The King in Yellow and Other Stories: A President Lovecraft Weird Fiction Timeline in Several Acts

Born in the USSA · Apr 12, 2022

-Josiah Warren in 1815

Born in Boston in 1798, Josiah Warren is considered the founding father of Rational Anarchism, though he himself never used that term. A successful inventor and factory owner, by 1825 he had become enamored with Utopian Socialism, though a brief stay at the Owenite colony of New Harmony, Indiana convinced him that Owen's experiment was communism; that only complete independence of individual interest could provide a lasting foundation for a sound society. Have shifted his attention to mutualism, Warren began developing his theories of individualist cooperation, pioneering the labor theory of value and the labor voucher, the exchange of a certified amount of work for the amount of goods produced by an equivalent amount by another person.*

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.

-A dramatized portrait of the Jersey Devil. Ignore the name 😅

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.

Born in the USSA · Apr 13, 2022

-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.

Born in the USSA · Apr 14, 2022

As I've mentioned, Raise the Black Flag! (aside from the focus on vigilante justice) revolves around a more successful individualist anarchist movement in the United States, or at the very least one that isn't ignobly snuffed out by the forces of reaction. To properly explore the origins of Rational Anarchism and a more radical Great Upheaval we'll have to get to the root of the problem both were responding to— it's time to talk about the panopticon. The product of philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon was designed to be a more efficient alternative to the prisons and workshops of the 1790s, with a cylindrical structure and a central guard tower. Because the guards could not be observed by the inmates, the goal was to create the suspicion that they were being watched at all times and so to modify their behavior while using them for useful work. When his ideas were rejected in 1803 Bentham inveighed against what he called the sinister interest, what he saw as a cabal conspiring against reform.

Ironically the First War of the Conflagration that would see the panopticon adopted en masse by Britain would take the life of its creator, though it is perhaps for the best that Bentham did not live to see how his ideas would be put into practice. By the time the first American panopticon was built in the 1850s the design had been refined through decades of experience, and in the wake of the Civil War panopticons would proliferate across the country not only as prisons but as factories and hospitals. And that's where the trouble started. While a case could be made that a panopticon hospital could make it easier for a smaller staff to respond quickly to patients the simple fact is that panopticons used for any other purpose literally don't work, inducing levels of stress and anxiety that erode any temporary increase in productivity that can be wrung from an inhabitant.

Within a decade the nation was sitting on a powder keg. Not only was the policy of "a foreman in every head" creating even more miserable conditions for the American working class, the passage of the Comstock Laws beginning in 1873 saw the first stage of a massive government effort to cleanse the nation of "obscenity", leading to the mass arrest of freethinkers, labor reformers and members of the National Liberal League and the Cyrenean Society. It was only a matter of time before someone struck a match. That spark would come on July 14, 1877, when railroad workers in West Virginia threw down tools. The Great Upheaval had begun.

News spread like wildfire as workers across the country walked out in solidarity. Trains and factories burned like effigies. To the powers that be it was catastrophe and the mechanisms of the state quickly began turning to crush the strikers. They would not have a field of Paris Communes growing in their own backyard*. The response would be a patchwork made up of a variable mixture of unorganized militias, Pinkerton security, and National Guardsmen and Federal troops. They would find themselves opposed by a similarly patchwork force, but one with considerably more skin in the game. Inspired by the sensational image of the Jersey Devil that had become a staple of the penny dreadfuls, the strikers took to wearing horned hoods and dark clothes, setting off to harass and demoralize the forces sent to crush them under heel. At the time they didn't have a name, or even a cohesive group identity, but the papers took to calling them Legion and the name stuck.

-A rare photograph of the original West Virginia Legion.

While in OTL the original strikes were put down after sixty-nine days and left a decade of churning unrest in their wake, the greater scale to the strikes and rioting here (and the more militant reaction and counterreaction) led the initial conflict to drag on considerably longer. By the time the worst of the strikes were put down after four months there remained an ominous sense that the worst of it could flare up again at any moment. Jailed during the initial outbreak of the strikes, Moses Harman and Lissa Stone would be released, setting them on the path that would lead them to Benjamin Tucker.

Born in 1854, Tucker was already considered something of a wunderkind in anarchist circles and by 1881 he, Harman and Stone had moved to Modern Times and were collaborating on a periodical they called Liberty, with the masthead "Not Reform But Abolition!". It would be in the pages of Liberty that Tucker would first lay out the principles of Rational Anarchism. Arguing against the concept of natural rights, the three believed that the only rights that existed were ones that were made to exist by the will of the individual and as such all laws and restrictions could be freely adopted or discarded based on rational analysis, hence the movement's name.

Rational Anarchism identified three monopolies that imposed upon these seized rights and proposed solutions for each, repurposing Bentham's sinister interest into the German neologism "Finsteresse"** to refer to those cabals that profited from the monopolies and the exercise of hidden tyranny in general.

The Money Monopoly- The tyranny of central banking could be undermined with the creation of a Gegenwirtschaft or counter-economy operated on the basis of labor vouchers. Because the vouchers could not accrue interest and were worth exactly what you put in they would not be exploitative.
The Land Monopoly- Rather than honor abstract ownership Tucker argued that only continuous use and occupancy of land served as any foundation to entitlement to it. This was a noticeable contrast to Henry George, who argued land could be owned even if unused so long as the ground rent reverted to the community.
The Trade Monopoly- Viewing truly free trade as the only form that was not exploitation, Rational Anarchism called for the total and complete abolition of all tariffs and trade barriers and the complete dismantling of the patent system.

As Liberty gained a nationwide circulation the principles of Rational Anarchism found a wider and wider audience, especially among the workers of the Upper Midwest, where the paper was often published in a bilingual German-English edition to cater to the wave of immigrants that had come in the wake of the Second War of the Conflagration in 1848. In 1886 the growing Rational Anarchist movement would face its first real test with what is now considered the last mass strike of the Great Upheaval, a single day in Chicago that would end with dozens maimed or wounded, not least of them a president.

*Apparently a genuine fear of some of the respectable citizens in the areas of concentrated striking during our own Great Upheaval.

**The functional equivalent to Synarchism. Here Tucker beats Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre to the punch by six years, so the term "synarchism" is only used for the concept in Latin countries, though both terms are adopted by secret societies as positive labels to spite the anarchists.

Born in the USSA · Apr 15, 2022

-The Altgeld Monument in Chicago. Although his attempts to commute the death penalties of those charged in the Haymarket Affair had failed he was widely seen in the aftermath as a friend to the oppressed.

In many ways the term "First Red Scare" is a misnomer. Yes, the campaign of government hysteria about leftist and antigovernment groups ticked up sharply as a result of the Russian Revolution, but in many ways this was merely a thin coat of red paint applied to a far longer (if lower level) Black Scare aimed squarely at anarchism and dating roughly back to the Haymarket Affair. Itself considered the last major incident of the Great Upheaval, the day of protest in Chicago's Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, would have an even greater impact than that of our history*. Beginning as a protest for a shorter work day by the FOTLU labor federation, as in our history dynamite was thrown, possibly by the police, injuring almost two hundred and killing dozens*.

What followed was a wave of hysteria seen to have definitely put an end to the Great Upheaval as the owners and their politicians clamped down hard on union organizing and other reform movements even as eight anarchists who had been present were convicted of murder and executed over the objections of the sitting governor of Illinois, a German immigrant named John Altgeld. Ironically, it was this disproportionate response that would help to forge the Rational Anarchists into a national movement.

Although the leading lights of Liberty had been critical of the efficacy of labor unions as a mechanism for change, Tucker, Harman and Stone had come around to support the rioters and the defenders as the grotesque show trial played out across the nations newspapers. Unions may have been an authoritarian force in their view but they were in this case clearly the more liberated faction at play. At the same time the Black Scare was an admitted boon to the Rational Anarchist movement as disproportionate hysteria and red-baiting had for all intents and purposes created a space for the movement to grow in the absence of more "traditional" competition.

Realizing that any organized group would simply be rooted out and suppressed by the Finsteresse, Liberty would become a locus for a Stirnerite Union of Egoists rather than a more centralized revolutionary organization. Under this model the "Liberty Party" such as it was would not consist of any formal structure or authority, merely existing whenever two or more people with Rational Anarchist sympathies had aligned interests, forming and dissolving on a case by case and issue by issue basis. As such, the movement would not have any central platform that demanded adherence**, instead consisting of dueling positions called paradigms. Under this schema Tuckers original conception of the ideology would come to be known as Unterrified Jeffersonianism and would have a major impact on all those that followed. This period would also see the development of the movement's flag, inspired by the inkblot illustrations of a book of poetry popular in the German-American community.

The Black Scare would have profound political effects in the establishment parties, with President Garfield declining to run for a third term and Vice-President Arthur handily defeated by Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland. Despite a reputation as a reformer Cleveland was not without his share of problems, however, with his staunch backing of the gold standard inflaming those portions of his party not yet lost to the steadily growing Populists. At the same time his interventions on behalf of capital angered labor. In 1890 Cleveland would be assassinated, stabbed to death by a worker that had had his skull cracked by hired goons when he and his compatriots went out on strike. What followed was the gutting of the party of Jackson as the silverites and reform oriented Democrats bucked the party and bolted to the Populists. Although the Democrats would linger for another cycle the Bryan presidential run at the head of the Populists is broadly seen to have snuffed the party out.

The most notable direct cultural result of the Haymarket Affair and the Black Scare would undoubtedly be the nationalization of a mischief making holiday known as Devil's Night. In the wake of the Haymarket Affair international workers groups moved to memorialize the tragedy of the repression and resulting show trials with an international day of labor solidarity on May first. Rather than adopt May Day and be seen as *gasp* encouraging radicalism the United States government chose a different date for Labor Day instead and Devil's Night was born, a modern variation of traditions such as Mischief Night that were sporadically common on the East Coast and around the Great Lakes. Even today groups can be seen out on May Day after dark dressed up in masks and cloaks to emulate the Jersey Devil, committing minor vandalism and pranks of variable hilarity.

Meanwhile life under President McKinley would largely see a return to the bad old days of the panopticon, with his own near assassination at the hands of a follower of Italian radical Luigi Galleani*** only escalating the sense of panic among the propertied classes, easily securing McKinley another term in the process. By 1908 the country was sick of Republicans after eight years of McKinley and four of Fairbanks, ushering frequent Populist presidential candidate into the office after cycle after cycle of striving. Largely distracted abroad during his first term with an attempt to negotiate a peace in the Mexican Revolution and at home pushing through Prohibition the relative drop in the intensity of the Black Scare would see major developments within both the anarchist circles and the Finsteresse.

The first would be the admission of a new state in 1915. Originally born out of a sense of alienation and conflict with the state government in the Texas panhandle, the movement would gain support from neighboring Sequoya, where the residents of the former Oklahoma Territory chafed at what they perceived as a state government falling under the increasing sway of the tribes of the former Indian Territory who were able to effectively mobilize their residents to vote as a bloc. In a bid to counterbalance the obvious failure of the assimilation policy Sequoyah and Texas would both be partitioned in the wake of statewide referendums, with the former Oklahoma Territory and the Texas panhandle uniting to form the new state of Jefferson. Seeing a perfect opportunity, several prominent Rational Anarchists would move to the new state, viewing its low population and anti-government sensibilities as the perfect test bed for the ideology at a larger scale.

The second major development of that year would be the release of The Birth of A Nation, a film dramatization of the Gray Ghost's hunt for the Jersey Devil that would have the dubious honor of being directly responsible for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and simultaneously being the first superhero movie, even if the character we would call the hero was vilified as the film's antagonist. One prominent critic of the film was James F. Morton, widely know for his lecture circuits on anarchist theory, his virulent dislike of racism and sexism, and his wide ranging correspondence. In fact, it would be this correspondence (and a shared presence in the New England amateur press community) that would spark an unlikely friendship between Morton and Howard Lovecraft, a friendship that would eventually see a Rational Anarchist made Attorney General of the United States.

*Roughly twice as many deaths as OTL.

**Since a Union of Egoists where even one member suppresses opposition for the good of the group instead of leaving has by definition become something else.

***The bullet missed, striking Henry Clay Frick in the skull and killing him instantly.

Born in the USSA · Apr 16, 2022

Although he was famous in ideological circles beforehand, it was his response to the Red Scare and the hysteria of the First Clash of Civilizations that would set James Morton's future in stone. Having earned a Masters in classical philology from Harvard in the 1890s, Morton's interest in language never subsided and he would go on to add French and German* to his command of Latin and Greek. He had decided to supplement his education with a law degree in the 1910s and would rise to fame using it during the wartime hysteria revolving around the German question.

Despite the fact that there had been a large contingent of German speakers in the country since its inception they had always been regarded by the WASPs who had long dominated the nation as an unassimilable and alien influence. While the Chinese Exclusion Act had failed**, the American entry into the First Clash of Civilizations would form the perfect opportunity to stamp out the largest second language in the United States. This mission was made even more urgent by the perceived radicalism of the German-American population, perhaps a natural consequence of ideological refugees of the Second War of the Conflagration but a greatly exaggerated tendency nonetheless.

During the war Morton would largely spend his time litigating on behalf of German-American clients suffering discrimination. He was not alone in this, joined by a contingent of lawyers with Rational Anarchist sympathies drummed up by Liberty. Although he would largely regard his and the others' role as a minor one there is no denying that the world of The King in Yellow retains a vibrant community of native German speakers into the modern day, to the point where a version of the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund exists TTL as a caucus within the US Congress.

In the wake of the war and the Red Scare Morton would continue to ride the speaker's circuit and publish editorials on the news and issues of the day, all the while proving to be a strong voice in the Rational Anarchist scene. Although he would deviate from Tucker's Unterrified Jeffersonianism paradigm as was his right to do, he would in time come to deepen his relationship with Moses Harman's daughter Lillian, essentially guaranteeing him a space to air his heterodox opinions within the movement. Although they were opposed on many issues politically Morton would also become a vital resource during the first Lovecraft campaign, almost singlehandedly securing him a large portion of the German-American vote in the Midwest.

In return for his loyal friendship and political insight Lovecraft offered Morton the position of Attorney General, a nomination that would have almost certainly failed if not for a series of incredibly specific circumstances. Most obvious of course was the sheer Independence Party dominance of the Congress, a natural result of the complete collapse of the National Unionists and the Populist disarray in the wake of the assassination of Huey Long. Morton was also helped by his relative moderation— while he was very close to the Liberty editorial board and the heart of Rational Anarchism in Modern Times he nonetheless favored Georgism as a solution to the Land Monopoly question and the fact that Georgism was a major party plank for the Independents helped immensely.

Aside from using his position in favor of his patron's Fascism program, Morton's greatest impact would largely be in his use of discretionary powers, refusing to pursue convictions under the Comstock Laws against groups such as the Cyrenean Society and the National Liberal League. This refusal to engage would enrage the more moralistic elements of American society but would ultimately be vindicated when the Supreme Court ruled that the same precedent that had enshrined the right to euthanasia under President Winthrop likewise protected the right to contraception and personal eugenics***.

While Morton was without a doubt the highest profile Rational Anarchist in the country he declined to codify a paradigm, rather letting his actions speak for themselves. This naturally created a space within the movement for an alternative position, especially in the wake of Benjamin Tucker's death in 1939. Some within the Rational Anarchist scene argued that a new vision for the future of individualist liberty was needed even as the most brutal war in human history raged around the globe. The most prominent of these young reformers would be a prolific writer and naval officer named Robert Anson Heinlein.

Much like Lovecraft himself (oddly enough), Heinlein had served on the front lines in a Clash of Civilizations, been injured in combat, and had devoted himself to writing and politics upon his return to the homeland. Long involved in the Rational Anarchist movement, Heinlein would come to articulate a paradigm of his own he would come to call the World as Myth. Divergent both in practice and in emphasis from Tucker's Unterrified Jeffersonianism, the World as Myth revolved around a Rational Anarchist interpretation of Social Credit theory and a new method to propagate itself. The latter is the more mundane, an emphasis on fiction over manifestos as the best way to mainline radical ideas into the public consciousness, which Heinlein did successfully with his 1938 novel For Us, the Living.

The plot of the novel itself was very thin, revolving around a modern man transported into the future as the result of a car accident and coming to grips with the Rational Anarchist-defined time in which he found himself. The future had come about as a reaction against an increasingly theocratic Populist Party, causing the masses to consciously rise up, stomp out the authoritarians and establish an individualist utopia in the United States. Through the exploration of the imagined society Heinlein was able to offer his own solutions to Tucker's three monopolies:

The Money Monopoly was the major focus of the work, advocating a culturally libertarian version of C.H. Douglas's Social Credit theory, where a combination of the elimination of fractional reserve banking and the institution of a universal basic income frees the American people to pursue their own wants and interests without being coerced into exploitative labor.
The Land Monopoly was barely featured, though Heinlein would later argue that a Georgist system would be an acceptable stopgap to the abolition of absentee possession of land.
The Trade Monopoly was perhaps Heinlein's largest divergence from Tucker's proposed solution, with the future US portrayed as almost entirely self-sufficient economically and content to contain itself to its regional sphere of influence.

Aside from these foundational questions Heinlein's novel also suggested a series of reforms to bring the existence of the state more in line with Rational Anarchist principles. He championed an amendment that simultaneously required a referendum to declare war and volunteered the "yes" voters to be drafted first and to serve for the duration. He also advocated a repeal to all morality laws and statutes and the institution of a requirement that any prosecution for a crime would need to prove not only means, motive and opportunity but also genuine harm inflicted on an actual person. Heinlein also proposed radically revamping the way laws were passed, with a bicameral system where two-thirds was required to pass any law in the first house but only a third of the second was required to defeat it, and believed that eliminating taxation and requiring legislators to fund the government would ensure a limited but no less dedicated government since only those willing to spend the money for the good of the country would be willing to stand for office.

*OTL he only learned French in addition to his Latin and Greek but the larger German-speaking population in the Midwest as a consequence of the Wars of the Conflagration prompts him to branch out and learn another.

**As a result of Garfield's assassination being butterflied and Arthur never becoming president.

***Due to the Cyrenean Society the dominant image of eugenics TTL is of individuals making choices based on rational consideration and bodily autonomy rather than top down government enforced population engineering like we were made to suffer through. With no Nazis to tar the enterprise eugenics is still viewed as a social good in the modern day.

Born in the USSA · Apr 17, 2022

It is important to stress that while Heinlein proposed his own solutions to the problem of the three monopolies the World as Myth paradigm was an innovation in praxis rather than theory, with Rational Anarchists of a literary bent throwing themselves into the pulps all over the country. As in our world the nineteenth century had seen a wave of utopian and dystopian literature that had crested with the mechanized horror of a world war but in this one the Rational Anarchists and the World as Myth would see a second wave hopped up on technology-fueled optimism and a belief that the masses would come to see and embrace freedom in the face of world tyranny. It was a long shot, but at least the Golden Age of Science Fiction was going strong.

Aside from Heinlein himself this period was largely dominated by a conflict between two prolific Rational Anarchist writers of starkly different opinion (and many would say, skill level), who would spend three decades after the Second Clash of Civilization harshly savaging each other's work and ideas in a civil war raging across the editorial pages of the nation. One was Mack Reynolds and the other was Ayn Rand, and it would be their conflict that would define a generation of Rational Anarchist thought and propel one into a run for the White House and the other into "exile" in the Alliance for Democracy.

Mack Reynolds had been born in 1917 into a avidly Marxist family and had grown up learning the tenets of Marxist-Trigonism, even quickly learning Esperanto. While Reynold's saw much to admire in the theory, his service in the Second Clash of Civilizations would propel him down another track where he would adopt Rational Anarchism with the zeal of a convert*. Throwing himself into the fiction writing scene Reynolds would soon be widely regarded for his skill and inventiveness in exploring experimental social and political systems in fantastic settings. Conscious of the social implications of automation and fully aware that the Finsteresse would never use rising productivity as an excuse to make the worker's life easier his notable contribution to the discourse would be a concept he called People's Capitalism. Building on the work of utopian socialist Edward Bellamy but removing the actual nationalization of property, People's Capitalism posited that the only way to truly overcome entrenched power was to supplement the Fascist welfare state with a universal basic income and to create a worldwide computer network of freely accessible information. It was all a bridge too far for Rand.

Similar to our world, Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905. Intensely bitter about socialism (despite benefitting from a public education) she would emigrate in 1926, settling in the United States. Seeing the Independents as a stepping stone to socialism and the Populists as deluded by their faith, Rosenbaum would quickly join the National Union Party, and would be radicalized in the wake of the 1932 election that marked its extinction. Adopting "Ayn Rand" as a pen name she would begin writing vitriolic articles in Rational Anarchist publications, developing a version of her theory of Objectivism that would become the center point of her novel Atlas Shrugged. Despite the fact that her paradigm practically ignored the three monopolies and the labor theory of value it still attracted an inexplicable following, one that would spar incessantly with Reynold's supporters within the movement.

Conflict between the two would reach its peak during the presidency of Gerald L.K. Smith. Serving from 1953 to 1961, Reynolds' supporters would savage Smith for his racist dog whistles and zeal to demolish the welfare state they viewed as the only bulwark against the Finsteresse. Rand and her Objectivists would come to support the president for dismantling what they viewed as a collectivist burden practically dragging the nation into the Comintern. Even when Smith won his reelection in the '56 election despite losing the popular vote Rand stuck with him, while Reynolds threw all his energy into the ultimately successful push to eliminate the electoral college. The loss of Smith's handpicked successor to "Two Gun" Bob Howard would prove to be the final straw, with her previous support for the Franco-British policy in the Congo evaporating when it became clear Howard intended to build a Fascist state instead of a corporatist one. Viewing the United States a lost cause she would emigrate again, moving to Ceylon where she would continue to write until her death in 1975.

*OTL he spoke Esperanto and was a longtime Socialist Labor Party member but chafed at the clash between his libertarian socialist preferences and the party's embrace of Marxism and DeLeonism. He was accused of "capitalist apologia" in 1958 and resigned his membership.

Born in the USSA · Apr 18, 2022

Thompson_for_1970_Aspen%2C_Colorado_Sheriff_poster.jpg

-A poster for Hunter S. Thompson's successful run for sheriff. Kindly ignore the "aspen, colorado" and substitute in "amarillo, jefferson".

For nearly a century in the wake of the movement's birth no publicly outed Rational Anarchist had made a serious run at a national office but that wasn't to say they weren't running (and winning!) at the lower levels. Although the birthplace of the ideology had been in New York state and they had enjoyed limited early success in the bilingual Upper Midwest, the true native heartland of the movement in the 20th century proved to be in the West, a great patchwork flecked with black and white extending west from Jefferson and east from California, all the way from the southern border to the Alaska Territory. Many of these runs were by RA-leaning independents operating in the Morton mold— that is running in elections with broad discretionary powers that they could use (or explicitly not use) to pursue Rational Anarchist ends. Hunter S. Thompson proved a master of this strategy, becoming sheriff of Jefferson's largest city on a platform of drug decriminalization, strict residency requirements for land ownership and a sweeping tide of counterculture vibes he called Freak Power.

That isn't also to say that there was no larger impact at the federal level. Constitutional reform had been in the air in the wake of the second President Smith's divisive presidency, the latter half of which was widely seen to lack a popular mandate. Many prominent thought leaders had been tireless advocates of voting and electoral reform, and under the Howard administration their hopes would be realized with two new amendments. The 22nd Amendment*, most commonly called the "Voting Rights Amendment" for the first time codified the positive right to vote into the Constitution, declaring it a universal right of state citizenship and lowering the voting age to eighteen. The 23rd Amendment established the direct election of the president, with a two round election system activating if the candidate with the most votes did not secure a forty percent plurality. In what some saw as a corrupt bargain Howard had used the establishment of the INSS system as a carrot to attract southern buy in with the implicit understanding that as federal jurisdictions the Voting Rights Amendment would not apply**.

While Mack Reynolds was content to focus on his writing and on developing People's Capitalism in the wake of what he viewed as the tyranny of a backroom deal, the election of 1972 would draw him into the political process. Billy Graham had won his first term fair and square under the new system and seemed content to leave the Fascist welfare state alone, even expanding it in certain respects in rural areas. The issue was his competition in his reelection bid. The Workingmen's Party of America had consolidated behind William Luther Pierce and the Independence Party had nominated the decidedly lackluster August Derleth as their nominee. While Reynolds could tolerate four more years of Graham as the lesser evil, Derleth's apparent openness to privatizing aspects of Lovecraft's legacy would be exactly the wrong move to make as automation only grew more sophisticated and the fact that Derleth seemed to fundamentally misunderstood his predecessor's positions certainly didn't help.

Operating under the theory that the Workingmen could potentially peel off enough unreconstructed Democrats from within the Populist ranks to win Derleth the presidency in the first round Reynolds would decide to throw his hat into the ring, tapping Thompson to manage his campaign. Running on a version of his People's Capitalism program, Reynolds would pitch himself as the true defender of the Fascist economic system as a stepping stone to something even more transformative. Barnstorming the country and using the sheer volume of his presence in the national press to his advantage (not unlike what Lovecraft himself had done), Reynolds began immediately eating into Derleth's support.

By election day the fix was in and Derleth's goose was well and truly cooked. While no candidate won the required forty percent to avoid a second round, Reynolds had edged out Derleth. He would go on to face Graham and though he lost he had defeated Derleth and introduced a huge swathe of the country to the coming scourge of automation and the necessity of a universal basic income and that was enough. His speeches on the campaign trail would also popularize the concept of the internet and would play an indirect factor in the initial HASTURnet project being designed for consumer use from the ground up. Derleth's loss would serve as a wakeup call to the institutional parties, accelerating the process of opening up the party nominating process to democratic input. As for Thompson himself, his acerbic writings and interviews in defense of his candidate would make him a celebrity. He would publish his observations as Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, raising his star even higher and laying the groundwork for his own successful run for the presidency.

*Recall the 21st Amendment TTL set the presidential term limit to two, moved up inauguration day and cleaned up the presidential line of succession.

**A bit of a bitter pill even to the present, but the current President Lovecraft campaigned on amending the Constitution to grant INSS dependencies and the District of Columbia congressional representation and the vote.

Born in the USSA · Apr 18, 2022

-Met with critical acclaim, 2003's The Ballot or the Bomb dramatized the 1976 election and starred Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson, Benecio del Toro as Zeta Acosta and Jackie Earle Haley as the Jersey Devil.

"There's two things that spring to mind when all those smooth talking mugwumps go on and on on the Sunday shows about how a small town sheriff has no business running for president. First: Amarillo is not a small town, and it's exactly that sort of highbrow gatekeeping that's roiling up all the little people the current contenders are trampling over to get the nomination or have driven out of politics entirely. Second: the last few decades in this country prove that we *need* a sheriff in the White House. I mean, if our government's going to content itself with nothing else besides moralizing and pearl clutching to the people at home and pointing the big guns abroad then it would suggest the best candidate would be someone with actual first hand experience enforcing the law and using a weapon in peace time, moreover someone with the actual sense to know the difference between the two. There's been a lot of questions lately about whether I'll make a run, so consider this my announcement. Because we're getting to the point in this country where we're down to the ballot or the bomb."

With that brief address to the press Hunter S. Thompson, Sheriff of Potter County, former presidential campaign manager and now and forever Rational Anarchist cultural firebrand, announced an independent run for the presidency in early 1976. While Reynolds had weighed the contenders and deemed a second Graham term the lesser evil in 1972, there was a large antiwar movement that had risen organically in the wake of Howard's commitments to the Congo War and had unleashed a tide of counterculture that had won Thompson his 1970 run for sheriff in the first place, one that didn't show any signs of slowing down.

The smattering of antiwar independents at the state level had been bolstered by Graham's increasingly heavy turn toward culture war, particularly the satanic panic that had gripped the nation and demonized such harmless fun as recreational drugs, Devil's Night and Miskasonic* music. By the time the 1976 election rolled around there were even a handful of Rational Anarchist-aligned independents in the House and one in the Senate, Arizona's Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, who would volunteer to be Thompson's Vice President to add a bit of institutional sheen to his campaign (and hopefully sweep the Hispanic vote).

At the same time, a new and harsher Jersey Devil moved from whispered urban legend to brutal fist of justice. Eschewing the elaborate costume that had characterized his predecessor(s?), this new version of the Devil wore a simple suit and trenchcoat, with a black and white mask with the Devil's Mark on it. He satisfied himself with simply beating criminals with his fists with little more than heavy sap gloves. More alarming than his sheer brutality was how indiscriminate he seemed, treating even minor crimes harshly and striking terror throughout New York and New Jersey. It would be this confluence of the Jersey Devil and the "father of Freak Power" that would be the subject of the riveting true crime political thriller The Ballot or the Bomb.

The film opens on Devil's Night, 1976, as the Jersey Devil prepares for the night's activities. Living in a run-down apartment, the civilian identity of the Devil isn't clarified to the audience until later in the film but the establishing scene gives a good window into the toll his crusade on crime is having. He wears his mask around his apartment as shots linger on a bookshelf laden with Ayn Rand's Objectivist tracts and on a weathered kitchen table with a sheaf of past-due bills. He gives them a glance before going to his closet to pull out the rest of his ensemble. Crisp suit. Clean coat. Military boots. The gloves. A drop of blood stains one heavy knuckle. He goes about his night, beating several petty criminals and leaving business cards with a hand painted Devil's Mark. He sees Thompson giving a televised speech through a pawn shop window. It begins to rain.

He doesn't speak until the conclusion of the film, with Haley instead narrating his scenes with excerpts from the actual Devil's journals. The remainder of the three hour film cuts back and forth between Thompson's campaign and the Devil's activities, with Scoop Jackson (I) and Pete McCloskey (P) attacking the former as an unserious publicity stunt even when they weren't attacking one another's positions on the Comintern or the India situation. All the while, the Devil is shown to become increasingly fixated on Thompson, particularly his Freak Power platform. Aimed at appealing to what Thompson viewed as a massive untapped well of disengaged voters, Freak Power revolved around bringing democratic accountability to the forefront, increasing public spending, and ending Graham's war on drugs while pursuing a peaceful and restrained foreign policy.

The Devil becomes more and more unhinged as his brutal night excursions begin to make national news and Thompson begins rising in the polls. The tension builds up to October of 1976 with the Devil finally deciding to take matters into his own hands to keep the man he views as the distilled essence of everything he's been fighting from even the possibility of winning. Had he carried out his activities clandestinely he may have succeeded, but by this point he's so far gone he's taken to mailing Thompson handwritten screeds, likewise conveyed to the audience by Haley's narration. Despite heightened security Thompson continues to do press events and to make speeches, with the climax of the movie revolving around the now famous assassination attempt, where the Devil attempted to drive Thompson's car off the road as he was leaving a Chicago campaign event, causing a bonecrushing multiple-car collision in the process before getting out of his wrecked car to finish Thompson off with a simple snub-nosed Bulldog revolver. The Devil is wrestled to the ground and his mask is taken from him, his only spoken words of the film being a gutteral demand that the NIB agents "give [him] back [his] face".

The film concludes with Thompson winning the election on the first round from his hospital bed, America's first independent president since Washington, having not only swept the west as expected but also receiving a last minute endorsement from the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, along with the expected swell of sympathy votes that normally follow in the wake of an attempted assassination**. The last scene of the film is the unmasked Jersey Devil in an NIB interrogation cell. He is finally revealed to be Steve Ditko, an out of work illustrator who went from drawing superheros to attempting to be one before cracking under the pressure of his dual life, with the very last shot one of his face falling when he's told that he almost certainly won Thompson the election.

*A rock genre drawing inspiration from weird fiction. Think rock and metal if they took more inspiration from cosmic horror and less from fantasy. Sex and gender stuff is actually a far lower priority on Graham's culture war playbook since the Cyrenean Society has been mainstream for a hundred years and bodily autonomy has been legally enshrined for fifty.

**Shirley Chisholm's selection as the Independence Party VP nominee prompted another attempt to mount a campaign from the WPA that would play a role in the final tally but this subplot was largely excised from the film.

Born in the USSA · Apr 19, 2022

The world of The King in Yellow diverged from our own over two centuries before the modern day and, as we've seen, that's quite a head start for all sorts of interesting divergences to pile up. I promise you ain't seen nothing yet and I've got all sorts of fun ideas about the actual divergence point and all sorts of other changes that will spring from it. One of the areas that most intrigues me about alternate history as a genre is the diverse political potential that I most often see explored in amateur (as opposed to commercial) works of the field. And so it is that ideology and politics have divorced quite broadly from OTL, even if there are certainly more resonances in things like geopolitics and historical figures than would be strictly plausible. I wanted to lay out the "big three" schools of thought that have shaped and will continue to shape the TL, three of my own original creations inspired by a confluence of historical factors that never intermingled or cohered here. That isn't to say that there aren't recognizable ones running around, just that they are very much bit players. For example, Marxist-Leninism is a minority position in the Comintern and Social Credit is the chief opposition in the Franco-British sphere from essentially the 1920s on. With that preamble out of the way let's get started!

Rational Anarchism
"Not Reform but Abolition!"

-Max Stirner, the ideological forebear of Rational Anarchism.

Rational Anarchism arose out of the American current of individualist anarchism and traces its roots to the 1840s, though it was only fully codified in the 1880s by the troika of Benjamin Tucker, Lissa Stone and Moses Harman. Disregarding any foundation on "natural rights", the Rational Anarchist possesses only those rights that they seize for themselves and as such may choose to allow or disregard any law or moral restriction based on careful consideration. Although the movement functions as a Union of Egoists and may be joined or left on a whim Tucker's original paradigm remains central to the ideology well into the modern day. Tucker identified three obstacles he perceived as entrenching authority and hierarchy which he called the three monopolies:

The Money Monopoly described the international banking and finance system and must be defeated by eliminating the price system through the embrace of the labor theory of value and the wholesale replacement of currency with labor vouchers that exchanged work hours for work hours to trade privately held goods and services.
The Land Monopoly described the titled ownership of land and must be defeated by completely eliminating all forms of land ownership, to be replaced with a system where only actively working the land could form a basis to a claim on it.
The Trade Monopoly described the system of international trade barriers and must be defeated by eliminating all tariffs and trade restrictions and completely dismantling the international patent system.

Stone and Harman also made eugenic individualism a key tenet of the movement. Eugenic individualism regards the body as another commodity to be mastered by the individual and describes as a sign of that mastery complete and inviolable bodily autonomy, with no restrictions on sexual selection or gender expression, no taboos around family structure, and no stock put whatsoever in the formally recognized "institution" of marriage. The existence of reliable chemical birth control since the 1870s and the availability of legal euthanasia since the 1920s have been revolutionary factors and eugenic individualism has become the dominant mode of thought TTL over our own statist take on the issue, with many self-selecting to produce "superior" children either within their own race or between diverse ones as an attempt to induce hybrid vigor. Eugenic individualism remains a common consideration to the present.

An ideology heavily focused on publication, Robert A. Heinlein perfected the World as Myth concept of using fiction to mainline Rational Anarchist discourse into the public consciousness. This has seen the further spread and diversification of Rational Anarchist ideas, though most notably Ayn Rand's Objectivist school is seen as a heresy rooted in multiple fundamental misunderstandings of the tenets of Rational Anarchist thought. Rand's work is now primarily associated with the Finsteresse, a neologism coined by Tucker contracting the German translation of Jeremy Bentham's concept of a sinister interest opposed to reform. Initially describing only the oligarchical tyranny of those profiting from the three monopolies, the modern conception of the Finsteresse is of rule by a secret elite and is commonly associated with panopticon surveillance and an economic model revolving around corporatism.

Marxist-Trigonism
"Antaŭen al Fina Venko! Laboristoj de la Mondo Unuigu!"*

-The Circle Trigon, a rounded triskelion representing the fundamental principles of Marxist-Trigonism.

The dominant paradigm in the Communist International and the global communist movement, Marxist-Trigonism cohered through the cross-pollination of ideas and policies among the bloc's member states in the 1920s and 1930s. Far more of a collection of equals than our Comintern could ever claim to be, following Lenin's death his political theory fell into disrepute at the newly communist nations of the world sought to build a true worker's society. The ideology derives its name from its three central tenets:

Konciliismo arose out of German council communism and the localist and anarchist-inflected embrace of communism in Spain and Belgium. Operating under the theory that vanguard parties are a threat to the Revolution, Konciliismo views local worker's soviets and popular assemblies as the only true form of government suitable to the working class. To that end Konciliismo also encompasses the concept of Finvenkismo, the embrace of Esperanto as an international language for the working class.
Libera Economio is derived from the Freiwirtschaft economic theories of Silvio Gessel and calls for the elimination of trade barriers within and outside of the bloc to serve as a vector for labor solidarity, the adoption of Georgist land value taxation and free public utilities to ensure public ownership of the commons, and the replacement of traditional "sound" or fiat currencies with a currency that decays in value in order to boost economic velocity and prevent hoarding.
Vorticismo arose out of the Russian God-Builder and Cosmist factions and represents the creation of a proletarian and scientific form of religious expression. Officially a form of deistic humanism, Vorticismo exalts the collective action of the working class as the best possible expression of a higher power in the material world, with the faith's highest commandment being an Esperanto translation of "Vox Populi, Vox Dei". Vorticismo places great stock in science and the arts, operating a network of religious technical schools and art collectives to better expand human potential and spread Marxist-Trigonism outside the Comintern proper and also maintains a distinct art tradition using abstract geometric patterns to draw the eye to the center of any given work.

Lovecraftian Fascism
"Compare the meager, mundane reality to the world you really desire. Do you see the commonality of interests here? Imagine what we might achieve!"

-"Struggle", a sculpture gifted from Szukalski to Lovecraft to represent the contrast between "quantity", the conformist fingers, and "quality", the fiercely independent opposable thumb responsible for civilization. Aside from traditional fasces the open hand has become a symbol of the global Fascist movement.

Fascism is a political philosophy first articulated in its current form by HP Lovecraft in his 1932 Independence Party presidential manifesto Some Repetitions on the Times. Originally meant to address the multiple crises of the Great Depression, Fascism spread in the wake of the Second Clash of Civilizations and the resulting wave of decolonization to become a major driving force in the tripolar world order. Fascism consists of a great number of interlocking parts but in general a Fascist system is...

culturally chauvinistic. Cultures are not considered superior or inferior because of something as trivial as biological heritage, but rather the length of their existence and their material and artistic sophistication. An inferior cultural group can become superior either through cultural assimilation or material development. As such, Fascism places great emphasis on studying history and preserving distinct cultural traditions, facilitating the spread of culture and technology to other Fascist nations, and providing a robust public education system.
futurist. Technological and scientific advancement is considered an inevitable if somewhat alienating process and a necessary and desirable end goal and is subsidized with robust funding for scientific research.
feminist. Gender-based constraints are outmoded, with the tenets of eugenic individualism adopted to allow for the maximum participation of all people in the cultural struggle.
Georgist. Natural resources belong to the nation and ground rent should devolve to the people. The profits of the same help to fund a welfare state consisting of free public utilities and a comprehensive public health service which includes access to family planning and legal euthanasia.
martial. Cultural struggle between nations is a fact of life and physical clashes between opposing cultural groups and nation-states necessitates a well trained and equipped military and a sophisticated intelligence and domestic security apparatus.
syndicalist. Government work programs are a necessity but only work that is fairly compensated and satisfying has personal and cultural value. The government serves as the employer of last resort, guaranteeing productive and stimulating work at a living wage. Strong unions are a necessity to prevent exploitation by market forces and private businesses, provided they do not serve as a vector for the culture-dissolving Marxist-Trigonism.
technocratic. The actual form of a nation's leadership, though ideally democratic, is less important than the soundness of the civil service. Only those with expertise in a field or government agency should be involved in managing it. Anything else leads to the misallocation of resources and rash decisions made by the uninformed.

Related to Fascism is Zermatism, an art movement pioneered by Polish-Lithuanian artist and political leader Stanislaw Szukalski. Common traits of Zermatist art include exaggerated movements and proportions, the depiction of visceral emotion, and the blending of mythic themes and cultural influences from throughout the Fascist sphere.

*"Onward to Final Victory! Workers of the World, Unite!"

Born in the USSA · Apr 21, 2022

Esoteric Fascism (Vitalism)
"A Warning to Future Man"

-The unofficial symbol of Esoteric Fascism, a hamsa reconfigured into a hand of glory, representing the hand of Fascism transformed by death into an illuminator of hidden truth. It's very metal.

As with many of this world's ideologies, Esoteric Fascism originated from a confluence of ideas and influences rather than springing fully formed from the mind of a single twisted visionary. Born in the black cauldron of the American cultural underground before metastasizing around the world, the earliest precursors of the ideology began to congeal in the 1940s following the resignation of President Lovecraft and the ascent of Clark Ashton Smith to the office. Although Lovecraft himself was far less racist by the time he became president the early Fascist movement had a not insignificant contingent of dyed-in-the-wool white supremacists who had signed on for the Fascist program of national renewal and recoiled at the first President Smith.

A mix of Independents and Populists, this group would be gradually purged from their prior parties, coming together with remnants of the Klan and the Minutemen to form the Workingmen's Party of America. Politically the group would embrace the Fascist program, albeit along explicitly racial rather than cultural lines. Consigned to the fringes, the spiritual void at the core of party would generate a narrative to justify their attitudes and explain away their political irrelevance and Esoteric Fascism was born, a melange of racism, nihilism and half-remembered Theosophy. An obsession with fears of racial pollution and degradation would permeate every facet of the movement, most obviously seen in its cosmology.

Centered on a lost precursor civilization known as the Atlans, bearers of a mystically advanced interstellar empire and masters of a pristine and Edenic Earth, the theory went that at some point conditions changed as a result of malign interference from hypo-dimensional forces* emanating from the sun, dividing the civilization in two and driving it underground. One faction, the Tero, remained pure as another, the Dero became increasingly more degenerate and depraved. Finding that life on the surface was now inimical to them, the Dero would set new plans to dominate the surface into motion.**

The first was to cull the newly risen human race through a global flood, though a surviving population on Easter Island was gradually able to repopulate the planet, necessitating subtler means. The first would be the creation of the Yetinsyny, the Sons of the Yeti, a savage apelike race*** created to corrupt humanity through interbreeding, which the Esoteric Fascists argued was the source of what they classified as inferior races in a far stranger analogue to the dual seed doctrine. The infiltration by the Yetinsyny would be helped along by the Dero, who would use their fearsome psychic powers to project horrific sado-masochistic scenarios into the minds of surface dwellers to induce societal degeneracy.

Convinced they are the heirs to the Atlan and the Tero, the Esoteric Fascists attempt to cultivate their spiritual powers and shield their thoughts from the Dero while avoiding physical contamination from contact with the Yetinsyny. They also believe that there is a proto-human language that when applied reveals the true intent of any word in any modern language and that aging is the result of cosmic radiation and that without it "pure" humans would be immortal. Needless to say they're a fun bunch.

*A conceit cribbed from OTL's Seven Minutes in Eternity, William Dudley Pelley's book about his out of body experience.

**This is taken wholesale from the Shaver Mystery.

***The Easter Island thing and the Yetinsyny are derived from OTL's Zermatism, much more complex but also more singular than the art movement it is in the TL proper.

Born in the USSA · Apr 24, 2022

Here's a little teaser for something that's going to become increasingly relevant as the TL goes on! I really liked the way they turned out!

-Flag of the Confederation of Rhodesia (1953-1973), inspired by the coats of arms of Northern and Southern Rhodesia

-Flag of the Rhodesian Free State (1973-20XX), which incorporates the symbol of the Rhodesian Renewal Front

Born in the USSA · Apr 25, 2022

Here's a teaser about another country that's going to become increasingly important!

-Flag of the East Indian Confederation (1858-1978)

-Flag of the Indian Union (1978-Present)

Born in the USSA · Apr 27, 2022

Inspired by my idea I decided to make another pair of relevant and related flags! I love how weird this timeline has grown since I first came up with it!

-Flag of the Franco-British Union (1943-1999), combining the Cross of St. George and Cross of Lorraine to represent its two largest nations and the symbols of the French and British governments. Component parts retain their original governments, flags and territories, though there is freedom of movement between them.

-Flag of the Franko-Norman Empire (1999-20XX), legal successor to the FBU and self-proclaimed successor to several members of the Alliance for Democracy as declared by FBU Prime Minister and AFD Secretary-General Narendra Mosley*

*No relation to the similarly-named world leader.

Born in the USSA · May 13, 2022

-First edition cover of Philip K. Dick's seminal alternate history masterpiece The Man in the High Castle, showcasing at a glance both the divergent world and the Tarot motifs that prove central to the narrative.

I couldn't get the Washington Monument to format properly but I'm chalking up the rough look to weathering. The country's been on hard times for awhile after all 🤔

Born in the USSA · May 14, 2022

-Flag of the Independent Republic of Oranbega, the sole free bastion of the former United States, under President Frank Belknap Long.

Born in the USSA · May 18, 2022

Born in the USSA · May 25, 2022

-Symbol of Mercury 7, the stage of the Mercury Program that made the United States the first power to reach the moon. The famous American flag with its fasces finial planted at the landing remains there to this day as a monument to American ingenuity and international Fascist solidarity.

Few organs of the American government have stoked so much awe and fear (in equal measure) as HASTUR, the Homeland Advanced Science and Technology Unified Reserve, an agency that has at one stage or another been involved in every major modern advance in American technological and martial prowess. While seen in the Strange Aeon as a monolith, something that had seemingly always been there behind the mask of the American state, this is largely a position for cranks and conspiracy theorists. To better explore the work-product of the Reserve we must then first explore its origins in the decentralized morass of competing agencies at the start of the 20th century, their conglomeration in the fires of the Second Clash of Civilizations, and the broadening of focus that came over the course of the Strange Aeon— from swords to plowshares and iron fist to velvet glove.

Veracruz- Praise the Lord, Pass the Ammunition
Lawyers Guns and Money- The Black Chamber
Accidentally Like A Martyr- The Demon Core
Johnny Strikes Up the Band- Stars and Strife
Nighttime in the Switching Yard- To the Moon!
Werewolves of London- Over the Rainbow
Tenderness on the Block- A Tangled Web
Excitable Boy- Draw Blood!

Born in the USSA · May 27, 2022

-Francisco I. Madero, President of Mexico and leader of the Constitutionalist faction of the Mexican Civil War.

All things considered the first phase of the Mexican Revolution in The King in Yellow was nearly identical to our own, with Francisco Madero challenging the quasi-dictatorship of Profirio Diaz, jailed in response, and successfully calling for a revolution to unseat the Diaz regime and elect him to the presidency. But the fact that Bryan was in the White House instead of Taft and Wilson would make all the difference to what was to follow. As in our history Emiliano Zapata come to represent the rural masses eager for rapid and far reaching agricultural reform, though here there was enough sympathy between the rank and file American Populists and the (admittedly more radical) Mexican agrarian reformers to generate pressure from Washington to help prevent the outbreak of armed rebellion in Morelos and bring Zapata and Madero to the negotiating table on the land question.

Without a Zapatista insurgency to help spark a patchwork of regional revolts the faction calculus of the Mexican Civil War would be drastically changed, with the Nationalists under Victoriano Huerta recast as the rebels and Madero's Constitutionalists as the federalist forces. These changes on the ground are largely the reason the conflict is most commonly called the Mexican Civil War rather than the Mexican Revolution in this timeline, though whatever it was called, Bryan was content to offer aid to the Madero government short of direct US involvement even as he remained blissfully unconcerned with the storm clouds even then gathering over Europe.

Without a President Roosevelt there could obviously be no Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, though something similar was promulgated under President Fairbanks, albeit almost entirely tailored to the protection of American corporate property abroad. Even though Bryan was not keen on enforcing it it would be the legacy of the Fairbanks Doctrine that would drag the United States militarily into the Mexican Civil War through the perfect storm that was the Tampico Affair. Tampico was home to relatively robust facilities for processing crude oil and the McKinley and Fairbanks administrations had seen the growth of a large and entrenched community of American expats who worked in the Tampico oil industry.

Unfortunately it also hosted a large population of unreconstructed Diaz-era military officers who wasted no time declaring for Huerta. Given its crucial infrastructure seizure of Tampico was a coup for the struggling Nationalists but it was not without its problems. While the oil companies themselves demanded intervention to protect their investments, the largest concern of the Bryan Administration and the Populist congressional majority would start and end with the protection of the Americans living in Tampico, and several ships of the American Atlantic Fleet would be deployed to the besieged city, most critically the USS Skeered O'Nothin.

-The USS Michigan had been renamed the USS Skeered O'Nothin in 1910 at the insistence of Populist Speaker of the House John S. Williams as a jab at the pretensions of British dreadnoughts.

Originally designed solely as a battleship, the Skeered O'Nothin had become something of a playground for the Office of Naval Intelligence as they sought to test out modernization strategies on the fleet, and what was the Tampico adventure if not a grand field test? While the Army's Aeronautics Signal Corps jealously guarded its monopoly on military airships* and fixed-wing aircraft the agreements between the branches said nothing about helicopters. Helicopters have a surprisingly long history in this world and in ours, with the first crude designs appearing in the 1860s. While accelerated advances in materials science as a result of a 19th century airship arms race would likewise accelerate the development of the helicopter, by 1914 they had not yet been deployed offensively in a war, something the Skeered O'Nothin was set to change.

Helicopters were a practical as well as a politically expedient choice, given that the conversion of the warship from a battleship to an aircraft cruiser still demanded a delicate balance between a launching surface for aircraft and the ship's preexisting big guns. Deployed for scouting and targeted firebombing these offensive helicopters would prove a resounding success, even successfully destroying the Veracruz, a crucial gunboat in the Nationalist fleet. The display had worked like a dream, with the eventual surrender of the city's Nationalist forces even partially attributed to the sinking of the Veracruz. While the Tampico Affair had proven the viability of aircraft cruisers paired with helicopters, further advancements with the advent of the First Clash of Civilizations would prove the deciding factor that would secure aircraft cruisers as the warship of choice well into the Strange Aeon. That invention was the ramjet.

-The first combat-ready ramjet-equipped helicopter TTL was developed by ONI in 1921 (three decades ahead of schedule), though fuel consumption issues would not be totally worked out until roughly a decade later.

Invented (both TTL and OTL) in 1915 by Hungarian Albert Fono, the ramjet had initially been devised as a means to extend the range of artillery through a combination of initial gunbarrel propulsion and a ramjet-equipped projectile. Given the far better showing of the Austro-Hungarians in this timeline they were actually able to bring some of his proposed projectiles to the testing phase before the war ended. The postwar proliferation of the ramjet would prove the crucial missing ingredient to the helicopter aircraft cruiser, with new generations of propelled projectiles able to achieve much greater ranges and the combination of the ramjet and the helicopter producing a wide variety of the designs that would culminate in the famous thrustwing aircraft of the Second Clash of Civilizations and the compound helicopters and tiltrotors that would come after, leaving a legacy of VTOL aircraft and ballistic missiles in their wake.

*Even as they had begun to fall from grace as a result of the Third War of the Conflagration.

Born in the USSA · May 28, 2022

-Though politically close to the National Union Party, William John Burns, the "American Sherlock Holmes", had made a name for himself as a tenacious and evenhanded investigator during the post-Great Upheaval period and was a natural choice to serve as the first Chief of the National Investigation Bureau.

The evolution of the American secret intelligence service was (much like the later HASTUR) the end result of a fairly adhoc collection of powers and responsibilities brought under one roof. The need for such a service had been evident since the Great Upheaval but the death rattle of the Democrats and the birth pangs of the Populists had created a political system too in-flux to mount any sort of concerted effort at the tail end of the 19th century, with competition between the Capitol Police, the US Marshals and the National Bureau of Criminal Identification ironically fostering the growth of the Rational Anarchist movement from lack of centralization. The ultimate saving grace of the American secret police was Prohibition.

Grassroots energy for national prohibition had been growing for decades by the time William Jennings Bryan assumed the presidency and after the passage of the so called "Suffragette Amendment" it became a question of political inevitability, instituted with the passage of the 17th Amendment* in early 1908. But it was one thing to moralize from the pulpit and the lectern but quite another to actually enforce such an order. And what was a law without teeth, after all? The answer would come in the form of the National Investigation Bureau, formed that same year with buy-in from not only the reigning Populists and National Unionists but also some factions of the slowly growing Independence Party.

The new agency would be formed through the reorganization of the NBCI, with the added infusion of veteran members of the Marshals Service and the Secret Service** to create an all-purpose agency not only to enforce the Prohibition Amendment but also to continue the preexisting suppression of Rational Anarchists, criminal and dissident elements and "unassimilable" minorities (including Germans). All that being said, Prohibition turned into just as much of a boondoggle as the one we had to deal with, with the added strain of the fact that the First Clash of Civilizations happened smack-dab in the middle of it, raising even more questions about the utility of enforcing a moral issue during a period of national emergency, rising crime rates and surging radical and ethnic unrest.

The repeal of Prohibition after the war would free up the NIB to focus on these "more pressing concerns", and 1924 would see a massive sea change in the organization with the appointment of J. Edgar Hoover as Chief of the Bureau and the absorbing of the Cipher Bureau, more commonly known as the Black Chamber. Originally a joint project between the State Department and the Army after the war focused on cryptanalysis and intelligence-gathering, disagreements over funding would cast the Chamber adrift before its temporary incorporation into the NIB, though its more illicit activities*** would continue uninterrupted under its new management.

-Hoover would go on to be the longest-serving Chief in the Bureau's history, and although his abuses of power would result in a bevy of restrictions on the agency (and on the position of Chief especially) following his death in 1972, he had an undeniably lasting impact on the state of American foreign intelligence and domestic security that persists in the agency to this day.

One of Hoover's major contributions to the work of the Black Chamber would be an aggressive policy of securing foreign nationals with cryptanalitic experience as covert operatives, the most famous of which would be Alan Turing, who had been turned into an asset as early as 1935 during a visit to Princeton University and would defect in the aftermath of the Second Clash of Civilizations after providing intimate details of the state of the Entente cryptanalysis program for the entirety of the conflict and the theoretical computer projects formed in the early years of the FBU. Hoover would also be an early and avid adopter of the British closed-circuit television system, itself a revolution in the physical application of the panopticon philosophy in that country and later in the FBU and its empire and client states more broadly. The Second Clash of Civilizations would see two other broad changes, including the expansion of the Bureau into not only a domestic but also a foreign intelligence service with the creation of the subordinate Office of Strategic Services and the almost symbiotic working relationship between the NIB and the American Hussar Corps, all the better to skirt posse comitatus laws and military restrictions when administering federal justice within and outside the United States.

*The women's voting amendment (16th here/19th OTL) was the first of the so called Bryan Amendments, followed during his tenure by amendments to enforce Prohibition (17th/18th), authorize an income tax to replace the loss of liquor taxes (18th/16th), and popularly elect senators (19th/17th). The 20th amendment (21st OTL) would repeal Prohibition under President Winthrop but the rest stuck around, with different wording to the income tax amendment providing cover for the Independence Party's push for LVT.

**Treasury actually forbid the transfer of agents to the infant BOI OTL for fear of creating a secret police. Womp womp.

***OTL the Black Chamber was secretly harvesting the communications of allied embassies in the United States, one of the factors in its historical dissolution. Here that policy not only continues for quite awhile under Hoover but also contributes to the Entente-American Split when the program is revealed in the 1970s.

Born in the USSA · May 30, 2022

How best to measure the worth of a president, by the things they accomplish while in office or by the second- and third-order consequences that follow in the wake? By the first metric President Lovecraft would score quite well, with a Depression ended and a Clash of Civilizations won under his banner. By the second measure, however, his legacy would far outstrip his firsthand accomplishments, a shadow out of time stretching forward into the present. The National Health Service, the public works, the professionalization and integration of the civil service and the education system, all these things have contributed to creating an America strong and smart and free, striding the Earth like a colossus. But perhaps most of all it was his creation of HASTUR, the last major achievement before his resignation, that has gone on to resonate through every corridor of American life. In one hand an olive branch, in the other a burning sword.

-Leslie Groves would serve as first Chief of the Reserve following the incorporation of the Carcosa Projects into the new agency. Though he would retire from the Army to ensure civilian control of the agency given unease in some quarters regarding its paramilitary components he would be retroactively promoted to Lieutenant General, backdated to the Sultan nuclear test.

HASTUR was created in 1943, a collection of factions and competing interests excised from their home agencies and service branches and brought together under a central authority, in some cases the better to ensure civilian control in the face of a rapidly expanding military-industrial complex. From its inception the Reserve was divided into well-defined silos, each with its own purview but all sharing data and personnel as required. Unlike DARPA of our own world HASTUR would retain the patents on any work-product developed, even in collaboration with educational institutions or private firms, with the agency more than financing itself with royalties and the remainder pouring into the government's coffers, year after year, all the better to prevent Lovecraft's political enemies from attempting to dismantle it.

At the instant of its inception the Reserve absorbed, in their entirety:

The Office of Naval Intelligence
The Army Signal Corps
The Cipher Bureau
The Carcosa Projects
The Army Chemical Weapon Corps
The Fortean Society

These components were supplemented by programs dealing with civil and mechanical engineering, biology and medicine, agriculture, materials science, and other areas deemed essential for the American people and their government. Though headquartered in the Leonard Wood Defense Complex, most of the actual work of the Reserve would be undertaken in an archipelago of purpose built intentional communities scattered throughout the country, each numbered and classified at the highest level*. The first of these would be expanded from the Carcosa Project headquarters at Groom Lake and renamed Science City Zero.

While the different Science Cities all had their quirks and particular specialities, City Zero distinguished itself for its focus on high energy physics, much of it an outgrowth from the life and work of Nikola Tesla. Tesla would die in 1943 but, as previously referenced, the fact that he had had a serious patron for the last decade of his life had made all the difference in arresting his mental decline, with City Zero left with a vast collection of ideas, prototypes and files dictated by the man himself during that time. Some ideas were impractical, some were unworkable, some were even impossible, but all were investigated as a possible edge against the Comintern as the Strange Aeon came into full force.

Although Tesla's dream of a World Wireless System would prove to fall within the third category, it was sustained work in this area through the 1960s that would eventually perfect so-called "near-field" wireless power transfer, with most modern home and work surfaces actually capable of charging or outright powering appliances and devices without the need for external wires. Likewise, while his so-called "earthquake machine" would prove a failure, his dreams of geothermal power generated with his bladeless turbine were closer to the mark, providing a valuable avenue toward energy independence with the eventual push to eliminate fossil fuel use later in the century in the face of climate change. And then we have the weapons.

Aside from the constant work of improving and expanding the nation's nuclear capabilities** City Zero would devote considerable time and energy to the investigation of the Teleforce proposal and its derivatives. There is a common misunderstanding (both in and out of universe) that the Teleforce system was a type of death ray. Rather, Teleforce actually functioned as a very early proposal for a mass driver weapon, accelerating metal slugs to high speeds using electromagnetic force, and Teleforce persists as a class of weapon encompassing what we would call railguns and coilguns today, forming an integral tool of the modern armed forces.

Another area of interest was the so called electrolaser, a device that could deliver a massive electrical charge over a distance by using a laser to generate a conductive plasma channel between the operator and the target, lightning in a bottle that would ironically prove its value through a horrible tragedy. At the center of City Zero was the original Carcosa Projects complex, unofficially known as the Demon Core among the staff given Tesla's now famous remark at the first successful nuclear test. While fine tuning an electrolaser testing array in the complex on September 15, 1945, researcher Harry Daghlian would be gruesomely killed when the device activated prematurely while he was in the line of fire, burning him from the inside out and killing him instantly.

-He was only 24. The complex would be renamed in his honor but there were no plans to stop his project.

*Insidiously some that dabble in pure theory would appear functionally identical to generic small towns, even using actual names to disguise themselves, though of course there are never homes on the market and visitors are obviously disincentivized from sticking around.

**Neutron bombs are an important arrow in the quiver.

The King in Yellow and Other Stories: A President Lovecraft Weird Fiction Timeline in Several Acts

Should I create new threads for a series of related TLIAWs?

Yes, they're Schrodinger's canon and should be enjoyed separately

No, they work best as one interconnected narrative and should be concentrated in the same thread

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