We now embark on the immediate post-war period, in which we'll see some of the change wrought by the Great War and its aftermath begin to play out. This will be the last chapter in the "Hinge of History."
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.
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.
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. 3 (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”): James Weldon Johnson, born at Daltonville in 1871, was already a famous poet before he served in a Combo regiment during the war years. It was his service in the war and the men he met there—from all over the Land of Jack Freedom, across the Caribbean, around the world – that inspired his great and wrenching triumph of religious poetry “Joss' Horns,” which told in free verse of Johnson's own struggle to reconcile his stubborn clinging to belief in a Creator with the horrors he had seen. The book spoke in the vernacular voice of the Palmey soldier and—a first in Palmey letters—in accurately-rendered Chatta here and there to boot*, and went on to become a classic of world Black literature generally.
(* Johnson was a real Black American poet in Florida of OTL, born at Jacksonville in the same year this Johnson was born in Daltonville. “Joss' Horns” is an analogue of – but a very, very different work from – the poet's real masterwork “God's Trombones.” The word Joss is itself Chatta or Palmey patois meaning “God,” just as “Jah” does in Jamaican patois. The title is a threefold allusion: to the regimental trumpets that called men out of the trenches – as often as not to meet their Maker – to the terrible angelic trumpets of Revelation and yet more darkly to the struggle to discern between the harshly sovereign will of God and the reavings of his horned Adversary in No Man's Land.)
For all that, the work of Johnson's that spoke most accurately to the nation's sense of deliverance at the end of the great tribulation had been written almost fifteen years prior to the war. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” would be put to music, read from pulpits or through tears at funeral eulogies over empty caskets, and quoted in political speeches, perhaps with a slight spin on the lyrics. It was, for example, quoted by Deputy Prime Minister Lemuel Bolton on rainy November's day, standing tall and dark and reedy before a microphone on a hastily-rigged stage with the Ensign of Freedom fluttering, the warlike statues of Daltonville's Monument to the Battle of Fort Campbell** looming in the background as he announced armistice and victory:
"Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark days have taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us rejoice that Victory is won."
(** The monument, actually erected in the wake of the Third Border War, consists of statues of the three greatest heroes of the first such conflict – Absalom Dalton, the Seminole chieftain Osceola, and Sir Charles Worthington – standing over the prone and defeated form of Old Hickory.)
It was the best part of what in truth was an otherwise pretty forgettable speech delivered to a small crowd. Oratory was not Bolton's strongest suit. There were no rapturous scenes in Palmera's streets: a deadly influenza epidemic was convulsing the country and the world, and most of the crowd watching Bolton were women wearing kerchiefs over their faces; he had happened to be in the city when the news broke because he was coordinating the response and trying to keep spirits up in Utina. A pall of sorrow and uncertainty still hung over tens of thousands of households, who were awaiting word of whether men captured in battle by the enemy would be coming home at all. Bolton would later recollect that he fancied he saw the questions
“Where is my brother? Where is my husband? Where is my son?” in the eyes of many of his listeners that day; the P.O.W. cause would become a central passion of the Allied Mothers of the Nation. Most of those families would be disappointed, the struggle of years thereafter being to find their loved one's remains or the circumstances of their deaths and in some cases to pursue compensation from the murderers of surrendered soldiers.
Still, there was a general mood of quiet relief. If complete deliverance hadn't come just yet, it was in sight. The guns had finally fallen silent and the worst was over. The Los Cayos Hurricane*** would come howling in the following year as the last of the epidemic's dead were being buried, but compared to the man-made disaster of the war, natural disaster barely registered as a blip on the nation's resolve. There would be a brief depression in the couple of years after that, and there would be recriminations, conflicts and controversies over how best to memorialize – or even just remember – the war years. To some, Forsyth and Bolton were heroes ever after, even honorary additions to the distinguished rolls of the Fathers of the Nation; to others, villains whose callous maneuverings illustrated modern society's allegiance to abstract “political realism” at the expense of life and justice. But in the short term, there were more of the former than the latter, enough so that Lemuel Bolton would go on from that rain-damp stage to succeed his boss in the top job in the elections of 1920, elections in which the United Freedom Congress would actually
gain seats in the Commons.
(*** Known IOTL as the Florida Keys Hurricane. There will also be a major hurricane at Hillsborough in the fall of '21.)
The roaring years, the years of jubilation and triumphalism, were very much in the offing, but they would bring a fresh round of conflicts and contradictions in their train. The war and the dormant social forces it unleashed would join the ever-accelerating pace of modernity to change Palmera's social fabric forever. Lemuel Bolton's successive governments would define the country in the Twenties and early Thirties, but would also prove the end point of the Juckers' golden era and unbroken procession of electoral victory.
The fall of what seemed at the time an impervious political dynasty was still almost fourteen years in the future, though, when Bolton stood up and quoted Johnson's most famous poem on that rainy November morning in 1918. Only the truly prescient would suspect its coming.
1. Social Change & The Parrish Field Ruction: Association Football, what America and Canada would call “soccer,” was forty-two years old in Palmera by 1921. By this time football's status as the national sport was unrivalled, unquestioned and proverbial; the urban share of the population was growing fast and if you lived in the towns or cities, supporting your local football side was nearly as much a necessity of integrating into Palmey society as learning your local Chatta in the streets or doing your militia service.
In the villages and hamlets around the country it was even more of a religion, with kids kicking balls in rustic yards and dreaming of glory, the league and division schedules memorized so that on Sunday mornings—when the county broadsheets carried the records of that week's matches and thrilling descriptions of the feats involved—boys and young men would be squirming in church with the agony of waiting to get home and find out whom God had favoured on the pitches. It was a state of affairs that their priests and pastors decried with a weary futility, and football's hold on young imaginations would only grow stronger with the advent of the crystal radio early in the decade and the rise of the sporting broadcast.
Parrish Field in Daltonville was tied for the title of the nation's oldest football pitch with Reddick Field in Eleutheria, but it was the northern stadium—capable of seating more than fifty thousand souls—that was the more prestigious, and the traditional site of the Nation's Cup Final. It was also where some of the most famous derbies were held in the tournament's qualifying rounds. Daltonville's most widely and passionately-favoured First Division sides – the Balton Gardens Spurs (informally nicknamed the “Fighting Teagues”) and the Livingston Athletic F.C. (now known informally as the “Livingston Combo” or the “Lucky Boys Combo”****) – often clashed early in the tournament in the Three Kings Derby.
(**** Balton Gardens was a poor neighbourhood in Daltonville proper, with a large Sutchey population; “Teague” was originally a nickname for Sutcheys who had, or claimed to have, Irish descent, but here it is generalized to both the players and fans of the Spurs. The wartime term “Combo” increasingly migrates to football clubs, especially First Division clubs – the top four clubs in each county, although really the First Division in the Big Four counties of Legree, Liberia, Hillsborough and Osceola were in a far different class – as a means of claiming the prestige of the Combo regiments for the finest players of the beautiful game. It was often bestowed in affectionate, honorary fashion on one's side by war veteran fans who crowded the stands, and in not a few cases because there were ex-Servicemen on the pitch itself, as was the case in the suburb of Livingston whose veterans described themselves as the “Lucky Boys.”)
Three Kings took place on the sixth of January at the tail end of Crucian*****, the earliest entry in Palmera's Carnival Season and a kind of miniature prelude to parties to come. The temperance movement had won its decades-long struggle to bring in Prohibition north of the border in 1920 – President Howe's controversial parting gift to his nation – and was still gamely fighting the battle in Palmera too. The Allied Mothers of the Nation were lecturing the passing crowds from improvised bandstands on the main routes to Parrish Field, on what had until recently been Daltonville's outskirts; they were joined by white-robed Israelites (or bow-tied Israelites) who in the name of their current Prophet Josiah Gershom warned all who would hear that liquor was ungodly and that they must keep pure, for “the Tribulation is just begun.”****** For the most part, the crowds streaming by benignly ignored them all.
(***** Palmera has its own version of Carnival, called Pascoe, at Easter—this is the real core of “Carnival Season” and the bash that truly compares with or excels Carnival elsewhere—but it also isn't averse to importing other versions from around the Caribbean in smaller form, along with celebrations of other holidays. At this date the round of celebrations has grown to what will basically be the modern Carnival Season calendar, and outside of Pascoe it includes Crucian – a three-day Epiphany carnival imported from the Leeward Islands – Mardi Gras from Trinidad in February, St. Patrick's Day in March [Palmera's actual Irish population isn't all that large, but what the heck], and Gustavus Vassa Day in April to commemorate the founding of Calusa.)
(****** By this point, Solomon ben Solomon has died in exile in British Guiana. The Israelites seen in the streets here are from an offshoot church which has renounced some of his more controversial doctrines, especially the ones about polygamy and white skin being the Mark of Cain, and have taken on the name of the Noetic Israelite Church of the Tribulation, which is now beginning to grow as a mainstream faith.)
In many respects those crowds looked much like they had always done: the upper and middle classes were represented by soberly-clad men and women of every race and creed, in bowler hats or long skirts that not so many years ago had been the height of fashion, but were already beginning to look like relics of a bygone age. Here and there, the colourful attire of Crucian was on display, women and sometimes men in bright skirts and dresses and beads dancing and singing and passing around bottles of rum, a preview of the atmosphere of carnival which would crescendo to the vast street parties of Pascoe a few months' hence. Among the more well-heeled youth more recent fashions could be seen, the daring short skirts and fashionable caps of the “flappers” already coming into evidence and drawing looks of mingled intrigue, trepidation and resentment from your more traditional sort, but the spirit of revelry wasn't too much different.
In other respects, though, the emerging new Palmera was on display. There were people in working men's caps, shirt-sleeves and boots, no small number of them women who switched out the caps for headscarves—and this was no bit of anarchist commentary, now, for it was women who'd enabled the factories grow during the War years and though many had gone home to the farms and put their dresses back on with the advent of armistice, many of them were still on the factory floors.
It was the working-class fans—especially the younger among them—who provided the most vivid visual evidence both of what united the nation in the wake of the War and what divided her, for among them football had grown from a unifying passion into a political one, a phenomenon exacerbated by the tensions that the recent depression (which would prove mercifully brief) exerted on the working poor. Among these there was an edge of fanaticism in their fandom that was something comparatively new. The Fighting Teagues and the Lucky Boys Combo had become metonyms for different partisan attitudes, different attitudes to the nation, different beliefs about which direction she should go and how her past should be viewed. Effectively they were the emerging new faces of the nation's two great political parties.
The Lucky Boys partisans were Juckers by and large, wearing the red and gold scarves of Livingston Athletic but also flying the Ensign of Freedom which proclaimed a pride in Palmera's achievements and sacrifices on the battlefield and her loyalty to the Crown. Trousered women notwithstanding they represented a pugnacious traditional nationalism in all its Jucker particulars; but even here there was an embellishment on this ideal emerging, a new independent-mindedness, for what was at this time called the Garveyite flag was also in evidence, a new proposed flag of the Union that did away with the Union Jack and featured a golden sun rising against sable with bars of green and crimson below; for even among Juckers there was a pervasive sense that Palmera had earned her own identity. Veterans of every race could be seen among their ranks waving either kind of flag and proudly sporting uniforms decorated with both British medals and those of the newly-established Orders of Palmera. The Palmey version of “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” characteristic song of the trenches during the War, would thunder through the stands when the match commenced and was already ringing through the streets.+
(+ The Ensign of Freedom – the so-called “Freedom Jack” for which the national symbol “Jack Freedom” was named – was a British Red Ensign sporting a mockingbird, the national emblem. “The Battle Cry of Freedom” or “Rally Round the Flag” migrated to Palmera in the early Exoduster days with Black American veterans of the Union cause, and would become recurringly popular in periods of nationalist fervour, as during the Great War, ever after. Its Palmey lyrics are mildly altered from the American version; the chorus' second line is “God Save the King, boys! And up with the Jack!” and the final verse is:
So we're springing to the call from Utina to Calloo,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom;
And to all our brothers' Liberty, forever shall be true,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom!
(Where “Calloo” references Calusa, naturally.
(The Garveyite flag here fictionalized is of course named for Marcus Garvey, who ITTL served in the Great War. He's actually dead by this point, buried somewhere in Flanders; his legacy has been carried forward by a squad-mate who absorbed some of his ideas and rescued his war diary and has built a Pan-Africanist movement of his own out of them, the name Garveyism being his homage to the earnest and brilliant young student who changed his worldview. We'll meet him and his movement more fully in a coming chapter.)
The Teagues' fandom in their green and orange scarves were likewise multiracial and counted many veterans among their numbers; though as a group they hewed more Black and Asian than their counterparts, who tended to hew more Creole and White. They represented a complicated stew of ethnic and economic backgrounds.
The Great Migration out of the American South to which the Exodusters had been prelude was accelerating steadily, driven by the increasingly draconian character of Jim Crow and the fresh rise of the Klan and like-minded groups; this new wave of emigration, which would span decades and would dwarf the Exoduster phenomenon, was as much urban as it was rural, and many of its members (called Sojourners in America and in their own parlance, but the common term in Palmera would be Tumblers or Tumbleys++) were dependent on factory work. They wouldn't find land and property – and thus participation in the franchise – as easy to come by as their predecessors. Happy as they were to have an adopted homeland that wouldn't riot and burn their homes for the crime of making a living and building a patrimony, they were still aware of being shy of full equality in the Black Zion.
(++ Sojourner, aside from its obvious meaning, came also from the Sojourner Societies which were the heirs to the old Palmyran Friendship Leagues; they provided guidance, material support and way-stations to help would be emigres navigate a crazy-quilt of various friendly, neutral and actively hostile or dangerous American jurisdictions that might lie between their point of origin and Palmera, even producing a Sojourners' Guide, updated yearly, that mapped current danger zones. Some of the funding for these societies came from Palmera herself. Tumbler and Tumbley was a mildly-disparaging reference to tumbleweed, disliked for the way it implied migrant or even vagrant but rarely a fighting word.)
These found common cause with Dustie veterans who often had borne the brunt of racist hostility in the trenches of the War, and whose relations were disproportionately among those who'd been shot on capture or worked to death in P.O.W. Camps; of these, their allegiance to Palmera as a nation was unquestioning, but they had less tendency to romanticize the war years and found the Freedom Jack an increasingly absurd symbol of British entitlement to the lives of the dominion's subjects. They found common cause, to a degree, with poor and disenfranchised Sutcheys who a later Royal Commission would find had been informally but systematically obstructed from joining in the great national struggle. They found common cause with Asians who had found their way out of coolie-ism but were still not fully welcome in all the country's towns and neighbourhoods. They found common cause with Jews whose position was likewise precarious, and with those poorer sections of the Creole community whose own access to land and the franchise was limited, and with many Haitian and other Caribbean immigrants likewise.
They were in other words a living cauldron of society's bottom half, whose collective sense of common cause made them all Dusties (in the sense that the Liberty and Justice Party was actively courting them and seeking to break down barriers to their participation in the electorate). It was evident in the way that various symbols of nationalism – Palmey and otherwise – and Black liberation were paraded by the Fighting Teagues of every race, alongside symbols of trade unionism. The Spurs' fans waved Garveyite flags, too, but the Ensign of Freedom was nowhere in evidence. The Palmey flag of the International Workers of the World – a stark design that showed clenched black fists breaking free of white manacles on a crimson field – was commonplace, and the still-aspirational flag of the soon-to-exist Irish Free State likewise. In seemingly contradictory fashion there was African royal symbolism, tied to anti-imperialist (or at least anti-European imperialist) sentiment like the Lion of Judah from Ethiopia or the emblem of Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar, still living in exile at Eleutheria. There was the red and black bicolour of the First Empire of Haiti, in pointed commentary on the effective occupation of that land now underway (some of those carrying this one were Haitian, others were Bravos of the Second Expeditionary Force who'd come back from tours on the island disillusioned). For noisemakers, not a few of the Teagues carried replicas of
abengs, the maroon horn of Jamaican origin which an increasingly broad and cosmopolitan version of
noireism was making fashionable+++.
(+++ Most of the heraldry on display among the Teagues is much as in OTL, except the Palmeran flag of the Wobblies which is a TTL invention.)
Both the Lucky Boys and Teagues partisans were united in their love of country and their love of rum... but even as they streamed into the stands at Parrish Field, where they would occupy their own great blocs in the stands, the tensions that divided them simmered. Polite society called these working-class revellers and rabble-rousers
jolly-boys and
jolly-girls, but jollity would be hard to find in what transpired as the match unfolded.
To be sure, Palmey football was no stranger to rambunctious fans, but this was different. From almost the first whistle, there were sporadic shoving matches and fights on the borders between the Teague and Lucky Boy sectors of the crowds, as if some of them were more interested in fisticuffs than in watching the match. There were game attempts by their fellows to separate them, though, and general order prevailed even as Livingston scored its first goal early in the half. Things settled then as the suspense of the Spurs' quest for a leveller quieted even the rowdies through the remainder of the first half and most of the second; and then the Teague stands erupted when, late in the second half, the Spurs' star Haitian striker Jean Aime broke free of his markers and put a pretty goal in the top left corner of the net.
The jubilation crested... then subsided in confusion and then anger when the official sounded an off-side. To virtually every Teague in attendance that day, the call was so clearly wrong as to imply corruption. To virtually every Lucky Boys partisan, the call was so clearly correct as never to have been in doubt. Aime argued, earned himself a yellow card for doing so, and the Spurs fought to muster their spirit again as play went on into the final minutes. That might have been it, except that fatefully, one trouble-maker in the Lucky Boys stands nearest the Teagues decided to rub salt in the wound by striking up a chorus of “Rally Round the Flag.”
The chorus caught on and was soon shaking the stadium, its tone unmistakably jeering as the Lucky Boys fans taunted their opposite numbers. The Teague jolly-boys endured it in silent resentment for about sixty seconds, and then all hell broke loose as
abengs sounded a defiant response to the battle anthem and one part of the stadium seemed to surge at the other as if animated by a single consuming fury. Several dozen people were trampled in the ensuing Parrish Field Ruction; the brawling spilled out of the stands until the constabulary had to be called in, and even then they couldn't entirely contain the fighting, which spilled out into the streets. It was near midnight before the last of the violence between the opposing factions of jolly-boys was quelled, leaving more than a hundred people hospitalised and almost ten dead.
The Ruction would later be marked as the birth (or at least the coming-out) of modern football hooliganism in Palmera. It drew cries of consternation and denunciations as a national embarrassment from every side. But curiously enough, it would also prove a turning point in the nation's democracy, providing one of the key motivations for the Bolton government to modernise Palmera's electoral system – renouncing property limits on the franchise – and to make a serious effort to curb violence or intimidation of any kind at polling places in any sort of election where politicised jolly-boys might be tempted to turn up. One way and another, change was on the march, and as Parrish Field would prove, its route could be entirely unexpected.
2. Diamonds & PERLs: Cricket was the preeminent ball-and-bat sport across North America and the Caribbean right up until the American Civil War. It remained the favourite such sport of Palmera for some time thereafter – to the point of being itself a kind of symbol of Palmey nationalism, nearly to the same degree as football – even as the post-Civil War craze for a sport apparently related to rounders exploded in America.
While baseball was storming its way to becoming a titan of American sport, soon to become America's “national pastime,” American Exodusters made a specific point of learning to appreciate cricket on coming to their adopted home in the Black Zion. It was a specific part of the nation's romance, and though originally a sport of the mannered gentry, it grew into a sport for all classes in parallel to baseball's career north of the border, and when Palmera celebrated the centennial Gustavus Vassa Day in 1887, the centrepiece of the celebrations at Eleutheria was a match between the St. Charles and Hope Cricket Clubs. As famous batsman Exum Budell once put it, speaking of his first sighting of his own beloved Yonaha Park stadium at Tallahassee:
“When I first made
whyrah* as a boy, it was seeing a game on a cricket pitch that let me know I was in a new land. People might think me melodramatic for saying it, but truly, it was like watching something magical.”
(* Whyrah is a Chatta word for emigration to Palmera -- specifically Black emigration -- meaning “climb.” The term is first attested in the 1880s and arises parallel to the Zionist term aliyah which gained currency with the First Aliyah to Ottoman Palestine in the 1880s. One could have inspired the other: the “Black Zion,” and not just the Jewish community therein, had a certain understandable fascination and some fellow-feeling with the emergence of modern Jewish Zionism.
(On the other hand the term's genesis could have been entirely independent, related to biblical quotes about Mount Zion and “city on a hill” sentiment already in the air. Unlike the Zionist movement in the Middle East, the term is not part of any explicit official ideology or religious obligation, but welcoming those "making whyrah" is basic to the national identity and influences immigration policy and practice. The term grows increasingly common through the 20th century.)
Palmey cricket gained a few adherents in Black America owing to the nation's prestige, but without the cultural context that buttressed it, it was not a sport that leant itself to export. Baseball was different, and during the early Twentieth Century and especially after the War, it began to make inroads in Palmera.
In part it came in a roundabout way via Cuban cultural influence after the Seven Years' War; the characteristically American game was a phenomenon in the Cuban republic starting in the 1870s, and had its own small league starting in the latter part of that decade, and by the early Nineties baseball and the fortunes of the trio of Cuban League teams were subjects of passion for the country's Cuban emigres and for an increasingly large Latino audience. The other vector: the growing numbers of Black American “Tumbleys” after the war, who not only brought long family histories with the game, but also brought a sense of grievance over the best Black players having been forced to form “Negro Leagues” by the strictures of Jim Crow, and a defiant urge to show their adopted country what the game at its best could be.
Before 1920, baseball's structure in Palmera was amateur and informal, with teams “barnstorming” from county to county and challenging each other. In 1920 the Union Baseball League was finally formed, and a round of league play drew growing crowds as the decade progressed. One of the most famous occasions in the early history of the League – regrettably not because of events on the diamond – was the “friendly” game between the Hillsborough Greys and the Eleutheria Royals in 1922, an event designed to show off the resilience of the city of Hillsborough after the catastrophic hurricane of October 1921.
Unlike football crowds, baseball crowds at this date weren't showcases of social division and conflict. There were no entrenched passions or team rivalries yet. Large swathes of the audience were there out of simple curiosity, and the smaller knots of aficionados clustered here and there throughout the stands—voluble and amiable about explaining the action to those around them—was overwhelmingly Dustie in the broadest sense, drawn from the same confluence of class and ethnicity that typified the Fighting Teagues. Nobody talked politics
per se, the baseball diamond was an escape from all that. Nevertheless for many people who acquired an interest during the decade in the work of the Palmeran Equal Rights Leagues—who helped push modernisation of the vote and the repeal of Good Neighbour Acts that restricted the purchase of land—they might easily have had their first encounter with a new friend who turned them on to such ideas at a baseball diamond.
This was not an accident. The Liberty & Justice Party could sense new opportunities in the air, despite the apparent continuing juggernaut of their Congress opponents, and they were calculated and subtle in their outreach in settings like the ballpark. Some of those knots of enthusiastic fans were genuine; others were LJP operatives there with an agenda of political evangelism. LJP politicians were likewise prominent ballpark presences. In attendance at the so-called
True Grits Friendly** at the newly-opened Everly Park that day was one of their most famous: one Tabitha Nason, also known as “Tabby,” “Nibs” or “Queenie” Nason.
(** “True Grits Friendly” is a play on words, referring both to “true grit” as in stamina and resilience, and to the plain old grits that Palmera has in common with the Marches as a staple food. This was a game being put on for the people, especially the ones who'd suffered and lost homes as a result of the hurricane.)
Queenie was Hillsborough's Chief Executive Magistrate. She had become the first woman to hold elected office in Palmera in 1920, and the first Black woman to hold office anywhere in the British Empire and its dominions. She had a colourful past that read almost mythically.
She'd made
whyrah around the turn of the century as little more than a girl, tending her siblings after the three of them escaped a race riot that ended their parents' lives. She'd desperately wanted to do her part during the War, and not just as a nurse, and had reputedly dressed as a man in order to join up with a Combo regiment, managing to fight in and survive three successive battles before she fell ill and her secret was discovered. Discharged with honour and decorated for valour despite the illicit nature of her sex—she became the only decorated female Palmey soldier of the Great War—she went home to become something of a celebrity for the Allied Mothers of the Nation thereafter, flogging recruitment and Victory Bonds from one end of the nation to the other. She met her husband Charles Nason in 1917 on one such junket, and three years later she came to succeed him in the same seat he'd held before delicate health had forced him to rethink running in another election.
As for Charles, or “King Charles” as he was known, he had been part of that pioneering group of Dusties who'd first flipped the Council of Executive Magistrates to an LJP majority in the election just before the War. Charles had been a notably efficient war recruiter and keeper of law and order throughout his county, but had also been notable for working in a generous spirit with everyone he could, for standing firm against the waves of anti-Sutchey hysteria the Klan scare provoked after 1915 (and not everyone could say this), for bringing a spirit of genuine compassion to his county's administration of social welfare and support programs, and for being a canny negotiator for needed resources with the Touladi. Hillsborough voters were fond enough of “King Charles” that when Queenie ran for his seat, the prospect of getting two “jefes” for the price of one (for it was assumed and implied that Queenie would be taking advice and direction from her more experienced husband) put her over the top of her nearest competition by double digits***.
(*** This is not unlike the kind of campaign that secured “Ma Ferguson” the Governor's mansion in Texas in 1925 IOTL.)
In office, Queenie wasn't a disappointment. She showed the same broad-mindedness and adherence to principle that Charlie had... in fact she took it further, for King Charles' tolerance had ended where the word “socialism” came up, but Queenie was willing to hold respectful conference even with radicals and was on cordial terms with Famous Five feminists Emma Shandy, Nellie “Wobbly Nell” Coleman and Bennie Kelty even though she didn't agree with their political ideals. She was forthright in lobbying for better and fairer electoral practices in her county and across the country and was one of the very first figures to come out forcefully (and incorruptibly) in opposition to the underground industry of liquor smuggling carried on by the nation's so-called
booney-men****, a phenomenon that had sprung up with a vengeance, it seemed, practically the week Prohibition had been announced north of the border. She had been capable and efficient in rousting a county-level corps of volunteers to work with the National Militia Service in rebuilding Hillsborough after the hurricane, and was energetically lobbying the Touladi for better legislation against insurance companies gouging the unfortunate in the wake of disaster.
(**** “Booney-men” is slang imported from Chatta for liquor smugglers. As a gateway to the rum production centers of the Caribbean, Palmera would become a major locus of the international liquor smuggling trade that the rise of Prohibition would empower. As we'll see presently, consortiums of booney-men would become a far-reaching and dangerous force in Palmey life, culture and commerce during the Twenties.)
Quietly unbeknownst to most of the voting public, she did all this without any of the promised advice from “the King,” who in truth spent most of his days laid up with the pulmonary ailment that had sidelined him. She made her politicking and image-building strategies without her husband's input either, and Queenie was the first Palmey politician to make a point of throwing out the first pitch at any baseball game she could get to. She did it that day at the True Grits match, astonishing the batter and delighting the crowd with a ball that curved wickedly across home plate, and the cheers were rapturous as the be-skirted and heavyset woman waved and grinned to the stands and went to take up her seat.
Not everyone was a fan of Queenie Nason, of course. Her early efforts against the booney-men had, in particular, plainly come to the attention of someone who didn't want interference in the already-lucrative liquor smuggling market to continue. Efforts at bribery having failed, what happened at the game that day was a very public—and profoundly brazen—attempt at sending a messsage not just in Hillsborough, but to magistrates across the country.
The gunman looked like a thousand other Gitcheys and Tumbleys in attendance that day. He held a beer in one hand and his pistol in the other as he approached Nason in the stands—for she insisted on sitting in the stands with her voters and not in some remote VIP box away from them—and as later accounts would have it, he actually sidled along the row toward her like a patron searching for his seat. He eventually approached close enough that he couldn't possibly miss.
It was Nason's good fortune that someone in the crowd behind her spotted the assassin before he could fire. Just how dedicated Queenie's electorate was became plain in how hard she had to work at restraining the dozens of loyalists who descended on the unfortunate hit man from simply ripping him apart or beating him to death. To hear the accounts after that day, virtually everyone in the stands had been right there at that moment, had a friend who actually grabbed the gunman's arm and kept him from firing, a friend of a friend who was the one who'd popped the ne'er-do-well a solid right. The failed attempt on Queenie became a story of such dimensions as to eclipse the game itself.
Few recognized at the time what the story really signalled about the level of devotion LJP recruitment tactics were beginning to inspire in their chosen base. What was more widely recognized at the time was a development that would prove of equal relevance to the country's political future: the rise of organized crime in Palmera.
3. The Battle of the Beaches: There was another fissure opening in Palmeran society after the War: this one within the Hacktey community, that category of middle-, upper-middle and upper-class Whites who had always been a lynchpin of the Jucker coalition. The White soldiers of Palmera's Combo regiments had been drawn largely from this class—poor Sutcheys, still habitually treated as an exploitable population of enemy aliens, a perception that would only grow with the “Klan scares” after 1915, had a disproportionate tendency to fall into administrative black holes in the conscription and recruitment system or to be judged mentally or physically unfit for service if they enlisted voluntarily—and had fought and died in not inconsiderable numbers alongside fellow Palmeys of every race. To a man, they were proud of this fact; but they didn't react to the world beyond Palmera in the same ways.
When Palmey troops faced racism, it was the Hackteys who often served as a wedge against it or who helped to ameliorate it. Sometimes they themselves faced echoes of it, too, in a perpetual suspicion—especially from Americans, and parallel to that often faced by emigrating Sutcheys in the Marches—that they themselves might be somehow racially tainted or “miscegenated.” Many of them, even a majority of them, were genuinely outraged and appalled by this framework of thinking and at the treatment their brother Palmeys of duskier hue were subjected to, the way they had to prove themselves over again to White troops at each new assignment. They were all too aware of the greater risks Black and Creole soldiers faced on the European battlefield and at the hands of European powers. They angrily confronted American troops on the occasions when they exhibited behaviour even more appalling than some of the Europeans did.
Others among the Hacktey ranks, though, felt something different on being exposed to other paradigms of race relations and White supremacy. They couldn't help but feel a certain... temptation. They met White men from other countries, especially among the British and the Americans, who were accustomed as a matter of course to seeing race-mixing as unnatural; who saw Blacks as menial labour and felt debased and resentful at having to interact with them as anything else; who felt part of (or had the prospect of feeling part of) an attitude of lordship over and freedom throughout the wide world. They caught a glimpse of what life might be like for a White men who could stroll down the street and never have to address a Black man by his last name or give way for him on the sidewalk; who would, it seemed, never have to wonder whether their daughters might bring a Lanney or a Gitchey home to dinner and announce marriage plans.
To this population among the Hacktey veterans, White supremacism was a kind of heady, forbidden fruit. They found themselves suddenly dissatisfied with Palmera's relatively free and tolerant multiracial society upon returning to it. Some would make an effort to lose their telltale Palmey accents and emigrate to Britain or Europe or the northern States or Canada or (for White Latinos) Argentina; in fact a small but lucrative profession of speech coaches sprung up to facilitate just that. They were a small percentage of the total, though. A much larger slice of this demographic, who numbered nearly half of the Great War's White veterans, had no intention of leaving the Sunny Nation. They would instead conceive projects aimed at reshaping Palmey society more to their liking.
From the outset, this new rising of White supremacy in Palmera would be far cannier and more circumspect than what had gone before it. Its members knew they were a minority in a perilous position, and that to become openly known as tools of the Klan and its ideology or of American-style White supremacy would subject them to backlash. Besides which they at least semi-genuinely disdained the crude hate of the Klan, and would claim to have no great animus toward Coloured people or Jews or Asians or Catholics the way that Klansmen and those like them did (and in “those like them” they would pointedly and to no small extent correctly accuse certain Creoles and some Blacks in Palmera of having such hostilities).
No, they saw themselves as simply wanting a pride of place comparable to what they felt science and reason had established as a White man's due anywhere in the world. Outright hate was for the “trash,” inclusive of the poor pecks and Sutcheys among whom gangs sometimes masqueraded as “cultural societies” or “fraternal orders” or “self-improvement leagues” and spent most of their time fighting among themselves; and Hell, even
they were wise enough by now—owing to the far more paralysing scrutiny they were under—to avoid too-open bigotry, any hint of which could bring the law and the courts down like a hammer so swiftly that
“whyting” had become a colloquial verb in Palmey law enforcement for the shameful practice of
presuming (usually Sutchey) guilt.*
(* This jaundiced view of the Sutchey population is obvious stereotyping and by no means a fair assessment of its full range of politics. Most cultural and self-improvement societies among the Sutcheys were in fact just that; only a minority were a cover for crypto-racist gang activity, which as the above implies was so heavily policed in Palmera as to reach the point of over-policing. It does however reflect some broader Hacktey perceptions of Sutcheys.
(“Peck” originated from well back in the 19th century as a characteristically Hacktey class slur, short for “peckerwood,” vastly more insulting than the word Sutchey and by the early 20th century generalized in Palmey society in roughly the same register as an epithet like “nigger.” It would not normally appear in print or be uttered aloud in polite company. The verb “whyting” is in fact of much more archaic vintage and its eventual migration to denote anti-Sutchey prejudice in Palmera created the false folk impression that the word had originated in-country in relation to race.)
So the new White supremacist tendency clad itself instead in innocuous names like the “Freedom League” or the “Society for Rational Dignity” or the “Mutual Respect Society,” from which derived the widespread autonym “Respecters.” The Respecters were careful to include a few non-Whites and Catholics and even the occasional Jew in their ranks as token of their opposition to Klannishness.
They did nothing so overt as founding their own political parties. To the extent they were openly involved in politics at all, they were allied to many traditionally Jucker political views which continued to be congenial to them. They romanticized the War years unashamedly and constructed a mythos in which all soldiers had been truly equal in and beyond the trenches, wherein Dustie veterans who harped on about the P.O.W. camps were basically just whining ingrates; it was a feeling in which some Creole and Asian veterans (mostly the fairer-skinned ones) joined them. They were open about the unacceptable nature of socialism and hostility toward trade unionism. They supported the rights of homeowners to benefit from Good Neighbours Acts while artfully concealing what they themselves hoped to gain by this posture.
The Respecters' most public role, however, was related to a subject not hitherto politically charged: the subject of beaches and tourism.
Palmera had guaranteed public access to her natural beaches as a shared trust and national right since the 1880s. To be sure there were upkeep and cleaning fees and the public had to purchase beach tags and passes to offset them—which admittedly ruled out the poorest from beach life and leisure except on specific days under certain support programmes—but unlike what would happen in much of America in coming decades, these were not a pretext to racially segregate the beaches. Tourists could expect to share the pristine sands of the natural beaches of Utina, which region was the pimary focus of the country's early beach recreation culture, with revellers of every colour.
In this fact the Respecters found an ideal “wedge issue.” In the Twenties they began to put forth the argument (purely commercial of course!) for “freedom of enterprise in the leisure industry.” They made the case that if tourism, hotel and cruise companies and developers could exclusively rent or even outright purchase beaches for their own purposes, could they not shape the tourism experience more to visitors' liking and thereby multiply tourism revenue for the country a thousandfold? Supposing, for example, that well-heeled Brits could pay a mint to spend a weekend frolicking at sophisticated beach parties with those living pieces of history, the Romanovs—who were already fixtures of the beaches around Daltonville when they weren't yachting outside of Eleutheria—who could calculate the monetary rewards for the nation? Or supposing American students could come south in the spring to find “an environment congenial to their native sensibilities;” would Palmera not be ideally-positioned to steal a march, as it were, on the Marcher states and reap even greater profits?
This point of view found powerful allies within the Jucker establishment, whose defining feature had so often been pragmatism at the expense of purity. There were no small number of Hacktey and Lanney businessmen who were far from being “Respecters” themselves but salivated at the prospect of profit the “free enterprise” approach to the beaches could bring.
There were external forces at work, too. Bainbridge Colby's Democratic administration in the White House privately but unmistakably let it be known that it favoured the Respecters' propositions and would even happily promote tourism to Palmera under such conditions. Successive British governments of the turbulent Twenties were alternately warm and indifferent to the idea but certainly never outright hostile to it. Most of all there were entrepreneurial American developers of whom it was an open secret that they were cats'-paws for American liquor barons and racketeers like Kai Thomas from Atlantic county or Chicago's “Angel” Gabriel Doria, who were determined to seize and exploit the largest piece of the Palmey leisure market they could manage**.
(** Thomas and Doria are analogues of Nucky Johnson and Al Capone from OTL. The Colby administration in Washington is a stark contrast to Howe's preceding government, featuring the full suite of racist tendencies that Woodrow Wilson' Presidency exhibited in our history.)
Others, however, Jucker and Dustie alike, were not fooled. When MP Christopher Brayboy (from Redeemer parish in Liberia county) introduced a measure “liberalizing” beach-related commerce and real estate in 1923, the opposition party opposed it vociferously; but even more strikingly, in a breach of the Commons' normally iron-clad party discipline, another Jucker rose to speak eloquently against it, too. Nicodemus Dunham was an MP for Epiphany parish in Osceola county, where some of the affected beaches could be found, and he unleashed a full blast of contempt at the “charade” of the Respecters and their allies, including those of his own party who temporized with them:
“Mr. Speaker, I am appalled that my colleague, the honourable member for Redeemer Parish, should put forth in all supposed seriousness a piece of legislation so transparently contrary to our national character.
"It is a piece of law crafted with many clear interests in mind. Those of the estimable President in Washington, for example, whose measure can be had in the fact that just last month he screened a certain propaganda film for a certain secret society of the Marches in the White House itself***. Those of certain business interests among us who have never particularly held the interests of our voters, veterans and loyal citizens above their own pocketbooks. Those of certain foreign interests known for their viciousness of character and conduct respecting no law of God or Man. So many interests represented here, Mr. Speaker, but the interests of the Palmey citizen are not among them.
(*** This is a reference to the original Klan propaganda version of “Birth of a Nation.” IOTL it was Woodrow Wilson's administration that was notorious for hosting screenings of this film in the White House.)
“Can we not see what this legislation is designed to enable? A wholesale rush to take a birthright of every citizen of this great land and place it in the hands of avaricious parties who could—let us use the word frankly, Mr. Speaker—
segregate some of our land's most beautiful and important resources away from those among us, Black and Asian and Creole alike****, to whom those interests and those to whom they cater are unremittingly hostile? Can there be the slightest doubt, Mr. Speaker, that we could not hope to put such legislation into practice without forever renouncing the proud claim that we are a bulwark against the thefts and oppressions of our brothers in Liberty so freely practised elsewhere?"
(**** The segregation of beach access away from local non-white populations has been a constant feature of such places in many parts of the world IOTL. Palmera will be compelled by the nature of its electorate to buck this trend... mostly.)
Dunham could hardly have ignited a greater furore in Jucker politics if he'd set off a bomb in the chamber. The Juckers were no strangers to vigorous internal debate but it was traditional to carry it on in the privacy of the lodge hall; not in the Commons itself, where unity was key. That he had resorted to breaking with his party in the open could only mean the possibility of a full-scale MP revolt against Lemuel Bolton himself.
The Prime Minister's office was tellingly hesitant, even paralysed, in its response. In the meantime other forces contested bloodily in the shadows, for there were forces arrayed in opposition to the Respecters and their allies who were just as ruthless. An Italian-American businessman connected with Doria's Chicago Outfit went missing as rhetorical fireworks dazzled the Commons. A developer from New Jersey was found mutilated, his heart and liver torn out, as the Parliamentary “ruction” reached the Senate, dividing Jucker against Jucker in that supposedly unified upper house. His death caused a sensation and raised (advisedly) the specter of resurgent “Nemoism”***** in the country.
(***** This describes a faux-”hoodooist” ritual murder of the kind identified with the Nono Nemo Society, which is now reactivating as a self-appointed counterweight to the Klan and other “foreign influences.” We'll see more on this in the coming chapter.)
Meanwhile, violent jolly-boys of one faction or another started to stake claims to certain beaches and try to exclude one another informally, brawling with one another and with the constabulary sent out to subdue them. As months of political wrangling unfolded in Eleutheria, the “Battle of the Beaches” was growing into something like a crisis, a genuine threat to the tourist trade that had to be resolved.
In the event, the Juckers could not afford to rely on a coalition of business-minded Lanney, Hackteys and “Respecters” in the modern era. As the electoral system itself was liberalizing, Bolton knew and privately acknowledged that the “free enterprise” scheme would result in
de facto segregated beaches, or nearly so, and permanently damage the party with Black and Asian voters. That Bolton still hesitated in resolving the crisis as long as he did, despite considerations that should have made the appropriate response obvious, raised serious questions about him in many minds; and he got little credit for it when he finally came out in full-throated opposition to Brayboy's bill, defeating it.
The Respecters—armoured to an extent by the charm and connections of their most prominent leader, one Sterling Jones—had by this point attracted exactly the sort of attention they didn't want. More and more they were acquiring less flattering names from their enemies like “Treachers” and “Cussids,”****** and drawing fire for outright racism. Still, they were men of sufficient standing that they couldn't be targeted as seditionists, at least not yet; and they resolved to press ahead and see if they couldn't find another route to wedging their agenda into the public debate.
(****** “Treacher” is one of those oddball Palmey archaisms and simply means “traitor” or “deceiver.” “Cussid” is Chatta, meaning “accursed.”)
After all, supposing one had been in on the “ground floor” of the process of actually
creating a beach, and the resort around it? Might there not be a loophole around the protections of public beach access then? Might such an experiment not be a test case that could answer Dunham's famous tirade and soften opposition?
The “test case” would come in Tequesta county in the form of an out-of-the-way fishing hamlet and smugglers' entrepôt named Helena. It was about to become the resort town of the future, the site where the final act of the Battle of the Beaches would be written.
I'll adjust and try to make it easier for people.
