TL-191: After the End

Even by the end of the JWR, living conditions are not nearly as bad as OTL North Korea. As of TTL’s 2011, conditions in the JWR are analogous to the late Brezhnev-era USSR, but with far more blatant corruption at the highest governing levels. The JWR is also analogous to the retro-dystopian society shown in Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, especially with regards to its sprawling, oppressive, and inefficient bureaucracy.
This description of the JWR gives me some Jin-Roh vibes.
 
Even by the end of the JWR, living conditions are not nearly as bad as OTL North Korea. As of TTL’s 2011, conditions in the JWR are analogous to the late Brezhnev-era USSR, but with far more blatant corruption at the highest governing levels. The JWR is also analogous to the retro-dystopian society shown in Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, especially with regards to its sprawling, oppressive, and inefficient bureaucracy.
depressing
 
What's the legacy of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the USA, Germany, and elsewhere in TTL?

In Germany and the United States, he’s still generally remembered fondly by the public at large, as of 2020. In the USA, it’s not surprising to find at least one Kaiser Wilhelm Boulevard or Wilhelm Street or Kaiser Avenue in the major cities, at least in the area comprising the USA’s 1914 borders.

In Germany, of course, he’s still considered one of the country’s great Twentieth Century leaders, and one of the greatest Hohenzollern monarchs.

Historians in both countries tend to be more critical of Wilhelm II, depending on the historiographical school, especially regarding his role during the pre-FGW period, and over the ways in which he responded to post-FGW changes in Germany, especially in response to the rise of the Social Democrats.
 
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What is life like in Austria-Hungary for the average citizen of the empire by 2020?

I'm a little bit surprised that the Duel Monarchy hasn't collapsed by 2000 and 2162 as well as not becoming the United States of Greater Austria, since the 1961 overview said it was on the edge of collapse.

Also what is the legacy of Emperors Franz Joseph I and Charles I & IV as well as Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the empire and abroad?

Also what is Austria-Hungary's international relations to the USA, Germany, and the rest of the ISC permanent council like by 2020?
 
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What is life like in Austria-Hungary for the average citizen of the empire by 2020?

As of 2020, the quality of life for the average citizen of Austria-Hungary, as in the German Empire, is quite high.

The political situation, of course, is rather different from the pre-FGW period. After a long period during the interwar years that involved its fair share of protected internal negotiations and factions, the empire by 2020 has seen both the advent of greater federalism and devolution.

Austria-Hungary, as of 2020, remains one half of the Central Powers that dominate the European Community and maintain the peace.

I'm a little bit surprised that the Duel Monarchy hasn't collapsed by 2000 and 2162 as well as not becoming the United States of Greater Austria, since the 1961 overview said it was on the edge of collapse.

The trajectory of the TL admittedly changed as it was written. Supported by the German Empire, and victorious in both Great Wars, Austria-Hungary ultimately endured and prospered, even through domestic political conflicts, the strain of the interwar business collapse, and periods of violent unrest in the empire’s Balkan territories.

Also what is the legacy of Emperors Franz Joseph I and Charles I & IV as well as Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the empire and aboard?

The emperors are remembered fondly in Austria-Hungary, as well as in both the German Empire and the USA, while Franz Ferdinand and his wife are both still remembered in Austria-Hungary as martyrs.

Also what is Austria-Hungary's international relations to the USA, Germany, and the rest of the ISC permanent council like by 2020?

Austria-Hungary, as mentioned, maintains its close military, political, and economic alliance with the German Empire through the European Community. Austria-Hungary also still enjoys cordial relations with the USA; one consistent feature of post-SGW Austro-Hungarian foreign policy, still relevant as of 2020, is encouraging close cooperation between Berlin and Washington. The Austro-Hungarians put a lot of stock in maintaining the traditional “Three Eagles” alliance against any potential enemies, even as the German Empire and the USA competed in postwar fields such as space exploration.

The Austro-Hungarians supported the German military alliance with Bharat that began in the 1980s, with Austria-Hungary contributing funding and technical advice for Bharat’s drive to modernize and expand its military in the years leading up to the Kashmir War.

Austria-Hungary, along with Germany, remakns wary of the Russian Republic, as of 2020. Along with Germany, Austria-Hungary maintains a system of military bases in the Eastern European member states of the EC.

As of 2020, Austria-Hungary enjoys generally good diplomatic relations with Brazil and China, although Austria-Hungary tends to closely coordinate its foreign policy towards these countries with the German Empire.

Later, as of 2162, Austria-Hungary, along with the German Empire, shares similar policies towards the two countries under active consideration for addition to the Permanent Council of the ISC: friendly towards Persia, and supportive of Tehran’s bid for Permanent Council membership, and suspicious, as well as increasingly hostile, towards the Congolese Federation, and opposed to Kinshasa-Ncuna’s bid for Permanent Council membership.
 
What about LGBT rights in TTL by 2020, especially the countries in the ISC permanent security council, also including the Congo, Persia, Japan, and the former Ottoman Empire countries in the Middle East?
 
What about LGBT rights in TTL by 2020, especially the countries in the ISC permanent security council, also including the Congo, Persia, Japan, and the former Ottoman Empire countries in the Middle East?

As of 2020, LGBT rights varies by country.

In the United States, there was never an equivalent to our world’s Defense of Marriage Act. Additionally, there was never a real equivalent of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in the modern US military; gay men were allowed to serve openly beginning in 1986. By the 2000s, federal legislation had been passed intending to address discrimination regarding employment and retirement benefits for same sex couples.

However, in the US in 2020, the issue of same-sex marriage remains a source of political controversy. While some states have legalized same sex marriage, other states have either banned it, or have passed laws allowing for same sex “domestic partnerships”, but not marriage. In 2020, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on the matter.

During the 2010s, debates in some areas of the US regarding same sex marriage were also affected by the Tens Revival - the name given to a religious revival driven by a surge in growth in some fundamentalist Protestant churches, especially in the Rocky Mountain West and in the Caribbean states.

There are also debates, in 2020, in the Austria-Hungarian Empire, the Empire of Brazil, and the German Empire over legalizing same sex marriage, although this is opposed in all three empires by social conservative groups.

As of 2020, LGBT rights remain curtailed in Bharat, the Russian Republic, throughout the Middle East. LGBT rights in Japan were also suppressed, during the time of the Japanese Workers Republic.
 
Apologies if this is stated somewhere in the thread, but what is the film industry like as of the present? Is Hollywood as big as OTL and what of domestic film industries in other countries like Germany or Japan (Both under the empire and Workers Republic)?
 
Apologies if this is stated somewhere in the thread, but what is the film industry like as of the present? Is Hollywood as big as OTL and what of domestic film industries in other countries like Germany or Japan (Both under the empire and Workers Republic)?
As of TTL’s 2009, southern California is still a major center of the US film industry, though there is now increasing competition from other locations.
 
Apologies if this is stated somewhere in the thread, but what is the film industry like as of the present? Is Hollywood as big as OTL and what of domestic film industries in other countries like Germany or Japan (Both under the empire and Workers Republic)?

As of 2020, the US film industry is massively influential, though not without competition. The German Empire has its own influential film industry, especially in the member states of the European Community and German Economic Association. US and German filmmakers, as has been the case since the emergence of the modern film industries in both countries, influence each other in terms of genres and filmmaking techniques, while popular movies from both the US and Germany tend get remade for each country’s respective domestic market (not unlike how some OTL US and Italian-made Westerns were effectively remakes of Japanese jidaigeki movies).

Of course, as of 2020, other countries have significant domestic film industries of their own, including Austria-Hungary, Bharat, Brazil, China, Italy, Persia, and the Portuguese Federation. By 2020, the respective domestic film industries of Great Britain and France have effectively merged, in order to better compete with the respective German and US mega-film industries.

An emerging regional film industry by 2020 can also be seen in the Congolese Federation, where a new generation of ambitious Congolese filmmakers and producersplan to challenge the old monopoly once enjoyed by the local distributors of the German Empire’s largest filming companies,
 
Is Congolese Federation a better version of Congo? Can you give me the socioeconomic status?

The Congolese Federation, as of TTL’s 2020, is roughly analogous to OTL 2019 Malaysia, in terms of its overall HDI. Of course, there are areas of the Congolese Federation that are wealthier, especially the major cities and provinces centered on mineral extraction. The capital of the Congolese Federation is Kinshasa-Ncuna, a rapidly growing metropolis located on the sites of OTL Kinshasa and Brazzaville.

By TTL’s 2020, the Congolese Federation has benefited from two decades of high annual economic growth, though the country’s economic will affected, as with other major economies, by the 2019 Great Housing Crash.

The Congolese Federation is led by a Chancellor.
 
What happened to the surviving POV characters of the series after the end, as well as their legacies?

Cassius Madison went on to found the Remembrance Center and Flora Blackford's son, Joshua, became USA president during TTL 1970's, that's the only ones I remember from reading this forum. What about the others, especially Irving Morrell, Sam Carsten, and Chester Martin.
 
What happened to the surviving POV characters of the series after the end, as well as their legacies?

Cassius Madison went on to found the Remembrance Center and Flora Blackford's son, Joshua, became USA president during TTL 1970's, that's the only ones I remember from reading this forum. What about the others, especially Irving Morrell, Sam Carsten, and Chester Martin.

They've been asked about several times in this thread. At the least, I recall Irving dying peacefully in Kansas sometime before his daughter became Vice President while Carsten died of cancer not long after the SGW.
 
What happened to the surviving POV characters of the series after the end, as well as their legacies?

Cassius Madison went on to found the Remembrance Center and Flora Blackford's son, Joshua, became USA president during TTL 1970's, that's the only ones I remember from reading this forum. What about the others, especially Irving Morrell, Sam Carsten, and Chester Martin.
Chester Martin died quietly in his sleep i think in the 60s, being the head of one of the largest union organizations
 
So far, I have done write ups for Irving Morrell, Alec Pomeroy, Armstrong Grimes, Michael Pound, Sam Carsten, George Patton, and Clarence Potter:


Irving Morrell was tapped by Harry Truman as his running mate for the 1952 elections (and is credited by presidential historians for being one of the reasons that Truman won; he would have preferred the position of Secretary of Defense, but was still able to excercise a key role in defense policy). Morrell served as Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961, and afterwards retired from public life and returned to Kansas. His three volume memoir (Great War, American Empire, Settling Accounts) was published in full in 1967, on the eve of the Fourth Pacific War. He passed away in 1970.

His legacy lives on as of 2009; his memoirs proved to be bestsellers and were eventually the subject of a trilogy of four-hour-long Endurance Films (filmed as one continuous movie from 1981 to 1985, which each movie released in 1987, 1988, and 1989 respectively).

His daughter, Mildred Morell-Quigley, served three terms as a Representative and one term as a Senator (for the Democrats) from Kansas. She served as Secretary of State under President Joshua Blackford (1973 to 1979) before leaving the administration to seek the Democratic nomination for the 1980 elections (which she won, only to lose the general election to Morgan Reynolds). After the 1980 election, she served as a consultant for the film trilogy based on her fathers’ memoirs, before retiring fully from public life. She passed away in 2000.

The Morrell family still largely lives in Kansas; there is a very strong tradition of national service that each generation aspires to. The family name lives on in other ways as well, from the Morrell Mark VI Barrel (scheduled to enter service by the end of the 2010s), to the Irving Morrell College of Armored Warfare (located in Topeka, Kansas).

Irving Morrell is also the only Vice President (who never became President) with a monument on the National Mall.

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Alec Pomeroy did not have a happy life. He was the only survivor of the US Army’s assault on his family’s diner in Rosenfeld, Manitoba in 1943 during the Second Canadian Uprising. He was six years old.

For Pomeroy’s new (Bureau of Protective Serivces) guardians, returning him to his only living family was out of the question (given the MacGregor-Pomeroy family history and the ongoing wartime emergency in Occupied Canada; his grandmother in Rosenfeld passed away from natural causes in 1944). Instead, he was sent to an orphanage in Dakota for two years, until the Bureau of Protective Services decided that what was needed for him was a life of military discipline; Pomeroy spent the next ten years at the Rock Island Military Academy (in Rock Island, Illinois).

As though being the only Canadian in a TL-191 American military academy was not hard enough, he also had to deal with the scorn that came from being the son of a widely hated terrorist. The reputation of the MacGregor family was still poisonous enough in 1954 to deny the 18-year-old Rock Island graduate admission to an officer’s training course, or any Army position that required any kind of technical education. The authorities were also fearful that Pomeroy could not be trusted on occupation duty in the former CSA (much less in the remainder of Occupied Canada).

At least Fiji had pleasant weather, even if he never had a chance of being promoted any higher than Private Second Class.

At a certain point in his Rock Island education, Pomeroy decided that he wanted nothing to do with his lost family, yet never really found acceptance (or a real sense of identity) anywhere else. Throughout the rest of his life Pomeroy preferred to keep to himself - during the Fourth Pacific War (where he served in Australia and West Papua in the Illinois National Guard), through three failed marriages, and through a thirty year career standing behind the counter at the Roosevelt Newstand-Cafe in Deerfield, Illinois, Pomeroy remained extremely introverted.

The only real hobby that he had consisted of frequent trips to the movies.

He died in 2002.

Pomeroy’s three failed marriages resulted in five children - two with his first wife (an Australian war bride), two with his second wife (a librarian who he met in a small town in Iowa during the only vacation that he took in his thirty years of work at the Newstand-Cafe) and one with his third wife (the president of the local Historical Society). Altogether Alec Pomeroy has twenty one grandchildren and three great-grandchildren as of 2009, none of whom care to know anything about the former MacGregor-Pomeroy family.

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Michael Pound serves in the US Army until 1950, when he is retired from active duty (over his very loud objections). Due to his old friendship and time of service with now Chief of Staff Irving Morrell, Pound is brought in as an instructor at the recently founded College of Armored Warfare in Topeka, Kansas.

Pound spends the rest of his life as an instructor at the College. He dies in 1965. Irving Morrell, by then retired from public life himself, delivers the eulogy at Pound’s funeral; Mildred Morrell-Quigley later writes that, “My father’s eulogy was for Michael Pound, yet also could have been for himself.”

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Armstrong Grimes spent two years being rotated around the former CSA along with his men. In spite of their worst fears, the intermittent violence that would plague most of the region for the first decade after the war never coalesced into a major rebellion (as had occurred in Occupied Canada and Utah).

In the 1944 elections, and throughout his first two years in office, President Dewey repeated his twin promises to “rebuild and reform” the Armed Forces and to successfully re-absorb the Southern states. Grimes resigned himself to never being released from active duty.

In late 1946, while stationed in Pascagoula, Mississippi, Grimes was brought before one Captain Coolidge Schneider. Schneider, also a veteran of the Canada and Utah theaters during the Second Great War, informed Grimes of a new unit being put together that would consist, “...of those like us.” While not offering any details, Schneider made it clear that it was Grimes’s choice to either stay in Pascagoula on occupation duty, or to join a new unit in the “rebuilt and reformed” Armed Forces.

Grimes accepted the offer on the spot.

The training for what would the first generation of the United States Army Irregular Forces was grueling, having a high drop out rate. Grimes succeeded in finishing the year-long course (which took the candidates across the Rocky Mountain West), and began his service with his fellow Grey Berets as Sergeant First Class in January 1948. A two-year-long Officers Training Course at Fort McSweeney, Oregon from 1952-1954 would see Grimes promoted to Second Lieutenant.

It was during his time in Oregon that Grimes would meet his wife, who ran the best-reviewed bed and breakfast in Fort McSweeney. Their marriage was strained by his long absences, yet ultimately endured.

Armstrong Grimes spent 25 years in the Grey Berets, eventually reaching the rank of Captain in 1968 during the Fourth Pacific War. During that conflict, Grimes and his fellow Grey Berets fought in Operation Grizzly (in Mongolia and northern China) and Operation Rainbow Dawn (in Korea). Wounded in action during the Battle of Seoul, Grimes would be honorably discharged in 1973. Grimes passes away in 1985, survived by his wife and three children (two daughters and a son).

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Sam Carsten dies in 1947 from melanoma. He is buried by the Department of the Navy in the National War Cemetary, just outside of Washington, D.C. in West Virginia.

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George Patton spent the last fifteen years of his life in Fort Custer, Wyoming - a military prison for high-ranking ex-Confederate military officers. Although afforded a degree of respect from his Second Great War opponents (namely Morrell and Ironhewer), the vast majority of Americans never forgave the general who had led Featherston’s treasonous Operation Blackbeard.

Patton spent the rest of his life reading (or re-reading) every military history that he could get his hands on and writing his memoirs, which would be published posthumously. He died in 1959.

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In between working on his own memoirs, Clarence Potter found himself with little else to do except to walk the streets of a devastated Richmond. He knew that the US government would never let him out of their sights (he wouldn’t have done anything differently in their shoes).

Potter was never reconciled to US rule, yet was also realistic (or perhaps just cold blooded) enough to recognize that the Confederacy would never return. The former intelligence officer was never tempted to take up arms against the US authorities, or even attempt to flee the former CSA for Texas (or somewhere farther afield). As he acidly reminded more than one angry, desperate ex-Confederate Second Great War veteran that he encountered on his daily walks, the USA had won a total victory: it was pointless to pretend otherwise.

In July 1946, just after Potter had completed a new draft of How I Blew Up Philadelphia, he was murdered on one of these walks by one of these angry, desperate ex-CS Army veterans (who himself did not survive the resulting one-sided firefight against arriving US military police); the murderer took offense to Potter’s “defeatist treason.”

Potter was cremated. His ashes were scattered in the Atlantic Ocean outside of US territorial waters.

The last draft of How I Blew Up Philadelphia was confiscated by the US military authorities, and would sit in the National Archives for the next fifty years, before being published in a heavily annotated edition in 1996 by Yale University Press. The book was controversial for historians and the general public alike; very few people who have read Potter’s memoir are entirely sure where the author’s self-serving personal worldview ends and where his frank descriptions of the Featherston dictatorship (and late Confederate society) begins.

In 2009, Clarence Potter is still among the most loathed people in US history.
 
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So who were the presidents elected from the end of the books to now?

Thomas Dewey (Democrat): 1945-1953
Harry Truman (Democrat): 1953-1961
Hubert H. Humphrey (Socialist): 1961-1973
Joshua Blackford (Democrat): 1973-1981
Morgan Reynolds (Republican): 1981-1989
Leo Enos (Socialist): 1989-1993
Thurston DeFrancis (Democrat): 1993-1997
Patrick Gutierrez (Republican): 1997-2005
Sergio Hernandez (Socialist): 2005-2013
Alfred Astaire (Democrat): 2013-2021
 
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