The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL
- Thread starter TastySpam
- Start date
Well I think that's going to be inevitable when McCarthy gets in the Oval Office.
PLA bleeding Americans dry. What's worse, I don't think their allies would have the stomach to fight in a war that's not really theirs. New Zealand has just experienced a tragedy.
Chapter 74 - The First Hundred Days
The First Hundred Days
January 20, 1957 was destined to be a day of big change. President McCarthy, even at his inauguration, was not a very happy man. Having relapsed entirely into his old alcoholic traits, the President spent the entire lame duck period getting into screaming matches with President Russell and any members of the Joint Chief of Staffs who sided with the man. If anything, McCarthy had begun to suggest many of those generals were in fact secret crypto-Communists. It was only the intervention of Vice President Kennedy, that stopped the President from firing the lot of them.
In many ways, the presidential transition was largely overseen not by McCarthy, who brought few members of the Republican Party with him, but rather Vice-President Kennedy and his "brain trust." The agenda was quick. Due to Justice Reed's illness, he quickly resigned once he had a "friendly" President back in charge. As a result, McCarthy's Chief Counsel Roy Cohn was picked for the position. The appointment was quickly easily confirmed by all Republicans as well as all of the Northern Democrats, who saw JFK as their man in the White House. On the first day, a federal executive order desegregating the military was immediately implemented, in line with the promises of the McCarthy-Kennedy campaign. A Civil Rights Act defending black voting rights, stalled in the Senate due to veto threats by President Russell, was immediately put on the agenda, where it sailed through with little opposition.[1] Similarly, the McCarthy administration would ignite a political fire in the American South, concluding that Wood v. Richmond would have to be enforced by the National Guard in case Southern states would not comply. President McCarthy's inauguration speech bellowed that America was "engaged in a Total Holy War to the end against a Satanic horde of Asiatic Bolshevism" and that Americans could be divided "by no color nor creed except the lies of Red Communism." As part of this, the President even proposed changing American immigration laws to end discrimination on national origin or race.
Another issue that helped defeat President Russell was a strike by the United Steel Workers of America, protesting for higher wages. President McCarthy criticized Russell for "weakness." Another action on his first day was the total nationalization of American steel plants, meeting the demands of the steel workers half-way, otherwise keeping the management of the plants the same, and promising that any additional strikes would be treated as war sabotage. Both the union and plant owners sued.
In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Robert Kennedy, Douglas, Black, and Ervin wrote in their opinion their position that the President did not have the unilateral authority to seize the steel mills, especially due to the lack of any explicit congressional authorization. However, Cohn, Kennon, Arnall, Coleman, and Patterson drafted an opinion that more or less validated all of the legal claims of McCarthy's lawyers. Finally, the Frankfurter opinion found that a President usually did not have such authority, but that the "totality of the situation" (the on-going war), justified such an act. The McCarthy Administration then immediately made it clear that any industries that failed to fully cooperate with the war effort would face a similar fate.
This claim caused a roar in corporate America. Although Secretary of Commerce Robert Kennedy assured corporate leaders that the power would only be used in cases when the war effort was genuinely threatened, he also hinted that "war effort" would be interpreted fairly broadly. The example RFK provided to a meeting of corporate executives was "sowing racial division and national disunity by discriminating against black customers." Much to the horror of Southern politicians, a variety of large corporations began to comply with such veiled threats, such as Woolsworth desegregating its lunch counters. However, whether or not it was viewed as the intended message, corporate executives soon feared any kind of political misalignment with the government. Corporate donations flowed freely to any politicians aligned with McCarthy and Kennedy - and none to their opponents. After all, one corporate leader who refused to desegregate his hotels quickly found himself investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which quickly drove him into bankruptcy as the mere bad press of being on the "list" turned away business. The price of opposing the government was made clear, even if the government itself never tried to argue this. However, the only party resisting the McCarthy-Kennedy agenda (although it was under McCarthy's name, most of the proposals were from Kennedy's orbit, as McCarthy was relatively uninterested in domestic affairs) were Southern Democrats. The Republicans and Northern Democrats condemned "excesses" of the administration, but more or less supported the general agenda in the name of wartime unity. Even then, under intense business pressure, many Southern Democrats took a more conciliatory attitude towards Civil Rights, led by Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. As a result, McCarthy's New Frontier agenda, a dizzying array of tax , welfare, labor, education, health, immigration, civil rights, environmental, agriculture, crime, infrastructure, and other reforms all passed within the first 100 days, almost always with healthy majorities.[2]
Although the first 100 days of the McCarthy Presidency were perhaps the most productive in American history, the White House itself was a shambling disaster. One general literally had a possibly drunken McCarthy break his nose by throwing a book at his face during a meeting. Vice President Kennedy notably said nothing during any of these meetings, trying to avoid getting between the President and his hated generals. A President who believed that he had been proven right about everything. Finland fell because the generals did nothing. McCarthy raged at how they pointed out in late January, Finland was a totally lost cause (US troops would not hypothetically arrive in Turku until February), because that implied Finland was not a lost cause in mid-November, when the State Department officials told McCarthy that troops couldn't be sent to Finland due to fears of starting a true World War III. Once again, in China, the refusal of the American diplomatic corps to directly confront the Soviet Union lead to some of the bloodiest months in American history. The lands in Liaodong had costed more American lives than Operation Overlord and the liberation of Normandy (though not overall Allied deaths), outraging McCarthy who correctly noted that much of those deaths could have been avoided if not for the American inability to target the Soviet base in Port Arthur. However, contrary to Communist plans, the deaths of Americans did not cause Americans to recoil the war - rather, they caused Americans to further rally behind McCarthy, who had around an 80% approval rating as the slaughter of Americans built up.
The generals and diplomats kept on telling McCarthy what he couldn't do and even his direct presidential orders ended up mangled before they reached the battlefield. The generals didn't seem to openly disobey his orders to prepare America's nuclear arsenal, but they clearly seemed to drag their feet. McCarthy quipped that he truly did not feel like a President, even though he was probably the most powerful American President in history, given his ability to more or less destroy any private business who failed to line up in support of his domestic and foreign policies. It was not only Hollywood that sought to blacklist suspected "Communists", but almost every large corporation in the United States, who feared that the hammer of HUAC, or even worse, nationalization would fall upon them. Labor unions shared these concerns and most of the mainstream labor unions immediately began expelling members suspected of socialist sympathies (those that didn't found themselves investigated, shed membership, and be decertified.) McCarthy also turned to agents in the government more sympathetic to his cause. While the military had liked Russell outside of his odious segregationism, the intelligence services loathed Russell, both the FBI and CIA.
Particularly influential in this time period was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was given a free hand by McCarthy to do anything he liked. Unlike the elected administration, Hoover directly told corporate executives that he would investigate any of them for Communist sympathies if they failed to "comply with the war effort." Hoover's COINTELPRO interestingly targeted both segregationists and any left-leaning Civil Rights activists who might have pushed a more radical Civil Rights agenda than the government. Hoover's FBI also extensively covertly wiretapped most of the US Congress. As a result, politicians secretly unsympathetic to the cause were quickly drummed out of the party establishment. The CIA was also given the order to escalate the war against the Soviet Union as dramatically as possible, a considerably more dramatic order than Russell's order that they merely prick the USSR. McCarthy saw two opportunities. First, the military government and socialists in Turkey were nearing some kind of peace compromise - this had to be squelched at any cost. Second, discontent was building up in West Germany over Chancellor Wehner's approach to foreign policy - an opportunity could similarly be found. After all, in McCarthy's estimation, the Germans nearly brought the Soviet Union to its knees...why not enlist them again?
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[1] Comparable to the OTL 1957 and 1960 CRAs combined.
[2] Really most of Kennedy's OTL New Frontier + some various OTL Eisenhower era stuff, except it's done in 100 days instead of over three years.
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It's 1957 and it seems that President McCarthy's losing his mind.... But I'll think he'll die just like otl on 1957 and we'll have a President Kennedy
Chapter 75 - If You're Here, Who's Piloting The Union?
If You're Here, Who's Piloting The Union?
Soviet tanks entered Turku in late February of 1957, just as the snows began to clear and any Allied resistance seemed futile. A tiny Finnish exile government in Aland was deemed no reasonable threat. The streets of Turku were lined with burning Allied vehicles as the Soviet Union extolled in its victory. It had not even been close. Allied forces mounted a desperate defense of Turku, but nothing could stop superior Soviet training and equipment from just battering them into dust. With the Soviet victory at Turku against an Allied force comprising troops from Britain, France, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Canada, the Red Army had conclusively proven that no army could truly stand against the Soviet Union with the possible exception of the American Army. It was highly controversial to prioritize Finland over Yugoslavia and even Stalin hadn't approved of it. It was largely a decision that General Secretary Voroshilov had pushed, as he argued that a show of force in Finland would demoralize the Yugoslavs. And it really had. However, a Soviet military parade in Turku featuring Voroshilov, basking in a victory that he had wanted ever since his humiliation in the first Winter War, was to change history.
One man in particular had an extremely crappy 1956. Signing up immediately on the first day despite his age and the fact that he had already had half of his jaw blown off, the man had to suffer through a variety of indignities. In the first week of the war, he had the other half of his face burned off. Waking up occasionally during the infection only to pull the maggots off, he went back straight into the fight, racking up an ever-impressive kill count. A mortar hit tore shrapnel into one of his legs, rendering it useless and eventually gangrenous. Another explosion tore off his nose, which he just covered with gauze. An explosion broke his left arm, which was fine since he was right-handed anyways. After a year of combat, despite only really having two and a half working limbs and having to wear a mask since he didn't really have much of a face anymore, the man had been waiting in the same collapsed building for three weeks, which was fine since the snow provided water. This was fine. After all, the goal of a sniper wasn't to maximize the kill count. It was to pick out the most valuable target. And weeks after all apparent resistance had been quelled, a Finnish Mosin Nagant wielded by Finnish militia volunter Simo Hayha fired a bullet straight into the heart of Soviet General Secretary Climent Voroshilov, killing him instantly. A barrage of return fire quickly put the sniper out of his misery, but he had done what he wanted - throw the Soviet Union into chaos.
A frustrated Stalin turned over all of the bureaucratic know-how and information and networks once available to Voroshilov to his second choice, a man who had served him well and the only man who sided with him on the Jewish deportations, Laventry Beria. Beria once feared that he would have to hunt for power in a crowd of piranhas after Stalin's death, but all of this power just now fell into his lap. This proved to be a grievous mistake. Once Beria had everything from Stalin he needed, an NKVD man showed up at Stalin's hideout, assaulting and suffocating the pretend-dead and now actually-dead Soviet leader. That NKVD man was in turn assassinated by another NKVD man, who was in turn assassinated by a third NKVD man, which Beria assumed was finally enough to cover his steps.
Unlike Stalin, Beria wanted to end the war. However, Beria wanted it to be on his terms and he thought the weakness of Stalin was not his brutality, but rather his belief that Stalin was too soft in private and too vicious in public. Beria was to take the opposite approach. He easily forged the "last orders" of General Secretary Voroshilov, which was a simple operation that Beria had planned. Soon after Voroshilov's death, the entire Soviet strategic bomber fleet, somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 Tupolev Tu-4s (the obvious Soviet knock-off of the B-29 bomber), Tu-16s, and Tu-95s, had been transferred to Hungarian and Romanian and East Austrian airfields. Taking off, they had one single target. In one infamous night, the Soviet Air Force, no longer fighting an aerial war in Finland, dropped their entire load, mostly incendiaries, all over the city of Sarajevo. The bombs were calculated precisely to maximize the size of the firestorm that would engulf Sarajevo, a city whose population had almost tripled during the Yugoslav War due to being a primary center of refugees that was not seriously bombed by the Soviets due to lack of military output. Worst of all, most of the refugees had overcrowded the city in makeshift shacks made of wood and whatever materials they could find, creating the perfect storm situation. Finally, Sarajevo was surrounded by forested mountains, the Dinaric Alps, providing few avenues of escape and ensuring that large swaths of the population that escaped the fires would simply asphyxiate. Due to the sheer number of bombs dropped, a firestorm soon consumed the entire Sarajevo valley. According to one estimate, of the 450,000 individuals in Sarajevo, around 350,000 would die in the infamous firebombings of Sarajevo, including much of the Yugoslav leadership, including Tito and many of his closest allies. The target of the atrocity at Sarajevo was very much Tito - Beria very much feared that Tito would be an alternative challenge to control of global Communism and he figured the Soviet reputation was already ruined, so he might as well take Tito out. If anything, an openly capitalist/democratic Yugoslavia seemed like a good idea to Beria (to ensure Titoism ruled nothing), and Beria prepared to make that "concession" sometime in the future.
With both Zagreb and Belgrade completely destroyed in urban assaults, and Sarajevo literally wiped off the map in what was so far the worst post-World War II war crime yet, the largest city in Yugoslavia ironically became occupied Tirana. It was at this moment that Beria officially appointed himself General Secretary, declaring a new approach to foreign policy at his speech. He approached the Swedes for peace, though the request for a separate peace was politely rejected, as the Swedes continued skirmishing with Soviet aircraft. Claiming that Voroshilov had ordered the bombings and that he had taken power to bring peace (very few Soviets believed this, though some Westerners did), he also opened up lines of communication with what was rest of the Yugoslav government under Milovan Dilas. The Yugoslav response was generally too foul for most Western media stations to print. Surprisingly, Beria thought that he would have to run a Second Great Purge, but it seemed at least at the time that nobody was willing to challenge his leadership, perhaps out of fear. That being said, although peace had not been truly declared, he deemed Finland and Yugoslavia to both be essentially neutralized. Soviet forces occupied much of Yugoslavia, but at this point, he viewed it as only a bargaining chip in the postwar settlement. In his view, the only obstacle to peace and his own personal ambitions...was now that damnable Mao. And maybe McCarthy. But he was probably just pretending to be crazy. Right?
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Oh dear lord. McCarthy and Beria are leaders of the two most powerful nations in the world.
Yikes, having McCarthy and Beria as leaders of the two most powerful nations sounds scary. Very scary.
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
Hell yes. Simo Hayha is a badass, but it's awful he had to suffer so much for this. Rest in peace, good man.
Is it too much of a stretch to say that TTL is on the path to being a very crummy dystopia as a whole? Beria's now in charge and committing war crimes that quite literally make Srebrenica look like a nothing, our main man and hero Tito is dead, and China is a mess for the third(?) time in a century.
Milovan Djilas survived? It's not all gloom and doom, maybe. It's not like there's much left of Yugoslavia here, but let's take what we can get. I can only wonder if the Yugoslav response is anything like the Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which I won't link since it's particularly foul in and of itself, but it's definitely how I feel about Soviet leadership here.
Is there any way the world can get better from here? Only God and perhaps TastySpam knows.
McCarthy’s policies are gonna lead to a backlash one day without a doubt. Also, anything going on in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East? I can only imagine more wars happening soon.
Yeah, it is; he'd probably prefer his OTL life (where he hunted with Finnish president Urho Kekkonen, among other things, and died in 2002 at the age of 96) to what happened to him ITTL...
ObWI: Simo Hayha's family emigrates to America before he is born?
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It's possible yes, but you never know. While TTL's 1950s are definitely more dystopic than OTL, that doesn't necessarily mean the whole TL will be as dystopic come the present day. It might even perhaps in a twisted way over the next 60 years become overall a better world than OTL.
*screams internally*
Between this and Footprint of Mussolini (another timeline I have a vested interest reading.) I feel like I'm comparing apples and oranges here.
But this...TastySpam you deserve a....a...Gold Star or something. I've never have been filled with such dread in an ongoing TL before til now.
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
This. There's a noted difference between grimdark and actually feeling something for this world. I have no idea what and how TastySpam is doing it, but oh wow. This is probably the first time I wasn't desensitized by something so effed-up in a timeline, probably because I wasn't expecting it to go in that direction.
So kudos to you, @TastySpam. I might not have been overly vocal here but nonetheless I still appreciate The North Star is Red and all of the good and bad in it.
What's weird is that there is reason to believe that Beria may have been more reasonable, pragmatic and pro-western (or at least, willing to work with the West) than most Soviet politicians capable of replacing Stalin. In fact, unusually for a Soviet leader, he's probably both more level headed and more sober than his American counterpart, McCarthy.
Not that he isn't a terrifying man...
Not that he isn't a terrifying man...
Thanks all for the reception, it's definitely a motivator to get me to push these updates out faster. 
And yeah, it's definitely appreciated.
Really, almost everything has a backlash. Part of ITL America going way more hardcore on Civil Rights than OTL America is a backlash against Russell's intense segregationism.
I think by pure death toll, the ITL 1950's aren't actually that worse than the OTL 1950's. Extra deaths in the OTL 1950 includes 2 million from the Chinese Civil War and aftermath, the Great Leap Forward (in most of China) so another 18m or so, 2 million in the Korean War, 1 million in the First Vietnam War. I haven't really theorycrafted the death toll, but this war has probably killed 3-4 million people in Europe.
However, I suppose there's a caveat to my math, because the ITL 50's isn't anywhere near over yet - and neither is the war. And I suppose that's where things can go really wrong.
That being said, I don't think ITL people would view it as dystopian. As bad as the ITL 1950's currently is, it's certainly a lot better than the OTL & ITL 1940's, which saw tens of millions of people die in World War II, the Holocaust, and other atrocities. The ITL 1950's aren't even much worse for Yugoslavia than the OTL 1940's, which really just underscores how awful the OTL 1940's were.
I too also read and enjoy Footprints of Mussolini lol. I thought it was dark, but not grimdark.
I was actually worried I was making things too obvious. Beria just kept on amassing more and more power because he's the only man Stalin can trust to do various atrocities. McCarthy is the living embodiment of a backlash to President Russell, Soviet aggression, and just a really failure GOP (the two-party system is definitely weakened by the fact that as of ITL 1959, the Republicans haven't won a presidential election since 1928.)
Also yeah, I definitely get that with grimdark. I can't get into stuff like Warhammer 40k for that reason. There are definitely some people of the world that are probably better off ITL, like Cambodia (no Pol Pot), North Korea (no Kim dynasty), etc. etc.
Beria is probably the most evil national leader in the world, and he is quite arrogant, but he is neither crazy nor stupid.
And yeah, it's definitely appreciated.Really, almost everything has a backlash. Part of ITL America going way more hardcore on Civil Rights than OTL America is a backlash against Russell's intense segregationism.
I think by pure death toll, the ITL 1950's aren't actually that worse than the OTL 1950's. Extra deaths in the OTL 1950 includes 2 million from the Chinese Civil War and aftermath, the Great Leap Forward (in most of China) so another 18m or so, 2 million in the Korean War, 1 million in the First Vietnam War. I haven't really theorycrafted the death toll, but this war has probably killed 3-4 million people in Europe.
However, I suppose there's a caveat to my math, because the ITL 50's isn't anywhere near over yet - and neither is the war. And I suppose that's where things can go really wrong.
That being said, I don't think ITL people would view it as dystopian. As bad as the ITL 1950's currently is, it's certainly a lot better than the OTL & ITL 1940's, which saw tens of millions of people die in World War II, the Holocaust, and other atrocities. The ITL 1950's aren't even much worse for Yugoslavia than the OTL 1940's, which really just underscores how awful the OTL 1940's were.
I too also read and enjoy Footprints of Mussolini lol. I thought it was dark, but not grimdark.
I was actually worried I was making things too obvious. Beria just kept on amassing more and more power because he's the only man Stalin can trust to do various atrocities. McCarthy is the living embodiment of a backlash to President Russell, Soviet aggression, and just a really failure GOP (the two-party system is definitely weakened by the fact that as of ITL 1959, the Republicans haven't won a presidential election since 1928.)
Also yeah, I definitely get that with grimdark. I can't get into stuff like Warhammer 40k for that reason. There are definitely some people of the world that are probably better off ITL, like Cambodia (no Pol Pot), North Korea (no Kim dynasty), etc. etc.
Beria is probably the most evil national leader in the world, and he is quite arrogant, but he is neither crazy nor stupid.
The lands of Yugoslavia probably end up as third world countries in the future of this timeline. No economic progress can happen with every bit of industry ruined.
Yugoslavia got screwed alright but that seems a bit pessimistic. Countries came out of several wars in the 20th century with all major cities destroyed and managed to rebuild at some level.