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

[Born in the USSA]

The Populist return to power after thirty years wandering in the wilderness had a fairly modest effect on the day to day operations of the Reserve and the broader bureaucratic ecosystem, at least under Earl Long. Long got on fairly well with Groves, keeping him on in recognition for his immeasurable contributions since the Second Clash of Civilizations. The new president made a point of directing a greater share of the agency's budget to its agricultural research as a commitment to his rural (small-p) populist sympathies, but the relationship between the Reserve and the administration was broadly cordial. The 1954 assassination of Long would throw all that out the window, with Gerald L.K. Smith eager to seize on his unexpected elevation to the presidency as the perfect vehicle in his ultimately ill-fated bid to reshape the organs of state power in his image. And for that to happen Groves would have to go.

-Although they shared several priorities for the future of the Reserve, Sidney Gottlieb had a notoriously poor personal relationship with the second President Smith owing to the latter's volcanic antisemitism. The selection of Gottlieb as Chief in 1955 had ultimately come down to Joseph McCarthy, who as the Populist Senate Majority Leader had flatly told the president that it was down to Gottlieb or Groves.​

Sidney Gottlieb had made a name for himself in the Reserve's chemical weapons projects but by the time he inherited the big chair he had come around to a new position— rather than focus on poisoning armies he would instead focus on individuals. That's right folks, all the same mind control experiments we had to deal with from the CIA. He had successfully sold the president on the possibility of reprogramming otherwise unremarkable individuals into unwitting assassins and covert agents and to better secure his power base within the agency he would decide against pursuing these... ethically dubious... projects through the traditional chemical warfare silo, instead electing to expand the focus of a little-known division of the agency codenamed CHARON.

-By the time of his death in 1932, Charles Fort, author, investigator, "Prophet of the Unexplained", had spent nearly thirty years studying anomalous phenomena. "Fortean" has evolved into an official term of art within CHARON to describe their purview. ​

While every other portion of the Reserve had been either a preexisting government or military agency or had been created from whole cloth after the founding of the Reserve CHARON was different, having begun life in 1931 as the Fortean Society, a public nonprofit organization. Formed by acolytes of paranormal investigator Charles Fort, the organization would be brought to Lovecraft's attention by Harry Houdini, former stage magician and long time covert operative for the American government* during the Winthrop years. Although himself an arch-materialist, Lovecraft was well aware that science was an evolving organism and that the unexplained of today could simply be science we understand tomorrow rather than any sort of supernatural claptrap. He would consult with the leadership of the Society during his presidency and would ultimately suggest that they come into the fold to continue their work under the aegis of the US government.

Aside from its origins, CHARON under Groves would also operate differently than the more conventional silos, serving as something closer to a purely investigative organization in the vein of the NIB rather than actually pioneering discoveries and building things directly as the others did. Tasked under Groves with merely investigating anomalous events and meticulously recording them for the benefit of future Reserve researchers, some within the group leapt at Gottlieb's directive that CHARON take a more direct approach in "expanding human consciousness and exploring the limits of the universe".

Aside from a gauntlet of projects using a variety of hallucinogens and other agents to alter human behavior CHARON would also conduct firsthand experiments in parapsychology, exploring areas like mental telepathy and remote viewing. Although the group would revert back to its purely investigative role after Gottlieb's eventual fall from grace disclosures of some of CHARON's work during the period have captured the public imagination, inspiring wild conspiracy theories** that the group is still acting in its prior role and committing large-scale human experimentation on American citizens, possibly on behalf of aliens. Notably Steve Ditko would reveal under interrogation that he firmly believed Hunter S. Thompson and his Freak Power movement to be a catspaw for the group.


*Lovecraft ghostwrote for Houdini in real life and the latter had not only a prominent career debunking supernatural phenomena but also a long shadowy history with American spycraft around the WWI period. It was too weird a set of connections not to include so I've butterflied his death, though he's long retired by the time the Reserve is actually founded.

**Roughly equivalent to stuff like the Men in Black and Majestic-12 conspiracy theories.

 

[Born in the USSA]

-Theodore von Kármán had immigrated to the United States in the the late 1920s from the United Kingdoms of the Danube. He had worked on Austro-Hungarian ramjet munitions during the First Clash of Civilizations and would go on to lay the foundation that would culminate in the Mercury Program.
​

President Lovecraft had long had an intense interest in space, having dreamed of becoming an astronomer before his stint in the Army forever changed the path of his life. Who's to say, perhaps there's a universe out there where the planet beyond Janus was named Yuggoth instead of Nox? Even as his political career took of he never lost his childhood enthusiasm for the stars, an enthusiasm that would go on to strongly influence the founding of the Reserve. The Lovecraft Space Center in Providence would be founded in his honor and officially commemorated on the tenth anniversary of his death, his wife and family in attendance.

The common misconception that territorialism between ONI and the Signal Corps had hampered aerospace technology would lead to their dismemberment in the new structure, with the actual wartime communication research and deployment spun of into a silo connected to and coordinating between each branch of the Armed Forces. Meanwhile, the formerly separate aeronautics research projects were combined, tasked (publicly) with modernizing the Army and Navy air wings and (secretly) with working towards an American presence beyond the Earth. A focus on domestic priorities would largely relegate this secret mission to the back burner under Smith, Long and... Smith but would come roaring back with the launch of Vojaĝanto.

Despite the fact that the Comintern had lost the war it had largely retained its core territory, even expanding slightly despite the partition of Belgium, and by the mid-fifties had completely recovered. Having likewise retained the majority of its scientific talent, the alliance would make crucial early strides in mechanical computers, though their most indelible mark on history would prove to the be the launch of Vojaĝanto in 1957. Placing the first artificial satellite into orbit, Wernher von Braun and his research team had struck a clear and unmistakable propaganda blow for Marxist-Trigonism and the Providence Pact and the Alliance for Democracy had taken notice.

Two Gun Bob would publicly excoriate President Smith for this stunning failure, raising his national profile just in time for the 1960 election. While initially promising only to "keep an eye" on the Congo he was much more full throated in his pledge to land a man on the moon during his administration. His defeat of Vice President Thurmond would allow him to take partial credit for the success of Mercury 1, which had begun under his predecessor and would be the first rocket to put a man into orbit and return him to Earth alive in late 1961. In office he would elect to retain Gottlieb as Chief of the Reserve, though in private he made it clear that CHARON's human experimentation needed to stop, both out of personal distaste for it and a firm conviction that America didn't have time to waste on trivialities if it was to beat the Commies to the moon.

-A portion of the Mercury Program technical staff. Marvel Parsons, second from left, was the leading light of the project, with Florida's Parsons Space Center eventually named in his honor. ​

Fearing that the Comintern was on the cusp of a major breakthrough and recognizing an excellent opportunity to refine technologies for ballistic missiles Gottlieb would do as ordered, throwing the full scientific might of the Reserve behind Mercury, with nearly every project in the agency providing something to accelerate it*. The government would even put out covert feelers to the rest of the Providence Pact, bringing in foreign talent to help with the program and giving China, the Estado Novo and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth valuable experience they would in turn apply to their own projects. In 1967, Mercury 7 would successfully take off from the (then named) Launch Operations Center, taking its crew of three further than any man had gone before.

Edgar Mitchell would be the first man to set foot on the moon, an event seared into the world's consciousness by every television and radio broadcast on the planet, his first transmission the surface "We come in peace for all mankind!" instantly becoming one of the most famous speeches in human history. Although American intervention in the Congo Crisis had begun to splinter President Howard's support by his second term and the fallout from American intervention had given him the opportunity to replace Gottlieb he had kept his earliest and grandest campaign promise. The crew would return to Earth with a large collection of samples but the American flag and the lunar lander will endure there forever.

-From Malkuth to Yesod. He transmits, we recieve.​

*Although they would not be put in place during Mercury itself sustained work by the agriculture silo would result in early theorizing on bioship design principles, the creation of ships with integrated plants to aid in water and air filtration and help support human internal biomes and mental health. Universal on modern space stations, the evolution of the concept has even lead to some serious work done by the modern Reserve exploring Freeman Dyson's proposed Dyson tree.

 

[Born in the USSA]

-British scientist Lyon Playfair is considered the father of chemical warfare for his successful push for the British Navy to use artillery shells filled with a cyanide derivative during the Crimean War.
​

By far the oldest component of the Reserve, the Army Chemical Weapon Corps was founded during the Civil War when New Yorker John Doughty brought his proposal for chlorine-filled artillery shells directly to Abraham Lincoln, inspired by the successful use of chemical agents by the British during the Crimean War. Doughty informed the president that his proposal had been blocked by Brigadier General James Wolfe Ripley and an investigation would reveal that the general had also sidelined a whole host of proposals for improved munitions in the first year of the war, among them the mass adoption of lever-action rifles, Gatling guns and improved artillery. Lincoln had heard enough, dismissing Ripley in late 1861, a full two years ahead of our timeline.

Rightly seeing these advances as crucial to the Union cause; all the better to make use of the North's superior industrial capacity, the early deployment of these weapons would unfortunately see the conflict gradually grind to a morass of trench warfare in most areas, much to the horror of European observers*, though it did prove crucial to the creation of a proper chemical warfare doctrine that finally allowed Grant and Sherman to break through with the help of a new generation of airships. The war would end roughly six months ahead of schedule but the damage was done. The Confederacy had been shattered and reabsorbed and the Chemical Warfare Corps was here to stay, initially under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman. Hard lessons learned with the new advances in firearms and artillery would also prove crucial to the escalating arms race between the Great Powers, accelerating weapons development by at least a generation in most areas and birthing a world with rampant chemical weapons use and equivalents to the M60 in service by the First Clash of Civilizations.

-The M60 was first developed in 1957 in OTL and was used prominently in Vietnam. Its rough equivalent here was commonly called the Trench Sweeper, one of which was actually responsible for Lovecraft's wartime injury. By the Second Clash of Civilizations it had been retired in favor of an analogue to the M240.
​

The Army CWC would prove crucial during the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War and the First Clash of Civilizations, enjoying robust funding under both parties. Aside from actual combat the Corps was also gradually given the responsibility for devising means to harden civilian targets against chemical attacks, a mission that only grew more urgent as the then-Great War revealed the truly devastating potential of fully industrialized chemical warfare. The conflict would see the weapons used liberally by all sides and would prove to be the largest deployment of chemical agents in human history up to that point, necessitating a massive investment in developing battlefield and civilian countermeasures.

The Corps would serve valiantly in the Second Clash of Civilizations and was a prime candidate to be absorbed into HASTUR when Lovecraft announced the agency publicly during his 1942 State of the Union radio address. While an old guard within the CWC had protested the move, a crop of younger officers elevated by the meatgrinder of the Pacific Theater and the increasingly sophisticated research division would leap at the opportunity. They saw the creation of the Reserve as vital to the nation's advancement and security and a prime opportunity to smooth access to scientific knowledge generated by the various organs of the blossoming military-industrial complex.

Under Groves the chemical weapons silo (renamed PROSERPINA) continued its work essentially unchanged, with the looming Strange Aeon making it abundantly clear that hardening civilian sites was an existential necessity in an age of weapons of mass destruction. This sustained investment would see the organization contribute not only to the creation of a nationwide system of civilian bunkers but also the development of sophisticated chemical and radiation detectors that would be installed in every town and city across the country. Gottlieb's promotion to Chief would also see him handpick several of his allies in the department and transfer them to CHARON to pursue the development of mind control techniques and, failing that, incapacitory agents that could be deployed against civilians, something even Sherman himself had not pursued.

A prominent discovery in this area would grow out of a CHARON expedition to Haiti. In exchange for pursuing his goals, CHARON in the Gottlieb years had been given essentially carte blanche to pursue their own research on the side, sending teams of agents around the world in search of rare poisons, allegedly anomalous objects and hidden knowledge. Because nothing bad ever happened when you let your occult bureau just run around collecting samples. Dr. Henry Jones** was one such agent, and would return from an expedition to Haiti with samples of the so-called "zombie powder", a blend of tetrodotoxin, plant extracts and other substances alleged to induce a suggestible trance like state (if it didn't kill you first). Experimenting with the compound would become the central focus of CHARON's chemical research division, though evidence of the divisions work (and its cavalier use of uninformed American citizens in that work) would begin to circulate in the press as soon as the early sixties and prove instrumental in getting the project shut down.

-Dr. Jones (pictured here in the field) would provide secret testimony to Congress about Gottlieb's pet projects that would finally give President Howard the opportunity to force him out of the Reserve.
​

One area where PROSERPINA became especially useful was the Congo Crisis, where American entry into the war would necessitate the deployment of herbicides and other agents even as CHARON field teams rushed to explore the possibilities of the country's rich biome. Since the incorporation of the Signal Corps into the Reserve it had been joined symbiotically with every branch of the Armed Forces, pursuing a system of recruitment roughly equivalent to early astronauts— military personnel with the proper education and skills would be actively poached by the agency, serving within the military command structure but technically subordinate to the Reserve and tasked with maintaining communication infrastructure or testing new or specialized weapons systems in the field (depending on which silo they were in, of course).

The centralization of SIGINT and the intelligence service would see NIB agents and Hussars also deployed to the front for the first time under the new structure, with the two organizations acting jointly to pursue special operations missions outside the conventional battlefield, much to the consternation of military officials who argued fruitlessly that they should be the ones doing that sort of thing. The Hussars proved especially adept at this work. Theodore Roosevelt had been appointed by President Winthrop as first Chief of the National Mounted Police and he had required military discipline and wilderness survival training from day one. Roosevelt's death in 1919 hadn't eroded that requirement, with his son Theodore Roosevelt Jr. taking up his father's mantle and maintaining his exacting standards, and his son Cornelius taking it up after him. Chemical warfare would be discredited by one such Hussar unit. Once they discovered the camps.


*They were rather desensitized by the dawn of the First Clash of Civilizations, where trench warfare and chemical attacks seemed far less shocking.

**Only a suspicious resemblance to the fictional character. Although he relished the chance to further his research he was deeply leary of what the former PROSERPINA operatives were doing with it.

 

[Born in the USSA]

With hindsight the concentration camps active in the Congo should not have come as a surprise. After all, they had been common practice by the British in southern Africa since the Boer War. While the existence of internment camps in the country had been common knowledge on the world stage practically since the FBU took on the colony as a protectorate in the wake of the dismemberment of Belgium the existence of the so called "black sites" deep within the interior of the country were not. When a team of Hussars stumbled across the derelict remains of one such black site in 1966 the results were sickening, revealing at least three mass graves filled with incontrovertible evidence of civilians who had been exposed to chemical weapons and herded in to die. The Rubicon had been crossed.

It seems an odd line to draw, especially given how prolifically chemical weapons had been used for literally a century. The simplest answer is that chemical doctrine is, and had always been, noticeably different from OTL parallels. Sherman had been the first to extensively make use of the new technology and he may have burned three states to the ground but he had made a stringent point to only gas those forces actively taking up arms against his army, on punishment of war crimes charges and execution. It had set a precedent that had been upheld for the entire history of chemical warfare: military targets were fair game, tangential civilian deaths were an acceptable but tragic byproduct, and use on civilian populations was nothing short of barbarism. It was a standard that had held through one War of the Conflagration, two Clashes of Civilizations, and innumerable smaller wars on smaller fronts. It was a standard that the FBU and its allies had discarded. Though the Entente-American Split would only erupt in full a decade later historians place that first irrevocable rupture to the discovery of the black sites.

-Senator Earl Warren was a driving force behind the investigation of the Congo black sites. ​

Reaction in the Providence Pact was swift and immediate even in the face of flagrant Franco-British denials, with Congress forming a special commission to investigate the use of chemical weapons in the Congo and to revaluate the American chemical weapons policy more broadly. Led by Senator Earl Warren, the so-called Warren Commission would listen to testimony from NIB agents and Hussars active in the discovery of the black sites and would call several witnesses from within the Reserve itself, most notably Dr. Jones, to testify on the public and privately acknowledged work of PROSERPINA and CHARON within the agency. Gottlieb was out within the year, his pet projects stripped bare.

Given the prominence of MERCURY and the Great Race between the superpowers, elevating Marvel Parsons to the position of Chief came naturally and under his leadership the mission of the Reserve itself would be significantly overhauled following the end of the Congo Crisis and the success of Mercury 7. Under US pressure the Providence Pact would swear off the use of chemical weapons, finding a surprising ally in the Comintern in a massive push for the complete banning of the practice worldwide. PROSERPINA would be retained but retasked, relegating to research and development for purely peaceful ends and with the civilian market in mind rather than the military. This would be part of a broader shift within the agency toward peacetime applications for its advances and would lead directly to the rise of Maize Machines.

-Formed by an Act of Congress and signed into law by President Howard as one of his last acts in office Maize has become possibly the largest corporation in American history.
​

Maize Machines was an interesting creature, a publicly traded corporation in which the United States government was legally required to maintain a controlling share. Largely the public face of the Reserve, Maize was tasked with marketing the civilian results of the agency's massive ecosystem of research projects. Originally focused on agricultural chemicals developed by PROSERPINA and farming and food processing technology developed by CERES, the company would make its shift to the electronics the company is now best known for due to the work of a program called ARACHNE.

ARACHNE had originally been merely the reorganized Cipher Bureau, tasked purely with signals intelligence and cryptanalysis. Under the leadership of prominent defector Alan Turing the program had diversified significantly since its formation, branching into all areas of communications and computer science. The first modern computers had been developed in the Comintern and used balanced ternary as their operating logic. An interesting divergence was the survival of vacuum tubes as the technology of choice, a result of an unwarranted fear that Tesla's much publicized World Wireless System (and the looming possibility of nuclear war) would produce devastating interference with semiconductors absent extensive shielding. By the time it became obvious in the late sixties that far-field power transmission was unfeasible and nuclear war might not be around the corner the drive toward automation in the Comintern and the Providence Pact (and related advancements in microfabrication) had produced the first prototype nanoscale vacuum transistors.

It would be this combination, ternary computers making use of miniaturized vacuum transistors, that would lay the foundation of the so called HASTURNET of the early Graham years. Originally designed solely for the components of the Reserve and the nation's military and educational apparatus to share data, Graham, always possessing a keen eye for mass communication, was adamant on making the technology publicly available as quickly as possible. It was a project Maize was more than happy to take on, marketing the first personal computer as early as 1975. Known as the Maize Kernel, the computers were a bit bulkier than the first PCs developed OTL, though relatively low cost and consumer subsidies would see the devices proliferate quickly. HASTURNET was reorganized into Cybersyn* and would be used to connect every computer in the country, serving not only its original institutional function but also providing a vast new frontier for the American people to explore and develop together.

Parsons would pass away in 1977, though not before he had steered MERCURY away from launch capsules and toward a project he had called "Void Steed"**, later renamed the Pegasus Program. President Thompson decided to choose his successor from the ranks of CERES, nominating a young but accomplished geneticist who had continued her mentor Norman Borlaug's work on the "Green Revolution". Though only thirty years old at the time of her appointment, Dr. Octavia Butler would lay the groundwork for a transformation in the study of genetics, even from her eventual office in the Long Executive Office Building.

-The appointment of a Negro-American woman to head perhaps the most powerful agency in the government was a major demonstration of the American commitment to the equality of all citizens, no matter what the Workingmen said. Emily Lovecraft would cite her as an inspiration and the good doctor was a guest of honor at the younger Lovecraft's inauguration. ​

*As in OTL from the term "cybernetic synergy"

**An alternate name for the byakhee from the Cthulhu Mythos.

 

[Born in the USSA]

-Patrice Lumumba, first president of the Republic of the Congo. ​

The different lessons taken by the superpowers in the wake of the Congo Crisis were a study in contrasts that would only accelerate the burgeoning Entente-American split that would fully blossom during the Thompson administration and the shift toward rapprochement between the Providence Pact and the Comintern that would begin in earnest under the Jackson* presidency that would follow. For his part Thompson pursued a peaceful foreign policy focused on continuing the rebuilding of the Congo and the phasing out of chemical weapons in the Providence Pact, facilitating several arms control agreements between Pact and Comintern member states to further that goal.

These policies were broadly popular with the war-weary public** over the protestations of hard liners in both parties opposed to anything that could limit American war capabilities or be seen to give a single inch to Marxist-Trigonism. Several attempts were made on his life and although none succeeded they no doubt played a role in his decision not to run for reelection, though he admitted in interviews that it was as much due to the difficult electoral math— his election had been a perfect storm unlikely to repeat itself. Following his term Thompson would retire to Amarillo, contenting himself with voluminous public editorials not unlike Lovecraft and (the first) Smith before him.

While the Providence Pact pursued peace on the world stage the Alliance for Democracy had taken the opposite lessons from their withdrawal from the Congo. The Franco-British Union had made South Africa and Rhodesia*** fully independent members of the AfD in the aftermath of the Crisis but still found itself dragged into a supporting role in the sectarian conflicts of the ensuing Bush Wars, which saw Comintern-backed rebels in the former Dominions and an attempt by the Estado Novo to support Fascists in the newly independent states of former Portuguese Africa. When Versailles demanded answers Thompson had argued that Brazil was pursuing unique cultural-historical prerogatives rooted in Lusotropicalism and that the actions of the Estado Novo neither represented the Pact as a whole nor set a precedent for any other member. It would prove to be the final straw, sundering the anti-Comintern axis that had persisted since the First Clash of Civilizations.

The Bush Wars provided the Franco-British with a pyrrhic victory of sorts. While the Alliance for Democracy had successfully prevented the states of southern Africa from falling to Communism or Fascism that status quo seemed balanced on a knife's edge and its unraveling would play a crucial part in the oncoming Age of Fear. The conflicts had also distracted the Alliance at a crucial moment, allowing the Second Great Revolt to gain unassailable momentum in India. The instability would also see the rise of the Rhodesian Renewal Front, a virulently racist regime even by the standards of the region, though they would at least have the decency to rebrand their Esoteric Fascist ideology "Vitalism" to avoid raising the ire of their imperial patron.

-Ian Smith, Prime Minister of Rhodesia, leader of the Rhodesian Renewal Front, avowed Vitalist. ​

While the Franco-British were hip-deep in blood fighting in the bush the legacy of the Congo in the United States was almost entirely cultural throughout the seventies, with several major films dramatizing the horrors of the war released during the decade. Often shot on location in the Congo with the support of the new government, the most famous and critically acclaimed would be Francis Ford Coppola's Heart of Darkness, loosely adapted from the novel of the same name and released in 1979. The film would take several liberties with Conrad's novel, shifting the action from the Free State ivory trade to the Congo Crisis and changing the names and roles of several characters given the geopolitics at play (and the demise since the novel of the Belgian state itself), though this would allow metacommentary by characters relating their situation directly to the novel itself.

-A reinterpretation of the Kurtz character, Van Owen as portrayed by David Robert Jones had the bearing of a "thin white duke", aristocratic, cruel and empty. Controversially Coppola's adaptation would retain the human sacrifice only implied by the novel as the ultimate symbol of the character's disdain for and detachment from his "subjects".​

The film would center on Roland Deschain, an American Hussar played by Harrison Ford, dispatched up the Congo River to assassinate a Franco-British holdout. The character of Kurtz was renamed Van Owen, with his new backstory making him a British-born commandant of a black site. After the withdrawal of Franco-British troops from the country he sets himself up as a brutal and cruel god, using his ragtag army and remaining stores of chemical weapons against Communist partisans and Pact forces with equal savagery. Played by noted character actor David Robert Jones, Van Owen would become one of the most famous film villains of the latter 20th century, with several memorable speeches and his infamous last line in the film ("The horror! The horror! Drop the bomb, exterminate the brutes!") After being shot in the neck in an ambush by Van Owen's forces that sees the last of his unit massacred Roland famously reaches the man himself despite a gaping neck wound, killing him and slowly dying himself as Van Owen's Montagnards seem to accept him as the new leader of the band.


*"Only Scoop could go to Petrograd", after all. I'll be diving deeper into this in Invisible Amendments.

**Polarizing it may have been but the Congo Crisis had been a victory for the United States, with the new Republic of the Congo proving a dependable US ally in the region and giving the Providence Pact its second foothold on the continent after Liberia.

***South Africa + Namibia and Southern + Northern Rhodesia, respectively.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Spoiler: A logo

Spoiler: A poster

-Base image credit included

Spoiler: A flag

 

[Born in the USSA]

-In my experience the existence of the Illuminati is a highly overrated phenomenon.
​

Given the sheer amount of cultural baggage the Illuminati have been saddled with in the modern popular imagination it's difficult to truly conceive just how irrationally afraid of the group the powers-that-be were following its founding. I was pleasantly surprised while researching that there was a persistent wild-eyed conspiracy in Britain from the 1790s on that the group was the power behind the throne in both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic system that followed despite the obvious contradictions between those two political projects. There, as here, it was nothing but baseless conjecture but we see plenty of examples in the modern historical record of reactions to similar hysteria producing concrete changes on the world stage. And so we come to this, the divergence for the timeline and all that follows!

1. Polaris- The Covenant of Perfectibility ​
2. The White Ship- Lightning in the Air​
3. The Doom That Came to Sarnath- Company Man!​
4. The Cats of Ulthar- Plum Blossom Fists​
5. Celephaïs- Black Youth, Dark Ocean​
6. Ex Oblivione- The Union Forever​
7. Nyarlathotep- The Star of the East​
8. The Quest of Iranon- A Brave New World​

 

[Born in the USSA]

-Sophie Blanchard, "the mother of aerial warfare", would pioneer a concept called "guerre d'éclair" focused on aerial bombardment.
​

Few things dent imperial pride faster than an aerial bombardment of the metropole. It was a lesson the British would learn well, though at great cost, one that would inform British planning for a century and give the Wars of the Conflagration their name. The state of war between Britain and France had continued essentially uninterrupted since the start of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793, only coming to a temporary respite in 1802 with the Peace of Amiens. This state of affairs was always tenuous at best and by 1803 the two countries were at war again, this time as part of what has alternatively been called "the Great War", "the Napoleonic Wars", or "the War of the Third Coalition". Realizing (correctly) that Britain and her monarchy would always seek to foil his Continental ambitions Napoleon would embark on a grand strategy to invade the British Isles, an invasion backed by the sale of Louisiana to the United States, a purchase only made possible by a loan from a British bank in a fitting bit of irony.

-Napoleon inspecting the troops at Boulogne. OTL choppy water sunk a good deal of the invasion force during a test of the new ships, costing many lives and dooming the planned invasion. Marginally better weather allowed the French to revise their designs without the loss of life and materiel, serving as the timeline's POD.
​

For the planned invasion Napoleon had raised an army of 200,000 men and commissioned a flotilla of new ships under the command of Eustache Bruix* and a large number of war balloons designed by Sophie Blanchard, the first female air force head in world history. The war balloons were a far cry from the proper airships that would come to define aerial warfare through the century, with the long narrow baskets supported by primitive leaf springs** suspended from conventional hot air balloons. Though primitive by any standard the war balloons would prove their worth defending the encamped French forces from a British raid on Boulogne in 1804 with the aid of favorable winds. Earlier in the year than the historical raid of that name, the failure of the British attack left the French with a closing window of relatively calm waters and a gap in the British blockade and Napoleon was keen to seize both, launching his grand invasion in late July of that year.

Napoleon's plans had been obvious to the British since the naval test the year before, with equal amounts of panic and caricature circulating in the government and among the public for almost two years by the time the invasion reached the British coast. Under Prime Minister Addington an army of 50,000 had been raised and the south of England had been fortified, a policy his successor Pitt the Younger had continued. British planners suffered from two unforseen complications:

• The first was a serious underestimation of the effects of air power on their defenses, with the war balloons considered a fanciful novelty rather than a potentially grave threat.​
• The second was the routing of the Boulogne raid, which had opened up a brief gap in the British blockade and given the French the opportunity they needed.​

By any metric the invasion of the England was a failure. Though the French were able to land troops and the war balloons proved effective at going around the defensive Martello towers to strike directly into the interior of Southern England they were unable to hold the Channel, cutting the invasion force off from resupply and dooming it to erosion by attrition. Some particularly able units were able to evade capture to continue disrupting life behind the lines but the only real victory the French could claim was a psychological one, with the (relative) success of the actual landing and the firebombing by the war balloons sparking widespread mass panic throughout the country, even in areas too far afield to ever see a Frenchman or a balloon on the horizon.

The French were far more successful in Europe with the British temporarily sidelined with internal unrest, unable to again break the Coalition blockade but able to successfully shepherd the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine. This stage of the conflict would see Prussia wade into the fray, inaugurating the Fourth Coalition. The French would continue to make liberal use of guerre d'éclair throughout the continental campaign, though the First War of the Conflagration would only end in 1815 with the death of Napoleon I at the battle of Tannhausen on the border of the Confederation. Despite the loss of troops in the British venture the French were in a superior military position compared to their historical one, with the deaths of Louis XVIII and Charles X*** making the dreams of a Bourbon Restoration in France an impossibility.

With Napoleon II all of four years old France would undergo a shift away from the sheer power it had afforded to his father, instituting a modified proposal inspired by the Sieyès plan that would more or less transform the French Empire into a complicated constitutional monarchy. Under the new system the Emperor would gain the official position of Grand Elector and be advised by two Consuls, one for the interior and another for war. While he would enjoy broad appointing powers once he came of age he would be stripped of them for the duration of any military campaign, while the actual business of legislation would be left to a three chambered body. The Tribune had the sole power to debate and propose laws, the Legislature had the sole power to ratify those proposals, and the College of Guardians would sit above both as a combination artificial aristocracy/constitutional court charged with not only deciding on the legality of the laws but also absorbing any person they found threatened the new constitution, forcing them to give up all other powers in the process.

The French experiment notwithstanding the end of the First War of the Conflagration left very few actual winners. While the Confederation of the Rhine would survive, the Holy Roman Empire was forced to shamble on as a vehicle for the competing aims of the Prussians and Austrians (though the two competing Holy Roman hegemons did manage to get along long enough to erect the Tannhausen Gate as a monument to Napoleon's death so there's that). The French invasion of Russia hadn't progressed as deeply so that's something, I suppose. All told the British saw themselves as the biggest losers, not only did that Corsican's spawn still technically sit the French throne but they had suffered a humiliating attack, no matter how futile it may have been. There were plenty in the Navy and the halls of power that had wanted to see Paris burned to the ground. It's here where we see the impact of the Illuminati conspiracy theory. There was no shortage of powerful people who saw the workings of a secret society at the root of their humiliation. And what better way to counter a secret society than with one of your own?

-Source. Founded secretly in 1816, the Esoteric Order of Dagon would devote itself to British military and political supremacy, by whatever means necessary.


*Who survives his historical bout of tuberculosis.

**Refinement of this design would be accelerated by the subsequent aerial arms race, eventually refined and miniaturized enough to provide the Jersey Devil with his fantastic leaps.

***The former when his ship sank in the Channel and the latter as an indirect consequence of the panic during the invasion when his house burned down.

 

[Born in the USSA]

While the Napoleonic Wars had ended with the Congress of Vienna, the War of the Conflagration had ended with a far messier resolution, a handful of bitter pills that in hindsight would make the Second War of the Conflagration an inevitability. Italian dreams of unification had been dashed when the portions of the peninsula wrested from France were simply transfered to Austria. Germany remained partitioned between a French vassal and an unholy frankenstate itself torn between two rival powers. Poland had been completely dismembered. France itself groaned under the weight of a needlessly complicated constitution despite its better showing in the conflict. Britain would suffer over a decade of lingering unrest stemming in one way or another from the French invasion as the initial panic transitioned into a widespread crisis of faith in the political system that would itself feed the flames of a diverse array of causes, from Chartism to the reform movement to Luddism.

-Ned Ludd was almost certainly a fictional person, though the Luddite movement would find new life as a result of the rush to industrialize born of the European arms race begun by the First Conflagration. ​

This period of transition would see several major changes begin in Britain before spreading across the Continent and the wider world. Jeremy Bentham had died in the conflict but his designs would be adopted en masse as the most politically palatable solution to the problem of lingering unrest. The panopticon model would also come to inform an accelerating trend of industrialization and weapons research— arising out of the perception by many nations that only rapid advancement and new discoveries could give them an edge in what many saw as an inevitable future war, the psychological stresses of the panopticon system would perversely only inflame tensions with the working class, most spectacularly in the case of the American Great Upheaval that would come half a century later. This period would also see the vast expansion of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, as a group that had begun among a small cadre of conspirators concentrated in the British Navy and the government began to extrude tendrils throughout the upper classes and the military-industrial complex.

By the 1840s the European powderkeg was primed to blow, with heads of state and nameless citizens across the continent waiting for the inevitable first spark. It would come from the abomination that was the Holy Roman Empire. Everyone living within the Empire knew it was well past its expiration date, with Prussia and Austria seething with mutual hostility and prepared to strike at one another at a moment's notice. Prussia would be first, launching the Holy Roman Civil War in 1848 and with it the Second War of the Conflagration.

Viewing the Austrians as a power in the midst of a long decline* the Order would covertly aid Prussia in a bid to create a land rival to France incapable of actually conquering her or threatening British sea power** even as the government itself took a position of official neutrality. With Prussian support the Italian states were dragged into the conflict, with the Austrians providing a useful enemy to kickstart the process of Italian unification. Meanwhile the desire of many within the Confederation of the Rhine to become part of a unified German state would directly involve France, exposing deep-seated flaws in Seiyès' unworkable constitutional order in the process.

-Ah to be an airship in the heady days after cheap aluminum but before helium. ​

The discovery of a cost-effective method to refine aluminum had proved the holy grail of guerre d'éclair. While the element had been discovered in the 1820s and had attracted much military interest for its potential to create lighter and more durable airships the sheer difficulty of isolating it had made the substance prohibitively expensive for a generation after its discovery, worth more per ounce than gold. By the start of the Second War of the Conflagration that had all changed, with a new generation of rigid airships replacing even the most refined war balloons, making the conflict the first true war in the air. They were not without their problems, however, with the need to rely on hydrogen as a lifting agent proving a fatal weakness when facing an enemy armed with incendiary shells, an innovation pioneered by both of the major German powers and initially based on the use of powdered magnesium.

The bulk of the Second Conflagration would last from 1848 to 1852. While Germany and Austria were unable to completely overpower one another, the broader ripples of the war would see Prussia the victor, with the Holy Roman Empire finally dissolved and popular revolts in the Confederation of the Rhine leading to the nation's annexation into the new German Empire. The Italian states had managed to drive out the Austrians, laying the foundation for the later Kingdom of Italy even as the remaining Austrian realms reorganized themselves into the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

While Prussia had been the unquestionable winner, it was France rather than Austria who would face the greatest shock to the system in a scenario ironically similar to the British position at the end of the First Conflagration. Although France had seen little actual fighting in the country, the inability of the French Army to put down the revolts in the Rhine and the vulnerability of her airships to Prussian incendiary rounds*** would lead to an unraveling of the French constitutional order as citizens erupted against their ineffective government. Though he was personally popular, Napoleon II absorbed the brunt of this discontent as the people cried out for a return to the decisive leadership and military victories they had enjoyed under his father. Into the breach would step his cousin Louis-Napoleon, who would lead a mutiny with mass public support, securing his cousin's abdication and becoming Napoleon III. The Order's plans had perhaps succeeded too well.

-In theory the College of Guardians should have been able to nip this in the bud by simply inducting Louis-Napoleon as a member (stripping him of his military rank in the process) but he had many supporters in the body and the system had been dysfunctional since its inception in any case.​

The new French constitution would do away with all that nonsense about the Grand Elector choosing between military or civil power and would simultaneously centralize the state more fully under his control and remove the needless complications that had stifled genuine democratic participation in the government. It was thought that this new system, with the Legislature and Tribune merged into a single directly elected body and the College of Guardians firmly loyal to the Emperor, would provide the best synthesis of the preceding constitutions of the Empire and provide decisive action in service to the popular will and the nation's imperial ambitions.

While German and Italian unification had largely been achieved as a result of the Second Conflagration, the fairly conservative nature of the new governments would still see a mass emigration of radicals to the Americas, largely Germans and Italians but also no small number of French, British and Irish. That last would actually prove much smaller than what we experienced, with a British state laser-focused on preventing unrest taking early and decisive steps to better manage the Great Famine. Those irrevocably opposed to British rule on the island would still leave, though British actions in Ireland during the Famine would make it a loyal bastion of the Empire for decades to come and an integral part of the Alliance for Democracy well into the modern day.


*Ironic, given Austro-Hungarian showing in the First Clash of Civilizations.

**Is there an echo in here?

***Still a primitive technology, since it's difficult to ignite magnesium in bulk, but the French considered airships a sign of their edge in warfare and to see even a fraction of them falling out of the sky in balls of fire was a shock to the planners of the day.

 

[Born in the USSA]

-The popular image of the Thuggee is... not a subtle one, to be sure. What say we do better?
​

The existence of the Thuggee is one of the more damaging historical fictions, born out of a conflation of unrelated data, ethnic scapegoating, and imperial paranoia. The theory put forward by the East India Company (and later historians that didn't question those sources) painted the Thugs as an impossibly widespread and organized network of bandits and highwaymen, ingratiating themselves with travelers in order to strangle them to death and loot their bodies. There were rumors they were Kali cultists or began as groups of Muslims who had somehow corrupted Hindus into joining the bands. According to the story, the Thugs were eradicated by the East India Company in the 1830s. Modern historiography has cast a great deal of doubt on this narrative, even calling the Thugs themselves a colonial fiction to paper over otherwise unconnected acts of banditry. Some have even suggested that the relatively high levels of banditry were a direct result of the colonization of the subcontinent, with demobbed native troops forced to turn to theft to make up for the loss of their livelihoods.

To explore the fate of the Thugs in the world of The King in Yellow naturally revolves around the fate of the East India Company. While the Company's first two hundred years were by definition identical to their historical trajectory, the sheer phychological blow dealt to the British in the First Conflagration (and the formation of the Esoteric Order of Dagon) would have drastic effects on the fate of the Honorable East India. The first major divergence would come in 1813 as the conflict was beginning to enter its terminal stage, with the passage of the Charter Act. While the historical bill by that name had renewed the Company's charter it had also stripped it of most of its power, limiting its monopoly exclusively to tea, opium and Chinese trade.

By contrast the Act's uchronic twin would be far more lenient. Although measures allowing missionary activity, funding education initiatives and granting the native governments greater judicial authority over Europeans were included as in OTL far more of the Company's monopolies were also protected, as the consensus at the time was that commodities like saltpetre, opium, and fabric were too crucial to the rapidly modernizing British military and to crucial industries to be left to the vagaries of market competition. At the same time it was made clear through unofficial channels that the government would be keeping a very sharp eye on the Company's affairs for any signs of irregularities with the supply of these crucial necessities.

The 1830s would see the Company root out the Thuggee, with the fantasy of a vast and insidious conspiracy used to give license to an equally vast crusade to round up every bandit and cutpurse on suspicion that they were all in league with some sort of sinister cult. 1833 would see another Charter Act, one that would see further attempts at social reforms in India and the preservation of the Company's monopoly on Chinese trade*. The crackdown on banditry had shown results, no matter how faulty its base assumptions, and the Company was keeping the British Isles supplied with all the raw materials expected of it, so best not to rock the boat. The Second Conflagration would see an uptick in demand, with Dagonites active within the Company perfectly willing to do whatever it took to increase supply. It would be this perfect storm of overeager reform and harsh quotas that would spark the Great Revolt.

-The spark that set off a subcontinent. ​

Despite a simmering cauldron of assorted grievances against colonial rule in India, from the social reforms and unjust land taxes to the blatant classism and the exploitative state of the newly introduced panopticon prison and factory system, the inciting incident for the Revolt was bizarrely unrelated to any of them. The 1853 Enfield rifle would be introduced to the subcontinent in 1857. It fired Minie balls and used paper cartridges that had to be bitten open in order to be used. The cartridges came greased in order to fit properly in the rifle, with rumors quickly circulating among Hindus that it was beef tallow and among Muslims that it was pork lard, part of a larger scheme to somehow render both groups unclean and induce a conversion to Christianity. Pure lunacy, especially since it was rendered from lamb, but we've already seen in this very volume just how these sorts of panics can get out of hand.

With the first shot fired, so to speak, the simmering tensions would finally erupt. As with most wars in this timeline** it was far from a clear cut affair, with the initial mutineers among the Company's levied forces soon joined by the Mughal Empire and several of the princely states even as a significant portion of the population declared for the East India or tried in vain to stay out of the way. Although war crimes were carried out by both sides as the fighting wore on superior Company technology (and overt British support) would ultimately win the day, particularly the Company's robust fleet of airships. Although the Second Conflagration had demonstrated that modern airships were not infallible*** the rebels lacked access to the sort of artillery that might have tipped the scales in their favor, dooming them to the prospect of a lingering defeat at the wrong end of a Company bomber.

-Evolution of Company rule in the decades before the Great Revolt. The areas in pink would be reorganized into the East Indian Confederation in the aftermath, with the princely states coerced into "alliances" with it. ​

The Revolt had lasted barely over a year but had badly damaged the reputation of the Company in the London halls of power. While there was serious talk about simply nationalizing the Indian holdings the example of Ireland provided an alternative solution. Although intervention to mitigate the Great Famine had been made for purely pragmatic reasons, the positive response it had engendered had proved invaluable, with limited concessions to Irish autonomy made in the aftermath in an ultimately successful bid to shore up that good will. Though Irish Home Rule would not arise until 1886 these early steps would prove instructive to the India question. In the 1858 Government of India Act the British goverment would take the radical step of extrapolating the Irish example on a larger scale as a crucial test case— those areas under direct Company rule would be reorganized into the East Indian Confederation and granted a theoretical autonomy within the British Empire.

Though impressive on paper these arrangements were somewhat hollow, with the British sovereign still recognized as head of state and the Company retaining a huge level of influence within the new government. This state of defacto suzerainty would be largely enforced through hard caps on the Confederation military and the undue influence of the new nation's air fleet, a privatized affair contracted to... well you can see where this is going. In fact by some metrics the "nationalization" of the air fleet gave the Confederation one of the largest air services in the world at the time, at least on paper. But what of the Thugs? I did, after all, promise to tell their story. For that we turn to William Chapman.

The Chapmans were long-standing Anglo-Irish nobility and William was born into the family in 1811. In a twist of fate he had been inducted into the Esoteric Order of Dagon during the Second Conflagration and had traveled to India in the aftermath to observe the Company in action, one of the informal network of informants the Order maintained to greater or lesser degrees throughout the Empire. While abroad he would become fascinated with the stories told about the Thuggee, seemingly unaware (or unconcerned) with the exaggerated mythmaking that surrounded the alleged group in the wake of its "extinction".

Before his return to Ireland he would make the acquaintance of several veterans of the Great Revolt now active throughout the Confederation who shared his interest in the group. Out of this mutual fascination would arise the Phansigar, a society within a society that would inextricably bind the Order and the Company all the way to the latter's dissolution. Empire loyalists to a man, the Phansigar would eventually grow to absorb the Order's informal network of dabblers and dilettantes, replacing it with a group of hardened veterans united by rituals, secret codes, and the knowledge that a few assassinations were a small price to pay for peace in the realm. Although shrouded in secrecy, it was known that his grandson was a member, though far less successful than his predecessor, and rumors abound that Narendra Mosley was the fourth generation of his family fully inducted as a Phansigar within the Order.


*The real life 1833 Charter Act is best known for ending that particular monopoly.

**To be fair the actual Great Revolt really was like that and actual clear-cut wars are a historical rarity at best and misapprehensions born of poor schooling at worst.

***Ironically the East India Company had a presence in Qatar, though helium would not be discovered there for another decade. Though theorized since the 1850s, the first terrestrial deposits of helium would be discovered by chance in the United States in 1863. The earliest helium airships would be deployed on a limited basis by the Union army and would be standard among the Great Powers by the outbreak of the Franco-German War. As the largest supplier at the time America would make out like a bandit.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Beyond a certain point the names we've collectively decided to use for wars are fairly arbitrary. Before it was World War I it was the Great War, and at the time the Napoleonic Wars had been the Great War too! Sure, the Clashes of Civilizations had the shared traits of global scale and another order of magnitude in lives lost and destruction compared to anything in the 19th century but the Wars of the Conflagration were something all together more difficult to describe. Why were the Crimean and Franco-German Wars not folded under that umbrella? Why stop at three? The defining trait of the First Conflagration had been the use of air power and the Second Conflagration had seen a continuation of that trend, but by that point certain other criteria had been tacked on to the label. A proper War of the Conflagration, according to the intellectuals of the day:

1. Revolved around the deployment and advancement of guerre d'eclair.
2. Involved competing coalitions of Great Powers rather than lopsided battles against lone opponents or colonial upstarts.
3. Met some arbitrary threshold of forces and materiel deployed.

A fairly inexact metric, but these things often are. In order to document the Third (and final) War of the Conflagration before the First Clash comes along and renders the term meaningless we'll have to rewind a bit. Back to the 1850s, so we can see all the moves that put the pieces into their inevitable places on the board.

Napoleon III had ascended to the throne on a white horse armed with promises of martial victory and he didn't exactly disappoint. The 1850s would see the start of the resurgence of the French colonial empire, with French troops carving out massive territories in North Africa and gradually bringing the former nations of Indochina to heel. Both would have their unintended consequences, with the eventual dissolution of Indochina all but guaranteed (even if it took a century) and the wildfire spread of the Leopard Societies throughout French Africa and eventually the wider world.

-Originally endemic to Sierra Leone in the 1870s, the Leopard Society would gradually evolve from a secret society to a more conventional organized crime syndicate to best take advantage of the chaos that flowed from European colonization. Although rumors continue to swirl about ritual cannibalism the Leopard Men have become deeply entrenched throughout the African diaspora. ​

The French colonial wars would win the nation imperial prestige and would do an excellent job blooding the troops, with many that had first seen action in Africa proving an integral part of the French force deployed during the Crimean War, a tawdry affair considered too small a scale to merit the title of a Conflagration. The fact that it was essentially Russia facing down a large alliance (armed with poison gas!) alone didn't help, though it would give the Russians an enormous axe to grind against France and Britain both. By the time of the Crimean War the British had shifted their concern from France to Germany, making an alliance between the two in Crimea palatable to both and opening up avenues for further cooperation. China was a notable example, with a coalition of French and British troops deployed in 1856 in support of the East India during the Second Opium War.

The recent amity would face its first real test during the Franco-German War. Since the conclusion of the Second Conflagration France had viewed Germany as the greatest threat to Napoleon's ambitions to be the dominant land power in Europe, setting off a generation of mutual hostility and saber rattling. The actual causes of the war revolved around French demands for the "return" of German territory that had been directly annexed by Napoleon I but lost after his death at Tannhausen, a nonstarter that Bismarck could never countenance. The inevitable clash finally came in 1870 and the world would never be the same even as Britain strived to appear neutral.

The drive toward technological advancement in 19th century warfare was always an uneven one. Airships were leagues ahead of where we had them at the same time, prompting a drive for ever larger and more effective artillery, while the earlier mass adoption of lever action rifles would play a role in the acceleration of firearms. By the outbreak of the Franco-German war "true" helium airships we'd be more familiar with had become the standard, along with a new generation of phosphorus-based incendiaries and the first widespread use of semi-automatic firearms.

One area that lagged significantly was any analogue to tanks, a product of the still early state of petroleum engines. The closest analogues were war wagons, evolutions of the steam car concept plagued with temperamental engines and an inconvenient lead time to build up steam pressure. As it turns out mechanized armor was the crucial missing ingredient, with its absence turning what was meant to be a quick and decisive victory for one or the other into a brutal morass of trench warfare. With no real hope of a breakthrough on the ground and too much parity in the air, the conflict would drag on to an inconclusive and anticlimactic draw, finally ending to no applause and much bitterness in 1872. The conditions would prove eerily prescient to the First Clash of Civilizations.

-With the death of Napoleon III in 1873 his son would take the French throne as Napoleon IV. He would become fast friends with King-Emperor Albert Victor*, deepening the ties between formerly bitter enemies.

Contrary to all expectations the Third Conflagration would come not in Europe but in Asia. The 19th century had not been kind to the Middle Kingdom, with loses in not one but two Opium Wars, a decade long rebellion by a Xiantiandao sect in Shandong and an archipelago of treaty ports and foreign possessions enforced at the end of a cannon and a bayonet. This state of affairs naturally produced bitterness among the Qing government and the Chinese people more broadly, producing a flowering of secret societies dedicated to purifying the land and driving out the foreigners. The largest and most successful of these groups was the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, commonly known in the west as the Boxers. Publicly pushing the government to adopt a harsher stance, the group would attack foreign railroads and warehouses and would spark the Third Conflagration in 1900 when they converged on Beijing to attack the Legations.

The Third Conflagration would see an alliance of the East India Company, the British and French Empires, the Japanese Empire and lesser participation by the United States, Italy, Germany and Austria-Hungary, the so called "Seven Nation Army". Originally believed to be alone against the onslaught the Chinese would draw support from a surprising benefactor, with the Russian Empire keen to embarrass Britain and France for the humiliation of Crimea. Officially neutral at the start of the conflict Russia would declare a separate war against Japan over a demand to a demilitarized zone** in Korea, discretely shipping weapons to the Qing in exchange for a guarantee of Russian rights to Outer Manchuria and advanced notice that had allowed them to discretely extricate themselves from the Legations before the siege began.

While the Legation siege was broken after two months when Company airships burned much of Beijing to the ground in retaliation the new weapons would prolong the conflict in China proper and quickly shred the fiction of Russian neutrality, expanding the Third Conflagration to the Russian Far East and dragging the rest of the alliance into Japan's war against Russia. This expansion of the scope of the war would provoke tensions within the Alliance between the Germans, French and British, limiting its effectiveness overall as competing war aims*** among the Great Powers hampered crucial coordination, further delaying the seemingly inevitable defeat of the Russo-Chinese alliance. The war would finally end in 1903 and would see further humiliations forced on the Qing even as Russia was forced to cede a large slice of Outer Manchuria to Japan. Most of the victors saw their holdings expanded, though a perception that Germany had gotten more out of the war than it had put in would further inflame Franco-British public opinion and ironically start to mend Franco-Russian ties in Europe in a bid to contain their neighbor. The burning of Beijing would prove a pyrrhic victory for the East India Company in China, however, and would eventually see it driven from the country entirely during the Wushen Rebellion.


*His father (our Edward VII) had died in 1871 of his historical bout of Typhoid fever. The 1885 assassination of Queen Victoria was publicly blamed on the British Republican movement that had festered since the First Conflagration, though there's a persistent conspiracy theory that she was killed by an EOD Phansigar as a response to her pro-German sensibilities.

**The inciting incident of the Russo-Japanese War OTL.

***Germany and Austria-Hungary were keen to expand their concessions in northern China at Russian expense, while Britain and France favored a purely naval war in support of the Japanese. The United States withdrew from the conflict once the siege of the Legations broke, arguing that the Open Door policy should be maintained but unwilling to get dragged into a land war in Asia.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The Seven Nation Army was always something of a misnomer, will all participants in the alliance only deploying in the same campaign during the so-called "liberation of the Legations". Following the break in the siege two months into the four year war the United States politely excused itself, selling weapons to the rest of the coalition but otherwise exclusively striving to to broker some sort of diplomatic end to the Third Conflagration, which would largely divide into two partitions only loosely related to one another.

1. The southern China theater would revolve almost entirely around guerre d'éclair waged by the Chinese branch of the East India Company with support from Britain and France, making it something akin to a third Opium War in both tactics and belligerents. The British and French deployed ground troops in this theater as a result of the simple fact that that was where most of their concessions and territories were.
2. Despite small scale deployments by Germany and Austria-Hungary in a bid to expand or at least entrench their local concerns the northern Manchurian theater would largely be the stomping ground of the Japanese, with the Franco-British lending support at sea but otherwise unwilling to deploy troops.

Following the end of the Third Conflagration the Japanese Empire had come away with the (not incorrect) idea that they had born the brunt of the war in Manchuria and the Sea of Japan, while their skilled conduct in the war had finally forced the Great Powers of the day to regard them as an equal, "racial handicap" be damned. This bittersweet sense that the Empire had won a great victory despite what many Japanese viewed as the lukewarm support by the rest of the Seven Nation Army would go on to inform Japanese politics and policy for nearly forty years. The other major factor in the Japanese context would prove to be the growth of a homegrown school of Rational Anarchism.

-Kōtoku Shūsui, the "father of Japanese Anarchism". ​

Kōtoku Shūsui had begun his political life as a fervent member of the Liberal Party before his gradual migration to Rational Anarchism. Born into a lesser samurai family in 1871, he had come by his radicalism honestly, with many of the samurai class resentful of the decline in status and loss of privilege stemming from the opening of Japan and the Meiji* Restoration. He would learn English and become involved with the newspaper industry, serving as an editor or contributor to several Liberal newspapers, though the Third Conflagration and the endorsement of the government by the party would tarnish his views on the Liberal movement. He discovered Rational Anarchism early in the war, even striking up a correspondence with movement thinkers in America and even a few surviving Nihilists** that had emigrated out of Russia following the suppression of that movement in the 1880s.

By the conclusion of the Conflagration he had taken to Rational Anarchism with the zeal of a convert, translating several works by Warren and the trifecta of Harman, Stone and Tucker into Japanese. In 1903 he would also found Heimin Shinbun, The Commoner's News, which would become the nerve center of the new movement and lend it its name, Heiminshugi, roughly translated to "populism", though unrelated to the American movement of that name. From the beginning Heiminshugi was seen as a vital threat by the powers that be, with Kōtoku and several of his contributors jailed and the paper shuttered for the first time in 1905. Reopened following his release in 1907 it would be suppressed almost immediately, and following the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 he would go into exile, joining a Rational Anarchist experiment that had sprung up in Outer Manchuria and resuming publication there.

It's mildly amusing that the same declining samurai class that had produced Kōtoku would birth the Green Dragon Society. The death of Emperor Meiji in 1912 would see the rise of his son Yoshihito, who would choose the era name Taishō. The Taishō period would see the relative stability of a western-style democracy after the tumult of the Meiji era, with the now dominant Liberals thoroughly accommodated to the government they had originally resisted. Some factions within the government and the military were unsatisfied with this state of affairs, viewing a strong civilian government as a vulnerability even as the ripples of the Wushen Rebellion reshaped China and threatened their view of East Asia as rightfully the Japanese sphere of influence.

-Founded sometime in the 1870s, the Green Dragon Society was dedicated to the ideal of a strong militarist government and a foreign policy centered on Pan-Asianism. Unrelated though structurally similar to the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the group would quickly spread through the Japanese military and sympathetic circles within the government. ​

Though initially more stable, the democracy of the Taishō period would prove unable to adapt as it aged. Citizens quickly grew disillusioned with the Liberals even as the system failed to generate popular alternatives and a moral panic around Heiminshugi and a sense that the Empire was being weakened from within and constrained from without began to spread among the population. The death of Emperor Taishō in 1926 and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 would prove the final blows to the sclerotic system, with a new militarist government taking power under Hirohito. His 1932 assassination at the hand of a Korean independence activist would see the end of the brief Showa era and the installation of his brother Yasuhito. Far more militarist than either of his predecessors, the Genka*** era would see the empowering of the Green Dragons, Japanese participation in the Second Clash of Civilizations, and a secret weapons project devoted to biological agents.

Though the Second Clash of Civilizations would not end with nuclear fire over the Home Islands it would still deal the militarist government a humiliating string of losses, with the annexation of the allied Empire of China into the Republic, the attempts to become hegemon over Indochina and the Nusantara repulsed, Taiwan lost and the Home Islands themselves blockaded into submission. The postwar chaos would see the unexplained disappearance of Yasuhito, a matter of rampant speculation but no clear answers in-universe. In his absence his brother Takahito would become Emperor, choosing the era name Koji to signal his intention to see Japan brought into the new postwar world reinvigorated and at peace with its neighbors.

The Koji period would see the return of civilian democracy, with the Liberals returning as the dominant party following a purge of those considered too complacent with the previous regime. It would also see a large reduction of the Empire's military and the deepening of ties with the new Franco-British Union, though Japan would elect to become an observer rather than a full member of the Alliance for Democracy. Domestically the early Koji era would see an ill-fated attempt at a military coup and a lingering independence movement in Korea. By the time the India Crisis became the center of international attention in the 70s the military had been firmly brought to heel and a new generation of Koreans had grown to accept being equal members of the Empire, though Heiminshugi wasn't going anywhere...


*An unrealistic parallelism I know, but Japanese era names are so layered with meaning I didn't want to get into the weeds on it.

**Recall that TTL's Nihilist movement had Rational Anarchist influences, though they were generally a more extreme breed than the American mainstream of the movement.

***These next era names are borrowed from @Zulfurium's excellent A Day in July.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The Entente Cordial of 1904 was something that would have seemed impossible a century before, formalizing an alliance between the British and French Empires that had been slowly taking shape since the disaster that was the Second Conflagration. The meteoric rise of Germany had upset the calculus of Europe and with the inconclusive end to the Franco-German War thirty years before the next great European war seemed inevitable. When it finally came with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by bombing the Entente and its allies stood firm against the Central Powers as the quagmire of trench warfare was finally writ large upon the continent. New technologies would enable some movement of the lines, with advances in mechanized armor proving invaluable for breaking through even as advances in artillery had finally led to the retirement of the military airship, with guerre d'éclair adapting to the doctrine of heavier than air fixed-wings and the earliest generation of helicopters.

When the tide finally began to turn in 1916 with the arrival of American troops on the western front some within the Entente high command began looking ahead to the conflicts that would follow and the resources they would need to see them through. New developments in armor and air power had made clear that petroleum was a matter of the utmost necessity and that any steps to secure it were acceptable. With this in mind the British government would deploy a Phansigar armed with untraceable bullion and covert Franco-British support into the hinterland of the Ottoman Empire. Acting as a deniable asset, T.E. Chapman, grandson of William Chapman, was tasked with instigating a "native" revolt by the Arabs against the Ottomans in a bid to create a state or states that would become oil-producing clients or colonies of the Entente. The failure of his mission and his discovery by the Ottoman government would see his execution by beheading, the crushing of the Arab Revolt, and a British shift toward Venezuelan oil in the postwar period.

-Chapman of Arabia managed to avoid dragging the Entente into a war with the Ottomans when he refused to break under torture, maintaining until his execution that he was a lone filibuster rather than a government agent. For his sacrifice he has been lionized by the Phansigar and the broader Esoteric Order of Dagon and is commonly euphemized as "the modern Orion" within the Order. ​

The end of the First Clash and Chapman's Arabian adventure would see the Entente alliance continue as both parties basked in the glow of victory and recoiled at the Red wave seemingly washing over the continent. In France Robert Nivelle would transform his successful military career into a successful political one, where he would remain as Prime Minister through the so-called "Tense Twenties" and the Second Clash of Civilizations beyond. At the same time Napoleon IV would abdicate the throne, allowing his son and heir to become Napoleon V. Aside from the rising threat of war in Europe the French would also find themselves preoccupied attempting to stamp out the Leopard Societies infesting their African holdings and the Indochinese rebels at that point covertly drawing on support from the Green Dragons.

The British would find themselves preoccupied with the first stirrings of what would blossom into the Second Great Revolt. In a bid to shore up the state of the Empire 1926 would see the Imperial Conference, bringing together local leaders of Ireland, the East Indian Confederation and the various settler colonies and properly defining the concept of the British Dominion for the first time. Under this structure Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand would gain a level of self-rule similar to that guaranteed (on paper) to the EIC in the 1860s and (more sincerely) to Ireland in the 1880s, though all would remain subjects to the sovereign and have certain restraints on their militaries and trade relationships. Though allegedly equals, the actual level of independence granted to a given Dominion would blatantly vary on a case by case basis, a situation that would lead to lingering tensions within the British Empire throughout the 20th century.

The Great Depression would hit the Entente particularly hard and the two nations would react in starkly different ways. Though democratic to a degree the unusual constitutional monarchy in France placed far more emergency powers in the hands of the Emperor than the British system, with Napoleon V (in his role as Grand Elector) reviving the long defunct Consular positions. Prime Minister Nivelle was awarded with the broad powers inherent to Consul for the Interior and the Emperor's confidant Simon Boulanger* was given the role of Consul for War and the task of preparing for a possible war against the Comintern. Britain meanwhile would see the floundering Liberal government collapse, sweeping in a new coalition between the Conservatives under Jack Tolkien and a group of Labour defectors led by Oswald Mosley called the New Party. The period would also neatly demonstrate the inequality of the Dominion system, with the British government essentially vetoing Canadian participation in a free trade agreement with Presidents Lovecraft and Vasconcelos.

-The rise of a(n admittedly English) Catholic to the office of Prime Minister was a testament to the much closer relationship between Britain and Ireland that had grown for nearly a century, a product of pragmatic concessions and paternalistic conservatism that would become a hallmark of the New-Conservative Coalition.
​

The Second Clash of Civilizations would see the Entente on the winning side but otherwise facing a hostile and alien world. Although allied to the United States and as belligerent to the Comintern as ever, the loss of Malaysia and Indochina to the nascent Fascist sphere would convince many within the Entente that to survive they would be forced to stake out their own position outside the quickly solidifying Providence Pact. The answer would come in 1942 with the creation of the Alliance for Democracy, an independent alliance system made up of the allies and colonies the British and French empires, along with the Kingdom of Italy, the Rhenish Republic, Danubia, the (remaining) Portuguese Empire and assorted other states in Europe and Africa. In a surprising move the Ottomans and the Japanese-Thai alliance would elect to sign on as observer nations to forestall potential Communist adventurism.

1943 would see the next great evolution of the Entente, with the dynastic marriage between the House of Bonaparte and the House of Windsor in 1930 finally paving the way for the creation of a true political union. In the new Franco-British Union the two component states (and their internal devolutions and political systems) would continue to exist unchanged, with a new All-Union government centered on Versailles. The All-Union government would operate as a parliamentary system, governing those areas not delegated to the component empires, including a joint military command and intelligence service, an internal migration authority, a shared currency and such prestige projects as the Entente space program**. Previous mandates shared between the two would remain the province of the All-Union government, though administration of the preexisting colonies would be a national affair despite the Entente Armed Forces largely responsible for enforcing the peace.

-Napoleon V several years before his ascension. Following his marriage to Queen-Empress Victoria II*** and the founding of the Franco-British Union it was decided the two would retain their respective titles and holdings as equals, with their future heir gaining dominion over two legally-distinct and independent empires and the union that connected them. To symbolize this equality it was decided the next generation of the family would receive the new surname Angevin.

​

*A descendent of an analogue to the two fiction Boulangers used in Look to the West and Separated at Birth.

**The project that finally put an espatier on the moon was called Galahad while the ship itself was the ESS White Valiant.

​

***Shown here in the clothing of the period. Although she would participate in the elaborate clothes and rituals as required Vicky II was just as comfortable in "modern fashion" and the fact that she was just as fierce and strong-willed as her husband is what made the marriage politically palatable in the first place.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The existence of the East Indian Confederation had never been a happy one. The fact that the Great Revolt had been snuffed out in a year hadn't changed the lived reality that many of the fundamental problems that had galvanized it still existed and on top of that it was plainly obvious to most everyone that even though India had served as the model in some ways for the later Dominion system the rights her citizens were guaranteed came with strings attached and loopholes big enough to fly a Company vimana through. Perhaps the only positive contribution of this confluence of old and new problems was the fact that the confessionally-neutral civil service and broad complicity of elites in the new system, both in the Confederation proper and the "allied" princely states, led to far more of the rabble's resentment being focused on class and caste instead of faith*. While discontent had rippled under the surface since the Revolt had ended the "modern" phase of the Indian independence movement is usually backdated to the 1880s because of three crucial events.

1882 would see the transfer of the core of the Theosophy religious movement to Adyar under founding members Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott. Theosophy had drawn enormous doctrinal influences from a variety of religious traditions on the subcontinent and had done a great deal to bring those traditions into the western consciousness, a trend which would continue even after the society began to fracture in the 1890s following Blavatsky's death. Interacting with South Asian religions in a serious and respectful way would be a sea change compared to the hamfisted missionary efforts that had helped spark the Revolt in the first place and several prominent proponents of independence** would credit the Society with sparking in them an awakening regarding the value of their own religious and cultural history.

-Under Charles Stewart Parnell the Parliamentary Party would become a dominant early force in Irish politics. ​

The second major turn would come in 1886 with the passage of the Government of Ireland bill. Events unfolding since the Great Famine would make the prospect of Irish home rule far more palatable to the British political elite, which had increasingly come to view Ireland as a loyal and dependable component of the United Kingdom if properly kept on side. The bill (which Gladstone was able to pass along with his proposed Land Purchase Bill) would create a devolved parliamentary assembly on the island and lead to massive advancements in political participation and tenant rights. While this had the intended effect of further endearing the Emerald Isle to its neighbor it would have the far less palatable side effect of crystalizing political awareness in a sizeable minority on the subcontinent who fully realized just how badly the formation of the East Indian Confederation had stunted their national development. While theoretically "a nation within the Empire", the end of the Great Revolt had simply constructed new and more insidious systems of control, with the East India Company shifting from direct control of the subcontinent to far more subtle economic manipulation with an Indian face. The initials were the same, for gods' sake!

1885 would see this sizeable minority cohere into the Indian National Congress, the first modern nationalist movement to arise outside the white-ruled British colonies. The early goals of the Congress were considerably more moderate than their later tone, pushing exclusively for home rule and the realization of similar civil rights and land reforms to those granted so successfully in Ireland. The INC would begin its turn to radicalism in the 1890s under the direction of a group of fiery activists led by the Lal Bal Pal triumvirate of Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal, who pushed for nothing less than full and total independence. Tilak would come to be seen as first among equals within the triumvirate and would pioneer the overt partnership between the Indian independence movement and the Theosophy Society (Adyar), forming a close working relationship with Society leader Annie Besant.

-The Lal Bal Pal triumvirate. Tilak (center) would accrue several titles by the time of his death, including "the Maker of Modern India", Lokmanya*** and "the father of Indian unrest", depending on who you talk to. ​

The early 20th century would bring several changes to the Society and the East Indian Confederation both. In 1909 Besant and her colleague Charles W. Leadbeater would discover Jiddu Krishnamurti and become convinced he was the incarnation of a foretold Theosophical messianic figure called the World Teacher. Besant would adopt the boy to oversee his spiritual and temporal education, with her connection to the triumvirate serving as a vehicle for his political awakening. The British would later go on to levy troops in the Confederation during the First Clash of Civilizations, where the harsh fighting would radicalize those troops who returned and would further swell the radical faction of the Congress. The first true cracks in the colonial edifice would come in the 1930s, with Company stock dealt a considerable blow by the Great Depression and an attempt by the Green Dragon Society during the Second Clash of Civilizations to support a Japanese-aligned Indian puppet state.

The end of the Second Clash and the formation of the Franco-British Union led to renewed fears among those advocates of independence, who saw in the marriage of Victoria II and Napoleon V the possibility that their status as a Dominion could be replaced with the far more direct administration of the Napoleonic system. Evidence for this was scant but the creation of a unified Dominion of Guyana (following the purchase of Suriname from the Netherlands) and the incorporation of French Polynesia into the new Dominion of Oceania demonstrated that change of that type could flow in one direction, so the belief it could someday do the opposite was not unthinkable. Direct rule of the subcontinent had been a pipe dream TTL but the prospect seemed like a terrifying setback to even the modest gains made under the Confederation.

During this period the Congress would be divided by two mutually exclusive positions. The Maximists were led by Jawaharlal Nehru, who sought complete independence from the British Empire and the Franco-British Union. His faction drew from a wide variety of influences, from the decentralized ideal of Marxist-Trigonism to the booming Fascist movement, which offered development and cultural rebirth. The moderates within the Congress had all but disappeared, leaving his primary opposition in the form of a group calling themselves the Irredentists, a Hindu nationalist movement that had grown out of the Azad Hind and sought to create a strong centralized state modeled on the French and Japanese Empires and allied with the FBU as an equal rather than a subject. Though lacking a single leader this group was largely influenced by Savitri Devi. Born Maximiani Julia Portas and of French and Greek descent, Devi had been introduced to Theosophy in Greece and had long been an associate of an ultranationalist group that had grown out of the Armée d’Afrique called the Serpents d'Ébène. Following the Second Clash the Serpents and the Dagonites had formalized ties with one another, suggesting to suspicion that she was a plant by the Franco-British to either undermine the Congress or create an independent but still subservient state.

The onset of the Congo Crisis in the 1950s and the resulting wave of liberalization in the white-ruled Dominions in the following decades would finally give the Maximalists the edge to outmaneuver the Irredentists. Nehru would continue to lead the Congress until his death in 1964, passing leadership of the organization to his longtime protege Krishnamurti. The 1970s would finally see the heavens open, with the Franco-British distracted in the Bush Wars, a new King-Emperor on the throne, and an American president uninclined to swoop in and install a Providence Pact member. The Second Great Revolt would be considerably more peaceful than the first, with mass demonstrations across ethnic and religious lines and a nationwide wave of strikes quickly overwhelming the weak Confederation government and catching the by now severely weakened East India Company off guard. To explore the new Indian Union we'll look to the next update.

-Lucien Angevin, now styled King-Emperor Lucien I, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the Dominions and Emperor of the French. The last Emperor of India. ​

*OTL the Great Revolt and the Raj that followed lead to massive shifts in participation in the colonial machinery along religious lines which played a major in the later sectarian tensions following independence. De facto continuation of East India hiring policies and a perception of broad-based complicity regardless of faith will butterfly that here.

**OTL Gandhi credited his turn toward independence and renewed interest in Hindu culture with being given a copy of the Bhagavad Gita by a pair of Theosophists.

***"accepted by the peoples as their leader"

 

[Born in the USSA]

-Though he had patiently declined the position of World Teacher in the 1920s, Jiddu Krishnamurti remained a valued spiritual and political leader in India until his death in the 1980s. Though only loosely affiliated with Theosophy after his turn toward political activism he insisted on including the Theosophy symbol in the new nation's flag as a testament to the religious tolerance it had been created to symbolize and which he now sought to make a permanent feature of the Union's government. ​

The Second Great Revolt was the last in a series of strains in Alliance-Pact relations dating back a decade or more, with the end of the India Crisis formally heralding the Entente-American split, the end of the Strange Aeon, and the beginning of the Age of Fear. An odd feature of the Strange Aeon was that although the weaponry tended to be more advanced (or at least more gruesome) there were hardly any brushes with disaster that theoretically could have ended with the mushroom cloud— nothing like the Cuban Missile Crisis or even the Korean War. Although there were plenty of very long and heavily guarded borders between the blocs and espionage was a constant concern historians tend to peg this lack of potential flashpoint events to a fluke of political geography, with each major faction either, like the Comintern, concentrated among itself or, like the other two, overwhelmingly dominant in an area with only token allies or neutrals around. Hence the Age of Fear. If the only thing stopping war was the fact that Alliance members in Asia and the Americas and Pact ones in Africa were technically aligned with their neighboring alliance structure what would the future hold in a crosshatched world of all against all? That's not for me to get into today.

The India Crisis (as it was known in the FBU) and the Bush Wars that had preceded it would have tectonic effects on the nature of the Dominion system and the Franco-British Union as a whole. There had already been a trend favoring the gradual independence of the most loyal* colonies but the Crisis had demonstrated the futility of trying to hold a restive colony of nonwhites absent good faith political autonomy, with Labour leader J.G. Ballard frequently going on long tirades about the banal and everyday horrors maintaining the colonial system was forcing on the Union even while the Africans were left to face the most visceral consequences. This bitter pill was much easier to swallow by the 70s because the administration of the colonies had by that point transitioned entirely to a loyalist native elite who stood to lose everything if their nations ever left the AfD. Guyana and Oceania had set a precedent for combining British and French colonial possessions, leading to the creation of a variety of newly independent Dominions loyal to the crown if not (de jure) subject to the Union, with the Union proper, not the component states, retaining strategically valuable exclaves as integral territory.

But what of India itself? While the ascension of Lucien I as King-Emperor in 1975 had kicked off an escalating cycle of unrest, the Second Great Revolt proper is usually dated to 1978, the year of the general strike and the high point of the mass mobilization that characterized the India Crisis. The FBU had signalled its unwillingness to stay in India any longer in the wake of the brutal slog of the Congo Crisis and the Bush Wars that had seen the Entente Armed Services deployed in combat essentially continuously since the mid-fifties and the Indian National Congress was able to declare a provisional government within the year. Nehru had not lived to see it but Krishnamurti had stewarded the independence movement ably in his absence, even commissioning a provisional constitution derived from Nehru's notes and theories before the India Crisis even began. With the discrediting of the Moderate and Irredentist factions several years before the Maximalists were firmly in control of the Congress and, with the Confederation government having successfully driven every possible other bastion of popular legitimacy to extinction, the Congress was firmly in control of the new state.

Nehruism drew from a wide variety of sources in a bid to create a third-way position hybridizing what he had seen as the benefits of both Fascism and Marxist-Trigonism and adapting the resulting amalgam to the Indian historical experience and cultural landscape. Fascism provided an excellent model for the fostering of cultural expression, with each state under the new system allocated funds to spend on the development of local styles of architecture and the arts, and also provided an excellent fiscal policy that accommodated the mixed economy of nationalized resources and private businesses the Maximalists favored. Though Vorticism was left at the door, Nehru also admired the Marxist-Trigonist policies of the Free Economy and Councilism, viewing the former as an effective way to improve the state of the economy through fiscal policy and the latter as the best method to ensure democratic accountability from the social base. Though a far lesser factor, all things considered, the state of Rational Anarchism in the Americas and Japan seems to have informed the Union's policy toward individual citizens, with a wide variety of personal restrictions abolished outright. This was seen as an essential step, with the overwhelming majority of citizens regarding the caste system those restrictions had enforced as an anachronism only retained for the privilege of elites who had done so well under Company and Confederation rule.

Once the Congress was in power these dynamics began to alter the nature of the party itself, transforming what was on paper merely the overwhelmingly dominant party in a theoretical multiparty system into a multiparty system in miniature. While American parties were strong things with subordinate labor unions that competed with one another over policy and the Comintern favored a decentralized ecosystem of language-based parties intentionally kept weak, equal to the labor unions and united around a central guiding policy**, the Congress would embrace a policy of fractionalism, with the different languages within the party empowered as separate party branches but with members caucusing across those lines and setting the party's policies through internal democracy.

Following the formation of the Indian Union the new government would stamp down on the violent but sporadic reprisals that had broken out in the wake of the Revolt, with Krishnamurti pushing for a general amnesty (barring cases of inciting or abbetting gender and ethnoreligious violence or politicide) from his position as an elder statesman within the Congress. While a majority of the former Confederation officials would take the offer, the elite classes were far more opposed to a government the saw poised to strip them of hereditary privileges and tax the living hell out of them, with the resulting Indian diaspora settling throughout the FBU and the Dominions. This "exile" community has historically provided the governments of the Union and the Dominions with some of their most stable and active support, a trend which continues into the modern day.

While the Union was absorbing or dismantling those organs of the Confederation government that helped or hindered the new state the time finally came to deal with the East India. In a widely heralded speech delivered across the nation's airwaves usually called "The Emergency" Premier Indira Gandhi made the forceful case that the Company had hindered and exploited the subcontinent since its arrival and would not be allowed to continue any further, citing the expulsion of the China branch in the Wushen Rebellion by name. As such she had ensured that although Company officials had been subject to the amnesty the Company's liquid assets had been seized pending review and its physical ones had been cordoned off or impounded. She announced on air that these assets would be nationalized or auctioned off to domestic concerns as appropriate and that no East India branch, affiliate or official would be permitted access to the nation's economy in any form. Now stripped of both its traditional bases of activity by a brutal 20th century those shattered elements of the Company that remained would be forced to consolidate in their last remaining stronghold in the Dominion of Ceylon.

-The Dominion of Ceylon had a government even more nakedly in thrall to the East India than the Confederation's had been, making it for all intents and purposes a Company special economic zone for most of its modern history. The rise of the particularly Randian Ceylon Renewal Front would see the nation renamed the Dominion of Kumari Kandam during the 80s but the Company remained secure as the power behind the ultranationalist and hypercapitalist throne. ​

With the passing of the Emergency the Union would undergo a diverse flowering of art, culture and societal movements, none more impactful on the global stage than the World State Movement that had been a major force pushing for independence for a generation. As in OTL Aldous Huxley had been longtime friends with Krishnamurti and had written a version of Brave New World around the same time. In this version the text ended with John the Savage accepting exile rather than embracing the downward spiral that lead to his suicide in the historical version. Living in the Confederation after the Second Clash, Huxley would publish a direct sequel in 1946. This second novel, Island, revolved around John's acclimation to the society to the island of Pala, made up of an exile community adopted into a preexisting culture influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism.

While the Palanese saw value in the World State's principles the community sought to employ them in a more fulfilling way, favoring personal spiritual development and individual choice over mind numbing Soma and fully artificial reproduction and striving to use technology for the benefit of man rather than man adapting himself to it. Island revolved around John gradually growing out of his emotional immaturity and coming to better understand himself and his place in the context of a broader society and the universe more generally, ending with the implication that he would attempt to become a World Controller to better export the more fulfilling life he had discovered in his exile. The duology would prove immensely influential, with the World State movement advocating for world peace and disarmament with the ideal of the eventual creation of a global international body marrying the reach of Brave New World's World State with the attitudes and approach fostered by the Palanese.

-The timeline's equivalent to the peace flag, the flag of the World State movement was inspired by the covers of Huxley's duology, with the globe inspired by Brave New World symbolizing the ideal of a universal international peacekeeping body and the myna bird representing the ideals of Island. The three stars represent the hope for peace between the Alliance, Comintern and Pact, and together the flag represented a world at peace among the stars. ​

*Read: "settler"

**"Vox Populi Vox Dei", the Comintern has such high levels of workplace and council democracy the actual positions of the bloc ebb and flow organically in response to public pressure with any factionalism, such as it is, the result of demographic differences that mirror society at large.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The end of the Strange Aeon and the start of the Age of Fear opened the door to a new and more aggressive geopolitical landscape as the anti-Comintern axis between the Providence Pact and the Alliance for Democracy suffered that final, fatal, fracture. To give a better idea of the factions at play (both within and between ideological blocs) I will be dividing an analysis of major political parties and factions (c. 1980) into three partitions:

1. The United States and the Providence Pact- As the founder of the Fascist movement and first among equals in the Pact the American political spectrum tracks well with the political consensus that has become normalized throughout the bloc more broadly, from the Five Eyes to La Hermandad to ASEAN.
2. The Franco-British Union and the Alliance for Democracy- The FBU has taken a more direct role in steering the politics of its vassals and allies as a result of its origins and the close ties its former colonies retain to the motherland, with not only affiliated but theoretically independent parties as in the Pact but also devolved cadet parties forming the dominant political force in the Dominions.
3. The Comintern and the Great Powers- The Great Powers, characterized by an existence outside the three dominant power blocs but also a high level of global or regional influence, are unaffiliated with the Comintern itself but all nations and alliances in this category share the key feature of being either one-party states or overwhelmingly dominant-party systems and so will be covered together.

 

[Born in the USSA]

-Symbol of the Five Eyes. Source: David Larocca​

Properly considered, by the start of the Age of Fear the Providence Pact is something closer to three separate alliances that share a common set of goals rather than a single monolithic bloc. At the top of the heap are the Five Eyes, commonly referred to in conversation as the Big Five or the Five Ayes, since a veto from enough of them basically sinks your initiative stone dead. Made up of the United States of America, the Republic of China, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Brazilian Estado Novo and the Republic of the Congo, the Five Eyes have earned their position through a combination of large size and population and high levels of industrial and military development. The other two alliances are not subordinate to one another, rather acting as coequal regional power centers. La Hermandad is an alliance of the Hispanophone powers of the Americas, while ASEAN, the Alliance of South East Asian Nations, is made up of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nusantara and the Philippines.

As the most powerful single member and undisputed heart of the Pact, the politics of the United States of America have played an outsized role in the development of political culture within the alliance more broadly. As a quirk of the historical context of Philippine independence that nation is the only one with cadet branches of the American parties, with the other members having affiliate parties to one or more of the American ones.

• As the oldest explicitly Fascist party in the world, the Independence Party still goes a long way toward establishing the broader Fascist overton window. Still a party devoted to materialism (in the philosophical sense), cultural development, Georgist resource principles and urban interests, some within the party have called for a reappraisal of the Pact's stance toward the Comintern, having come to view the two blocs as economically similar enough (and the new Comintern culture sufficiently refined sixty years on) to warrant closer ties in the face of escalating Alliance bellicosity. Affiliates:
  • Bolivarian Republic of Colombia- Radical Party of Columbia
  • Bolivarian Republic of Ecuador- Radical Party of Ecuador
  • Brazilian Estado Novo- Integralist Party of Brazil (maintains cadet branches in Portugal, Angola and Mozambique)
  • Caribbean Confederation- Progressive Action Party
  • Central American Republic- Progressive Action Party
  • Dominion of Canada- Social Credit Party of Canada (factions)
  • Dominion of Oceania- Justice Party (factions)
  • Franco-British Union- Popular Republican Rally (factions)
  • Kingdom of Persia- Laborer's Party (factions)
  • Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- National Democracy
  • Republic of Argentina- Radical Civic Union
  • Republic of Bolivia- Revolutionary Nationalist Party
  • Republic of Cambodia- Democratic Party
  • Republic of China- Nationalist Party (factions)
  • Republic of Liberia- Republican Party
  • Republic of Laos- People's Revolutionary Party
  • Republic of Mexico- Progressive Constitutionalist Party
  • Republic of Paraguay- Liberal Party
  • Republic of Peru- Independent Civil Party
  • Republic of Nusantara- New Order Party
  • Republic of the Congo- African Solidarity Party (factions)
  • Republic of Vietnam- Constitutional Party
  • Republic of Uruguay- Colorado Party
  • Second Atlantean Empire- Freethinker's Party
• Though the Populist Party remains centered on rural interests and religious faith, the party has perhaps evolved the most from its original form under President Bryan, with the isolationism advocated by Huey Long gradually chiseled away in favor of a sort of humanitarian pacifism, an accommodation with the Fascist welfare and land policies and the complete purging of the last of the racists and unreconstructed Democrats from the party. Affiliates:
  • Brazilian Estado Novo- Republican Party
  • Dominion of Canada- Social Credit Party of Canada (factions)
  • Dominion of Oceania- Justice Party (factions)
  • Franco-British Union- Popular Republican Rally (factions)
  • Kingdom of Persia- Laborer's Party (factions)
  • La Hermandad- Liberation Army of the South (Zapatista)
  • Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- Polish People's Party
  • Republic of Cambodia- Social Republican Party
  • Republic of China- Nationalist Party (factions)
  • Republic of Liberia- True Whig Party (back to its rural roots)
  • Republic of Laos- National Progressive Party
  • Republic of Nusantara- Nationalist Party
  • Republic of the Congo- African Solidarity Party (factions)
  • Republic of Vietnam- Personalist Labor Party
  • Second Atlantean Empire- Agrarian Party
• Though not a political party in the traditional sense, the Liberty Party label adopted by politically unaffiliated Rational Anarchists is going strong, with a record presence in Congress since the start of the Thompson presidency. Although it lacks actual affiliates in the rest of the Pact, several Rational Anarchists in other countries remain aligned with the broader movement, particularly the Nihilists thriving in the Comintern, and it has also come to shape the Fascist and Populist movements abroad, especially as expressed in La Hermandad. Affiliates:
  • Empire of Japan- Commoner's Party (Heimin tō)
• Ever the black sheep of the American political scene, the American Workingmen's Party is beginning to show its age, with decreasing membership rolls, a growing rift between the Esoteric Fascists and the Christian Theocrats, and persistent rumors it is being illegally funded by the Entente Renewal Front in a bid to destabilize the American political system. Affiliates:
  • Dominion of Canada- Canadian Renewal Front
  • Franco-British Union- Entente Renewal Front (de facto)
  • La Hermandad- National Synarchist Union

 

[Born in the USSA]

The politics of the broader Alliance for Democracy are a symptom of its nature, with a domineering superpower at the center and a mix of loyal Dominions and subservient though theoretically independent vestigial empires on the periphery. As such, the party line of the Franco-British Union within the Alliance is the overwhelmingly dominant one, and the party systems of the bloc's members have adapted accordingly. Unless otherwise noted, those parties belonging to the Dominions are cadet branches of the major parties of the Union, with far less independence of thought than is tolerated in the affiliates located in independent member states, much less those the United States tolerates within the Pact. As integral Union territory Scotland, Wales, Newfoundland, Entente Honduras, Madagascar, Singapore and Hong Kong all have official branches of the major parties, though Ireland is no less integral but is allowed minor leeway in this regard.

• The Entente Conservative Rally/Rassemblement Conservateur de l'Entente is the party of perpetual government in the Union, having formally merged from a wartime partnership of the New-Conservative Alliance, the Liberal Party, and the Bonapartist Party following the creation of the Franco-British Union. The party of panopticon, paternalism and one-nation conservatism, the Rally is the party of the status quo, more than willing to make use of opportunistic reforms, bread and circuses and, if needed, political crackdowns to keep winning elections. Although every recognized party in the Union is required to mandate both preservation of the FBU and royalism as official party doctrine the Rally is strongest in both of these regards. Affiliates:
  • Dominion of Algeria- Algerian Unity Party
  • Dominion of Canada- Liberal Conservative Party
  • Dominion of Guyana- Guyanese Unity Party
  • Dominion of Ireland- Irish Parliamentary Party
  • Dominion of Oceania- Fusion Liberal Party
  • Dominion of South Africa- National Party (factions)
  • Dominion of the Central African Confederation/Dominion of the East African Confederation/Dominion of the West African Confederation- African Liberal Party
  • Dominion of the West Indies Confederation- People's National Party
  • Kingdom of Italy (Sardinia)- Liberal Union Party
  • Kingdom of Sweden- Clerical People's Party
  • The Netherlands- Rexist Party
  • Portuguese Empire- Falange
  • Republic of Greater Egypt- National Party of Egypt
  • Rhenish Republic- Centre Party
  • Spanish State (Sahara)- Falange
  • United Kingdoms of Danubia- Constitutional Party
  • United Kingdoms of Denmark-Norway- Conservative People's Party
• Regularly painted as a Marxist-Trigonist front group, Labour/Labeur forms the official Left Opposition within the Union. Formed out of a merger of the British Labour and Co-Operative Parties and the French Communard Movement (hearkening back to the short-lived Paris Commune of the Franco-German War), Labour advocates for increased power to the anemic unions and increased democratic accountability in the government, a far cry from the councilist system and triumval power structure embraced by the Comintern. One interesting deviation from this platform of social democracy was the adoption of the Rational Anarchist World as Myth tactic of proselytizing, with the party boasting of numerous artists and writers among its ranks eager to churn out politically charged fiction while evading the Union censors.
  • Dominion of Algeria- Algerian Socialist Party
  • Dominion of Canada- New Democratic Party
  • Dominion of Guyana- Guyanese Socialist Party
  • Dominion of Oceania- Australian Labor Party
  • Dominion of the Central African Confederation/Dominion of the East African Confederation/Dominion of the West African Confederation- African Labour Party
  • Dominion of the West Indies Confederation- Caribbean Socialist Party
  • Kingdom of Italy (Sardinia)- Constitutional Democratic Party
  • Kingdom of Sweden- Social Democratic Party
  • The Netherlands- Labour Party
  • Portuguese Empire- Worker Peasant Alliance
  • Republic of Greater Egypt- Ba'ath Party (de facto)
  • United Kingdoms of Danubia- Social Democratic Party of the Danube
  • United Kingdoms of Denmark-Norway- Venstre
• The Entente Renewal Front/Front de Renouvellement de l'Entente forms the Union's official Right Opposition. Made up of the right fringe of Mosley's New Party, the Front is awash in conspiracies about a secret cabal between the Pact, the Comintern and disloyal elements at home to undermine the Union and its component nations alongside the traditional trap about aliens and mysticism. Originally outnumbered by rival French and British nationalist groups, four decades of the new status quo has allowed the Front to leave its one-time rivals in the ashes of history. Embracing an even more radically royalist platform than even the Rally, the Front advocates for the replacement of the FBU with a genuine Franco-British Empire, and has established official branches in Portugal, the Rhenish Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy (Sardinia) in pursuit of this goal on historiographically dubious grounds. Adamant that they are not Esoteric Fascists, the only real difference they can point to is that they have the Mosley Memoranduminstead of Some Repetitions on the Times among their canon.
  • Dominion of Algeria- Algerian Renewal Front
  • Dominion of Canada- Laurentian Renewal Front
  • Dominion of Ceylon- Ceylon Renewal Front
  • Dominion of Oceania- English Socialist Party (EngSoc)
  • Dominion of Rhodesia- Rhodesian Renewal Front
  • Dominion of South Africa- National Party (factions)
  • United States of America- American Workingmen's Party (de facto/factions)
• Officially banned for refusing to embrace royalist principles, the Popular Republican Rally/Rassemblement Républicain Populaire continues to soldier on. The fusion of French and British republican movements that have churned under the surface since the First Conflagration, the PRR is agnostic on the Union itself, though they are adamant that the royal family has got to go. Already long suppressed, there's not much more the government can do to them despite the strong suspicion the United States has adopted them as a front group. Although it has allied with republican groups throughout the Dominions they are regarded as affiliates rather than cadet parties, though they are all by their very nature suppressed by their respective governments and forbidden from standing for election.
  • Dominion of Algeria- National Liberation Front
  • Dominion of Canada- Social Credit Party of Canada
  • Dominion of Guyana- Guyanese Liberty League
  • Dominion of Ireland- Sinn Féin
  • Dominion of Oceania- Justice Party
  • Dominion of South Africa/Dominion of the Central African Confederation/Dominion of the East African Confederation/Dominion of the West African Confederation- African National Congress (factions)
  • Dominion of the West Indies Confederation- Caribbean Liberty League
  • Portuguese Empire- Integralist Party of Portugal/Angola/Mozambique (de facto)
  • United States of America- Independence/Populist Parties (de facto)

 

[Born in the USSA]

While the Pact and the Alliance have multiparty democracies, the Comintern and the Great Powers are defined by either officially entrenched single-party systems or by overwhelmingly strong dominant-party systems. Sometimes this is the result of the fact that the largest political force is a big tent or catch-all party, able to accommodate diverse tendencies into a single cohesive whole, while in other cases this state of affairs is maintained either through state power or as an aftereffect of an opposition too small and fractious to amount to a credible electoral threat. Aside from this political tendency, the three Great Powers are set apart by their large amount of regional and global clout and de facto independence from the three ideological blocs of the Strange Aeon, though the OTO and the GEAC-PS are nominally observers (but not members) in the Alliance for Democracy.

The Comintern has perhaps the most unusual electoral landscape on Earth, an outgrowth of the tenets of Marxist-Trigonism. While the vanguard party has been maintained as a political necessity, inherent distrust of the ossification of the Party, born out of an observation of the Soviet Union under Lenin, the Spartacist Republic under Goebbels and the Social Republic under Mussolini, has seen restrictive rules put in place to ensure proper obedience to the social base and the active cultivation of alternative centers of power to check and balance it. The erosion of political boundaries between the Comintern members has seen the gradual replacement of more traditional national legislatures with proportionally representative councilist ones arranged along linguistic lines, with these nested councils carrying out the necessary business of government from the local level upwards. The government of the Comintern proper is made up of members elevated from these national councils, setting policy for the bloc as a whole and conducting its business entirely in Esperanto. This level is open to Marxist-Trigonist parties existing outside the bloc, such as the Persian Tudeh Party and some factions of the African National Congress who, in the name of proletarian solidarity, are allowed to fully participate in the setting of Comintern policy* more broadly in proportion to their membership.

• The Monda Komunista Partio is the only sanctioned political party within the bloc, originally formed through the fusion of the various communist and anarchist parties and factions of the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Spain. As the most conventional electoral branch of the Comintern political system, the World Communist Party best illustrates the divide within society between the Continentalists, who favor a focus on domestic issues and the final eradication of the few remaining remnants of bourgeois repression, and the Internationalists, who favor the expansion of the Comintern and a robust foreign policy. The Continentalists contain the majority of the Rational Anarchist-aligned Nihilists undergoing a renaissance within the bloc, giving them the numerical strength to outmaneuver the Internationalists, who, barring Mussolini's acquisition of Libya, have few successes to point to.
• Solidareco is the umbrella organization for the Comintern's diverse ecosystem of cooperatives and labor unions. Organized on a hybrid one big union-industrial union model pioneered by the IWW, Solidarity has staked an aggressive claim on outlining and directing the Comintern economic policy.
• The result of the grand Vorticist experiment, the Monda Akademia functions as a combination of a humanist church, a comprehensive education system, and a series of research laboratories analogous to the American Science Cities. Aside from providing for the education needs of the Comintern member states at all levels, the World Academy also operates an international network of free colleges and education programs abroad and provides the bloc with the majority of its technological research and development.

The Indian Union is listed first among the Great Powers because in spite of being two years old the new nation's sheer size and impressive potential for rapid material development have already placed it on a trajectory to reach the level of the Five Eyes within a matter of a generation. Add to that a military larger than any single other Great Power and its placement on this list is secure. Officially a multiparty democracy, the nation is a defacto dominant-party system in the face of the vast Indian National Congress, a scenario unlikely to change soon. As a result of the party's size, internal fractions within in it are large and active enough to be considered parties unto themselves, with the fractions unified on the broad domestic goals of the Union but divided largely around foreign policy.

• The Requisitionist faction is the faction of Premier Gandhi, favoring an official alliance with the Comintern, the devolution of power to the labor unions, and the adoption of an educational system modeled on the Monda Akademia, properly adapted to the Indian national character. Most popular in the south of the Union, proximity to Kumari Kandam has given the region the most strident opposition to the Franco-British Union and has cultivated an outspoken disgust of their island neighbor's Objectivism.
• The Organization faction is the resident pro-Fascist bloc in the country, advocating a less sweeping nationalization regime than the Requisitionists while still wholeheartedly supporting massive land reforms, a broad social safety net, a massive increase in the size of the Indian Army, and the development of domestic Science Cities. Broadly popular in the center of the Union, this fraction has made a point of reaching out to ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities to its north to broaden its base of support and suppress the specter of nationalist factionalism.
• The Irredentist fraction is the odd man out, not only for its advocacy of an alliance of equals with the FBU but also for its uncomfortable tolerance of ethnoreligious nationalism within the broader Union. Membership of this fraction is the smallest, ensuring they are kept far away from power, though their support is strongest in the northern parts of the Hindi Belt and they maintain small branches catering to Muslims in East and West Bengal and Sikhs in Punjab who agree on the fraction's central goal of increased ethnoreligious segregation and autonomy. There is a real concern they are receiving covert funds from the Entente Renewal Front in a bid to weaken the former Dominion, further limiting their broader appeal.

The Oriental Treaty Organization is the largest political faction formally outside the three superpowers. Political development in this bloc has been largely shaped by the experiences of the Ottoman Empire, which has capitalized on a sixty year reputation of neutrality to carve out a niche for itself and its allies on the international stage.

• The largest political party in the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress has been the central driver in the Empire's sweeping half-century of reforms and has become the model for like-minded parties in the OTO. Occupying the political center, the CUP advocates for the preservation of the current constitution and the monarchy's role in it and pursues a growth-oriented agenda focused around modernization and the shrewd management of oil and other vital resources. Affiliates:
  • Emirate of Jabal Shammar- Committee of Union and Progress
  • Empire of Ethiopia- Ethiopian Democratic Union
  • Sultanate of Somaliland- Committee of Union and Progress
• Forming the official opposition, the Ba'ath Party is a secular social democratic party advocating for an expansion of the social safety net and public works programs, greater democratic accountability, and an increased voice for the Empire's ethnic minorities. Affiliates:
  • Emirate of Jabal Shammar- Ba'ath Party
  • Empire of Ethiopia- Nationality Democratic Association
  • Republic of Greater Egypt- Ba'ath Party
  • Sultanate of Somaliland- Ba'ath Party

The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere has fallen quite a long way from its height during the Second Clash of Civilizations and consists of only two members at present, the Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Thailand. The Japanese Liberal Party and the Thai People's Party exercise defacto one-party control over their respective states, with a broad set of policies similar to the CUP. While the Thai opposition is too fractured to matter much, the Japanese Empire faces recurring opposition from the Heimin tō, the electoral arm of the Heiminshugi branch of Rational Anarchism largely centered in Korea. While the majority of political parties have paramilitary wings, the Liberal "Special Unit" is particularly feared, seeing itself as the last bastion against anarchy in the Empire.


*This was inspired by an OTL suggestion by Amadeo Bordiga that the USSR, as the bastion of the global proletariat, should be ruled collectively by the world's communist parties. TTL the American affiliate is the Socialist Labor Party, though their membership is so anemic they don't have many votes and have never been elevated to the Comintern's Central Committee.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The following are arranged according to their line in the presidential succession following the Vice President, Speaker of the House and President Pro Tem.

1. Department of State (1789)
2. Department of War (1789)
3. Department of the Treasury (1789)
4. Department of the Interior (1849)*
5. Department of Agriculture (1862)
6. Department of Justice (1870)
7. National Investigation Bureau (1896)
8. Department of Commerce (1903)
9. Department of Labor (1913)
10. Department of Fine Arts (1922)
11. Homeland Advanced Science and Technology Unified Reserve (1943)
12. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (1945)**
13. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (1950)
14. Department of Infrastructure and Energy (1950)
15. Department of Peace (1990)

*Oversees the American Hussar Corps, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (the Freedman's Bureau, reconstituted in 1947)
**Oversees the Veterans Affairs Agency and the National Health Service