What is this?
A TLIED
What does that stand for?
Timeline in eight days.
OK, so what's it about?
A list of alternate US presidents, created as an expansion of
this story.
Now, let's cut to the chase
THE PERFECT SHUFFLE
An American political TL
By Lost Freeway
Harry S. Truman (Democrat)
1945-1949
It was a calm winter morning on January 20, 1945 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, due to be inaugurated for an unprecedented fourth term as president, was found unresponsive in his bed, having died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage. Roosevelt's new Vice President-elect, Harry S. Truman, would take the oath of office on the steps of the White House that day.
Having been thrust straight into the highest office in the land, Truman did his best to rise to the challenge. The first 100 days of his presidency would see the Iwo Jima campaign, the final Allied push into Nazi Germany, the Okinawa campaign, and the associated last stand of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Battle of the Ryukyus.
Germany would finally lay down their arms on May 8-Truman's birthday. The Japanese would hold on for three more months before the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced them to surrender.
After the war, Truman faced the difficult task of transitioning the nation back to a peacetime economy. Military expenditures were cut significantly and all large warships except the
Midway-class aircraft carriers-and a few
Essex-class carriers that had come too late for the war-were deactivated as the Navy reevaluated its priorities in the new post-battleship era. Wages declined precipitously, resulting in the largest wave of strikes in American history.
Truman did his best to continue FDR's legacy, but was often hamstrung by Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress. Nonetheless, he did win a few victories, such as the Housing Act of 1948 and the desegregation of the armed forces. In the 1948 presidential election, Truman managed to win a narrow victory against New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey.
Tragically, Truman's support for civil rights for African-Americans would be his undoing. On July 4, 1949, during Independence Day celebrations in Washington D.C., Truman was shot and killed by Samuel Bowers, a 24 year-old Navy veteran and committed white supremacist. Bowers managed to escape in the ensuing commotion, but was captured the next morning in Arlington. Bowers was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. He would be executed in 1951.
With the death of Harry Truman, the reins of the nation passed to the hands of his relatively young yet able vice president...