How does the government treat big businesses? Do they allow monopolies or oligopolies? Did the UK or France adopt fascist styles of government during the war?
The King in Yellow and Other Stories: A President Lovecraft Weird Fiction Timeline in Several Acts
- Thread starter Born in the USSA
- Start date
Strictly, especially given the absolute disemboweling the Republicans have been through and the populist turn the Democrats have been on since Bryan was president. The Independence Party has been anti-trust for its entire existence (barring the glaring exception of anything with Hearst in the name, though they're restricted only slightly less heavily. The focus in Lovecraftian fascism for fulfilling work has translated into a lot of worker power in their industries, with the mindbogglingly large government tap used to steer industrial policy and enforce good labor practices.
They did not. They're small "c" conservative and have been looking at the Lovecraftian economic experiment with shock and horror, though they do of course tolerate "loyal" unions as a safety valve for unrest among the working class.
Frankly I suck at mapmaking to be honest 😅 though I suppose the handiest visual would be if you took a European map pre-World War I and made the following changes, since the World War I analogue didn't end with any Wilsonian self determination and the World War II analogue didn't exactly refute the "Great Powers are allowed to have any territory they can keep" mentality:
- Subtract OTL Poland, Kaliningrad, Lithuania and Latvia, they're what make up the new Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
- Subtract pre-1914 Hungary from Austria-Hungary, it's in the Comintern now.
- Divide Belgium up and parcel it out based on language.
- Subtract the sliver of Germany west of the Rhine, it makes up the Rhenish Republic along with like two crumbs of the former Belgium.
- Combine the UK and France (plus Francophone Belgium)
- Subtract Sardinia from Italy, it's the rump Kingdom of Italy now.
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They're trying but as we'll see tomorrow it's a bit of a bitter pill
They haven't united but were having discussions during the war to pool resources.
Basically this, though by the end of the conflict talks are starting for an alternate version of the Franco-British Union concept floated during OTL's World War II, the better to maintain their remaining colonial holdings and stand firm against the Comintern in a world where it's enormous and tightly integrated and they've grown wary of the US. It's not even that Lovecraft has lost his Anglophilia, but several in his party are increasingly critical of France and Britain and even Lovecraft himself makes a clear distinction between respecting their legacy of civilization and allowing them to maintain their Great Power hegemony, so they're feeling increasingly alienated.
So how does the US and Lovecroft view the various European colonies? Independence or 'managed' by someone else?
It sort of depends on how developed they are. VP Smith has been a really good influence in nudging Lovecraft further down a less racist path but there's still plenty of cultural chauvinism. Basically, aside from the Pacific colonies that threw off the yoke during the 2CoC and were allowed to stay free as a reward* for hamstringing Japan, he considers the other European colonies worthy of independence when they've proven they're developed and civilized enough to earn it. In his view nurturing colonial dependence on the mother country stunts this "natural" course of development, and as the last war proved was a massive weakness.
*The new Republic of Indochina has become a little brother to the RoC, though there's still a lot of growing pains. The Dutch East Indies and Malaysia reorganized into Nusantara and are consciously modeling themselves on a hybrid of the Chinese and Ottoman systems.
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I have another errand that's going to delay today's update by a couple of hours, so I'll open the floor to any other questions! I'm glad you all have stuck with me on this 😂
No, it's just a sign of how completely desperate the Qing were. Rather than face a two front civil war and with an Emperor dealing with lingering anthrax poisoning it was either take the humiliating deal Sun was offering or be extinguished entirely by Yuan. Then the Emperor kicked the bucket and ironically his death and the results of his earlier purge of Manchu conservatives solved the cognitive dissonance.
What is Lovecraft and the Independence Party's view on Ecology, Pollution and National Parks? Can you tell us about American law enforcement and the justice system?
Most of the substantial reforms to the areas you're curious about are related and rooted in the Winthrop Administration, combining the start of a robust conservation system of national forests and fisheries established under the Secretary of the Interior with the creation of the National Mounted Police to administer the parks and prevent poaching. Lovecraft loved the outdoors and so he expanded the system even further, along with reorganizing the National Mounted Police into the more expansive American Hussar Corps. State and local law enforcement is relatively unchanged, though the Populist states are chafing at the federal yoke. At the national level internal policing is largely divided between Hoover's National Intelligence Bureau and the Hussars, since neither organization violates posse comitatus. As for the wider justice system euthanasia has been ruled constitutional and by this point is considered a right to be expected in any civilized country, though the practice hasn't spread far beyond the Outer Pact.
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So it was called a republic despite not being a republic, but a monarchy? I realize that right after that, you have it actually become a republic, I but it seems to me that at the time of the deal it was still at least formally the "Chinese Empire" or whatever exactly they would've called it.
Anyway, it's a minor detail so I'm gonna stop pestering you about it after this
Police!!!- Life in the Strange Aeon
Tangible improvements in people's lives and the need to confront economic calamity and a global conflagration had delivered Lovecraft two reelections but he couldn't deny that he was worn thin. He had already announced that he would under no circumstances seek a fourth term and after the founding of the Providence Pact with China and the PLC in 1943 he shocked the nation and the world, announcing that he would be resigning the presidency. He had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer*. Leaving the office in the capable hands of Clark Ashton Smith, he would spend the remaining decade of his life at Zaman's Hill, an estate he had established in Providence with Louise, and would devote himself to writing newspaper editorials and publishing an autobiography he would title The Outsider.
Smith had been a capable and dedicated Vice President, but he knew before he took the oath that it was possible he'd only get a year, and so he seized it. Always more racially progressive than Lovecraft, he decided to devote his energies to civil rights, in recognition to the sacrifices all Americans had made for fascism, regardless of color. The Lovecraftian work programs and educational initiatives had been designed to be fully integrated and colorblind, giving Negro-Americans the most government support they had received since Reconstruction but lingering injustices remained, especially concentrated among the nation's Jews.
Although the segments of the 1923 Immigration Act concerning Italians and Slavs had been amended the provision banning Jewish immigration remained. As the culmination of a lifetime of tireless effort on the part of civil rights pioneer Sonia Greene, the 1944 Slattery Act would open up the Alaska Territory to unlimited Jewish immigration in response to the Comintern's Kultura Lukto. In 1943, Bogdanov had died of a botched blood transfusion**, with antisemites in the Comintern (Goebbels chief among them) quick to insinuate the presence of a vast conspiracy. For several years open antisemitism soared within the Comintern, producing a flood of refugees to Alaska and the PLC before the fever ebbed. Ironically the Kultura Lukto drove a wedge between Goebbels and Mussolini, and by the time sanity was restored Goebbels would see his emergency powers stripped away and the return of the Spartacist's much beloved councilism, though Mussolini remained in his position until his death some years later.
Reelected for a term in his own right in a massive upset, Smith would use his remaining political capital to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1947 along with a revitalized version of the Klan Act and the 21st Amendment, which moved up inauguration day, straightening out the methods and order of succession, and set a limit of two presidential terms all in a single stroke. This finally proved to be too much too fast, with the nation elevating Earl Long to the presidency in 1948. Running on a modernized version of his brother's agrarian noninterventionist populism and likewise quiet on the race issue, tragedy would strike during his campaign for a second term as he was stabbed on stage during his election night victory speech. The fringe American Workingmen's Party had claimed its first victim and handed Vice President Gerald L.K. Smith the presidency.
Focused on domestic over foreign policy, the second President Smith devoted his energies to trying to unwind the fascist agenda and stem what he derisively called "the rising tide of color", attempting to use the expansive ecosystem of government spending and regulation to restrict nonwhite access to the bevy of benefits and social support that had become too entrenched and wildly popular to risk doing away with for the population at large. Although lower voter turnout and voter suppression would likewise give him a term in his own right, Smith's broader project would be largely foiled by the deep Independence tilt in the courts, the military and the federal bureaucracy***, with several of his attempts to restrict programs or otherwise expand tacit systems of segregation overturned by the courts or otherwise stymied.
With political violence on the rise and global tensions escalating 1960 looked to be another pivotal election, with the country torn between Senator Strom Thurmond and Texas Governor Robert "Two Gun Bob" Howard. A veteran of the Eastern Theater and long time Moon-Beast within the Church of Starry Wisdom, Howard campaigned on recommitting the nation to its global commitments and pledged to get a man into space before the Comintern, marking the beginning of the Great Race. Serving from 1961 to 1969, President Howard was faced with a combination of domestic unrest in the wake of the bipolar Smith presidencies as well as the international crisis that was the Congo.
-Steely eyed missile man Marvel Parsons, father of the American space program. Though the Comintern would be the first in space von Braun's Vojaĝanto artificial satellite, the US would be the first to successfully get a man into space and back alive, eventually landing a man on the moon with the Mercury program.
The Congo had proved to be a weeping sore for the newly unified Franco-British Union. Though the FBU had administered the colony since the dismemberment of Belgium, a historical irony of Belgium's democratic embrace of communism was that the Congo had spent a generation as a defacto colony of the Comintern. Genuinely committed to spreading the alliance's strain of modern Marxism to the nation, the Belgians had doubled their efforts to right the injustices of the Free State period, helping the nation to grow and modernize in preparation to becoming a fully recognized and independent member of the Comintern. The destruction of Belgium had opened up the nation to conquest on behalf of a colonial master still bitter over the loss of its Pacific colonies and it showed. Though loyal "Dominions of the Union" reserved the right to self government under a native elite class, there was no way the FBU was going to extend the privilege to a bunch of commie Congolese, and early tensions would devolve into a bitter guerilla war that would drag on for over a decade.
The FBU had finally given up in the Congo by the early sixties in the face of mounting losses, domestic unrest and the increasingly untenable resource drain it represented, an unnacceptable imposition when the Union was already badly behind in the Great Race. Leaving an unstable Republic of the Congo in their wake, Howard saw the expansion of communism in the region as a direct challenge to America's interests, taking to the airwaves in 1963 to make the case for American intervention in the conflict. Laying out a plan for the deployment of an American peacekeeping force along with civilian engineers and political advisors, the second phase of the Congo War would prove increasingly divisive among the American public and consume much of Howard's time in office, though the carrot of new military investments did convince several southern states to aquiesce to the president's proposed INSS system and the end of the conflict would eventually see a fairly stable fascist Congo ascend into the expanding Providence Pact.
-The concept of the "Independent Negro State System" (loosely inspired by the Indian reservation system but with even less actual sovereignty) had been tossed around as far back as Winthrop and Howard used it to simultaneously strike a blow for civil rights sorely neglected under Gerald Smith and to mollify several incredibly hostile state governments facing unrest. In exchange for absorbing the cost of the smattering of new dependencies the Federal government would become their arbiter rather than the states themselves.
Although it had been a victory the Congo war still cost the Independence Party at the ballot box. After so long in the political wilderness, the Populists had finally found a broadly popular electoral platform by 1968, combining a status quo tolerance of the fascist safety net and economic system with increased support for rural areas and a focus on turning out the largely unengaged Religious Left and keeping the (overt) racists at the fringes of the party. With its identity now secured, who better to lead the party of Bryan and Long into its new age than our thirty-third president, the Reverend Billy Graham?
*Delayed 6 years due to better nutrition and medical care, but still exacerbated by the stress of the presidency.
**Exactly what had happened to him IRL, just a bit later.
***Not nearly as sinister as it sounds, since there hasn't been a judge appointed by a Populist in literally three decades. As for the rest, Lovecraft founded or modernized most of the agencies Smith is trying to wrestle with and without Wilson the military is never intensely segregated.
Smith had been a capable and dedicated Vice President, but he knew before he took the oath that it was possible he'd only get a year, and so he seized it. Always more racially progressive than Lovecraft, he decided to devote his energies to civil rights, in recognition to the sacrifices all Americans had made for fascism, regardless of color. The Lovecraftian work programs and educational initiatives had been designed to be fully integrated and colorblind, giving Negro-Americans the most government support they had received since Reconstruction but lingering injustices remained, especially concentrated among the nation's Jews.
Although the segments of the 1923 Immigration Act concerning Italians and Slavs had been amended the provision banning Jewish immigration remained. As the culmination of a lifetime of tireless effort on the part of civil rights pioneer Sonia Greene, the 1944 Slattery Act would open up the Alaska Territory to unlimited Jewish immigration in response to the Comintern's Kultura Lukto. In 1943, Bogdanov had died of a botched blood transfusion**, with antisemites in the Comintern (Goebbels chief among them) quick to insinuate the presence of a vast conspiracy. For several years open antisemitism soared within the Comintern, producing a flood of refugees to Alaska and the PLC before the fever ebbed. Ironically the Kultura Lukto drove a wedge between Goebbels and Mussolini, and by the time sanity was restored Goebbels would see his emergency powers stripped away and the return of the Spartacist's much beloved councilism, though Mussolini remained in his position until his death some years later.
Reelected for a term in his own right in a massive upset, Smith would use his remaining political capital to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1947 along with a revitalized version of the Klan Act and the 21st Amendment, which moved up inauguration day, straightening out the methods and order of succession, and set a limit of two presidential terms all in a single stroke. This finally proved to be too much too fast, with the nation elevating Earl Long to the presidency in 1948. Running on a modernized version of his brother's agrarian noninterventionist populism and likewise quiet on the race issue, tragedy would strike during his campaign for a second term as he was stabbed on stage during his election night victory speech. The fringe American Workingmen's Party had claimed its first victim and handed Vice President Gerald L.K. Smith the presidency.
-Led by George Lincoln Rockwell, the AWP rose up as a response to increased Chinese and Jewish immigration in the West to fill the vacuum left by the extinction of the Klan outside of the Solid South and the suppression of the Minutemen. Though believing fascism to be the best defense against communism, they're fanboys of The Conservative and the original version of the Immigration Act and try to blame all of Lovecraft's evolution on the race issue on (Clark Ashton) Smith somehow. With masks illegal under the new Klan Act the AWP sticks with brownshirted paramilitary uniforms.
Focused on domestic over foreign policy, the second President Smith devoted his energies to trying to unwind the fascist agenda and stem what he derisively called "the rising tide of color", attempting to use the expansive ecosystem of government spending and regulation to restrict nonwhite access to the bevy of benefits and social support that had become too entrenched and wildly popular to risk doing away with for the population at large. Although lower voter turnout and voter suppression would likewise give him a term in his own right, Smith's broader project would be largely foiled by the deep Independence tilt in the courts, the military and the federal bureaucracy***, with several of his attempts to restrict programs or otherwise expand tacit systems of segregation overturned by the courts or otherwise stymied.
With political violence on the rise and global tensions escalating 1960 looked to be another pivotal election, with the country torn between Senator Strom Thurmond and Texas Governor Robert "Two Gun Bob" Howard. A veteran of the Eastern Theater and long time Moon-Beast within the Church of Starry Wisdom, Howard campaigned on recommitting the nation to its global commitments and pledged to get a man into space before the Comintern, marking the beginning of the Great Race. Serving from 1961 to 1969, President Howard was faced with a combination of domestic unrest in the wake of the bipolar Smith presidencies as well as the international crisis that was the Congo.
-Steely eyed missile man Marvel Parsons, father of the American space program. Though the Comintern would be the first in space von Braun's Vojaĝanto artificial satellite, the US would be the first to successfully get a man into space and back alive, eventually landing a man on the moon with the Mercury program.
The Congo had proved to be a weeping sore for the newly unified Franco-British Union. Though the FBU had administered the colony since the dismemberment of Belgium, a historical irony of Belgium's democratic embrace of communism was that the Congo had spent a generation as a defacto colony of the Comintern. Genuinely committed to spreading the alliance's strain of modern Marxism to the nation, the Belgians had doubled their efforts to right the injustices of the Free State period, helping the nation to grow and modernize in preparation to becoming a fully recognized and independent member of the Comintern. The destruction of Belgium had opened up the nation to conquest on behalf of a colonial master still bitter over the loss of its Pacific colonies and it showed. Though loyal "Dominions of the Union" reserved the right to self government under a native elite class, there was no way the FBU was going to extend the privilege to a bunch of commie Congolese, and early tensions would devolve into a bitter guerilla war that would drag on for over a decade.
The FBU had finally given up in the Congo by the early sixties in the face of mounting losses, domestic unrest and the increasingly untenable resource drain it represented, an unnacceptable imposition when the Union was already badly behind in the Great Race. Leaving an unstable Republic of the Congo in their wake, Howard saw the expansion of communism in the region as a direct challenge to America's interests, taking to the airwaves in 1963 to make the case for American intervention in the conflict. Laying out a plan for the deployment of an American peacekeeping force along with civilian engineers and political advisors, the second phase of the Congo War would prove increasingly divisive among the American public and consume much of Howard's time in office, though the carrot of new military investments did convince several southern states to aquiesce to the president's proposed INSS system and the end of the conflict would eventually see a fairly stable fascist Congo ascend into the expanding Providence Pact.
-The concept of the "Independent Negro State System" (loosely inspired by the Indian reservation system but with even less actual sovereignty) had been tossed around as far back as Winthrop and Howard used it to simultaneously strike a blow for civil rights sorely neglected under Gerald Smith and to mollify several incredibly hostile state governments facing unrest. In exchange for absorbing the cost of the smattering of new dependencies the Federal government would become their arbiter rather than the states themselves.
Although it had been a victory the Congo war still cost the Independence Party at the ballot box. After so long in the political wilderness, the Populists had finally found a broadly popular electoral platform by 1968, combining a status quo tolerance of the fascist safety net and economic system with increased support for rural areas and a focus on turning out the largely unengaged Religious Left and keeping the (overt) racists at the fringes of the party. With its identity now secured, who better to lead the party of Bryan and Long into its new age than our thirty-third president, the Reverend Billy Graham?
*Delayed 6 years due to better nutrition and medical care, but still exacerbated by the stress of the presidency.
**Exactly what had happened to him IRL, just a bit later.
***Not nearly as sinister as it sounds, since there hasn't been a judge appointed by a Populist in literally three decades. As for the rest, Lovecraft founded or modernized most of the agencies Smith is trying to wrestle with and without Wilson the military is never intensely segregated.
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