But they don't have to litteraly rebuild their nation or be saddled by an enourmous debt while at the same time trying to remain relevant as a superpower
Patton in Korea/MacArthur in the White House
- Thread starter BiteNibbleChomp
- Start date
- Status
But they don't have to litteraly rebuild their nation or be saddled by an enourmous debt while at the same time trying to remain relevant as a superpower
AIUI the problem wasn't simply the cost of the forces committed to Korea but the overall rise in defence spending the war provoked. This took resources away from exports amd infrastructure improvements. There was also a problem with inflation as commodity prices rose.
The near panic also led to orders for obsolescent weapons (Meteor) and delays in the development of new aircraft.
Feel free not to answer if spoilers are required to answer this question, but is MacArthur only going to be President for one term due to his age?
It's interesting to note that leftover Imperial Japanese weapons and vehicles were also used by both sides of the Korean War.
wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com
wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com
I wonder if PEFTOK would appear in this story.
North Korea: WWII weapons after the Korean War
(North Korean troops march with WWII PPSh–41 submachine guns in 2016.) In North Korea’s formative years (1945-1949) it’s army’s weapons were entirely WWII vintage; a mixture…
wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com
WWII Japanese weapons in the Korean War
Japan ruled Korea between 1905-1945. In August 1945, during the closing days of WWII, the USSR invaded the peninsula and the Soviet 25th Army advanced as far south as Seoul, before pulling back to …
wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com
I wonder if PEFTOK would appear in this story.
If we are actually talking about nations damaged by WW2 though, even France was able to afford fighting large wars overseas deploying far more men than Britain.And unlike Britain, they were in the driver’s seat.
Wolf of Badenoch
Donor
The major commitments to BAOR (150,000 +) and elsewhere meant that there was a troop shortage which ended up with National Servicemen (two year conscripts) being sent to Korea - something not previously planned. I believe that actually 100,000 UK service personnel served in Korea of which 4500 were killed or seriously injured. 400+ of these were National Servicemen. Given the economic situation at home and the ambitious social and welfare plans of the Attlee government things were not good - food and other rationing continued and bread rationing (which had not been in place in 1939-45) was most unpopular. Rationing continued until 1954. I remember when sweets (candy) came off the ration in 1953 and I no longer needed coupons to buy my weekly sugar fix.
Sure, thanks to a lot of american logistical, military and financial help and litteraly giving them the weapons and by using French Union troops aka the wannabe French version of the Commonwealth
Primarily, yeah. He'd be a week shy of 77 at the end of one term, and people live longer today than they did in the 1950s.
There's also the matter of 1956 making a much more satisfying end to the TL than 1960 would be. I was reading Eisenhower: The White House Years by Jim Newton a few weeks ago, and almost all of the exciting events happened in his first term, something that would likely be the same with MacArthur at the helm. Boring is fine for real life, but I'd rather make a good story!
As for whether he would be re-elected if he did run in 1956, I will leave that up to you readers to decide at the end of the TL. More fun that way
I'm afraid I'll probably have to disappoint you on this one - the Korean War is over now so PEFTOK doesn't have much reason to keep existing.
- BNC
Well then, I'm curious how this alternate Korean War would influence the Philippines especially the Huk Rebellion would be ongoing.
Very fair. Thanks for the info!Primarily, yeah. He'd be a week shy of 77 at the end of one term, and people live longer today than they did in the 1950s.
There's also the matter of 1956 making a much more satisfying end to the TL than 1960 would be. I was reading Eisenhower: The White House Years by Jim Newton a few weeks ago, and almost all of the exciting events happened in his first term, something that would likely be the same with MacArthur at the helm. Boring is fine for real life, but I'd rather make a good story!
As for whether he would be re-elected if he did run in 1956, I will leave that up to you readers to decide at the end of the TL. More fun that way
- BNC
And Britain was largely using left overs from the world wars with the forces being almost 1/20 the size of the French expeditionary force deployed in Indochina.
Last edited:
I
Interesting. If that can have enough effect on the situation in Suez to prevent the 1957 defence white paper, I'm in!
Yes, but it was paying on his own pocket unlike France and there were other consequences as other have pointed out; so yes, the Korean adventure was costly for a cash strapped UK, simple that
Seems you are right.The US paid 80% of the war,though what’s surprising is that even factoring US contribution, France was still paying much more than Britain and for a much longer time—they fought in Indochina for seven and a half years.
I know that Magasaysay is kicking the heck out of the Huks, and the brits are saving malaysia.Generally ITTL I try to keep what's going on in the communist sphere as largely a mystery - puts decisions made by the characters more in context when you don't know the full story any more than they do
That said, for those who don't mind breaking the illusion, here's the story I've been using behind the scenes:
Stalin, despite promising "not to lift a finger" should Kim be unsuccessful in the invasion of SK, was disappointed to see the first outright defeat of a communist nation in battle. Throughout the winter of 1950-1, Soviet advisors, 'volunteer' pilots and other evidence of the USSR's involvement was quietly withdrawn, and while he publicly announced that "Korea was not yet ready for socialism" and had his diplomats tell Mao to cut his losses, privately he became angry at the humiliation that the communist cause (with him its head) had suffered, spending weeks of early 1951 in a particularly bad mood.
Unfortunately, it was around this time that Nikita Khrushchev gave a lengthy speech offering a number of proposals to reform Soviet agriculture, which was then published in Pravda. Stalin was furious, and already having convinced himself that someone would seek to overthrow him as a result of the Korean disaster, ordered Khrushchev be purged, putting an end to the "conspiracy" before it could "destroy the Soviet Union". Such a conspiracy had never existed, not that it mattered to the luckless former commissar.
I've got some stuff planned for the region
Might be a bit late for Mac to do anything about that - he's only going to serve one term which ends in January 1957... Lumumba's MNC wasn't even founded until late 1958 and the Congo doesn't appear to have been high on Eisenhower's radar until 1960. Interesting thought though!
There's certainly some room for that: Britain in particular has two less years of Korean War draining money from the treasury, some of which can now be spent on "soft" power in the MidEast. We'll see.
- BNC
Part IV, Chapter 26
CHAPTER 26
MacArthur’s strongest bastion of support had always come from the Midwest, and Wisconsin in particular. The general’s attachment to what would become his home state was more due to his father than his own experience – he had been born in Arkansas, and the Army had been his ‘home’ since the turn of the century. Wisconsin had called him its own in 1948, and when a Milwaukee donor offered him a home in the city, the Badger State became the headquarters of the MacArthur campaign once more.
After spending two and a half weeks touring the western half of the country, receiving huge crowds at every stop he made, MacArthur arrived in Milwaukee on September 27th, where he was greeted by Phil LaFollette and Robert Wood, two men who had served under him (Wood in World War I, LaFollette in World War II) and who were both well-known Republicans that had spearheaded his campaign in 1948. LaFollette, who had attempted to form a Progressive Party in the 1930s, often disagreed with the firm conservative Wood on policy matters. The one exception to this was foreign policy: like most in the Midwest and indeed much of the Republican Party, both men favoured a more isolationist tone be taken.
MacArthur’s first meeting with his Wisconsin team, predictably, centred around foreign policy. It was one field where MacArthur could legitimately claim to have experience, having been the de facto governor of both the Philippines and then Japan, and his desire to change America’s position on the world stage provided most of his motivation to run for office in the first place. While Truman had concentrated on Europe, MacArthur proposed to give priority to Asia. He had attacked Truman’s handling of Asian affairs several times as he paraded through the western states, reminding the public that Truman had ‘lost’ China, and how he had taken months to secure a peace in Korea after the Yalu River was reached. Then he offered his allies his first policy point: if elected, he would meet with Chiang. The Chinese leader was popular in America, and a formal defensive alliance would secure America’s position and contain communism across the entire Pacific Rim.
Satisfied that he had made his views clear, MacArthur retired for his afternoon nap, leaving the matter for his subordinates to turn into a platform however they saw fit. Subordinates they were too: just as he had in wartime, MacArthur would announce his orders to his staff, and unless he took a particular interest in the matter, they would be free to carry them out however they saw fit. They would then report back not to MacArthur himself, but to his chief of staff, and then said chief of staff would decide what information was important enough to pass back to the top, often with MacArthur being unaware or uninterested in the minor details. In the Pacific, he had Sutherland. In Tokyo, he had Almond (at least until Patton decided Almond wasn’t worth listening to). On the campaign trail, he would soon have Frederick Ayer. LaFollette and Wood reported to him.
***
October 11, 1951
“I’m sorry, Mr President, but I don’t see any way out of this.”
Harry Truman had expected the words long before they came out of his Secretary of the Treasury’s mouth, indeed they were a big part of why he had made it a priority to meet with him today, but hearing John Snyder say them was about as welcome as being kicked by a mule all the same.
“This recession is expected to be short and mild, but unless you have another Korean War to get people in work, we’re going to face a downturn.” Snyder continued. “If the Feds didn’t insist on tightening monetary policy right now, we might have been able to ride this out, but cutting spending and hiking rates at the same time makes our job nearly impossible.”
“The price we pay for an independent Fed.” Truman said glumly. Just seven months ago, he had called all the top people at the Federal Reserve to the White House to sort out their differences, chief among them their unwillingness to keep supporting the government’s spending, and the result had been separating the Treasury from the Fed. Almost immediately, the Fed had decided that inflation was getting out of control, something that had concerned Truman for a while, and so they raised interest rates. Snyder had explained it as being like ‘lightly pressing the brake on the economy’, which until now had been roaring.
Then the Korean War ended. Fifty billion dollars of government money had been going to the military, and the 1951 deficit was much larger than Truman had been comfortable with. As soon as there was no war, he moved quickly to slash the military’s budget in half. It wasn’t quite the full-fledged ‘economisation’ of 1946-49, which some critics had lambasted him for, saying it had left the US weak and exposed, and even going so far as to blame for the Korean War itself (though had it really been that bad of a policy? Korea had been a striking success even with a greatly reduced spend on the Army), but it did give him a chance of delivering a balanced budget next year.
“What can I do then to reduce the impact of this recession?” Truman asked.
“A few things. Tax cuts will give people more money to spend. An infrastructure build will create jobs. If the Fed cuts rates back to their previous level, that would help too.” Snyder said.
“We can’t do anything about the Fed, it has been less than a year since we signed that Accord.” Truman said. “And both of the others will result in a larger deficit.”
“That’s correct.” Snyder said. “Unless you let the recession run its course, it is likely we will face a deficit in this year’s budget.”
“Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.” Truman said. Being president meant you got blamed whenever something went wrong: the Republicans were already starting to blame him for the recession, and they’d blamed him for all the recent deficits as well. The only problem was, this president didn’t seem to get any of the credit when things went well: nobody thanked him for winning the Korean War. They thanked MacArthur.
“Leave the taxes as they are.” Truman decided. “Alert me – immediately – if things show any sign of getting worse, but we can ride it out for now.”
***
While Harry Truman continued to wrestle with his Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, MacArthur’s great tour across the country continued to attract huge numbers of spectators, including the largest ticker-tape parade in history in New York. The last stop was Boston, where after giving a speech to an audience of thousands, he would finally meet in person the man who would aim to put him in the White House.
Frederick Ayer Jr’s first meeting with Douglas MacArthur very quickly convinced him that MacArthur would be his own greatest obstacle. MacArthur had a lot of support – he had the Hearst papers, he had Henry Luce, he had the LaFollettes. Harry Truman’s popularity was at a record low, so 1952 would be a likely victory for whoever ended up with the Republican nomination. MacArthur was arguably the most popular person in the country, and had recently come home from two victorious wars – although Winston Churchill, recently re-elected as Prime Minister, had proved in 1945 that that did not mean as much as people thought it did. Regardless, MacArthur should have had the presidency in the bag.
Instead, MacArthur greeted Ayer the same way he greeted almost everyone he met, with a monologue. “A very fine monologue to be sure, and one that incorporated all the best parts of the English language, but he did not seem to realise that presidents are not elected purely on oratory.” Ayer would later say. “I was impressed with what he did say, and I believed he would be a better president than Robert Taft or the Democrats, but there was a lot he did not say, and it became my job to make sure he said the right things and didn’t leave anything important out.”
Ayer had written to his uncle several times asking what to expect from MacArthur, and Patton’s replies had amounted to ‘he thinks he knows everything’. MacArthur never asked questions – that would imply there was something he did not know. He spoke, you listened, and then his policies, combined with the fact that he was Douglas MacArthur, would get him into the White House. Within half an hour of meeting the general, Ayer could see that Patton, if anything, had understated it.
MacArthur’s policies, indeed the only things he had spoken at length on across his national tour, were that taxes needed to be cut and that he had turned Japan into a “shining light of democracy” and could apply his experience to the United States. The former could come from any Republican candidate, and likely most Democrats too, so Ayer didn’t worry about it too much. The latter put MacArthur as arguably the most qualified person to ever run the country other than a former president, by virtue of having actually run a country before, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that was going to convince a farmer in Kansas or a coal miner in West Virginia to vote for him.
After it became apparent that an afternoon meeting in Boston would not be enough to get MacArthur’s campaign moving beyond tax cuts and Japan, and thanks to another letter from Patton telling him that MacArthur never used the telephone, Ayer decided the best way to move forward would be to fly to Milwaukee, sit down and talk with the general and some of his key supporters, and find out what parts of his policies could actually be put on a campaign poster without turning the electorate against him (as even at this early stage, some of his ideas turned to the downright bizarre). All the while convincing the general that everything was his own idea.
In Milwaukee, Ayer questioned MacArthur on every aspect of government policy that he could think of (“General, how should the government handle labour unions?” or “General, what do you think about the Tennessee Valley Authority?”), and realised that for a lot of aspects of policy, what MacArthur said, what he thought he believed, and what he actually believed were three different things. “Take the New Deal” Ayer would say in a 1977 interview, “MacArthur said that FDR’s policies amounted to an impossible fantasy, then when I questioned him on New Deal policies, such as Social Security or Crop Insurance for farmers, he said he thought just about all of them were a good idea. Then, five minutes later, he would brag to me about how successful policies very similar to them had been in Japan.”
Ayer would say that his greatest challenge in the whole campaign was to convince MacArthur to admit to things that he already believed in, but at the same time making it seem like it was the general’s idea. He knew that if MacArthur openly attacked the popular New Deal, it would spell doom for the campaign, and even though MacArthur agreed with most of it, he was likely to do just that. On the New Deal issue specifically, Ayer decided to preempt MacArthur’s bad habits, and had Pat Echols quote the general speaking favourably on New Deal policies in the papers. If the press established him as a New Deal supporter, maybe they wouldn’t question him so heavily on it later down the line.
Ayer soon boiled MacArthur’s policies down to a few key points. On the domestic front, MacArthur was an economic conservative: he wanted to balance the budget, bring taxes down and generally believed in a lassiez-faire approach to the economy. He was much more liberal when it came to social policy: he supported civil rights (though that touchy subject would have to be kept quiet if they intended to contest the South), and tended to favour a strong labour movement, which would help him capture the votes of the Northeast. His preference was for Congress, not the President, to drive legislation, up to and including declarations of war (the latter point being a blatant criticism of Harry Truman’s actions in June 1950), and he supported the rights of states to handle their own affairs. Abroad, a Cold War version of Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’ rounded everything out nicely.
Presented well, there was something in the platform to appeal to both liberals and conservatives, hawks and doves, and everyone in between (almost… Ayer and the rest of the campaign would have to decide if it was worth making an effort in the reliably Democratic South and its hundred or so electoral votes). But beyond the millions-strong crowds, Ayer knew that MacArthur was also a controversial figure with a long lifetime of enemies. The best platform in the world wouldn’t mean anything if they weren’t handled correctly.
The following day, November 6th, MacArthur’s first real challenger for the Presidency threw his hat in the ring.
- BNC
MacArthur’s strongest bastion of support had always come from the Midwest, and Wisconsin in particular. The general’s attachment to what would become his home state was more due to his father than his own experience – he had been born in Arkansas, and the Army had been his ‘home’ since the turn of the century. Wisconsin had called him its own in 1948, and when a Milwaukee donor offered him a home in the city, the Badger State became the headquarters of the MacArthur campaign once more.
After spending two and a half weeks touring the western half of the country, receiving huge crowds at every stop he made, MacArthur arrived in Milwaukee on September 27th, where he was greeted by Phil LaFollette and Robert Wood, two men who had served under him (Wood in World War I, LaFollette in World War II) and who were both well-known Republicans that had spearheaded his campaign in 1948. LaFollette, who had attempted to form a Progressive Party in the 1930s, often disagreed with the firm conservative Wood on policy matters. The one exception to this was foreign policy: like most in the Midwest and indeed much of the Republican Party, both men favoured a more isolationist tone be taken.
MacArthur’s first meeting with his Wisconsin team, predictably, centred around foreign policy. It was one field where MacArthur could legitimately claim to have experience, having been the de facto governor of both the Philippines and then Japan, and his desire to change America’s position on the world stage provided most of his motivation to run for office in the first place. While Truman had concentrated on Europe, MacArthur proposed to give priority to Asia. He had attacked Truman’s handling of Asian affairs several times as he paraded through the western states, reminding the public that Truman had ‘lost’ China, and how he had taken months to secure a peace in Korea after the Yalu River was reached. Then he offered his allies his first policy point: if elected, he would meet with Chiang. The Chinese leader was popular in America, and a formal defensive alliance would secure America’s position and contain communism across the entire Pacific Rim.
Satisfied that he had made his views clear, MacArthur retired for his afternoon nap, leaving the matter for his subordinates to turn into a platform however they saw fit. Subordinates they were too: just as he had in wartime, MacArthur would announce his orders to his staff, and unless he took a particular interest in the matter, they would be free to carry them out however they saw fit. They would then report back not to MacArthur himself, but to his chief of staff, and then said chief of staff would decide what information was important enough to pass back to the top, often with MacArthur being unaware or uninterested in the minor details. In the Pacific, he had Sutherland. In Tokyo, he had Almond (at least until Patton decided Almond wasn’t worth listening to). On the campaign trail, he would soon have Frederick Ayer. LaFollette and Wood reported to him.
***
October 11, 1951
“I’m sorry, Mr President, but I don’t see any way out of this.”
Harry Truman had expected the words long before they came out of his Secretary of the Treasury’s mouth, indeed they were a big part of why he had made it a priority to meet with him today, but hearing John Snyder say them was about as welcome as being kicked by a mule all the same.
“This recession is expected to be short and mild, but unless you have another Korean War to get people in work, we’re going to face a downturn.” Snyder continued. “If the Feds didn’t insist on tightening monetary policy right now, we might have been able to ride this out, but cutting spending and hiking rates at the same time makes our job nearly impossible.”
“The price we pay for an independent Fed.” Truman said glumly. Just seven months ago, he had called all the top people at the Federal Reserve to the White House to sort out their differences, chief among them their unwillingness to keep supporting the government’s spending, and the result had been separating the Treasury from the Fed. Almost immediately, the Fed had decided that inflation was getting out of control, something that had concerned Truman for a while, and so they raised interest rates. Snyder had explained it as being like ‘lightly pressing the brake on the economy’, which until now had been roaring.
Then the Korean War ended. Fifty billion dollars of government money had been going to the military, and the 1951 deficit was much larger than Truman had been comfortable with. As soon as there was no war, he moved quickly to slash the military’s budget in half. It wasn’t quite the full-fledged ‘economisation’ of 1946-49, which some critics had lambasted him for, saying it had left the US weak and exposed, and even going so far as to blame for the Korean War itself (though had it really been that bad of a policy? Korea had been a striking success even with a greatly reduced spend on the Army), but it did give him a chance of delivering a balanced budget next year.
“What can I do then to reduce the impact of this recession?” Truman asked.
“A few things. Tax cuts will give people more money to spend. An infrastructure build will create jobs. If the Fed cuts rates back to their previous level, that would help too.” Snyder said.
“We can’t do anything about the Fed, it has been less than a year since we signed that Accord.” Truman said. “And both of the others will result in a larger deficit.”
“That’s correct.” Snyder said. “Unless you let the recession run its course, it is likely we will face a deficit in this year’s budget.”
“Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.” Truman said. Being president meant you got blamed whenever something went wrong: the Republicans were already starting to blame him for the recession, and they’d blamed him for all the recent deficits as well. The only problem was, this president didn’t seem to get any of the credit when things went well: nobody thanked him for winning the Korean War. They thanked MacArthur.
“Leave the taxes as they are.” Truman decided. “Alert me – immediately – if things show any sign of getting worse, but we can ride it out for now.”
***
While Harry Truman continued to wrestle with his Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, MacArthur’s great tour across the country continued to attract huge numbers of spectators, including the largest ticker-tape parade in history in New York. The last stop was Boston, where after giving a speech to an audience of thousands, he would finally meet in person the man who would aim to put him in the White House.
Frederick Ayer Jr’s first meeting with Douglas MacArthur very quickly convinced him that MacArthur would be his own greatest obstacle. MacArthur had a lot of support – he had the Hearst papers, he had Henry Luce, he had the LaFollettes. Harry Truman’s popularity was at a record low, so 1952 would be a likely victory for whoever ended up with the Republican nomination. MacArthur was arguably the most popular person in the country, and had recently come home from two victorious wars – although Winston Churchill, recently re-elected as Prime Minister, had proved in 1945 that that did not mean as much as people thought it did. Regardless, MacArthur should have had the presidency in the bag.
Instead, MacArthur greeted Ayer the same way he greeted almost everyone he met, with a monologue. “A very fine monologue to be sure, and one that incorporated all the best parts of the English language, but he did not seem to realise that presidents are not elected purely on oratory.” Ayer would later say. “I was impressed with what he did say, and I believed he would be a better president than Robert Taft or the Democrats, but there was a lot he did not say, and it became my job to make sure he said the right things and didn’t leave anything important out.”
Ayer had written to his uncle several times asking what to expect from MacArthur, and Patton’s replies had amounted to ‘he thinks he knows everything’. MacArthur never asked questions – that would imply there was something he did not know. He spoke, you listened, and then his policies, combined with the fact that he was Douglas MacArthur, would get him into the White House. Within half an hour of meeting the general, Ayer could see that Patton, if anything, had understated it.
MacArthur’s policies, indeed the only things he had spoken at length on across his national tour, were that taxes needed to be cut and that he had turned Japan into a “shining light of democracy” and could apply his experience to the United States. The former could come from any Republican candidate, and likely most Democrats too, so Ayer didn’t worry about it too much. The latter put MacArthur as arguably the most qualified person to ever run the country other than a former president, by virtue of having actually run a country before, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that was going to convince a farmer in Kansas or a coal miner in West Virginia to vote for him.
After it became apparent that an afternoon meeting in Boston would not be enough to get MacArthur’s campaign moving beyond tax cuts and Japan, and thanks to another letter from Patton telling him that MacArthur never used the telephone, Ayer decided the best way to move forward would be to fly to Milwaukee, sit down and talk with the general and some of his key supporters, and find out what parts of his policies could actually be put on a campaign poster without turning the electorate against him (as even at this early stage, some of his ideas turned to the downright bizarre). All the while convincing the general that everything was his own idea.
In Milwaukee, Ayer questioned MacArthur on every aspect of government policy that he could think of (“General, how should the government handle labour unions?” or “General, what do you think about the Tennessee Valley Authority?”), and realised that for a lot of aspects of policy, what MacArthur said, what he thought he believed, and what he actually believed were three different things. “Take the New Deal” Ayer would say in a 1977 interview, “MacArthur said that FDR’s policies amounted to an impossible fantasy, then when I questioned him on New Deal policies, such as Social Security or Crop Insurance for farmers, he said he thought just about all of them were a good idea. Then, five minutes later, he would brag to me about how successful policies very similar to them had been in Japan.”
Ayer would say that his greatest challenge in the whole campaign was to convince MacArthur to admit to things that he already believed in, but at the same time making it seem like it was the general’s idea. He knew that if MacArthur openly attacked the popular New Deal, it would spell doom for the campaign, and even though MacArthur agreed with most of it, he was likely to do just that. On the New Deal issue specifically, Ayer decided to preempt MacArthur’s bad habits, and had Pat Echols quote the general speaking favourably on New Deal policies in the papers. If the press established him as a New Deal supporter, maybe they wouldn’t question him so heavily on it later down the line.
Ayer soon boiled MacArthur’s policies down to a few key points. On the domestic front, MacArthur was an economic conservative: he wanted to balance the budget, bring taxes down and generally believed in a lassiez-faire approach to the economy. He was much more liberal when it came to social policy: he supported civil rights (though that touchy subject would have to be kept quiet if they intended to contest the South), and tended to favour a strong labour movement, which would help him capture the votes of the Northeast. His preference was for Congress, not the President, to drive legislation, up to and including declarations of war (the latter point being a blatant criticism of Harry Truman’s actions in June 1950), and he supported the rights of states to handle their own affairs. Abroad, a Cold War version of Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’ rounded everything out nicely.
Presented well, there was something in the platform to appeal to both liberals and conservatives, hawks and doves, and everyone in between (almost… Ayer and the rest of the campaign would have to decide if it was worth making an effort in the reliably Democratic South and its hundred or so electoral votes). But beyond the millions-strong crowds, Ayer knew that MacArthur was also a controversial figure with a long lifetime of enemies. The best platform in the world wouldn’t mean anything if they weren’t handled correctly.
The following day, November 6th, MacArthur’s first real challenger for the Presidency threw his hat in the ring.
- BNC
Great update. Of course a recession would happen and of course Truman would get blamed for it. MacArthur will have a field day using the recession against Truman. And oooh who is this other challenger? I bet it's Eisenhower
It'd be great to see MacArthur turn out to be quite forcefully in favor of civil rights
Edit: Just to add a little more to this, I think if he did act forcefully he could lead the GOP in a completely new direction. A form of conservatism that is fairly laissez faire but still supports unions and then strongly in favor of civil rights (while likely being social conservative in some other areas) would be super interesting and make for a very dynamic era in American politics. Not to get into current politics but the economic side of that would remind me of Trump in the way he was both pro-business and pro-tax cuts, but also went after union workers in the rust belt based on trade issues.
Edit: Just to add a little more to this, I think if he did act forcefully he could lead the GOP in a completely new direction. A form of conservatism that is fairly laissez faire but still supports unions and then strongly in favor of civil rights (while likely being social conservative in some other areas) would be super interesting and make for a very dynamic era in American politics. Not to get into current politics but the economic side of that would remind me of Trump in the way he was both pro-business and pro-tax cuts, but also went after union workers in the rust belt based on trade issues.
Last edited:
The recession actually happened OTL in mid 1953-54 after Korea ended (drawdown on military spending a big part of it), and the anti-inflation rate hike is taken straight from OTL as well... Korea ending in the late spring of 1951 just means these events happen at roughly the same time instead of two years apart. Not good news for the economy.
Yes he will
A rather specific prediction... let's see if you're right
Interesting take! I'm taking Mac's policies as close as I can from what he actually said in Reminiscences, the 1952 RNC keynote speech and a couple of other addresses he gave, and his actions in Japan. The result is a rather strange mix - sometimes he comes across as being stuck in the 1910s (not an exaggeration - he proposes abolishing the federal income tax, a 1914 law, in Reminiscences... I don't think that was a really practical policy by the 50s), and other times he could be remarkably progressive and forward-thinking. Not yet sure how those two would mix in the party once Mac himself is no longer in the picture, but definitely something to explore!
2020 was the first US election I followed to any real degree (I was still a bit young to make sense of 2016, plus it was happening in another country), so any links to 45's campaign are purely coincidental.
- BNC
- Status