First a request: could someone make a map based on the outcome of the Great War? And now moving on with the story.
Part 2: The Second Civil War.
Consensus within Socialist ranks was that segregation had to be eliminated, but during their first four years in power they hadn’t taken any steps against it yet because they wanted to consolidate their hold on power. After that Debs had intended to incrementally revoke the system of racial segregation in place in the Deep South, but there was a significant faction within the party that didn’t have the patience to demolish Jim Crow over a twenty or thirty year timeframe. As Socialist success increased in the 20s, they had absorbed a significant part of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Plenty of communists had realized that a proletarian revolution wouldn’t happen and had set their sights on penetrating the upper echelons of the party and the state to orchestrate a “revolution from above.” To reconcile the democratic socialists with the Marxists, Debs had put known communist William Z. Foster on his Presidential ticket in 1928. This would prove a fateful decision. Had he not done so, the Socialist Party most likely would have adopted his slow, methodical approach to ending segregation and would likely have continued operating within an electoral, democratic context rather than turning the country into an authoritarian state. Foster took the hard line against racial segregation in the South, and the South wasn’t going to accept that without a fight.
Debs and Foster had had heated disagreements on how to deal with the Jim Crow laws, with Foster representing the faction demanding immediate abolition. Foster once said “Jim Crow is an abomination that needs to be eliminated in a fortnight rather than in two more decades. White supremacism is a tool to keep the working class divided. It also disqualifies this country from calling itself the land of the free as at least one tenth of our people are not free, but second rate citizens instead.” Debs considered this risky, but nonetheless gave Foster his endorsement. The result was that Foster became the 32nd President of the United States of America and in his inaugural address he would begin taking steps to “truly make this the land of the free.”
That caused a stir in the South, where Jim Crow laws had been in place ever since the end of the American Civil War. These laws had enforced segregation of public facilities, which included separate schools, hotels, bars, hospitals, toilets, parks, even telephone booths, and separate sections in libraries, cinemas, and restaurants, the latter often with separate ticket windows and counters. The laws also prohibited blacks from being present in certain locations. For example, blacks were not allowed on the streets of Palm Beach, Florida after dark, unless required by their employment. Moreover, state laws prohibiting interracial marriage (“miscegenation”) had been enforced throughout the South and in many Northern states since the Colonial era. During Reconstruction, such laws were repealed in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Texas and South Carolina. In all these states such laws were reinstated after the Democratic “Redeemers” came to power. The Supreme Court declared such laws constitutional in 1883. Furthermore, The voting rights of blacks were systematically restricted or denied through suffrage laws, such as the introduction of poll taxes and literacy tests. Loopholes, such as the grandfather clause and the understanding clause, protected the voting rights of white people who were unable to pay the tax or pass the literacy test. Only whites could vote in Democratic Party primary contests. Where and when black people did manage to vote in numbers, their votes were negated by systematic gerrymandering of electoral boundaries.
President Foster had an “Equal Rights Act” drafted that, if adopted, would outlawed any and all discrimination based on race, skin colour, religion, gender or national origin. It would also prohibit unequal application of voter registration requirements, and racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations. Given the Socialist majority in Congress, the Equal Rights Act was passed. The Republican vote was split, but the Democrats unanimously voted against it. Given that the Jim Crow laws had been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court, the Democrats immediately announced they’d challenge the Equal Rights Act through legal means.
President Foster enlisted the aid of the ambitious Bureau of Investigation Director John Edgar Hoover to fabricate evidence to blackmail the judges on the Supreme Court of the United States. Hoover was even more motivated to carry out Foster’s wishes, as agents of the Socialist Party’s own intelligence agency had uncovered and reported his pornography collection, his homosexuality and his crossdressing habit. The President could blackmail Hoover into doing whatever he wanted, at least for now. One federal judge was arrested on a bogus charge and all the others supported the administration’s chance without being able to clearly explain why to the Democrat litigants in clear legal terms. The Democrats denounced the verdict as they believed it had been coerced by the White House, but they still tried to reach a compromise. President Foster flat-out refused any compromise as he was convinced segregation was a great evil of capitalism and that the legal ambiguities surrounding the Equal Rights Act were ideologically, morally and ethically justified.
The Democrats persisted in their struggle to maintain segregation in the South and at this point began accusing the President of illegally intimidating the Supreme Court judges into giving the desired ruling on the Equal Rights Act. Simultaneously, the Democrats started an odious propaganda and smear campaign that was aimed Southern audiences in particular. It played into fear by predicting what a white Southerner would consider horror scenarios. For example, they said that white schools would be forced to accept black pupils, which was a certain way to lower the quality of education as blacks were supposedly “slow” and “lazy.” The Democrats and other advocates of Jim Crow also frequently appealed to sexual fears concerning white women being seduced by black men, which was downright unacceptable by the mores of the time. Lewd pictures (by the standards of the time) with a white woman kissing and embracing a black man were put on posters with the caption “What would you do if this was your daughter, sister, wife or mother being intimate with a negro?” One Congressman from Alabama went so far as to saying that an African American man being intimate with a white woman constituted bestiality as blacks were closer to apes than to whites, a horrifically racist thing to say by modern standards. The horror that in black majority areas, blacks would get control was also mentioned and no white man alive in the South at the time would wanted to take orders from a black man. Further examples were blacks in white churches and mixed crowds in all kinds of public places ranging from cinemas to restaurants.
The result was widespread race riots in the South and violence by the Ku Klux Klan as well as the ultranationalist, white supremacist and conservative Silver Legion (modelled on the Russian National Solidarist gold shirty party militia). During this wave of violence in the spring of 1933, the lynching of blacks, other murders against blacks and destruction of their property took on epidemic proportions, prompting President Foster to declare an emergency and deploy militiamen to restore order. The militias, however, drew their manpower from the locals and was therefore hardly unbiased in the matter of race and did little. In May 1933, a group of pro-segregation Democratic politicians and anti-Socialist wealthy businessmen joined forces and decided to channel the violence. First they planned stage a coup d’état by seizing the Capitol Building during a Joint Session of Congress, scheduled to take place on Wednesday July 5th, in which President Foster would, once again, defend his policies against Democratic attacks. Next, the Southern militias would seize control of all their respective states. The optimistic estimate was that the rest of the country would follow (that there were no Jim Crow laws in the north and west, after all, did not mean there wasn’t still plenty of racism there).
Anti-communist Silver Legion paramilitary forces led by retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler dressed in civilian clothes took up positions around the Capitol Building. The militants stormed the Capitol Building at 09:45 PM as President Foster was about 25 minutes into the lengthy speech he’d prepared. Secret Service personnel, policemen and soldiers guarding it repulsed the attack, which in hindsight was set up rather amateurishly, and a gun battle erupted around the building. Many of the men part of the attack on the Capitol were captured, but Smedley Butler escaped.
In the meantime, the militias in the South who were in the know did their part by seizing control of state parliaments, police stations, key infrastructural targets and military bases. Though the coup in Washington failed, the plotters did succeed in seizing control in the South. In hindsight that was unsurprising given that state and local authorities were sympathetic to the cause of the plotters and because the US Army presence was small in spite of the state of emergency in effect (which was because the US Army only numbered 125.000 men at the time).
In control of the South, the plotters now sought a figurehead leader with some kind of democratic legitimacy and first tried to recruit their candidate for the 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, when he refused, their 1928 candidate Al Smith. Smith, a northerner like Roosevelt, refused. Smith’s running mate from 1928 Joseph T. Robinson responded positively and was illegally inaugurated President of the United States in Richmond, Virginia.
Contrary to the First Civil War (1861-1865), the South didn’t attempt to secede but instead aimed to take control of the country. Things quickly spiralled out of control with two administrations both claiming to be the legitimate government of the United States of America. Rather than a war of secession, like the First Civil War, both sides wanted to keep the country unified. The Socialists, however, ignored this distinction and immediately denounced the segregationist Southern states as the “Second Confederacy”, a term which has since been adopted by most American Marxist historians. They’ve since explained it in terms of capitalist industrialists and landowners fighting to maintain a system of exploitation of the black as well as the white proletariat by promoting white supremacism to keep the two from joining forces.
The Socialists eventually slapped down this Second Confederacy and crushed the romanticist “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” ideology through military victory. A draft was instated that caused the North’s forces to swell to 1 million men in only one year and the North had held all the cards: besides a greater population, the North also had a substantial number of factories and industries producing needed war materials. The North also had a better transportation network, mainly highways, canals, and railroads, which could be easily used to re-supply military forces in the field. The North’s forces immediately concentrated to advance down the Mississippi River to allow unimpeded movement of foreign imports. Secondly, the US Navy by and large remained loyal to Washington and cut off international trade to the South. The Battles of Memphis were a protracted affair, resulting in a breakthrough during the Third Battle of Memphis in May 1934.
This time, however, the North didn’t have the exclusive recognition of the entire world as the legitimate government as most of the world became unsympathetic to the increasingly ideologically hostile North, as it now aggressively denounced Western capitalism, imperialism and colonial rule in general. With the Second Civil War not even over yet, President Foster announced the Foster Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine which made the liberation of remaining vestiges of colonial oppression in the Americas a foreign policy goal (later to be expanded to the entire world in the global anti-capitalist struggle). South Africa, a predominantly black country under white minority rule, recognized the South as the true United States of America and the British, who feared for their colonial holdings in the Caribbean and the security of Canada, used South Africa as a corridor to provide the South with loans and trade extensively with the South through neutral Mexico (at least until the North cut off the Mississippi). Anti-communist Foreign Secretary Winston Churchill was a driving force behind this. He was also the one pushing for British forces in the region to seize Panama when it became apparent the South would fall to avoid a communist takeover there.
Britain also now actively began to seek a continental partner in Europe as they recognized America was a juggernaut, which would become hostile if the Reds won. Germany, as the dominant European power, was the obvious choice. The Germans provided the South with the design to the easily mass producible Type VII U-boats, a class of 800 tonne U-boats (submarines), which the South used asymmetrically against a superior fleet of battleships and cruisers and to run the blockade. Southern submarine commanders scored many kills, but the North built more ships than the South could sink.
In the following year, battles raged up and down the Mississippi, but eventually the North’s demographic and industrial superiority made itself felt and by June 1935 the South was split in two. In January 1936, Richmond, the provisional capital of the South fell and the South’s leaders fled to Atlanta. There they learnt of the news of the capture of Norfolk in March and further Red victories at Lexington, Kentucky in April and Nashville, Tennessee in June 1936. In August 1936, the South’s leadership finally threw the towel into the ring and Red America was about to be born.
