I've got an errand to run on Monday but I'll try to start the new TLIAW on Tuesday!
The King in Yellow and Other Stories: A President Lovecraft Weird Fiction Timeline in Several Acts
- Thread starter Born in the USSA
- Start date
Raise the Black Flag!: A Jersey Devil TLIAW
- A famous engraving memorializing the latter stages of the Great Upheaval.
Vigilantism is as American as apple pie, a tradition of mob violence and lone wolves that stretches literally back to before the founding of the country and continues well into present. The same tendency exists in the world of the King in Yellow and while I've discussed the suppression of the Klan and the Minutemen and the rise of the Church of Starry Wisdom and the Workingmen's Party of America it is incumbent on me to take a look back to the prior century so that we can construct a full picture of the modern notion of the political paramilitary and its roots in the actions and example of one enigmatic man...
- Devil's Advocate: The Peaceful Revolutionist
- Wake the Devil: Lucifer, the Light-Bearer
- Devil's Own: Liberty
- Speak of the Devil: Do You Want Free Speech?
- Devil You Know: For Us, the Living
- Devil in the Details: Trample an Empire Down
- Devil Incarnate: Fear and Loathing
- Idle Hands: The Daily Crusader
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If you mean the Black Flag! TLIAW specifically then partially, in more of a meta than a plot sense. I just thought it would be a cool thing to add and then kinda filled it out and expanded it from there. The Jersey Devil is inspired by an ambiguously real historical person and given the long history (TTL and OTL) of night riders, vigilantes and paramilitaries that we seem to have largely forgotten in the modern day I decided it would be interesting to do a scenario where that was the major focus. Given that the Church of Starry Wisdom, Klan and Minutemen all used costumes it seemed fitting to juice that tendency a bit since masked heroes are the great American passtime.
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Thanks! With the actual content I've always loved pulpy stuff and @Napoleon53's Madnessverse and EBR's Separateverse have really been inspirations for this TL, specifically how those works take small forgotten factors or attitudes and ratchet them up to construct really alien and amusing TLs by combining this historical detritus into new and unexpected combinations rather than focusing on more mundane changes and ripple effects. As for the experience of consuming a comic book I didn't actually set out to do that but it seems to be an organic result of my "timeline as a web of TLIAWs" strategy, since it creates this feeling of a set of distinct narratives that all tie together into a larger shared universe.
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Man once the ideas start they just don't stop 😂 my idle musings throughout the day have culminated in a set of chapter titles and a rough outline for A Bolt From the Blue (the one after Raise the Black Flag! focused on the 20th century arms race) and I already have the media update picked out for the super secret part five of this TL, plus a title and rough idea for a hypothetical part 6 if I wanted to pursue it. As an aside the fact that the Independence Party was rooted in the New York/New England area was a happy accident given my desire to focus this TL on Lovecraft but I keep finding weirder and weirder things all rooted in the New England area and its neighborhood. Talk about Lovecraft Country!
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Devil's Advocate: The Peaceful Revolutionist
-Josiah Warren in 1815
Setting out to further refine his theories in real world conditions, he would set out eastward from Cincinnati, creating a model community on Long Island in 1847 he called Modern Times, even today considered the heart of the Rational Anarchist movement.** Operating entirely on a labor exchange to buy and sell goods, Modern Times had no city government, local laws or police force. And here we hit the butterflies. The First War of the Conflagration*** had led to a large influx of European immigrants to the east coast, some from England but the overwhelming majority from the German lands. As with all massive influxes of "different" people this naturally led to a sharp increase in hate crimes and mob violence in the first decades of nineteenth century, almost all of it aimed at the German immigrants.
Though many moved further west to the Great Lakes region as a result a steady influx of immigrants that would settle into Modern Times left a distinct stamp on the city retained to this day, best seen at a glance in the German-English bilingual signage typically only seen further west. Warren was happy to have them, valuing their industriousness and even learning enough German to translate Max Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigentum into English a full fifty years before it was done in our history, another influence that would lay the foundation of the ideology that would later trace its roots to Warren and to Stirner. An ideology that would play a major role in the Great Upheaval to come. But that is for another day.
Though Modern Times was by any metric a success story, especially relative to the more numerous but far shorter lived Owenite and Fourierist planned communities that sprouted and withered throughout the period all was not well on Long Island, with some of the village's neighbors growing resentful of what they viewed as a lawless foreign enclave on their doorstep. Slowly but surely the Native American Party partisans of the area came to the conclusion that something had to be done about the village, and a group calling itself the Long Island Vigilance Committee would begin a campaign of targeted harassment that would escalate through the late 1850s, with Modern Times creating what amounted to a private security force in response.
This state of rising tensions would culminate in the Know-Nothing Riot of 1857, an actual event and part of a historical series of riots prompted by conflict between native born and immigrant groups. While the actual New York Know-Nothing Riot was largely limited to the city proper (and was actually the first scene of Gangs of New York), different circumstances saw violence spread to Modern Times, where Know-Nothings sparred in the town square with residents and attempted to burn down shops. And so we come to the Jersey Devil.
Although rumors of the Devil had persisted in the Pine Barrens and the broader New Jersey area for well over a decade and had in fact given the vigilante his name, the Modern Times riot would prove the first time where he was seen by credible witnesses in broad daylight as opposed to the badly beaten highwaymen and corrupt officials who were his usual victims. Leaping about like a man possessed, the Jersey Devil proved himself seemingly immune to the flames as he set upon the rioters. The sight of the Devil is widely seen to have turned the tide of the fighting, with the townsfolk of Modern Times rallying to drive out the arsonists even as the vigilante himself disappeared in the aftermath.
Wearing what was alternatively described as black wings or a cape or a long coat, modern analysts suggest this supposed immunity to fire may have been something as simple as a lining of asbestos in his clothing, with his spectacular leaps and frightening mask intended to disorient his victims and produce fearful exaggeration that would discredit their accounts. While the actual mechanism that enabled the jumps is uncertain, descriptions of unusual height and "hooves" suggests some form of boots equipped with spring stilts or leaf springs, though this explantation is slightly more credible at explaining away modern sightings given the technology available in the 1850s.
In the wake of the riot Modern Times had been saved and counter to expectations would not create a police force or city government, rather choosing to devote itself to the private security model funded by labor exchange. Changes in the broader New York area would center on more effective incarceration, with the New York metropolitan area coming to play host to several Panopticon prisons built on the British model that had previously proven effective in Massachusetts' own Arkham Penitentiary.
*This is all identical to his life in OTL. Warren called his theory "cost the limit of price", where only the amount of work used to create a thing and market it determined its value. Labor vouchers are a hypothetical replacement of money and the price system in socialist circles even today.
**In real life he spent some time in a Fourier community called Utopia in the interim but that's butterflied here. Modern Times really existed (founded in 1851), but in real life the experiment ended around the time of the Civil War and is now the town of Brentwood. Although a town without law the community reportedly had no crime of any kind during its brief existence.
***The Napoleonic Wars, to be discussed in detail in the super secret part 5.
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And so we see the first steps toward Rational Anarchism and the debut of the Jersey Devil. In the former case we'll see how the earlier translation of The Ego and Its Own and the greater success of Modern Times will see both a stronger individualist anarchist movement in the United States and a broader knowledge of Warren and his contributions to mutualist alternatives to capitalism. As to the latter I decided to accelerate the development of spring stilts (first patented in 1891 in OTL), with the Jersey Devil using a primitive iteration of leaf spring jumping stilts enabled by a slightly different technology trend brought about by the First War of the Conflagration that'll receive a more direct focus in TLIAW number five, though the Second War of the Conflagration will receive some indirect mention in Thursday's update.
Jumping stilts - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
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He's the only "superhero", he just happens to have an outsized impact on the tendency of costumed militias to standardize their look by the time we get to update 3 set in the 1880s. As for turbulence, the Know-Nothing Riots of the 1850s and the Great Upheaval of the 1880s are actual things that happened, though the former is as we've seen slightly different because of changes in Europe after the alt-Napoleonic Wars and the latter will end differently as a result of the rise of Rational Anarchism in the interim.
Part of my motivation for the subject matter of Raise the Black Flag! is to point out that vigilantism and costumed mobs really do have deep roots in the US most people today are unaware of— for example all four parties in the election of 1860 had paramilitaries running around disrupting the other side's events but we never covered that in my high school history classes. Aside from one or two examples we don't really see night riders with standardized costumes/uniforms until the second iteration of the Klan (and its splinter group, the Black Legion) OTL but I wanted to get that standardization process going a little faster TTL partially to make use of a historical picture I'm going to use but mostly as a matter of personal aesthetic preference.
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The modern phenomena of "Real-life superheroes" is also significantly more prevalent in the US then in other countries, likely for similar reasons.
That's true. Given the impact of the Jersey Devil there will be sightings up to the modern day though of course only cranks believe it's anything other than a string of copycats.
I just had a last minute idea for a tragic "villain" to be forever memorialized as the Devil's only worthy foe 
it'll add a bit more texture to this timeline's version of the Klan in the process and complement what would already be a very strange update 🤔
it'll add a bit more texture to this timeline's version of the Klan in the process and complement what would already be a very strange update 🤔
Wake the Devil: Lucifer, the Light-Bearer
-Flag of the Cyrenean Society founded by Lissa Stone, the timeline's version of the American Red Cross and Clara Barton, respectively. A combination of growing out of her childhood shyness sooner and different influences have made her feminism far more radical, something in line with Victoria Woodhull.
The outbreak of the Civil War would have a far milder impact on Modern Times than the town suffered in OTL. This better fortune was largely a result of Josiah Warren securing a patent on the rotary printing press he had invented both in this timeline and in ours. In both timelines it was the first, completely revolutionizing the printing process, but in ours he released the plans for free, where they were immediately patented by someone else who made a fortune. Financially secure, we take our leave from Modern Times to focus on the exploits of the Devil and to further explore the roots of Rational Anarchism.
The eyewitness testimony of the "Siege of Modern Times" had thrust the Jersey Devil into a national spotlight, making a celebrity of a masked man who up to that point had been considered a myth or boogeyman. His exploits in the Civil War would only embellish his legend further. Never part of any larger army or chain of command, the Devil would spend the war as a lone bushwhacker, crossing the Confederate lines in the dead of night to strike terror. Legends swept through the ranks that he was bulletproof and that he could breath fire. Credible research suggests that the former was likely exaggeration but that the latter could possibly have been some form of modified air rifle**. Whatever it was, it had caught the attention of the Gray Ghost.
The Gray Ghost is perhaps one of the great tragedies of the world of The King in Yellow. John S. Mosby had opposed secession but fought for his state anyway, proving an invaluable asset at gathering intelligence and an expert at lightning quick raids at the head of a unit commonly known as Moseby's Rangers. In our world he would become a Republican after the war, even forming a friendship with U.S. Grant, but fate here had something else in store. By 1863 Mosby had built his reputation as an expert in cavalry tactics behind enemy lines and the order came down to turn his attention to the Jersey Devil. But while he was hunting the Devil the Devil was hunting him.
What would follow would be several months of back and forth, all the while Mosby's famed division was worn down by an equal mix of night raids on any stragglers and desertion in the face of an enemy well versed in stoking fear. The fateful confrontation between the two would come when a torrential rain let up on August 24, 1863. Surviving witnesses were few in number and badly shaken but seemed to agree that the Gray Ghost and the Jersey Devil had engaged one another directly and that an explosion had blown off Mosby's legs. He died in the mud and the Devil disappeared, only seen again after the war had ended. The rest of the war continued unabated, with Mosby lionized as a martyr to the Lost Cause by war's end, something seen even today with the gray robes favored by the Ku Klux Klan.
Reconstruction would bring its own challenges but would also bring together two of the leading lights of the burgeoning but still unnamed Rational Anarchist movement. The first, Lissa Stone, has served as a battlefield nurse during the war and committed herself to civil rights in the aftermath. Remaining in the South after the conflict ended, she came to develop a deep appreciation of the silphium plant that had spread through the region. Long thought extinct, the Classical plant had been rediscovered growing wild in Turkey during the 1840s** and had been introduced to the South as a potential cash crop. Long valued as a condiment and as a medicinal herb, the plant's revolutionary potential was in its use as a contraceptive, something that meshed well with Stone's commitment to Free Love. When Reconstruction ended in 1877 she returned Northward with a collection of cultivars, establishing the Cyrenean Society that same year with the help of Moses Harman.
Harman had been living in Missouri with his wife and children during the Civil War and Reconstruction but had likewise moved north in 1877, in his case as a result of the death of his wife that year in childbirth. Renouncing his position as a Methodist pastor, he joined the radical secularist National Liberal League and threw himself into anarchism, feminism and eugenics, advocating his views through a newspaper he published called Lucifer, the Light-Bearer. It was the paper that would bring him to Stone's attention and the two would form a correspondence. The two would serve as the founding members of the Cyrenean Society, an aid organization devoted to humanitarian aid and eugenic family planning that still operates across America and the broader Fascist and Comintern spheres into the present day, commonly referred to as the Verdant Heart as an analogy to the Red Cross Societies common in the nations of the Alliance for Democracy.
Strongly influenced by The Ego and Its Own, the eugenic policy advocated by the Cyrenean Society would prove far different than that embraced by many suffragettes and other reformers around the same time in OTL, with a greater emphasis on bodily autonomy as opposed to top-down editing of the gene pool in accord with something as ephemeral as social norms. Opposed to marriage and other restrictions on love and sexuality, the Society was also unique in that it did not view children out of wedlock as a sign of moral or genetic decay, using The Light-Bearer to forcefully advocate for the abolition of all laws that created power imbalance within marriage or between the married and the unmarried. Almost immediately coming under the fire from the Comstock Laws for the distribution of "obscene material", the Cyrenean Society would only be saved by factors outside of its control: one was Benjamin Tucker and the other was the Great Upheaval.
*Air rifles were a mature technology by this point (Lewis and Clarke carried one that could be filled to 800 psi) so I decided to include this detail to "rationalize" the Spring-Heeled Jack encounters where he breaths fire, here the result of an air rifle modified to discharge flash powder as a primitive fuel-air explosive. Never precisely safe at the best of times, it was especially dangerous when wet.
**It was rediscovered in 2021 OTL.
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I really had fun with this one and I'm loving that I moved the POD back a full century, it gives me so much more to play with! Tomorrow we get the Great Upheaval and the coalescence of Rational Anarchism.
I leave it to the reader to suss out whether the Jersey Devil lived to contract mesothelioma another day or limped off to die with someone else taking up the mantle.
Nope I'm pretty confident with my Napoleonic POD 😂 We'll see what it actually is in Act 5 but one of the major ripples it causes will be a major factor accelerating the Great Upheaval and helping the Rational Anarchists to cohere in opposition in the next update. Benjamin Tucker was something of a wunderkind actually and was already a major leading light in American anarchism by his mid twenties. OTL his abandonment of the concept of natural rights led to a split in the movement but here the earlier publishing of The Ego and Its Own means that by the time he makes a name for himself his position will be the mainstream of the movement. I promise Rational Anarchism won't just be AnCap though, that's complete trash.