment was killed or wounded.
Through this horror the men of Palmera and the Caribbean had earned their place on the front lines; everyone said it even as reservists were being called up to join what was reformed into the Combined Expedition Force of Palmera and the British West Indies (known as the Combos for short). The War Office renounced limits on their numbers, and Combo regiments would go on to fight with distinction on the Western front and in the Middle East. In all nearly a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, sailors and aviators from Palmera, and another thirty thousand men from across the Caribbean, would serve in the Great War by the time it was done+. More than half of them were killed, wounded or captured; Black prisoners of war were almost immediately executed or put to forced labour.
3. The Haitian Incident, a.k.a. The Sixty-Minute War: In the view of the Forsyth government, the sanguinary sacrifices in the far-off theatres of the Great War were heartbreaking -- “Big Ike” himself aged dramatically in the course of it as guilt weighed on him for having fought for his country's place at that blood-soaked dinner table – but necessary, however terrible, as an exercise in staking an irrevocable place for the nation on the world stage. To be sure this reasoning would come to attract derision from some quarters after the war's end, but at the time it was understood and supported in a visceral way—to varying extents—by the thousands upon thousands of reservists, conscripts and fresh recruits alike who would go on to serve. The “Alfas” and the “Charlies” and eventually the “Combos” were buying Palmera's future in the global order at the price of their own lives.
Arguably, though, it was events in the Western Hemisphere, especially across the northern border in the Marches, and in the Caribbean and the Gulf that were more directly crucial to the nation's security. The so-called “seconders” or “Bravos” who came to serve in this theatre as part of what initially was called the Second Expeditionary Regiment, and which eventually became the Second Expeditionary Force, were exiled from what even Palmeys saw as the main stage of history but would take part in a drama that would come closer to bringing direct war down on the country's head than anything happening in Europe.
Great “Scares” would sweep both Palmera and America during the period of the Great War. In America, easily the worst of these was the “Red Scare” which came in late 1917 with the November Revolution in Russia. The Bear had already been pulled from the War by the prior February Revolution that had ousted the Tsar—who would seek refuge along with his family in Britain, but be denied as continued turmoil was marching toward a Communist revolution under the leadership of Maxim Kamenev, also known as “Argunin”—but it was Kamenev's Bolshevik revolutionaries, co-led by even more sinister figures like Nikolai Narodin, who stirred the true sensation, leading to hysterias and notions of “Reds under the bed” across the States even before the war's end, particularly due to vigorous anti-war agitation by anarchists of the IWW. It was in response to this that President George Howe's government eventually championed a Sedition Act that deported socialists, anarchists, terrorists and ideological dissidents with remarkably little discernment among them come 1918.*
The Red Scare would cut no similar figure in Palmera. To be sure, the Jucker government deplored the Communist Revolution when it came, was sympathetic to the Tsar's plight—in fact as an old partner in the Ethiopian Wars it was eventually Palmera who would extend him asylum, controversially and semi-sensationally, when all the European candidates had turned him down**—was as resolutely anti-socialist as ever and was vigilant about the prospect of anarchist terrorists on its own shores, of whom it arrested not a few during the war years. But there were no mass expulsions or exiles, as the common wisdom in Forsyth's government was that the famous “Bolt From Above” had pulled the teeth of socialist revolutionary elements years before, and antiwar sentiment among Palmera's workers—especially in the burgeoning industrial sector, which had the war to thank for its growth—was far from being at threatening levels. The event that provoked a renewal and updating of the nation's own sedition laws with the Sedition and Revolution Act in 1916 thus had nothing to do with communists in far-off Russia; it had to do with the Klan Scare that began in 1915 and that would effectively persist for at least another decade and a half.
The re-emergence of the Klan didn't occasion much immediate note outside the Marcher states in America, at least not at first. On the other hand, the Klan propaganda film “Birth of a Nation” was seen as a shot across the bow in Palmera, the signal flare of a resurgent nightmare that had been thought dead a generation ago. To be sure, it was not as if the racial environment in the States after Jim Crow (or for that matter before it) had been particularly conducive of optimism to begin with; many Dusties had come to the country fleeing this race riot or that, the most recent spectacular example being Atlanta in 1906. But the Klan represented White violence, and the threat of White supremacist agitation among the Sutcheys of Palmera, like nothing else did.
“Birth of a Nation” quickly became the first film to be outright banned in Palmera, on national security grounds (a ban that would be contested by some civil libertarians, even some Black civil libertarians, but very few and to little avail in the short term). The Forsyth government camouflaged this fact to a limited extent by producing its own propaganda film under the same name—in point of fact the nation's first feature-length major film, directed by the seminal Dustie novelist and filmmaker Oscar Devereaux—lionizing the Servicemen of the Third Border War as part of the recruiting effort for the present one.*** Even as this seemingly-minor drama of the arts was playing out, however, the Klan Scare would motivate the government to perhaps the riskiest political action any government of the nation had ever attempted.
Haiti had been a simmering pressure point of relations with the great Goliath in the north for years. The States was increasingly taking a maximal view of the Monroe Doctrine, out of a genuine interest in stability but also in no small part with a view to enhancing its military and commercial prospects throughout the Hemisphere, and Haiti—as a desirable naval base and centre of trading opportunity—was increasingly a target from the latter 19th century into the present one. Palmey companies also sought opportunities in Haiti, but as a country outside the original British sphere of influence their participation in the Haitian market was resented by American businessmen.
This involvement was suffered grudgingly because close relationships between Palmey officialdom and the tiny but economically powerful community of Haitian-Germanic creoles—forged in the old Dalton days—had enabled Palmera to talk their counterparts in the troubled Haiti out of floating high-interest loans to competing revolutionary political factions on more than one occasion, thus stabilising the country (at least somewhat) for business from all nations; the Haitian Germans had been compensated by corresponding business opportunities in Palmera herself. On the other hand, loans from Palmera had also been successful in staving off an American consortium's attempt to outright buy Haiti's national bank and treasury in 1910, which Forsyth had claimed was an “unanticipated outcome” but which some parties in Washington felt certain was deliberate sabotage****.
In truth it probably was deliberate sabotage. The Secret Service was active in Haiti, seeing in it a primary theatre of national interest not just on commercial grounds but also on Black Zion grounds; however complicated relations with Haiti might be, however superior Palmey attitudes might have been, nobody in the Touladi was in any doubt that an American occupation in Haiti would be carried out by White troops hailing mostly from Marcher states, with results almost certain to be sinister and disastrous. It would amount, in some minds—including Forsyth's—to simply letting the Klan occupy the island*****. On the other hand, Palmera officially retained a posture of “cooperation in mutual interest” with the States, which made defending Haiti's continued self-determination, and staving off the prospect of a puppet dictator who might favour American business interests and extirpate their Palmey counterparts, a difficult prospect indeed after the advent of war with Germany.
Sure enough, Howe's administration in Washington began making noises immediately upon the advent of the Great War about the likelihood that the Haitian-Germanic community was wholly controlled by Germany. The Touladi thought this claim to be patently absurd—no such ties showed up in their intelligence reports and the general feeling was that Haiti's German creoles were loyal largely to themselves—but there was no point protesting to Washington about it, as the idea was clearly pretext, designed to provide a casus belli for an invasion and occupation long bruited about in American officialdom. The Haiti Question loomed every bit as large in Palmera's foreign policy calculus as the Great War itself did, as the country could ill afford to be cut out from the Haitian trade (or that of the nearby Dominican Republic, also sure to happen) if it hoped to continue being able to participate in affairs further abroad. Something had to be done.
And yet... the prospect of Doing Something was a fearsome one. Palmera had never before put her toe, militarily speaking, across the lines drawn by the Monroe Doctrine, and not doing so was one of the pillars of national survival. Testing Washington's resolve in this way amounted, in many opinions, to an act of madness; it was better to have to do without the gold mines in the highlands of Hispaniola than to take such a risk. Still, it was a virtual certainty that acting unopposed, the Howe administration could quickly bring about a takeover of the little island nation. Palmera was already sending her sons into battle for national credibility in Europe; how could she still claim such credibility if she were impotent in the Caribbean?
In July of 1915, Haiti was quite suddenly racked by an anti-German revolt. It brought to power Leonaldo Hipolyte, who tried to seize the assets of the Haitian-German creole families and moved to expel... well, it was not clear quite who else he moved to expel. The Palmey story was that he had vowed to drive out both American and Palmey traders in the country and to nationalize their holdings. In response to this threat, the Second Expeditionary Regiment swung into action—almost as if they'd been pre-alerted to the coup—storming Port-au-Prince and deposing Hipolyte so swiftly that the resulting conflict was called the Sixty-Minute War.****** Isaac Forsyth telephoned Washington to inform President Howe of the action and that he had, as ever, acted to preserve the mutual interests of the “old and friendly American-Palmeran partnership.” He did so the day after it was already a fait accompli.
Was the anti-German revolt really ginned up by a Touladi playing both sides as its own pretext for preempting an American invasion? Howe certainly thought so, and was furious. American newspapers covered the “Haitian Incident” sensationally, calling it a betrayal of the Monroe Doctrine and American rights on the island, a thumbing of the nose by an “upstart Negro dominion hiding under Britain's skirts.” Factions inside the White House demanded action against the “Nigger Nation,” as one of them infamously described the Palmeys+. Tensions rose amid the very real prospect of an American occupation not of Haiti, now, but of Palmera itself, as Howe raised holy Hell with Britain's foreign ministry, even directly calling on the Prime Minister himself and warning him ominously that British “interference” in the Western hemisphere, which to his mind the Palmey action clearly was and which any action to save her from the consequences would certainly be, would not be tolerated.
Forsyth, for his part, blithely reassured all and sundry that he had acted in American business interests as much as Palmera's, preserving both with the utmost possible speed, that he had no involvement whatever in the revolt of Hipolyte and that he had entirely meant to inform Howe before taking action, save that events had run ahead of anyone. He was also rumoured to have privately argued to the British foreign office that obviously Washington was a far likelier sponsor of the revolt than Palmera and that it had simply backfired, that Palmera had happened to be in a position to clean up the mess at no cost to the White House and was happy to do it, and that there was no reason to let this minor event interfere with the dominion's continued loyal support of the Allied war effort.
The crisis teetered on a brink for several weeks. It was the sacrifice of the First Expeditionary at Gallipoli that finally resolved it. The British frostily informed Howe that if he really was the champion of self-determination that he pretended to be, a cause to which it was pointedly noted that Palmera was already contributing more in terms of lives and sacrifice than America was, he should surely be more concerned with repelling Hun aggression than with feathering his nest in Haiti. It was left implied that this fact should shame the Americans, but it was not left implied that the British Empire would regretfully have to carefully consider the “special relationship” and possibly even regard Washington as effectively having entered the war on the side of the Germans if it attacked what was now deemed an important part of the Allied war effort.
Howe was reportedly even more outraged by this than by the “Haitian Incident” itself, as well he might have been... but he was also sensible of the larger eye of history, and that imperilling the “special relationship” with Britain and allowing himself to be painted a villain over little Haiti was far from worth it++. In the end, cooler heads prevailed. The White House tabled the question of “sure consequences for Palmera's meddling” for the future in the interests of amity with Britain and the common cause of defeating the Hun, and the shared bonds of sacrifice in the Great War would, in the event, put future prospects of Washington waging war on Palmera firmly in the ambit of fringe American elements thereafter.
The British message to Forsyth was reportedly four simple words: “Don't do it again.” Forsyth blithely reassured them even as Ovince Danastor—assuring one and all that he was certainly not the puppet of the Palmeran Secret Service that rumour held him to be—took power on the island. The Second Expeditionary evacuated the Haitian-German creoles for their safety (it was a small operation, there were only about two hundred of them+++) and remained to “secure a peaceful transition of power” as Palmey businessmen established a trust to supervise and protect the property and holdings of the German creoles until such time as they could “safely” return to them. Thenceforth it was competing communities of American and Palmeran expatriate businessmen and their families who would lead the ranks of Haiti's exploiters.
Palmera's role in the revolt and its aftermath remained obscure; Secret Service documents related to the Sixty-Minute War were deemed some of the nation's most sensitive, enough so that they remained classified until well after the turn of the following century. Palmera would go on to reinvigorate the “American partnership” by her role in exposing a German plot to lure America and Mexico into war with one another++++, and short-term official hostility receded. The long-term arrangement would amount to effective Americo-Palmeran condominium over Haiti under the cover of the Danastor regime.
Ill-feeling persisted, though; when the American Expeditionary Force joined the War in 1917, one Palmey regiment that arrived in France to serve alongside them found that the Americans had fortified their own barracks against them and forbade Palmeys to enter, even training their guns on them+++++. The Haitian Incident was cited for years after by lawmakers demanding tariffs on Palmeran goods. Rumours of Palmera's shadowy influence and spies fuelled anti-Palmey sentiment in the Marcher states as never before, arguably contributing—rather ironically—to the growth of the Klan.
In the Palmey press, though, the whole business was celebrated as one of Big Ike's most famous exploits, nothing less than the salvation of Haiti. As his deputy PM, Lemuel Bolton, would later put it in his memoirs: “Of all the mad gambles of those mad years, that Haitian business was by far Big Ike's maddest; may God bless him for it.”
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.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
To come in the timeline:
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, Pt. 2 (“We Shall Do What Must Be Done”): Prime Minister Isaac Forsyth, “Big Ike” as he was commonly known, was as famous for his larger-than-life personality as he was for his outsized twenty-one-stone frame. He had a passion for horse racing and came north to take his vacations during the National Cup Festival at Hillsborough, held at the first-class Fenhalloway Park just outside the city limits. Aside from his fondness for the occasional flutter, it was an opportunity to burnish his salty man-of-the-people image (Forsyth could often be seen with doubles* in one hand and a beer in the other as his booming laugh filled the ministerial box), and to remind people of his commitment to the ideals of the Black Zion. After all, many of the best racers on the track were ex-American jockeys whose jobs in segregated America had evaporated, and it was Forsyth who had championed the Racing Corporations Act that was shoring up and growing their industry in Palmera.
(* A sandwich of flatbread and channa – chickpea curry – which was iconic food-cart fare in the streets of Palmera. A humble man's food.)
Of course, it was also a chance to occasionally to take a public victory lap of his own, for example in the wake of having just won his second government with a majority mandate (notwithstanding that the opposing party had just taken control of the Council of Executive Magistrates for the first time, which Big Ike tended to wave off as a minor detail). It was particularly sweet on the sunny twelfth of July in 1914 to be celebrating that victory while watching celebrity jockey Jimmy Winkfield on Navigator, who'd toured Russia and Europe after being effectively frozen out of the Kentucky Derby after three wins there, and whose coming to Palmera was a coup. The ministerial box was packed with notables keen to watch Big Ike cheer the great Winkfield to victory... and of course to attend one of Forsyth's legendary Nation Day fetes afterward, where champagne would flow instead of beer, fireworks would welcome in the latest anniversary of Home Rule, and the legendary “King of Ragtime” Scott Joplin was on the cards for entertainment**. It was one of those days, at least if you were in Forsyth's circle, when all had seemed right with the world.
(** Winkfield and of course Joplin were famous Black historical figures of the day in our timeline, too; Winkfield's career trajectory is similar here except that he will now also become a horse-racing icon in Palmera, where Black jockeys will continue to dominate the tracks as they did prior to segregation in America. Owing to its connection to great American musical celebrities, “ragtime” swiftly became a species of high-culture fare in Palmera, at least among populist politicians like Big Ike Forsyth who saw it as the ideal combination of intricate musical brilliance and man-in-the-street appeal.)
In part this was because the world as a whole was breathing a sigh of relief after another near-miss with war in what seemed to be the ever-accelerating round of European crises. There had been sleepless nights in government palaces round the world when the word had first come that a Serbian assassin had tried for Austrian Prince Maximilian's life during a tour of Sarajevo. Thankfully, the assassin had failed.
The sighs of relief weren't just on account of the prospects of peace. The Prince was genuinely well-liked around the world in his own right for his liberality, charisma, sense of humour and adventuresome exploits. He'd explored jungles, hunted game and scaled mountains on four continents, was noted for having found time in all this to mount a capable reorganization and strengthening of the Austro-Hungarian navy (in which he'd served as a younger man), and was even rumoured to have once been approached by a coalition of Mexican conservatives and French diplomats to rule Mexico in a contemplated intervention in the Mexican civil wars of the middle 19th century (a mad-sounding rumour he always denied... though with a wistful twinkle in his eye at what might, perhaps, have been). His relationship with his elder brother the Emperor was cool by all accounts, but he still had his uses as a dignitary and a symbol of his house and his own miniature court at Trieste was a glittering centre of Belle Epoque high culture. He had clearly been thought to be the perfect choice as both show of force and olive branch to Austria's subjects in the Balkans.***
(*** Maximilian in our timeline of course really did, briefly, become Emperor of Mexico, dying when his French support evaporated. There is a minor “butterfly “at work here, not related directly to Palmera, in that France of this timeline was successfully talked out of trying to intervene in Mexico, persuaded that the Mexicans wouldn't stand for it; hence Prince Max's very different life here, which is mainly an excuse to slightly adjust the core figures in the opening drama of the Great War.)
The Black Hand clearly hadn't agreed, or perhaps had feared that the strategy might work well enough to interfere with their own plans. The bomb that bounced off the hood of the prince's Daimler hadn't deterred the royal – famously intrepid even as an octogenarian – from continuing his tour. His courage or recklessness had very nearly cost him dearly when a backup assassin had caught sight of him thereafter and squeezed off a shot at him. The bullet struck his collarbone and for days afterwards it had been touch and go, since even for a younger man there was no guarantee of surviving such a wound. There had been general relief when the word came down on the fifth of July that Prince Max was recovering and was expected to pull through.
All was well... until the next crisis came along, anyway, but there was no point worrying about that. There was sabre-rattling from the Austrians, as one might expect, but it wasn't anticipated to amount to much. In fact at the very moment of the afternoon—just before Winkfield and Navigator were set to take to the track—when one of his functionaries brought the Prime Minister an urgent phone call, all the talk around him was of peace. One of his companions in the box, the noted citrus magnate and rising star of Palmey industry named Felix Gandel, had just returned from the opening of a symbolic Peace Palace in Belgium to which he'd been one of the benefactors. As Forsyth took the phone, Gandel was holding forth about his conversations with the great American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie**** and relating their agreement on how the sinews of business and trade and the general demands of rationality would force men of substance on every side to forgo anything so mad as a general war, and that the tribunals of the Peace Palace would tame crises and stabilize the European system. It was so obviously in everyone's interests that he couldn't see any other outcome.
(**** Carnegie's anti-imperialist and pro-peace activism is just as prominent as in OTL. Gandel is a fictional figure who will be a similar icon of philanthropy for Palmera, notwithstanding the rather contradictory fact that his rising star in industry is related to the production of war materials; that he reconciles being an arms manufacturer and advocating peace at the same time is one of those remarkable feats of hypocrisy with which human history is replete.)
Forsyth set down his beer and took the call. He was smiling when he took it; he wasn't smiling when he finished. His face ashen, he got up and excused himself and, to the considerable shock of his companions, left the box at speed. Big Ike never walked out on a race. Never, until now.
The reason was simple: the news had come in over the wire. Prince Max had taken a bad turn and had died in the small hours of the morning. The Black Hand had gotten their man after all.
1. “Jack Freedom Wants You!” Big Ike might have seemed frivolous about certain things, but war was never one of them. He'd served in the Third Border War as a younger man, had seen the Kitchener Camps firsthand. One of the primary reasons that the Militia had never been deployed en masse in foreign conflict—excepting the brief interlude of the Spanish Crisis, where they had at any rate not seen combat—was that figures like Forsyth had argued passionately against the proposition in Parliament. He couldn't pretend to anticipate the full horrors the coming war might have in store, but horrors he knew they would most certainly be.
For all that, he also knew that Palmera could not continue to aspire to being a “lion's cub” if she sat out the war. Her national pride and profile, which related directly toward her national survival, were at stake. As the July Crisis unfolded and war emerged with nightmarish rapidity—at least he would have the miserable consolation of knowing his own “July Crisis” would be thoroughly eclipsed in the pages of history—he promised stolidly to follow Britain's lead and urged Palmeys to be united in doing the same. When Britain declared war in August, Forsyth stood up in Parliament to declare – only a fraction shy of his usual ringing bravura – that “we shall do what must be done.” Perhaps it was less enthusiastic than Canada's cry of “ready, aye, ready!” but the action that followed was no less decisive.
The National Conscription Act of the Seven Year's War days had always been unevenly and somewhat lackadaisically enforced; now it became serious business and Forsyth pressed magistrates hard to treat draft-dodging as a crime to the maximal extent the law allowed. He was sure that when the British saw the first Palmey regiments in action, they would demand more, and he didn't want the stick of the courts to be the only incentive to sign up. Palmera needed to mobilize manpower from her largest city to her smallest hamlet as never before, and could leave nothing to chance. The “lion's cub” needed, as never before, to roar.
An Expeditionary wing of the National Militia Service was formed in haste, and before the month of July was out, Forsyth was propagandizing urgently to get young men to volunteer instead of waiting for their draft card to appear in the mail. The Dustie painter Horace Pippin* found his first steady work as an artist for the Service, producing stark images of Jack Freedom, rifle in hand, demanding solidarity from all his children. “Jack Freedom Wants You!” was the cry of the day, along with such slogans as “When the Nation Calls... Her Sons Will Answer!” and “God Save the King!” and “The Hun Brute Rampages – Enlist!” Posters and handbills went out in a blizzard across the nation and summoned forth a response that almost swamped the militia's processing offices; young Palmey men were enthusiastic, almost disturbingly so, about the chance to show the world their nation's mettle.
(* He's an historical figure, although having grown up a Dustie in Palmera he had better access to schooling and his work is more polished in this timeline—more comparable to the work of Julius Bloch, who did a famous portrait of him IOTL—which depending on your preferences is either a gain or a loss.)
The Expeditionary Service wasn't just preparing to go to Europe, or North Africa, or wherever in the main theatre of the war they might be called. They were also preparing to defend the Caribbean in the event the war should come home to Palmera herself, or that the Germans should have designs in the Western hemisphere. They thus mustered up three regiments, one designated for trans-Atlantic service – the First Expeditionary Regiment – another designated for service in the “near abroad,” the Second Expeditionary Regiment, and the Third a reserve. The“firster” and “seconder” experiences of the Great War would be drastically different. The reservists, or “thirders,” at first despaired of ever seeing action, while the “regulars” who continued to serve on the home front would have another experience again. In officers' (and eventually soldiers') parlance they came to be “Alfas,” “Bravos,” “Charlies” and “Deltas.”
The further one's assignment was from at least the prospect of fighting on a European front, the less prestige it held. The gulf swiftly became bitter enough to alienate family members from one another, as was born witness by the letter that one young recruit, Frank Heyland from the tiny hamlet of Quamina (in Kingsland county), sent to his grandmother:
“Dearest Ajee**,
“I hope you are well. We are all bearing up fine here and eager to be in the fight. Tustenuggee*** is a harsh place but I am very inspired by the severity and bravery of our training officers who I am sure are doing the best they can to prepare us to face up manfully in the trials to come. I am eating well and the camp is suprisingly [sic] healthful, and I am feeling more vigorous than ever. I suppose when I come home that I shall trouble you even more than I have ever done with my runnings-about!
(** “Ajee” is a West Indian term for “grandmother.”)
(*** The Service's boot camp outside of Daltonville.)
(*** The Service's boot camp outside of Daltonville.)
“Jack is not speaking to me and is in pretty persistant [sic] sulks. Its [sic] a shame. I think it is on account of his having been assigned the Second Force instead of the First which has been my fortune. I hope he comes round but if the truth be told I am glad he shall be here in the Sunny Nation whilest [sic] I go into the maw of the Hun. The prospect seemed almost romantic when we enlisted but the closer we come to shipping out the darker my thoughts grow. I should like Jack to be spared whatever is to come although my squad-mates are all capitol [sic] fellows and I am reassured that they will stand beside me through whatever valleys of darkness we may encounter.
“I wanted not to speak of such things in this letter but I do not suppose you have any allusions [sic]. You never did. At any rate I know that you are proud of us for doing our duty. I think perhaps we may never see fighting at all as it happens for the Brits and the Canucks are already making a fine brest [sic] of it and gave the Hun a good pasting at Vimy as you have probably heard.
“I am getting along well with my Enfield and feel we shall be fast friends by the end of the buisness [sic]. I do miss little Cassie and do tell her I hope she is keeping up with her letters and that I would very much like to hear her reade [sic] some verses when I am back again. Mister McKay's poetry has been speaking to me of late and I am sure you know the one****. Maybe do not have her read that but some of his verses about the sun on the waters. I am confidant [sic] you know best.
(**** Claude McKay, who is a Palmey poet in the timeline, has still written the poem “If We Must Die” which Frank is likely alluding to here.)
“I must get about things as it is about time for dinner. Until next time Ajee. Write back soon and know that if the Hun ever does come over the horizon in the near abroad or the far one that the Heyland boys stand reddy [sic] to give them what for! Lay a flower for Mama for us. I will write again soon.
“Your loving grandson,
“Frank”
Frank Heyland would never see home again after he shipped out. Most of the First Regiment never did.
2. The Price of a Vineyard: It wasn't just from Palmera that men of the region came to answer the call to war. They came from points across the Caribbean, too, forming up at Tustenuggee by pre-arrangement with the British War Office, and a full British West Indies Regiment would ship out alongside the First Expeditionary Regiment in November of 1914, under the joint command of Palmera's Colonel Tapley Pendergrass and Colonel Jardine Hopewell from Jamaica. Pendergrass was de facto senior of the pair and would effectively control the two regiments as a combined force.
He was a glamourous looking Lanney, a solid old Service hand and one of those curious individuals who seemed never to age visibly past a certain point (for all that he was sixty you wouldn't put him a day over forty). Mainly he was thought qualified for the duty on account of having been a freebooter in his younger days – legend had it he had met his wife, and most such tale-spinners described her as his “beautiful White wife,” while raiding pirate ships in the Sea of China* – and thus having seen actual combat. Saving his wife, who was deceased now, Pendergrass didn't view that era of his life with the romanticism his men did; since joining the Service he'd come to regard mercenaries as mostly vicious, shameful curs and was ashamed to have been one of them. But his journeys had at least prepared him for one reality that his men were about to face: the full force of European racism.
(* An actual tall tale by a real freebooter of the era named George Boynton.)
There were years of high-level lobbying by Palmey officials behind the fact that Britain's War Office had called on Palmera and the West Indies at all. Most of the British bureaucracy of the day was opposed to the use of Black soldiers in any capacity, and had only agreed to it because the King – owing to an old friendship with Micajah Dalton, who appealed to him quietly as all the behind-the-scenes bargaining played out – had personally interceded. Even thus, Pendergrass had been privately briefed before embarking that it was likely the British would try to push his men into support and labour roles; when Palmera's multiracial First Expeditionary arrived, and the mostly-black British West Indies Regiment beside them, getting into the fight at all would be the first fight they faced.**
(** There was a British West Indies regiment during the Great War IOTL and in fact they were mostly placed in menial roles in just this way. Royal intercession was necessary for even that degree of service; here it goes farther. There was also a West India Regiment, a separate colonial force that in OTL saw brief action in the German Cameroons. Thanks to the First Expeditionary and the BWI Regiment's example, these colonial troops will also see action in the European theatre.)
In truth just getting a tent proved a challenge. Hundreds of the troops came within a whisker of dying of exposure at Sussex; Pendergrass had to raise Hell at the highest levels of command to avert the disaster***. It was hard to say whether it was good fortune or ill that this attracted the attention of an old “friend” of Palmera, Herbert Lord Kitchener, now the Secretary of State for War; alerted to their plight, he not only vouched for the Palmeys' fighting spirit and leadership, but also suggested their force as a participant in a scheme he had in mind for “opening up” the war.
(*** Several hundred West Indian troops in fact did die this way for lack of shelter in Britain IOTL.)
The Western front had already become an infamous meat-grinder. There were two competing schemes for launching an assault on Turkey that would essentially flank the Central powers and hopefully produce an Arab revolt into the bargain. One involved an assault on Constantinople through the Dardanelles; while Kitchener's scheme suggested a landing in Syria at Alexandretta. The French eventually refused the Syrian option—nervous at the prospect of having British troops landing and fighting in their sphere of influence—and a direct assault on the Turkish capital had tantalizing war-winning potential. The end result, after a massive British naval task force failed to force the straits on its own, was the Palmera and West Indian contingent being joined to a combined force of Brits, ANZACS, French colonials and Indians in an amphibious landing at Gallipoli****.
(**** It's Austro-Hungarian naval action that thwarts the attempt to force the straits ITTL; you can thank Prince Max. Most of what follows here stays close to the actual events of the Gallipoli campaign, except that the Palmey and West Indian troops stand in for the 88th Brigade and the Dubliners at Cape Helles, who are thus freed up to find different but otherwise fairly typical Great War-type fates elsewhere.)
The Palmeys and the West Indians found themselves in the fight directly as part of the landing force at Cape Helles—proving their bravery and mettle to everyone's satisfaction in short order—but the assault stalled due to indecisiveness up the chain of command, giving the Turks time to rally the defense. The grinding trench warfare that characterized almost every front of the war began.
By the time the August offensive came, there was no longer any question of the Palmeys and West Indians having to win anyone's respect. They fought for months beside British and French colonial troops who had learned to rely on their bravery; men of every colour dug the same trenches, sang the same songs, went over the top together. It was a brotherhood forged at an awful price in blood and fire, and when the order came to go over the top once more in a “diversionary action” for the main force at Sari Bair, it would be among the most lethal and futile actions of the entire war. The First Expeditionary Regiment was virtually destroyed as a fighting force when it was enfiladed by Turkish machine guns, and the British West Indies Regiment was decimated, Col. Hopewell falling along with his men. The vineyard was the only piece of territory they managed to gain in exchange.
Pendergrass left Gallipoli a shell-shocked and broken man, haunted forever after by how eager he'd been to get his boys into the fight, by survivor's guilt and by a dark suspicion that British commanders held his men's lives cheaper than White men's. “Cape Hell,” as it came to be known, claimed the lives of over 3,500 of the four thousand officers and men who'd embarked from Palmera*****, most of the remainder being evacuated due to sickness. More than half of the British West Indies Regiment was killed or wounded.
(***** Proportionally these losses are similar to the disaster that befell the 88th Brigade in the Battle of Krithia Vineyard IOTL. In the real battle most of the Brigade was wiped out in the span of ten minutes. More Palmeys fall because the First Expeditionary is a slightly larger force. Pendergrass' suspicions might well be right except that it would be hard to excel the cheapness of life already on display.)
Through this horror the men of Palmera and the Caribbean had earned their place on the front lines; everyone said it even as reservists were being called up to join what was reformed into the Combined Expedition Force of Palmera and the British West Indies (known as the Combos for short). The War Office renounced limits on their numbers, and Combo regiments would go on to fight with distinction on the Western front and in the Middle East. In all nearly a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, sailors and aviators from Palmera, and another thirty thousand men from across the Caribbean, would serve in the Great War by the time it was done+. More than half of them were killed, wounded or captured; Black prisoners of war were almost immediately executed or put to forced labour.
(+ This is just over eight percent of Palmera's population. If that seems like an astonishing figure, it is, but it matches the proportions of populations that enlisted in Canada and Australia and is just under New Zealand's, a country of more comparable size. The Caribbean contribution is nowhere near these proportions but matches the combined participation of the British West Indies and the West India Regiments IOTL; general enthusiasm for dying in the cause of Empire, in the British West Indies mostly driven by hopes of gaining recognition and independence, was understandably cooler.)
3. The Haitian Incident, a.k.a. The Sixty-Minute War: In the view of the Forsyth government, the sanguinary sacrifices in the far-off theatres of the Great War were heartbreaking -- “Big Ike” himself aged dramatically in the course of it as guilt weighed on him for having fought for his country's place at that blood-soaked dinner table – but necessary, however terrible, as an exercise in staking an irrevocable place for the nation on the world stage. To be sure this reasoning would come to attract derision from some quarters after the war's end, but at the time it was understood and supported in a visceral way—to varying extents—by the thousands upon thousands of reservists, conscripts and fresh recruits alike who would go on to serve. The “Alfas” and the “Charlies” and eventually the “Combos” were buying Palmera's future in the global order at the price of their own lives.
Arguably, though, it was events in the Western Hemisphere, especially across the northern border in the Marches, and in the Caribbean and the Gulf that were more directly crucial to the nation's security. The so-called “seconders” or “Bravos” who came to serve in this theatre as part of what initially was called the Second Expeditionary Regiment, and which eventually became the Second Expeditionary Force, were exiled from what even Palmeys saw as the main stage of history but would take part in a drama that would come closer to bringing direct war down on the country's head than anything happening in Europe.
Great “Scares” would sweep both Palmera and America during the period of the Great War. In America, easily the worst of these was the “Red Scare” which came in late 1917 with the November Revolution in Russia. The Bear had already been pulled from the War by the prior February Revolution that had ousted the Tsar—who would seek refuge along with his family in Britain, but be denied as continued turmoil was marching toward a Communist revolution under the leadership of Maxim Kamenev, also known as “Argunin”—but it was Kamenev's Bolshevik revolutionaries, co-led by even more sinister figures like Nikolai Narodin, who stirred the true sensation, leading to hysterias and notions of “Reds under the bed” across the States even before the war's end, particularly due to vigorous anti-war agitation by anarchists of the IWW. It was in response to this that President George Howe's government eventually championed a Sedition Act that deported socialists, anarchists, terrorists and ideological dissidents with remarkably little discernment among them come 1918.*
(* George Howe is TTL's analogue of Woodrow Wilson, an in-law of the real Woodrow Wilson who died relatively young IOTL but here lives to go into politics and reach the summit. He's an older and more seasoned figure than Wilson was, and although he's not one of those Northern liberals charmed by Booker T. Washington, neither is he anywhere near as racist as Wilson was. A lot of American expansionist politics plays out the same regardless, because those are driven by forces larger than any one man, but Howe's extra half-measure of reserve proves crucial in what follows.
(The Red Scare and Russian Revolution events are much as IOTL except Vladimir I. Ulyanov and Josef Dzhugashvilli didn't survive their prison stints here. “Maxim Kamenev” is a Lenin analogue with a characteristically Bolshevik tough-guy pseudonym that means “as hard as it gets” or “as stony as it gets” (he is not Lev Kamenev); his other 'nym, “Argunin,” is based on a Siberian river just like Lenin's was. “Nikolai Narodin” or roughly “Nikolai the People's Man” is basically Nikolay Bauman—IOTL the first martyr for the Bolshevik cause—who survives here to take on a snazzy new pseudonym of his own; it's Dzhugashvilli, never getting the chance to grow into Stalin, who takes his place in the martyr role. Bauman of our timeline was noted for being witty, malicious and an effective and dedicated organizer; you might be able to guess at the kind of role he'll eventually play in Russia.)
(The Red Scare and Russian Revolution events are much as IOTL except Vladimir I. Ulyanov and Josef Dzhugashvilli didn't survive their prison stints here. “Maxim Kamenev” is a Lenin analogue with a characteristically Bolshevik tough-guy pseudonym that means “as hard as it gets” or “as stony as it gets” (he is not Lev Kamenev); his other 'nym, “Argunin,” is based on a Siberian river just like Lenin's was. “Nikolai Narodin” or roughly “Nikolai the People's Man” is basically Nikolay Bauman—IOTL the first martyr for the Bolshevik cause—who survives here to take on a snazzy new pseudonym of his own; it's Dzhugashvilli, never getting the chance to grow into Stalin, who takes his place in the martyr role. Bauman of our timeline was noted for being witty, malicious and an effective and dedicated organizer; you might be able to guess at the kind of role he'll eventually play in Russia.)
The Red Scare would cut no similar figure in Palmera. To be sure, the Jucker government deplored the Communist Revolution when it came, was sympathetic to the Tsar's plight—in fact as an old partner in the Ethiopian Wars it was eventually Palmera who would extend him asylum, controversially and semi-sensationally, when all the European candidates had turned him down**—was as resolutely anti-socialist as ever and was vigilant about the prospect of anarchist terrorists on its own shores, of whom it arrested not a few during the war years. But there were no mass expulsions or exiles, as the common wisdom in Forsyth's government was that the famous “Bolt From Above” had pulled the teeth of socialist revolutionary elements years before, and antiwar sentiment among Palmera's workers—especially in the burgeoning industrial sector, which had the war to thank for its growth—was far from being at threatening levels. The event that provoked a renewal and updating of the nation's own sedition laws with the Sedition and Revolution Act in 1916 thus had nothing to do with communists in far-off Russia; it had to do with the Klan Scare that began in 1915 and that would effectively persist for at least another decade and a half.
(** The Romanovs in Palmera are a saga all their own and will be covered in a subsequent chapter. In truth it is the relatively low ebb of the left at this period in Palmera—and a curious basking in the reflected glory that comes of guesting a former Russian Emperor—more than the obscure old ties through the Ethiopian business that really carry the day for Tsar Nicholas and his relations.)
The re-emergence of the Klan didn't occasion much immediate note outside the Marcher states in America, at least not at first. On the other hand, the Klan propaganda film “Birth of a Nation” was seen as a shot across the bow in Palmera, the signal flare of a resurgent nightmare that had been thought dead a generation ago. To be sure, it was not as if the racial environment in the States after Jim Crow (or for that matter before it) had been particularly conducive of optimism to begin with; many Dusties had come to the country fleeing this race riot or that, the most recent spectacular example being Atlanta in 1906. But the Klan represented White violence, and the threat of White supremacist agitation among the Sutcheys of Palmera, like nothing else did.
“Birth of a Nation” quickly became the first film to be outright banned in Palmera, on national security grounds (a ban that would be contested by some civil libertarians, even some Black civil libertarians, but very few and to little avail in the short term). The Forsyth government camouflaged this fact to a limited extent by producing its own propaganda film under the same name—in point of fact the nation's first feature-length major film, directed by the seminal Dustie novelist and filmmaker Oscar Devereaux—lionizing the Servicemen of the Third Border War as part of the recruiting effort for the present one.*** Even as this seemingly-minor drama of the arts was playing out, however, the Klan Scare would motivate the government to perhaps the riskiest political action any government of the nation had ever attempted.
(*** The original “Birth of a Nation” is in its basic outlines pretty much the same as D.W. Griffith's infamous but influential propaganda reel of OTL. The answering Palmey version is roughly coeval with New Zealand's first feature film “Hinemoa,” and its director Oscar Devereaux is an analogue of IOTL Black filmmaking pioneer Oscar Micheaux, who will go on to cut an even more towering figure in the history of film here.)
Haiti had been a simmering pressure point of relations with the great Goliath in the north for years. The States was increasingly taking a maximal view of the Monroe Doctrine, out of a genuine interest in stability but also in no small part with a view to enhancing its military and commercial prospects throughout the Hemisphere, and Haiti—as a desirable naval base and centre of trading opportunity—was increasingly a target from the latter 19th century into the present one. Palmey companies also sought opportunities in Haiti, but as a country outside the original British sphere of influence their participation in the Haitian market was resented by American businessmen.
This involvement was suffered grudgingly because close relationships between Palmey officialdom and the tiny but economically powerful community of Haitian-Germanic creoles—forged in the old Dalton days—had enabled Palmera to talk their counterparts in the troubled Haiti out of floating high-interest loans to competing revolutionary political factions on more than one occasion, thus stabilising the country (at least somewhat) for business from all nations; the Haitian Germans had been compensated by corresponding business opportunities in Palmera herself. On the other hand, loans from Palmera had also been successful in staving off an American consortium's attempt to outright buy Haiti's national bank and treasury in 1910, which Forsyth had claimed was an “unanticipated outcome” but which some parties in Washington felt certain was deliberate sabotage****.
(**** The American consortium outright buying out Haiti's national bank and treasury was an actual IOTL event and arguably the single greatest contributor to the crisis that led to the American occupation. The regrettable tendency of the wealthy Haitian-German minority to feather its nest by what amounted to a sort of revolution profiteering was also real IOTL.)
In truth it probably was deliberate sabotage. The Secret Service was active in Haiti, seeing in it a primary theatre of national interest not just on commercial grounds but also on Black Zion grounds; however complicated relations with Haiti might be, however superior Palmey attitudes might have been, nobody in the Touladi was in any doubt that an American occupation in Haiti would be carried out by White troops hailing mostly from Marcher states, with results almost certain to be sinister and disastrous. It would amount, in some minds—including Forsyth's—to simply letting the Klan occupy the island*****. On the other hand, Palmera officially retained a posture of “cooperation in mutual interest” with the States, which made defending Haiti's continued self-determination, and staving off the prospect of a puppet dictator who might favour American business interests and extirpate their Palmey counterparts, a difficult prospect indeed after the advent of war with Germany.
(***** This is an exaggeration, but the fears are not completely unfounded. Notwithstanding roads, schools and infrastructure-building, the American occupation IOTL is largely remembered in Haiti as a reign of racist terror in which at least some American troops manifested habits that sound distinctly not just White supremacist but strikingly Klan-like, for example in the habit of wearing blackface to both mock and intimidate the local population in just the same way the early Klan did with its victims. If this wasn't actually Klan-inspired, it qualified as an independent invention. Of course the entire American military isn't made up of people like that in either timeline.)
Sure enough, Howe's administration in Washington began making noises immediately upon the advent of the Great War about the likelihood that the Haitian-Germanic community was wholly controlled by Germany. The Touladi thought this claim to be patently absurd—no such ties showed up in their intelligence reports and the general feeling was that Haiti's German creoles were loyal largely to themselves—but there was no point protesting to Washington about it, as the idea was clearly pretext, designed to provide a casus belli for an invasion and occupation long bruited about in American officialdom. The Haiti Question loomed every bit as large in Palmera's foreign policy calculus as the Great War itself did, as the country could ill afford to be cut out from the Haitian trade (or that of the nearby Dominican Republic, also sure to happen) if it hoped to continue being able to participate in affairs further abroad. Something had to be done.
And yet... the prospect of Doing Something was a fearsome one. Palmera had never before put her toe, militarily speaking, across the lines drawn by the Monroe Doctrine, and not doing so was one of the pillars of national survival. Testing Washington's resolve in this way amounted, in many opinions, to an act of madness; it was better to have to do without the gold mines in the highlands of Hispaniola than to take such a risk. Still, it was a virtual certainty that acting unopposed, the Howe administration could quickly bring about a takeover of the little island nation. Palmera was already sending her sons into battle for national credibility in Europe; how could she still claim such credibility if she were impotent in the Caribbean?
In July of 1915, Haiti was quite suddenly racked by an anti-German revolt. It brought to power Leonaldo Hipolyte, who tried to seize the assets of the Haitian-German creole families and moved to expel... well, it was not clear quite who else he moved to expel. The Palmey story was that he had vowed to drive out both American and Palmey traders in the country and to nationalize their holdings. In response to this threat, the Second Expeditionary Regiment swung into action—almost as if they'd been pre-alerted to the coup—storming Port-au-Prince and deposing Hipolyte so swiftly that the resulting conflict was called the Sixty-Minute War.****** Isaac Forsyth telephoned Washington to inform President Howe of the action and that he had, as ever, acted to preserve the mutual interests of the “old and friendly American-Palmeran partnership.” He did so the day after it was already a fait accompli.
(****** Hipolyte is TTL's analogue of Vilbrun Guillaume—who met an ill fate indeed after his short five-month reign IOTL—here unseated before he has the chance to properly establish a government. The Sixty-Minute War is between fifteen and twenty-two minutes off-pace from our timeline's shortest recorded war, the Anglo-Zanzibar War.)
Was the anti-German revolt really ginned up by a Touladi playing both sides as its own pretext for preempting an American invasion? Howe certainly thought so, and was furious. American newspapers covered the “Haitian Incident” sensationally, calling it a betrayal of the Monroe Doctrine and American rights on the island, a thumbing of the nose by an “upstart Negro dominion hiding under Britain's skirts.” Factions inside the White House demanded action against the “Nigger Nation,” as one of them infamously described the Palmeys+. Tensions rose amid the very real prospect of an American occupation not of Haiti, now, but of Palmera itself, as Howe raised holy Hell with Britain's foreign ministry, even directly calling on the Prime Minister himself and warning him ominously that British “interference” in the Western hemisphere, which to his mind the Palmey action clearly was and which any action to save her from the consequences would certainly be, would not be tolerated.
(+ An analogue to William Jennings Bryant's infamous “Imagine it, niggers speaking French!” quote about Haiti from OTL. This was just how a lot of Americans talked at the time.)
Forsyth, for his part, blithely reassured all and sundry that he had acted in American business interests as much as Palmera's, preserving both with the utmost possible speed, that he had no involvement whatever in the revolt of Hipolyte and that he had entirely meant to inform Howe before taking action, save that events had run ahead of anyone. He was also rumoured to have privately argued to the British foreign office that obviously Washington was a far likelier sponsor of the revolt than Palmera and that it had simply backfired, that Palmera had happened to be in a position to clean up the mess at no cost to the White House and was happy to do it, and that there was no reason to let this minor event interfere with the dominion's continued loyal support of the Allied war effort.
The crisis teetered on a brink for several weeks. It was the sacrifice of the First Expeditionary at Gallipoli that finally resolved it. The British frostily informed Howe that if he really was the champion of self-determination that he pretended to be, a cause to which it was pointedly noted that Palmera was already contributing more in terms of lives and sacrifice than America was, he should surely be more concerned with repelling Hun aggression than with feathering his nest in Haiti. It was left implied that this fact should shame the Americans, but it was not left implied that the British Empire would regretfully have to carefully consider the “special relationship” and possibly even regard Washington as effectively having entered the war on the side of the Germans if it attacked what was now deemed an important part of the Allied war effort.
Howe was reportedly even more outraged by this than by the “Haitian Incident” itself, as well he might have been... but he was also sensible of the larger eye of history, and that imperilling the “special relationship” with Britain and allowing himself to be painted a villain over little Haiti was far from worth it++. In the end, cooler heads prevailed. The White House tabled the question of “sure consequences for Palmera's meddling” for the future in the interests of amity with Britain and the common cause of defeating the Hun, and the shared bonds of sacrifice in the Great War would, in the event, put future prospects of Washington waging war on Palmera firmly in the ambit of fringe American elements thereafter.
(++ The “special relationship” has arguably existed since the late 1850's but in neither our timeline nor this one has it yet become the thing of concrete solidity that it would later become for the bulk of the Twentieth Century.)
The British message to Forsyth was reportedly four simple words: “Don't do it again.” Forsyth blithely reassured them even as Ovince Danastor—assuring one and all that he was certainly not the puppet of the Palmeran Secret Service that rumour held him to be—took power on the island. The Second Expeditionary evacuated the Haitian-German creoles for their safety (it was a small operation, there were only about two hundred of them+++) and remained to “secure a peaceful transition of power” as Palmey businessmen established a trust to supervise and protect the property and holdings of the German creoles until such time as they could “safely” return to them. Thenceforth it was competing communities of American and Palmeran expatriate businessmen and their families who would lead the ranks of Haiti's exploiters.
(+++ Yes, there really were just a couple hundred of them at this point IOTL, too.)
Palmera's role in the revolt and its aftermath remained obscure; Secret Service documents related to the Sixty-Minute War were deemed some of the nation's most sensitive, enough so that they remained classified until well after the turn of the following century. Palmera would go on to reinvigorate the “American partnership” by her role in exposing a German plot to lure America and Mexico into war with one another++++, and short-term official hostility receded. The long-term arrangement would amount to effective Americo-Palmeran condominium over Haiti under the cover of the Danastor regime.
Ill-feeling persisted, though; when the American Expeditionary Force joined the War in 1917, one Palmey regiment that arrived in France to serve alongside them found that the Americans had fortified their own barracks against them and forbade Palmeys to enter, even training their guns on them+++++. The Haitian Incident was cited for years after by lawmakers demanding tariffs on Palmeran goods. Rumours of Palmera's shadowy influence and spies fuelled anti-Palmey sentiment in the Marcher states as never before, arguably contributing—rather ironically—to the growth of the Klan.
(++++ OTL had the Zimmerman telegram, in TTL it's the Zoellner Incident: a German agent is caught on a journey through Palmera instead and the plot is exposed.)
(+++++ Something like this really happened IOTL, but between White and African-American soldiers of the 364th Infantry, stationed together on home soil in the Jim Crow South during WW2.)
(+++++ Something like this really happened IOTL, but between White and African-American soldiers of the 364th Infantry, stationed together on home soil in the Jim Crow South during WW2.)
In the Palmey press, though, the whole business was celebrated as one of Big Ike's most famous exploits, nothing less than the salvation of Haiti. As his deputy PM, Lemuel Bolton, would later put it in his memoirs: “Of all the mad gambles of those mad years, that Haitian business was by far Big Ike's maddest; may God bless him for it.”
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One of the biggest effects is of bringing home to a generation of Palmeys just how hostile the world is, as a place generally and to them specifically.
OTL, baseball teams held spring training in various areas around the South, and only in the 1930s and 1940s were they consistently in Florida, though the Grapefruit League, IIRC, had its start in the '20s. It would be interesting to see if any teams trained there in Palmera for a few years as they did OTL in FLorida for a few years before going elsewhere.
John McGraw OTL had lists of blacks he would sign if baseball integrated, and ewas very much into going to Cuba on trips; i wonder if in TTL Palmera would be a favorite place of a couple other managers, since it's on the continent itself.
I wonder if the border will eventually be open like that of Canada's with the US. it would be nice if my family still wound up in Treasure Island as a vacation spot TTL.
Does Hemmingway still find his way to Palmera and love it like he did Florida OTL?
John McGraw OTL had lists of blacks he would sign if baseball integrated, and ewas very much into going to Cuba on trips; i wonder if in TTL Palmera would be a favorite place of a couple other managers, since it's on the continent itself.
I wonder if the border will eventually be open like that of Canada's with the US. it would be nice if my family still wound up in Treasure Island as a vacation spot TTL.
Does Hemmingway still find his way to Palmera and love it like he did Florida OTL?
Baseball is a very American sport with limited appeal. It's only popular in nations that have had significant presence of US troops for a long period of time. Sports in Palmera will be British meaning Soccer, Equestrian Sports, Cricket, Rugby, Tennis, Golf, Field Hockey etc...
The reverse is likelier, with Palmeran Sports gaining traction among African Americans in the US esp. with Segregation on full swing.
The reverse is likelier, with Palmeran Sports gaining traction among African Americans in the US esp. with Segregation on full swing.
There will be talk of beaches, baseball and racial conflict related to both forthcoming as we pass the Great War, so stay tuned for that. (@Sceonn is partly right about the greater popularity of British sports in Palmera, but some American sports will have a high profile, too, particularly those popular in Black America and brought with increasingly numerous Black American emigrants. Baseball is one and likely to take cricket's niche. There is cultural cross-influence between Black America and Palmera -- the latter certainly holds considerable prestige for the former, while the former has far more weight of numbers than the latter -- and traffic in both directions.)
There will eventually come a point where American-Palmeran relations are less wary, but it's far in the future and the Great War period isn't going to help matters, particularly on account of what's about to happen in Haiti.
Hadn't thought specifically about what Hemingway will be doing in all this, truth to tell. (Much as I like his books I admit to not being a fan of his as a personage.) Some of the American "Lost Generation" types will likely make it down to Palmera, though.
(@Sceonn is partly right about the greater popularity of British sports in Palmera, but some American sports will have a high profile, too, particularly those popular in Black America and brought with increasingly numerous Black American emigrants. Baseball is one and likely to take cricket's niche. There is cultural cross-influence between Black America and Palmera -- the latter certainly holds considerable prestige for the former, while the former has far more weight of numbers than the latter -- and traffic in both directions.)There will eventually come a point where American-Palmeran relations are less wary, but it's far in the future and the Great War period isn't going to help matters, particularly on account of what's about to happen in Haiti.
Hadn't thought specifically about what Hemingway will be doing in all this, truth to tell. (Much as I like his books I admit to not being a fan of his as a personage.) Some of the American "Lost Generation" types will likely make it down to Palmera, though.
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I'm whacking butterflies like Capone whacked stooges for sure. I have to admit I was very tempted to make up an alternate WW1 battle for the Palmeys to get involved in, at the very least, but it's hard to invent anything that matches real Great War events for sheer awfulness. (The fact that I studied Gallipoli in depth as an undergrad might also have something to do with it.) Thanks for reading.
I have to admit I was very tempted to make up an alternate WW1 battle for the Palmeys to get involved in, at the very least, but it's hard to invent anything that matches real Great War events for sheer awfulness. (The fact that I studied Gallipoli in depth as an undergrad might also have something to do with it.) Thanks for reading.
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Thanks man.
Okay, the third and final subsection of "The Hinge of History, Pt. 2" is now up. That will do for the Great War for the time being, from here we will be moving on to the cultural, social and economic aftermath.
I liked the new updates, interesting action during the war.
I have a suggestion though. Its easier to finde new large story posts if you make a new entry instead of editing the old entry. I almost missed the new parts because I was looking for new entrys at the end of the thread. Its easy for people to miss your good content.
I have a suggestion though. Its easier to finde new large story posts if you make a new entry instead of editing the old entry. I almost missed the new parts because I was looking for new entrys at the end of the thread. Its easy for people to miss your good content.
Zagan
Donor
Oh, no! Did he do that?!
@CeeJay: Why? I missed the updates this way! And probably many other readers. We are not notified that a post had been edited. We can only see when there are new posts!
Please, always post updates in new posts or most readers will never find them. Although what you did may make sense to you, since nobody does this, we are not used to it.