Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree: A Nineteen Eighty-Four Timeline

[Roberto El Rey]

Well, we didn't win the Turtledove, but that doesn't bother me one bit. As long as someone out there is reading my stuff and enjoying what I write (and it seems as least 32 of you are), I am more than satisfied with the work I continue to put into this TL. Sorry about the long break; I wanted to wait until after the Turtledove poll closed, and since then I’ve been torturing myself over the particular wording of this entry for the past several days. Here it finally is!

Oh, and I’ll be wrapping up World War II fairly quickly. The actual procession of the battles isn’t particularly important by this point, more so the order that will emerge in postwar Europe. Although, I have been getting some good feedback on some of the War-related posts, so if I get enough demand I might go into some more detail.

Radio Speech by Senator Robert Taft, 19 July 1940

Not one Socialist plan or policy will bring about solutions or recovery in the long term. President Thomas may point to the negligible drop in unemployment figures since he entered office; and yet, a outrageously large segment of the American population remains destitute and impoverished. Never does he miss a chance to boast about the millions of jobs his Labor Corps has created; and yet, any man not content to sweep streets or dig ditches for the rest of life finds the factories closed off to new job-seekers, their profits strangled by excessive regulations and nationalizations.

President Thomas might propose that the federal government keep the unemployed half-alive through handouts and charities; after all, his egregious taxes on the rich generate such an enormous revenue that there must be enough money in the Treasury to feed every family in America for years, if so much of it were not wasted on corrupt union bosses and wasteful Socialist programs. But I tell you that this system would be the death of American freedom. Never mind that that kind of scheme would create such sloth and indolence among its victims that no man would have much of a reason to go looking for a job; never mind that inflation would reach even loftier heights than it already has, and drag businesses big and small even further down into the depths of insolvency. A system that doles out stipends like reduces the population to slavery. No man who feeds off government charity, no weary man who relies on the cold, uncaring hand of the government to push him through to the end of each day, is free. The limits on production must be abolished, the wage floors and price ceilings must be demolished, for it is only when every man has built his own road to prosperity can this country call itself free.

Speech by Governor Harry Byrd in Ottumwa, Iowa, 5 August 1940

The so-called Labor Empowerment Act will not survive the first day of Harry Byrd's Presidency, that I promise you today. My first act in office will be to destroy that law, to smash that tyrannical piece of Socialist thievery to pieces, that Satanic edict that has stolen so much from the hardworking, true American men that will stand against the tyranny of big government, whatever serpent’s skin it crawls into!

If there ever was conclusive proof that the Socialists don't give a damn about anyone outside New York or Chicago, it was that damned Act. The unions haven’t got a rat’s ass to give about the real America. It’s you who grow the food they eat, it’s you who milk the milk they drink, and how do they show their thanks? Every chance they get, they block up production, stop digging the coal that keeps you warm in December, and call their pet in the White House to pilfer the money from your pockets and put it in their fat, greasy hands. A vote for Harry Byrd is a vote against those big-lipped crooks, those treacherous cronies of the Socialist Party!

National Radio Address by President Norman Thomas, 18 August 1940

It should not surprise you to hear that I find practically all of Senator Taft’s words no less than appalling, repugnant, and outrageous; it is, after all, the grave mission of the Socialist Party to inoculate the people of this country against deceptions such as his, the lies and false promises that have upheld the corrupt verandas of capitalism for centuries. And yet, one of his statements has given me pause. While I would hardly call a drop of over eleven percent a “negligible” decrease in unemployment numbers, as Senator Taft has repeatedly done, it pains me to admit that in my first three-and-a-half years in this office, the plentiful fruits of socialism have not reached all Americans equally and fairly. An unacceptable high proportion of you remain jobless and destitute, and this can no longer be ignored.

Most of this is the fault of a Congress dominated by unscrupulous hacks, who for the past eighteen months have cared so little for their constituents as to shut down all legislation intended to relieve their economic distress, remaining loyal to the dictates of their own political cabals rather than to the pressing needs of the American people. But in part I must blame my own reluctance. Instead of pushing ahead with the changes the people of this country so desperately need, I have cowered, fearful of the backlash that would follow any true attempt to confront the corruption of the capitalist order. No longer.

If I have served you to your satisfaction, and if you judge it fit in November to renew my term in office, then my supreme task during my second term shall be to secure for the American people a right that is as crucial and unalienable today as the rights of speech and worship were one hundred and fifty years ago. When that circle of able statesmen enshrined the vital rights by which our nation is governed, they could not possibly have foreseen that the population they sought to protect from external oppression would be reduced, as they have been today, to capitalistic slavery--an institution that crushes its victims in the dual vice of subterranean wages and interminable hours, and whips the flesh from their backs with threats of jobless destitution. And if that circle were reconvened today, if its wise members saw a society such as this, where a man who cannot find a job is inextricably doomed to shiftless pauperism, they would require little deliberation to agree that it is the natural right of a working man to be employed. Any man who cannot secure from his corporate overlord a living wage or reasonable hours must have the choice to approach the state, and to find a vocation in the public service that allows his skills to be directed towards the general betterment of his peers and of our society.

If you have been betrayed by the promise that you may prosper if only given the liberty to find a job; if the threat of being tossed out on the street tomorrow brings you worse terror at night than any nightmare could; if you have spent years searching for even the most grueling, backbreaking job, and still watch your children’s stomachs tighten for the avarice of the monstrous corporate machine, I ask that you place your confidence in the aspirations of socialism. And if you have been failed time and time again by administrations content to stare at you in cold indifference, disdaining you for your station while offering you no routes of escape, know that the Thomas administration, in its second term, will make its peculiar mission to secure for all Americans the right--the fundamental, God-given right--to worthy employment.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

From British Diplomacy in the Second Great War, Melbourne University Publishing, 1956

Many today are of the conception that the Second Great War was, for the most part, a time of diplomatic lethargy on the part of the British government, that the bureaucrats in London were determined to gaze intently into their own navels while Britain’s Continental allies fell, one by one, under the German yoke. While there certainly were a few functionaries who urged inaction at many crucial points in the conflict, it is simply incorrect to assume that all ministers were collectively responsible for the weak military and diplomatic position in which Britain found itself by the end of 1940. Such an assumption is, frankly, unfair to the memories of the admirable statesmen whose tireless negotiations with various far-flung states not only helped to secure dependable sources of desperately-needed commodities for the British, but also did much to lay the groundwork for the international order that has existed since the War ended more than a decade ago.

By 1940, the most urgently-needed commodity for the British was oil, as the cold winter set in, shipping needs rose and fuel was desperately required to defend British cities from the vicious onslaught of German bombers. Before the great international crisis had set in, most of Britain’s petroleum had come from the rich fields of southern Iran. However, by that point Iranian oil was inaccessible: the Mediterranean had been effectively closed off to British shipping since the official declaration of war, while the route around Cape Horn was too long to be practical (and after the Fall of France, it became dangerous, since several of France’s African colonies had offered up their ports to the Kriegsmarine). Prewar plans for oil shortages had depended heavily on the cooperation of the United States, but it was quite clear that President Thomas would sell no oil to Britain as long as it was in a state of war. Thus it was that the British civil service was forced to search for alternative sources of petroleum, ones that could be accessed through the relatively safe shipping lanes across the North Atlantic.

Their first port of call was Venezuela. Since 1938, the South American nation had been the world’s largest source of petroleum, producing hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil per day and generating enormous profits for the government through hefty taxes and export duties. This mountainous profit made the regime of Eleazar Contreras so eager to strike deals with foreign buyers that Hugh Dalton, the President of the Board of Trade, had been able to hammer out a suitable agreement with the Venezuelan ambassador in only a few days in June of 1940. On the other hand, the taxes were so unwieldy that Britain, with its treasury and currency supplies severely strained under the conditions of war, could only afford to buy relatively small quantities of oil at a time, even with the lower rates codified as part of the trade agreement. The Foreign Office was therefore compelled to seek out an additional source of plentiful petrol, one which would not charge such steep rates for export; and, unfortunately, the only viable option seemed to be Mexico.

The prospect of approaching the Mexican government for a trade deal was be a thoroughly humiliating one, due to the hostile circumstances of Anglo-Mexican relations. In 1936, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas had nationalised the country’s huge oil industry, expropriating the property of several British petroleum companies in the process; in response, Britain had severed diplomatic relations with Mexico in a huff and angrily boycotted Mexican goods. And now, in 1940--not four years later--this once-haughty and condescending power was compelled to dispatch a young Hugh Gaitskell (then the Minister for Fuel and Power and a rising diplomat in the Foreign Office) to grovel for an agreement. Cárdenas took some mild amusement from the irony of the situation, offering few concessions during Gaitskell’s two official visits to create even a marginally advantageous deal for the British.

However, prospects for a favourable agreement soon improved significantly, for several reasons. The most immediate change was that in December of 1940, Cárdenas stepped down from the Presidency after a six-year term, and was succeeded by his Secretary of Defence, Agustín Olachea, who proved considerably more receptive to negotiations [1]. An equally important reason was the formation of the National Government in London, which brought the bright, young Conservative statesman Anthony Eden into government as Deputy Foreign Secretary, a position from which he quickly joined Gaitskell as an envoy to Mexico*. Eden’s involvement is significant because, along with his exceptional diplomatic skills, he brought to the negotiating table an impressively creative bargaining chip: the fruits of years of painstaking British military research.

By 1941, the Air Ministry had made significant strides in researching the nascent technology we now know as radar; British engineers had developed highly advanced magnetrons, and drawn up theoretical models for sophisticated radar-based air defence systems. Though military historians speculate that the Germans, French, and possibly even the Dutch were also experimenting with radar before the war began, the technology was yet undiscovered in Latin America, as most local strongmen were more interested in amassing personal wealth than with groundbreaking military research. However, President Olachea (a general given near-autocratic powers over a resurgent, industrialising nation seeking to protect the achievements of its Revolution by bolstering its national defences) was in a rather different position. Eden correctly guessed that the Mexican President would be so intrigued by a technology as strategically valuable as radar that he would be more than willing to accept a few trade arrangements in exchange for specimens of its technology and instructions on its implementation.

After the existence new technology was revealed, Olachea wasted no time in expressing his eagerness to a deal that would provide the British government with the rights to heavily discounted oil from the Mexican national corporation. Greenwood and Churchill (who, despite holding the normally-unimportant post of Deputy Prime Minister, was swiftly gathering administrative clout comparable to that of a co-Premier) were understandably averse to revealing key military secrets to a foreign government, especially one with no real history of positive relations with the United Kingdom; Eden and Gaitskell, however, assured their superiors that they would only share the most rudimentary aspects of the new technology, and not the special advancements made by Air Ministry researchers. The men were also troubled by the chance that Mexico might interfere with British interests in the Honduras, but when Gaitskell managed to extract from Olachea an promise to enter the war on the side of the British, this fear was assuaged enough for the heads of government to give their assent to the plan. On 28 February, 1941, the United Kingdom secured a reliable supplier of affordable oil as well as a new ally, as the Republic of Mexico declared war on the German Reich, the Kingdoms of Sweden and Italy, the Empire of Japan and their less-relevant allies.

[In-universe note:

*It was in this diplomatic capacity that Eden and Gaitskell first met, and sources indicate they got on exceptionally well from the very beginning. The mutual experience of these two young men precipitated the exceptional cooperation that would occur between the two men and their parties after the war.]


[1] IOTL Cárdenas handpicked a more civilian-inclined general, Manuel Avila Camacho, to succeed him as President. However, in the ATL, the deprivation and lack of effective law enforcement that has existed in the southwestern U.S. since the Garner years has led to a boom in cross-border smuggling, bootlegging and banditry in Mexico’s northern states; this forced Cárdenas to give the army larger autonomy in maintaining law and order in those regions, which in turn meant that when he was apportioning power to the various national interest groups within the PRM (Party of the Mexican Revolution, an old name of the PRI), he was compelled to give the army leaders a much larger share of governmental influence than OTL. This heightened influence compelled Cárdenas to select Olachea, the military’s favored man, over Avila to succeed him as President.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

From British Diplomacy in the Second Great War, Melbourne University Publishing

Thanks to the dual genius of Eden and Gaitskell, British access to petroleum was now (theoretically) secure. However, a new problem immediately came to light, far more fundamental and pressing than the issue of sourcing: The British were simply unable to safely transport large quantities of goods from far-off continents to their isolated island.

After France fell and Britain became, for all intents and purposes, isolated in Europe, many in Britain predicted with despair that the German Naval Forces might reduce Britain to subjugation, ruthlessly sinking British supply ships until the populace, starved from the lack of food and basic goods, clamored out for peace at whatever exorbitant cost the Germans might demand. Fortunately, however, by the middle of 1941, it became clear that the Kriegsmarine was incapable of posing a serious threat to British shipping: barely one of every nine British convoys was sunk by a German submarine, and the rest reached their destinations safely [1]. The problem, therefore, was not that British convoys were in significant danger of being sunk, but that there were simply not enough ships in the British fleet to furnish enough convoys to carry Britain through two years of continental siege.

The demilitarisation of the early years of the Greenwood ministry had left the Navy badly wanting of ships. When war was declared by the North Sea Pact in 1940, the inventory stood at fifty-nine destroyers, six battleships, and just over a dozen each of submarines and cruisers [2]—far insufficient to guard the transports carrying the million-and-a-half tonnes of food that would have to be shipped into Britain each month, to say nothing of the basic goods that would be needed to keep the gears of life spinning at even the most tedious grind. The merchant marine was huge and unarmed transport ships plentiful, but without escorts they were easy prey for German submarines. Initiatives were, naturally, underway to restore the Royal Navy to a useful size, but shipbuilding efforts were hindered by low availability of vital metals and the constant threat that German planes would bombard the shipyards. Thus, “radar diplomacy” was put to work once again.

Like Mexico, Brazil had never had exceptionally warm relations with Great Britain. In 1941, however, Brazil was under the leadership of Getúlio Vargas. Like Mexico’s Olachea, Vargas was an authoritarian strongman with ambitious goals of industrialising his vast agrarian nation, and one whose job security rested in considerable part on his ability to keep his military placated. And whatever reservations the British might have had about asking the help of a dictator only marginally less repressive than Mussolini, Gaitskell offered Vargas an attractive deal: The Brazilian government would build ships for the British. In return, rudimentary aspects of radar would be revealed to the Brazilian army; but more significantly, British engineers, blueprints and ship designs (which would be brought to South America to facilitate construction) would subsequently made available for Brazilian use, so that Brazil could build up its own naval forces using the same tools and standards that had allowed the Royal Navy to dominate the seas in decades past.

In addition to this help, Anthony Eden’s typical diplomatic creativity stepped in to sweeten the deal: he promised that, in the event of a North Sea victory, the U.K. would invest generously in projects to expand Brazil’s sparse railway network and grow its burgeoning steel industry. This, combined with the natural stimulation of the coastal economy that British shipbuilding contracts would create, made an offer that Vargas could hardly refuse, especially as relations with Brazil and the Axis had been steadily deteriorating since 1938, when the German government had expressed support for a clique of fascist putschists that had abortively attempted to remove Vargas from power. An agreement was finalised in April of 1941, and while Vargas never went as far as to declare war on the Axis Powers, he affirmed clearly that Brazil’s allegiances lay with the West.



[1] The German Navy is far weaker at this point ITTL than it was OTL. ITTL, before the outbreak of war, the stoppage of trade between Germany and Trotsky’s USSR gave Hitler far less in the way of petroleum and metal resources to use in preparation for the inevitable provocation, and he chose to invest most of it into the Army, correctly inferring that the war with Russia would be a land war. In addition, this continuous (and justified) prioritization of the army over the Navy has eaten up most of the resources that would have been used to construct more ships, particularly submarines. As a result, the Kriegsmarine is significantly reduced in strength, with the U-Boat program at one-fifth its OTL size, and those U-Boats that do go out hunting on the open seas rarely take the risk of threatening well-guarded convoys for fear of being sunk themselves. The problem for Britain in this version of World War II is not that their convoys keep getting sunk, but that they don’t have the warships to safely transport their convoys across the seas.

[2] In OTL 1939, Britain had in its possession 21 submarines, 82 destroyers and frigates, 21 cruisers, 4 aircraft carriers and 9 battleships, according to this site.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

“With over sixty-two percent of the vote in Texas tabulated, we arezzHHkshnow to make a vital prediczzHHkkksshh…”

Robert Trout’s wavering, nasally-tempered voice dissolved into a whirr of static just as the table of bleary-eyed men, tightly enveloped in wrinkled suit jackets, leaned in to enhance their perception. A multitone chorus of groans ensued as one of them leapt for the dial, frantically attempting to pluck the lost frequency from the aerial highway, cursing the fact that the secluded room was buried in a concrete catacomb that was good for maintaining the privacy of weary, important men on particularly intense nights, but less good for receiving clear radio signals. Finally, after several torturously vital seconds, the tinny voice reemerged:

“...SSSHHhhhuukkwenty-three votes in the electoral college will go to Governor Byrd. Once again…”

The repetition was obscured by another series of groans, which had subsided by the time Trout finished repeating the sparse outlines of the pronouncement. It wasn’t that the men were despairing of the results of the ongoing election; in fact, the night’s events had been highly encouraging (the many politicians both within and without the Socialist Party who had feared a wipeout for President Thomas were stunned at the announcement that he had swept the Midwest, including Senator Taft’s own Ohio, while holding on to the key states of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York), but most of the occupants of the table had little energy left to process the finer details of the result: it was almost two hours after midnight by now, and not one of the weary men gathered around the table had seen more than an hour or two of sleep since the previous morning.

A figure rose abruptly from the table: “I’m heading home.”

Albert Goldman, Attorney General of the United States, was saluted by a few distracted hands as he departed the stale room, rummaging through a sparse coat rack in a momentary search for his winter jacket. Goldman was still struggling to understand Washington’s rather musty November climate; he’d only moved out from Chicago in June, and was now experiencing for the first time the alternating frigid and tepid autumn temperatures of reclaimed swampland.

Most of the department heads, in fact, were new to the area; President Thomas had spent the latter half of 1940 quietly wheeling out members of his tripartisan cabinet and replacing them with loyal Socialists. By the time Goldman had replaced Burton Wheeler as Attorney General, George Norris had already been swapped out for Jack Reed as Secretary of State, and Tucker Smith had been replaced as Treasury Secretary by Lou Fraina (and promptly reinstalled in Bob LaFollette’s old post as the Secretary of War). Some department heads had kept their posts—John Lewis, the immensely popular Secretary of Labor, had been retained, if only because his removal would likely have caused every miner in the country to go on simultaneous strike—but even he was losing influence every month to Bill Weinstone, the Head of the Socialist Party’s Confederation of Labor, who had considerable power in coercing Socialist-affiliated unions to follow the Party line. [1]

Even Fiorello LaGuardia, whose voice had been among the chief guiding ones in Thomas’s White House for quite some time, had found himself dispatched to Italy as ambassador, where his diplomatic talents might be put to better use assisting American citizens in a war-torn country. Thomas had harbored profound reservations about any action that would imply recognition of a fascist state, but Earl Browder, Thomas’s private secretary, had made the reasonable argument that a truly neutral country would afford equal recognition to all belligerent parties, regardless of the system by which their governments were run[2]. So, to mirror John Williamson in London and Ray Robins in Moscow, LaGuardia was sent to Rome, far removed from the President he had expended so much breath advising.

Not that Thomas had been left without counsel, of course; in the preceding year, in fact, Earl Browder and Bill Foster, the Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party, had become instrumental in helping the President maintain close links with his country and his Party. In fact, Thomas had only begun to rearrange his cabinet once Browder had convinced him that he could never institute an irreversible socialist agenda by cooperating with a clique of bourgeois moderates; and it had been on Foster’s urging that Thomas had adopted a radical platform during the present campaign (the idea of securing for the people a right to gainful employment had been Foster’s, and, if the people had seen it fit to reelect him to office, Thomas was expecting to rely rather heavily on Foster’s counsel in order to get it passed.)

Now, as the precise figures of the Texan vote trickled in a tinny stream from the radio, Bill Foster briefly considered using some sort of discrete hand signal to beckon Earl Browder outside for a private discussion, but he quickly realized that the two other inhabitants of the room were too concerned with maintaining their own consciousness to listen to a pair of politicians’ election night chatter. He stalked over to Browder’s chair, sat down beside him and posed the grimly vital question: “Can we still win this, Earl?”

“We might,” Browder replied, grumbling half from uncertainty and half from weariness as he put down the pencil and paper he’d been fumbling with. “We lost Texas, but we did sweep the Midwest, and we’ve won New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. If California swings our way too, we’ll have a majority two in the electoral college.”

A majority of two? fretted Foster. In that case, any obstructionist pair of bourgeois electors can sabotage the election if they want. The last thing Browder wanted was a hung electoral college. The Socialist Party had lost control of the House of Representatives in the 1938 midterms, and neither of the other two parties had an outright majority; but in the even of a hung college, he could easily see them reaching an agreement to elevate either of their own candidates to the White House, for no other reason than to block President Thomas from his rightful second term. He momentarily pushed the thought from his mind, not wishing to burden himself with more stress on this incredibly stressful night. “We’ve won Indiana, too, haven’t we?” inquired Foster, his memory somewhat impaired by the thirty-one continuous hours he’d now spent without sleep.

“We have,” came Browder’s response. “A bit surprising, in fact, considering it went Republican last time, and so did Pennsylvania.”

“But we didn’t win majorities there,” Foster pointed out dejectedly.

“Not in either one,” he confirmed, glancing back down at the figures he’d copied onto the sheet of paper. “The votes aren’t all counted yet, but the last prediction said we’re set to win around 35 percent in Indiana—Taft got about 33 percent, Byrd got 28. It seems we’ve fared better in Pennsylvania: 39 for us, 30 for Byrd, 27 for Taft.”

“So,” analyzed Foster as he attempted to kick his sleep-deprived mind into a state of some marginal usefulness, “If the right-wing vote weren’t split, we’d be getting trounced.”

Browder halted, not having considered that rather dismaying interpretation of the night’s events. “I suppose so,” he admitted, abandoning the weary optimism that had illuminated much of the evening. He tried to remember the more precise details of the Midwestern vote: he’d been practically ecstatic when Ohio had rejected its own Senator in favor of President Thomas, but, as he now recalled, nearly every Socialist vote in that state had been cast in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, or some other industrial town. If Byrd’s aggressive populism hadn’t stolen so much of the rural vote from Senator Taft, Browder realized, Thomas would almost certainly have lost the state and its 26 votes in the electoral college. In fact, Browder recalled with growing distress, several of the states that had swung for Thomas that night had gone Socialist only through a precarious bisection of the conservative vote: Baltimore had come out almost entirely for Thomas, while just enough rural Marylanders had voted for Taft to rob Governor Byrd of his plurality and swing the state red. The same had happened in Missouri, and from what the radio had revealed so far about the vote figures in California, it seemed the rural vote there was being split in a similar fashion.

“In the cities, we’re unbeatable,” Foster reminded his colleague, “but in the boondocks, we haven’t got a leg to stand on. Which means if the two fascist parties decide to discard their negligible differences and start running joint candidates, we’ve got no hope of winning anything statewide or nationwide unless we can ensure that every single worker in every sizable city—teamsters, welders, teachers, bureaucrats, elevator operators—votes straight-ticket Socialist in every possible election.”

Foster’s whispery tone did nothing to soften the implications of his words, which left an ominous vacuum in the air as they dissipated. Browder responded just as a cheerful musical interlude from the radio (interspersed with cantankerous bouts of static nonsense) threatened to suck the gravity from the discussion: “We’ve got most of the unions in the palms of our hands—well, you do, at least,” Browder pointed out, needlessly stressing the formal distinction between his own high-ranking position in the public service and Foster’s supreme position within the Socialist Party hierarchy. “Most of the industrial and public workers already vote Socialist anyway, and with a bit of nudging from the top, the politically rebellious workers can certainly be persuaded into the fold: once they’ve been passed over for promotion, relegated to physically-demanding jobs, and denied enough sick leave, I expect they’ll see reason and start casting their votes for progress and change.”

Foster sank back into his chair and pressed his hands to his temples, as though trying to complete a cerebral circuit. “If we lose this election and Labor Empowerment gets repealed, that sort of arrangement might be our only chance to keep the unions useful and keep ourselves powerful. Lord knows Byrd or Taft won’t lose any time stomping union power into oblivion.”

Browder was quick to reassure his colleague. “Well, if there’s a grain of sincerity buried somewhere in their constant talk of states’ rights, we might be able to shield the unions from the worst of it all. We’ve got majorities in eight state legislatures and the governorships in a few more, so if the union charters get revoked, we should be able to preserve the unions’ arbitration powers against management in a few key states, at least. And union power means Socialist power, provided we use it right.”

“And we’ll have no hope in hell of using it right without discipline—ruthless, unforgiving party discipline,” Foster quickly affirmed, his words becoming more intense and determined as he spoke. “This Party has been tolerating weakness and factionalism for plenty long enough. For all the times the moderates and the Weatherers nod their heads about the need for revolutionary change, they’ll be the first ones to run screaming when it’s time to get off their permissive asses and make it happen. If we lose this election, our only hope of surviving the next four years is to lay down a strong party line and enforce it—and deviance must be punished in everyone, from the boss of a thirty-man Allegheny coal miners’ union to Deputy Executive Secretary of the Party. If we allow those weak-willed pacifists to spread their pansy ideas around, they’ll do nothing but impede the natural course of human progress. I’d say it’ll soon be time to start permanently purifying the Party ranks, from top to bottom.”

A noticeable pause ensued “That’s if we lose,” Browder finally said, “but what if we win?”

Foster’s expression brightened, almost imperceptibly. “If we win, we do one thing: consolidate. Our objective will be the same—to squeeze every Red vote we can out of the industrial regions, and to impose unbreakable party discipline—but if Thomas holds White House another four years, that’s our chance to make it permanent. We must entrench labor authority so thoroughly into the fabric of this country’s legal system that no reactionary President, if one should ever ascend to the presidency again, will be able to disentangle America from the fibers of socialism. The right to employment is the key to our enduring success.”

Foster would have gone on to mention that particular document in which the American people’s most integral rights were enshrined, but radio, finding a convenient moment to interject, leapt forth from its rhythmic repose:

“…I have just been informed that enough votes have been counted in California to predict, with reasonable certainty, which crKKshzh will carry the state and its twenty-two votes in the electoral college. Given the very close-run nature of this election and the varying popularity of Socialist Governor Upton Sinclair, it has up until now proved imposZZZZHhzzksshh……brzzZZlifornia would swing; but with seventy percent of the vote now countered, CBS’s expert panel will, in a few moments, be prepared to make a projection. WhileBBBRSssszzzh…zzHinform our listeners that, if President Thomas carries this state, its twenty-two electoral votes will bring his share in the electoral college up to 267—a majority of two, which, while very thin, would seem sufficient to guarantee his re-election.”

Foster and Browder dropped their discussion and leaned in frantically to hear the radio; even the other two occupants of the room, who had been trapped in states of dubious consciousness for the better part of the preceding hour, managed to scrounge up enough vitality to inch closer to the receiver, just as a new voice, older and with a discernible Brooklyn Accent, replaced that of Bob Trout.

“Of the approximately two million, nine hundred thrrzZZHrKkhsthave heretofore been counted in the state of CaliforrzzhHHJZzz…” Foster’s hand raced for the dial, only to be pulled back midway through as the pale voice was reasserted. “…rzzzhhshshundred thousand, eight hundrzzhs…sjzzhhshhper cent, to President Thomasshhzzz…zghhzzhhjhas receivvvvmmmShhKZz……” The tired voice of the announcer fought valiantly against the interference, but only a few brief gasps of his speech managed to scale the wall of static: “grSHShshsksix-hundred and four, or thirty-tSHHszzhHhszz……szzhenator Taft. We can now confidently predict the state as a victosssHHHShshHHH…”

Foster and Browder glanced at each other, flustered. Who in the hell had won?

Nearly five thousand miles away from that room, men as young as sixteen and as old as sixty-seven, men who at best were only passingly aware of Norman Thomas and his position in the world, were too busy dodging German bullets to care much about the confusion about two committed communists on the other side of the globe.

[1] Since the passage of the Labor Empowerment Act, most unions across the country have chosen to simply affiliate themselves directly with the Socialist Party, since whenever that Party is in government they have more direct power over Congress and greater bargaining power against management.
[2] Browder dispensed this particular piece of wisdom shortly after advising the President to endorse William Foster for the position of Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party.

---------

Dang, that took a while, didn't it? Sorry guys, I had a bunch of scheduling (and a few motivational issues) that kept me from posting, in addition to spending many collective hours scouring Wikipedia for information on every American Stalinist in the 1940s. I should be back on schedule soon.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

From World History in the Early Twentieth Century by H.W. van Loon, 1952

The beginning of 1941 was the zenith of the Third Reich. The German triumph at Minsk in September of 1940, coming as it did after a string of consecutive victories against the Russians in their own territory, convinced many observers both in Britain and America that Hitler had finally turned the tide of the war decisively in his favor, and put an end to the fluctuating tug-of-war that had obliterated much of Poland in the first two years of the conflict. The relative speed by which France, Belgium, and Holland were brought to their knees seemed to prove that German military and industrial strength was as high as it had been in October of 1938, while the Russians' failure to mount a counterattack made it seem as though their ability to fight had been drained after two years of attrition. However, events soon showed that the truth was precisely the opposite.

Germany was still plagued by the fundamental obstacle that had held it back during the First Great War: due to its geography, it was simply unable to generate enough petroleum and food within its borders to fuel the conquest of an entire continent. The most reliable source of petroleum had been lost in 1939 when Codreanu's Romania fell to the Russians; and Hitler's plan to alleviate food shortages by pillaging food from occupied areas might have worked at least partially, but German control over the Polish breadbasket was never secure enough for large amounts of food to be extracted until the autumn of 1940, by which point nearly all of the region's arable land had been ravaged beyond productivity. Food shortages on the home front worsened as a large proportion of agricultural workers were drafted into the Heer or patched off into manufacturing jobs, uniting rural farmers with the starving urban poor in silent opposition to the war. While outright resistance was impossible amid the ruthless persecution of the Nazi regime, the German nation found itself slowly being sapped of the fanatical spirit that Hitler had instilled into it. These deficiencies slowly ate away at the foundations of Nazi Germany, unnoticed by the outside world as it turned the regime into a sinkhole ready to collapse at the most unexpected moment.

The Fall of France, while taken at the time as a sign of German invincibility, was in fact the beginning of the end for the German war effort. German strategy in the east had always relied heavily on the use of tanks, planes and mechanization to offset the large numbers of men Trotsky threw against the front; constant research and improvement was required to stay technologically ahead of the Russians, whose research programs were never far behind those of the Germans. Hitler's insistence on a quick rush to Paris meant that by the start of 1941, about half of Germany's strategic petroleum reserves had been depleted, while most of its armored divisions (and with a few million of its men) were busy consolidating the hold on France, leaving the eastern front sorely underdefended.

Meanwhile, the months-long reprieve in fighting gave Russia's machine of state ample time to readjust its organs, like the components of a mighty telescope, and point them all toward the objective of decisive victory. Economic plans were modified to refocus production on artillery, armored vehicles, tanks and airplanes; experimental, new designs for sleek fighter-bombers went into production. The bureaucrats charged with administering the war, relieved for once of the constant need to raise and redirect new divisions, used their newfound spare time to resolve logistical problems and improve the Army's supply lines. Almost overnight, it seemed, a rhythmic coordination emerged between Russia's military and industry: steady currents of armaments and equipment flowed from the country's mostly-unharmed industrial hubs, and the millions of tons of grain that had been stockpiled for the winter were removed, in edible condition, from their warehouses. The main obstacle in delivering these supplies to the front was that Minsk, Belorussia's most crucial railway hub, lay in German hands; but by March of 1941, fighting had still not recommenced, and the Red Army had amassed an oversupply of tanks and artillery, new recruits were well-trained, and seasoned veterans rested and ready to fight [1].

It is much less surprising to us, then, than it was to most of the world when, on March 8, 1941, multiple tank divisions smashed into the German defenses surrounding Minsk, encircled the city in two days, retook it within a week, and proceeded forth almost without slowing down. Before their deaths, local German commanders frantically attempted to sabotage the railway hubs, but the damage was quickly repaired, so that by the eighteenth, 1.2 million men, four thousand tanks, and twenty thousand pieces of artillery were in a seemingly unstoppable rush westward under the command of General Vasily Blyukher, eagerly pursued by trains filled with ample provisions, supplies and munitions.

The German High Command scrambled to move its assets from France, but by the time reserves finally started to arrive in April, the Baltic states and most of eastern Poland had already been recaptured and German units were practically in a state of continuous retreat. Here the Russian drive slowed down somewhat due to the poor quality of the railroads after years of continuous fighting, but nevertheless the Red Army continued expanding westward while the Germans were largely helpless to put up real resistance, starved of fuel and forced to keep much of their troop strength in France to bolster the occupation. The Russians under Blyukher captured Lublin on April 17 and Bialystok on April 29 after token resistance from the local German garrisons, and from thence initiated a two-pronged invasion of Warsaw, which they reached in the second week of May; by this point, some of the Russian's momentum had worn off and reinforcements had begun to arrive at last to bolster the German defenses, but there nevertheless was little contest; by May 26, the capital of the old Polish Republic had changed hands for the last time (though one-sixth of the city had at that point been destroyed by the repeated invasions).

Colonel Pavel Belov, whose attack on the Germans near Bromberg put an end to any hope of a German counterattack during the summer of 1941.​

Danzig fell two weeks later on June 10, and after crossing the River San at the city of Stalowa, the ancient capital of Krakow was captured by troops under Colonel Aleksandr Baraulin on the last day of June. Just as the Dnieper-Vistula Offensive, as it was called, drew to a close, the Germans were set back by a stroke of true military inspiration. Shortly after the fall of Warsaw, Russian intelligence reported the presence of two panzer divisions under German General Kempf, closing in on the riverside city of Bromberg with the intent to split off into a pincer formation and attack the natural salient formed by the River Vistula. In response, Russian Colonel Pavel Belov led the single tank division under his control into a daring charge straight into the oncoming enemy. The two opposing forces met 20 miles west of Bromberg on June 4; Belov surprised Kempf by smashing into his center on and destroying it with minimal casualties, before veering sharply to the north and wrecking one of the arms of the pincer in a stunning flank attack. The south pincer was surrounded and destroyed the following day, the Germans lost over 600 tanks, and their ability to counterattack along the new front line was neutered for months. In just three months of fighting, the Russians had reversed two years' worth of Germany's gains along the eastern front. By June of 1941, a turning point in the war had been reached: The image of German military invulnerability had been seriously compromised, and it would never approach recovery.


[1] In trying to explain why the USSR seemed to jump from a low point of weakness in 1940 to an explosive burst of strength in 1941, historians will broadly come to the same conclusion as van Loon: That the USSR always had the industrial strength to put up a real fight against Germany, but its administrative apparatus was too disorganized at the beginning of the war, and the central leadership was too distracted during the first two years to get the war machine working right. The months-long reprieve from 1940-41, therefore, provided the crucial break in active fighting the Soviets needed to get their train on track. Of course, the real reason is because of Marshal Tukhachevsky's grand strategy: he and the Grand Staff had been waiting for Germany to invade France, so that they would have a pretext to push their forces all the way to the Atlantic. Now that France is out of the game, they're kicking the war effort into high gear in an effort to steamroll Germany and the rest of Europe once and for all.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

From The Second Great War: A Picture History, Houghton Mifflin, 1954

Up until 1941, the Kingdom of Hungary's policy toward the war had been one of uneasy neutrality. An authoritarian regency dominated by extreme nationalist elements, Hungary's government and populace were far more sympathetic to the Germans than to the Russians, but a fear of open warfare with either power had up to this point discouraged the country's monarchical leader, Regent Miklos Horthy, from formally picking a side. This hesitation was reinforced in mid-1940 after two of Hungary's neighbors, Czechoslovakia and Romania, fell respectively to the Russians and Germans. Horthy's wariness of an alliance with Germany did not fade until the Fall of France, after which Germany appeared unassailable.

Now assured of a German victory, Horthy gladly reached out to German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath. Clandestine negotiations had nearly concluded for an official declaration of war against the Anti-Fascist Coalition when the Russians launched the Dniepr-Wisla Offensive, driving the Germans back hundreds of miles in a matter of three months; within days of the initial attack, Hungary withdrew from the negotiations, and by the time the Offensive concluded, eastern Poland was solidly in Russian hands, and Horthy sought to erase all evidence that he had ever seriously considered an alliance with Nazi Germany. Therefore, when Russian Foreign Commissar Alexandra Kollontai delivered an ultimatum—submit to an occupation by the Red Army, or face a full-scale invasion—the Regent reluctantly accepted, and ordered his military to yield to Russian forces.

Miklos Horthy, Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary.
​

While part of Hungary's military obeyed the edict out of loyalty to the Regent, most of the Army promptly ignored Horthy's edict. When Russian troops under Colonel-General Georgy Zhukov came pouring through the Romanian border on June 27, they resisted fiercely, mounting a surprising defeat of Russian forces outside the city of Szeged on July 6 and yielding Brettenbach to the invaders the same week after inflicting heavy casualties.​

Alas, the brave resistance was not to last. Enraged that Horthy would betray Germany in such a way (and overlooking both the fact that no formal alliance with Hungary had been finalized, and that the Wehrmacht, still reeling from its crushing defeat in Poland, was in no position to invade yet another country), Hitler ordered an invasion of Hungary from eastern Austria, Operation Albatross, that commenced on July 8. This was a dismal failure: Austria, surrounded by heretofore unthreatening territories, had not been heavily militarized, and the already-weakened Germany had just finished transferring most of its free units from France to the Vistula, leaving few with which to conduct an invasion. German planners seemed to assume that the Hungarian military would welcome the invaders as allies against the Communist threat; however, they evidently failed to realize that to a significant portion of the Hungarian Army, a German invasion was barely, if at all, preferable to a Russian one.

General Geza Lakatos, leader of the contingent of the army that had remained loyal to Horthy, managed to attract more than a quarter of the rebellious units to defect from the anti-Horthy faction and travel to the western border to engage with the encroaching Germans, led by General Wilhelm Willemer. Though they took early losses, including the cities of Sopron on July 11 and Gyor three days later, their situation improved by the end of the month, when the Germans reached the country's eastern mountains and their momentum petered out. Meanwhile, the loss of so many units weakened resistance to the Russians as their tanks swept across the country's western plain; approximately 62,000 resisting troops under General Dome Sztojay were rounded up and defeated on a plateau near Debrecen on July 21, and when Russian troops approached the capital of Budapest, Horthy and his loyalists unenthusiastically let them enter the city unmolested, allowing them to proceed westward across the mountain passes (still held by Lakatos and his men) to push the Germans back to their own borders. By mid-August, the whole of the country was under Russian occupation, the Germans had been forced into retreat over yet another new front, and the Russians were poised to invade the former Czechoslovakia.

The push into eastern Slovakia was perhaps slightly more difficult than the Russian General Command anticipated. Anxious to remove any salient through which the Germans might attack east of the Vistula, Russian control over Hungary had not yet been fully consolidated when Zhukov's men in Gyor and Akhromeyev's men in Krakow embarked at the start of August to strangle the puppet “Slovak State”.

As it turned out, there was little need for such urgency. Slovakia had had a sizable German troop presence at the start of 1941, but most of the units had been sent to the Polish front in the spring, and after Hungary was occupied and Albatross was unceremoniously repulsed, the German High Command decided that the region was as good as lost and recalled most of their remaining troops to Bohemia. Therefore, there were few Germans left to oppose the invasion when it commenced, and the only real source of resistance came from the moribund security forces of the client state itself (whose authority and strength had been negligible even before the evacuating Germans stripped the land of most anything of military or strategic utility). The “Slovak Militia” was dealt with in short order, with many poorly-armed units simply surrendering immediately upon encountering Soviet troops. By the start of September, the Russian presence had fanned out through the region, the only serious opposition being nationalist partisans whose activities were little more than a recurring nuisance to the new occupiers.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

From World History in the Early Twentieth Century by H.W. van Loon, 1954

The Red Army spent the late summer of 1941 consolidating the gains it had made in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. Russian planners, Trotsky included, were anxious about allowing the Germans enough time to regroup and mount a counteroffensive, and did not want to wait for very long before renewing their attacks. Before pressing further west into German territory, however, the General Command made a weeks-long hesitation to attend to a country that had seen no action thus far in the war: the Kingdom of Bulgaria.

If you forgot that Russia was nominally allied to Greece, don't fret; so little cooperation, military or otherwise, came of the partnership that even Trotsky seemed to have forgotten about the pact his emissaries had signed in 1938. If it had indeed slipped his mind, however, he was soon reminded—not by the Greeks themselves, but by a secret cable intercepted in mid-August on its way from Berlin to Sofia. The message was simple, and several like it had been sent in the preceding three years to no tangible effect: it was a German attempt to entice the Bulgarians to declare war on the Greeks (and, by extension, the Russians) in return for promises of Greek territory after war's end. At first glance, this resembles a desperate, pointless attempt by the Germans to gain an ally at a point when the winds of war were very clearly not blowing in their favor. However, there was a clear logic behind the proposal, as the Russians would soon realize.

Even after the secret telegram was shared with him, Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas was hesitant to ask the Russians for assistance. Firstly, there was no reason to expect that the Bulgarians would actually declare war on a Russian ally, due to the clear threat of Russian conquest (as shown by the examples of Hungary and Slovakia). Secondly, the failure of the Italian Army to defeat Greece had convinced Metaxas that his country would be able to repulse a Bulgarian invasion without any outside help.* Thirdly, Metaxas was justifiably apprehensive about allowing the Red Army to come anywhere near the borders of Greece itself; even then, Trotsky's designs on the Russian-occupied territories were obvious to the fiercely anti-communist Prime Minister, and he had no desire for his homeland to be invaded and converted into a communist puppet state.

Nevertheless, despite no indication that the Bulgarians would acquiesce to German demands, the Russian General Command seized upon the opportunity to absorb yet another new territory. After publishing the telegram and kicking up a fuss about “maintaining security on [their] own borders and supporting a vital ally”, the General Command delivered an ultimatum to Bulgarian Prime Minister Pencho Zlatev on August 17: submit to occupation by the Red Army or face an invasion. It was quite similar to the ultimatum levied against Horthy in Hungary the previous month, but Zlatev, a military man through and through, refused to heed its example. He refused the Russian demands on August 19 and prepared his forces for invasion from occupied Romania, which came two days later and predictably resulted in the routing of the small and poorly-equipped Bulgarian Army. Two weeks later, Russian units were besieging the capital of Sofia and rolling through the surrounding countryside when the General Command realized that they had marched headlong into a German trap.

On 5 September 1941, two German divisions slammed into the Russian-occupied port city of Danzig, captured it the following day with high casualties for the Russians, crossed the Vistula with little difficulty, and proceeded southward to ensnare Russian garrisons further south along the river's eastern bank. With most of the Red Army's units outside Poland busy in Hungary, Slovakia or Bulgaria, it seemed in the first few days of the renewed offensive that there were no spare units to confront the resurgent Germans; were it not for the army that was already being amassed outside Warsaw, all of the Russians' summer gains may well have been reversed.

As it happened, the German thrust was blunted near Marienburg on September 17, though it took until November for the Russians to beat back the determined Germans and restore their pre-offensive position. Once again, the Wehrmacht had been repulsed and losses recouped, and more German reserves had been wasted on a fruitless offensive. However, the winter was setting in, and Operation Concomitant—the planned Russian drive toward the River Oder—was delayed by several months. The General Command had learned its lesson: no more engaging troops in uninvolved countries until Germany and its armies had been well and truly dealt with.


*This was a rather unrealistic expectation on Metaxas' part. While the Greek Army under his' authoritarian hand had indeed managed to fend off the Italian Army for over a year, this was largely due to the incompetent leadership of Mussolini and his generals, and Greece had been bled white by the arduous defense. If the Army had had to face an invasion alone in 1941, even from as negligible a military power as Bulgaria, its armies likely would have crumbled from lack of morale, manpower and supply.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

I promised that this update would bring us up to date on both Australia and New Zealand, but I figured that 64 updates' worth of total neglect warrants a heftier dose of exposition than can be covered in a single update. So, here's part one of how Australia's been doing:

The Sydney Morning Herald, March 24, 1930

KNOX TO BE APPOINTED GOVERNOR OF N.S.W.

New South Wales Premier Thomas Bavin has announced that he will advise the King to appoint Adrian Knox, Chief Justice of the High Court, as Governor of New South Wales. Knox, 66, announced just days ago that he was retiring from the Court after over a decade of distinguished service, and most observers expected he would retire from public life. However, when asked whether or not he intends to serve as Governor, he responded in the affirmative. Knox will be the first Governor in a long time not to come from the ranks of the British military; sources within the state government indicate that Bavin's initial preference for the post of Governor was Sir Philip Game of the Royal Navy, but personal differences caused the Premier to pick another distinguished statesman for the job. [1]

October 26, 1930

LANG GAINS FIFTEEN SEATS, FORMS GOVERNMENT

In yesterday's elections to the state Assembly, Mr. J. T. Lang, Leader of the Labor Party's New South Wales branch, led his Party to a profit of 15 seats, winning a majority of 9 and setting himself up to become the next Premier of New South Wales. [2]


From Jack Lang: The Pied Piper of Canberra by Ordney Brigstocke, 1953

The Great Depression hit Australia hard, just as it hit every other wealthy country in the world. The highly profitable export market, which had sustained so much prosperity in the preceding decade, practically disappeared, rendering millions of Australians unemployed and removing billions of pounds from the market. As a result, prices plummeted, deflation reached crippling levels and most forms of commercial activity ground almost to halt. Faced with unemployment rates of nearly 30% and a stagnating economy, the newly-elected Labor government of Prime Minister James Scullin had to find a way out of the crisis.

The solution they came up with was harsh on the millions of Australians who had been rendered destitute by the financial collapse. Acting on the advice of British banker Otto Niemeyer, Scullin urged a plan to pay off the country's debts, balance the national budget, and further deflate the pound; this program would require massive reductions in government spending (including cuts to salaries and pensions for government workers), as well as a sharp tax increase. Needless to say, Scullin's plan was unpopular among the common people, which looked much more favourably upon the proposals of Premier Lang and his government in New South Wales.

Lang was fiercely opposed to austerity measures. He had won the premiership of New South Wales in 1930 on a promise to deal with the Depression, and his plans drew upon the ideas of the British economist John Maynard Keynes; whereas Scullin's plan called for zealous repayment of Australia's foreign debt, Lang urged that interest repayments on all government borrowings be sharply reduced, and that the resulting savings be channeled directly into the economy through the still-functioning banking system. The most inventive aspect of Lang's plan was the abandonment of the Gold Standard for what he called the “Goods Standard”, whereby the amount of money in circulation would be determined not by a fixed quantity of gold, but by the total value of all goods produced by the Australian economy.

Bowing to pressure from conservative elements of the Labor Party, Scullin resigned as Prime Minister on 14 June 1931. He was replaced by his Treasurer, Joseph Lyons, who promptly paid off the foreign debt and then demanded that Lang turn over New South Wales's share of the cost. As the new Prime Minister discovered, however, Lang was as bold as he was innovative. Rather than simply surrendering NSW's money to Canberra, Lang withdrew the state's entire budget and held it in cash at Trades Hall, where the federal government could not access it. A political showdown had begun between Lang and Lyons, and the stakes were high: Lyons was risking a large portion of his political capital within the Labor Party and outside of Canberra, and Lang was risking his entire political career.

Lyons at first seemed in the superior position, as he had a highly influential ally: New South Wales Governor Adrian Knox. Knox was a veteran of Australia's conservative tradition, and held Lang's bold defiance to be illegal (which, in Lyons' defence, they were). More importantly, as a former Chief Justice of the High Court, he knew that as His Majesty's anointed representative, he had the constitutional power to dismiss the Premier and call for a new state election. No viceregal official had ever exercised such a power before in the country's history, but it looked increasingly like he would set yet another constitutional precedent when, suddenly[...]


The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August, 1931

GOVERNOR KNOX DEAD!

The Honourable Adrian Knox—Governor of New South Wales, Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, and respected jurist and legal scholar—was found dead this morning in his residence at Governor House, having died peacefully in his sleep. [3]


From Jack Lang: The Pied Piper of Canberra by Ordney Brigstocke, 1953

[…] With no Governor to dismiss the rebellious Premier, Lyons' most convenient asset had disappeared. He was minimally concerned, however, because his second-best option—suing Lang's government in the High Court—remained open. The Court was still dominated by conservative justices, and was sure to take Canberra's side on this legally precarious issue; perhaps it would appear unsettling for the Commonwealth to be so heavy-handed in imposing its will on a single state, but, Lyons reasoned, these were extraordinary times, and extraordinary measures were required. Unfortunately for Lyons, he had underestimated his rival once again. He barely had time to publicise his intentions before the floor dropped out from under him: in a hastily-organized confidence motion, 11 of New South Wales's 20 Labor MPs (whose loyalties lay more with Lang than with the seemingly aloof Lyons) voted with the opposition to bring down the government. All of a sudden, Lyons' attentions were focused solely on the forthcoming election, and he had no time to spare for the rebellious Lang.

The Premier did not waste the time he'd bought himself. Rather than run a formal campaign, Lang chose to institute his policies, and turn the election in his state into a referendum on his leadership style. As such, the day after the election was announced, all £18 million were hastily withdrawn from the Trades Hall building and spirited to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, whose cooperative leaders quickly converted it into credit and distributed it to smaller banks, businesses and individuals throughout the state. At first, Lang's approach was unpopular, with Lyons' newly-formed, fiscally conservative United Australia Party (a merger of the National Party, the Australian Party, and some dissident Labor MPs) polling highest in New South Wales during the first weeks of the 43-day campaign. However, midway through the campaign, the state economy started to pick up, and continued to rise as commerce revived under the torrent of government spending. As election day neared, unemployment levels began to slowly drop, as businesses started up again and hired back old employees, and a hint of recovery graced the shores of New South Wales.

When voters went to the polls on 15 October, 1931, they turned in an echoing endorsement of Lang and his policies: all but two of NSW's 28 federal constituencies returned Labor MPs, rejecting several former Laborites who had thrown in their lot with Lyons' UAP. The effect of Lang's governance rattled throughout the country, as several Labor candidates picked up seats in conservative areas. When the dust cleared away, no party had the 38 seats necessary for a majority: the new UAP held 33 seats, Labor (under the interim leadership of Ted Theodore) had dropped to 29, and Earle Page's agrarian Country Party had 13. Lyons had to sort out the formation of a coalition with Page's caucus and pass a budget before turning his attentions back to Lang, by which point nearly three months had passed since Lang had injected much of New South Wales's treasury into the state economy. When Lyons' new government demanded the money, Lang bared his empty hands and pointed to the signs of renewed growth in the New South Wales economy. The battle was over, and Lang had won.

Not that Lyons would forego his revenge. Within a month of the election, the case was appealed in the High Court, which quickly ruled against Lang, ordering that he resign his post as Premier and that new elections be held. Considering his work finished, Lang gladly stepped down on 16 November, handing the reins over to his political ally Jack Beasley, who handily won the subsequent state election with an increased majority of two seats (and governed in large part on the advice of Lang). Lang would not, however, stay out of politics for long: as the most popular Labor Party member in the country, he was moving up to the federal service.

A by-election was found for Lang in East Sydney, whose electors sent him to the House of Representatives in an enormous landslide. As an MP, Lang was quickly elected leader of the Labor Party against token opposition (Theodore, the caretaker leader of the federal party, chose not to contest the leadership). He was massively popular in his own state and in loyal Labor constituencies for his defiance of Lyons, and as Leader of the Opposition he showed no mercy, using his oratorial skills to periodically harangue Lyons about the suffering that continued in the country despite Lyons' “sensible” policies of recovery. As Beasley continued using NSW's somewhat limited capacity for deficit spending and the state economy continued to grow slowly but steadily, Labor Premiers were elected in Tasmania and Western Australia, cementing the party's dominance on the state level. Lyons rode his mandate to its maximum date of expiry, until finally, on 2 December 1934, elections were held. Aside from two seats gained by the Centre Party (which had been formed the previous year and had never yet contested a federal election), the result was predictable: a comfortable majority for Labor, and a mandate for the mustachioed Sydney firebrand. Jack Lang was the Prime Minister.


The Canberra Times, 12 February 1935

McKELL ANNOUNCES “NATIONAL RECOVERY PROGRAMME” TO CURB POVERTY, UNEMPLOYMENT

Treasurer William McKell announced yesterday the incumbent government's plan to address the country's pervasive problem of unemployment with an injection of over £210 million into the economy through Commonwealth Bank credit, and transition from a monetary policy based around the Gold Standard to one determined by the gross economic output of the country, as delineated by Prime Minister Lang during the recent electoral campaign. Addressing criticism by the Opposition that this "National Recovery Programme", as the Treasurer called it, will compel the federal government to spend more money than it controls and may destabilise the nation's fiscal system, McKell stated that now is “a time of crisis in Australia”, pointed out that unemployment rates remain high at 16%, and called the plan “moderate and restrained” relative to the country's needs.


From Economic Policies of the Australian Labor Party, 1901—1941, Melbourne University Press

After some modifications mandated by dissatisfied Senators, the National Recovery Programme was eventually passed by Labor majorities in the House and Senate. The nation as a whole experienced what New South Wales had experienced four years prior: a clear, if erratic, decline in unemployment accompanied by a steady rise in economic productivity. The distribution of credit to needy firms and individuals added momentum to businesses that were just starting to grow anew after the contractions of 1929, and the flexible flow of currency afforded by the abandonment of the Gold Standard allowed that credit to be repaid at reasonable rates. The government was rewarded for its charity by generous purchases of bonds by the large financial institutions which benefited from the rises in commerce and investment. In addition, the inflated Pound facilitated the raising of both prices and wages; and although these increases were measured in their nominal rather than real values (meaning that many of the associated benefits were cancelled out by inflation), the raises imbued families with a sense of security that led them to increase their spending, further fueling the recovery. [4]

A flyer distributed in Brisbane in February of 1937

Australians:

Do you oppose the SOCIALISATION of your home country?

Do you fear the creeping influence of COMMUNISM upon your God-granted liberties?

Will you DEFEND your homeland against INVASION by uncivilised hordes of Orientals?

Do you believe that three more years of Labor tyranny could mean DISASTER for the
continued welfare of our national heritage?

Join the
CENTRE PARTY—
[5]

A free association of PATRIOTIC, CONSERVATIVE, WHITE Australians prepared to FIGHT
against the BOLSHEVISATION of Australia AT ANY COST.

Open meeting with address by Centre Party leader and respected solicitor Eric Campbell
22 February, Yeronga Memorial Park
ALL PATRIOTS WELCOME!
​

​

[1] IOTL, Game was appointed. ITTL, due to butterflies, he and Bavin had a falling out and a different man was picked on the spot.
[2] As OTL.
[3] IOTL, Knox died in 1932. Up to this point, everything described is OTL (except for some events happening a year earlier, Knox rather than Game being Governor of NSW, and Joseph Lyons becoming Prime Minister without an election).
[4] The author of this passage is somewhat biased, and doesn't paint a complete picture. While the economy does start to grow anew as Lang's Programme is administered, the lopsided doling out of credit benefits some firms more than others and prevents unemployment from dropping in a stable or reliable way. And while inflation makes it easier for debtors to pay off their debt, it eventually diminishes the effect of Lang's monetary injections as every million pounds is worth less than the last million pounds.
[5] These jackasses. Despite their name, they were anything but centrist: they were a far-right group organized to oppose Lang's Premiership of New South Wales, associated with the arch-conservative New Guard. Most of the members were right-wing businessmen and middle-class conservatives, but the leadership (Eric Campbell included) were died-in-the-wool fascists. They were never taken seriously in the mainstream political scene, were never active outside of New South Wales, never had a candidate win an election, and once Lang was dismissed in OTL they quickly faded into nothingness. Here, however, with Lang as Prime Minister and the Australian right frustrated and fractured, they're enjoying a speedy rise in popularity.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

Also, (rolls d20) come on, U.S. Election Results from 1940...

Crit fail, I'm afraid. Though that's coming quite soon. As for the update, here it is, as promised, modeled after an old World History textbook I had lying around! Not quite every month of alt-World War II is covered, but the rest will only take about half an update or so.


From World History: Perspectives on Humanity, McGraw-Hill Education, Toronto, 1958

Chapter 32, Pt. 2

Japan expanded its Asian Empire.

While the Germans suffered major reversals on the Polish front in the summer of 1941, the Japanese Empire set its sights southward. Japan had already been occupying Chinese territory for over a decade, and when Japanese soldiers had marched into the Chinese heartlands in 1937, military leaders in Tokyo believed that the vast country would soon be totally under their control. But by 1941, the renewed conflict had been dragging on for over four years. Japan's economy was stretched to the breaking point, and Japanese military leaders were growing alarmed at their dwindling supplies of iron, rubber, and tin. They began to eye the French and British colonies in Southeast Asia, where rich supplies of these resources lay.

On June 15, 1941, Japan invaded the French colony of Indochina. There was little resistance to the invasion; France had been under German domination since its capitulation in January, and Pétain's government in Bourges had little choice but to allow the invasion to proceed. The colonial capital of Saigon fell after only four days of fighting, followed by the southern port city of Saigon three days later. On June 22, after only a week of fighting, French forces in Indochina surrendered on orders from Pétain, and Japanese troops moved to occupy the interior highlands of Laos and Cambodia.

Japan's next target was the Kingdom of Siam. Siam had been an absolute monarchy under various dynasties for the preceding eight centuries, and by 1941, the Siamese military was divided into two factions: one that supported the absolute rule of King Rama VII and one that wanted to limit the King's powers with a written constitution [1]. The first faction wanted to resist the Japanese encroachment, while the second faction was in favor of appeasement, hoping that they could gain some political freedom by cooperating with the Japanese. The Prime Minister of Japan, Fumimaro Konoe, initially wanted to negotiate with King Rama for a peaceful takeover, but General Hideki Tojo, leader of the Imperial Japanese Army, believed there was no point in negotiating with such a bitterly divided country and insisted on a military takeover, which would be followed by an invasion of the adjacent British colony of Burma. Konoe agreed, on condition that he be allowed to arrange a lasting peace between Japan and the United States. The invasion of Siam began on July 17 and ended on September 2, lasting barely one week longer than the invasion of Indochina, with entire Siamese units voluntarily surrendering in the face of oncoming Japanese troops. Rama was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Rama VIII, and General Luang Kriang was installed as Regent of the new Siamese state.

The Japanese could not proceed immediately with their invasion of Burma, because the monsoon season brought intense tropical rainstorms that would have made it impossible to move large amounts of troops or equipment across the countryside. But when it began in October, there was little to challenge the Japanese; the capital of Rangoon was captured within three weeks, and the remaining twelve brigades of General Harold Alexander's Indian Division were forced to retreat northward to the city of Mandalay, where they were decisively defeated in battle on December 12. Reinforcements from Britain were slow to arrive, and because the Burmese coastline was blockaded by Japanese submarines, they had to be trucked in over the Burma Road from India. The last British forces in Burma surrendered in March, ceding the colony to Japanese occupation.

Having blitzed from Hanoi to Rangoon in less than nine months, many in Britain feared that the Empire would now attempt to invade India, or that it would use its new territories as a land route into southern China. However, Tokyo looked further south for its next conquests. Just as Burma was being conquered, Japanese forces were hacking through the thicketed jungles of British Malaya, taking the British port of Singapore on November 18. With Britain's two largest ports in Southeast Asia, Rangoon and Singapore, now under Japanese domination, there was little to stop the Imperial Navy from feasting itself on the archipelagos of the Dutch East Indies. One by one, the islands fell, and with the lack of a responsive government in Amsterdam there was very little to defend them. First Borneo, then Java, then Celebes, then Sumatra fell under the Japanese yoke. By the time New Guinea was overrun in August of 1942, practically all of East Asia (with the exception of the American-held Philippines) was part of the Japanese Empire, and no power seemed willing or able to challenge it.

Fascist rule collapsed in Sweden.

By autumn of 1941, Swedish military strength was at its end. Three long years of war against the mightiest military power in the world had left the country's ability to fight completely drained. With Germany itself too deprived to provide its ally with cheap foodstuffs and equipment, the Swedish people grew more destitute with each passing month, and the popularity of Birger Furugard's fascist regime plunged at a similar rate. Although fighting on the Finnish front had essentially ceased the previous year, the Swedish Army was critically lacking in equipment and armaments; Swedish independence was at the mercy of the Soviets, and when the Soviet line formed up along the Vistula in September, that mercy ran out.

Operation Narwhal, as the invasion was called, began on October 4, 1941, when sixty-two thousand troops sailed from the Aland Islands and landed less than forty kilometres north of Stockholm. The following day, another thirty thousand sailed from the island of Gotland (which had been in Russian control since 1940) to the large coastal island of Oland, and thence made their way to the mainland on October 9. There were few Swedish divisions to oppose the Soviet drive to Stockholm, and the war-weary citizens put up little resistance; the capital fell within a week of the invasion, just as German forces marched north to occupy Denmark in the name of security. The rest of Sweden was quick to capitulate, with the entire southeast coastline in Russian hands by the end of the month. Though the leadership fled to Norway without announcing a formal surrender, the Svea Rike (as the regime called itself) had essentially ceased to exist. By the end of the year, all of the populated parts of Sweden were under Russian occupation.

German defences crumbled.

By the spring of 1942, it was clear that Germany was on the back foot. It was running dangerously short on petroleum, metals, and foodstuffs, having expended much of its reserves on the conquests of France and Norway. It had proven incapable of mounting a counteroffensive on the River Vistula during the winter, and though it had successfully occupied Denmark during the Russian invasion of Sweden, it had had to deal with little resistance from the tiny Danish army. Now, as the weather and the fighting prepared to heat up once more, the Germans found themselves unprepared to defend their remaining bit of western Poland. The winter had been a particularly rough one, with most of the roads leading to the front blocked by snow; and the port city of Danzig, the entrance to the River Vistula, had fallen to the Red Army in September, preventing the Germans from supplying their garrisons along the front with river barges. This army was badly unprepared to face a renewed Russian onslaught, and so when it came at the beginning of March there was little for the Germans to do but retreat. And retreat they did: as Operation Cyril began and Russians under General crossed the River in three places, they faced only token resistance. By May, the western cities of Posen and Breslau were under siege, and Germany was reduced almost to its prewar eastern frontier.

Confident that the Wehrmacht could retake the initiative as it had done several times before, Hitler ordered that most of Germany's remaining troop strength be positioned between the front lines and Berlin, so as to prevent a direct Russian drive to the German capital. This strategy might have worked, but for the fact that the Russian strategy involved several invasions from multiple directions. When the Russians landed on the Jutland peninsula northwest of Berlin on May 29, most German troops were too far away to resist them; and when soldiers were moved northward to oppose the invaders, a weakness was opened up at Stettin that allowed the Red Army to break through to the northeast of the capital. By June, the Russians had Berlin encircled and were slowly closing in on the German capital, preparing for a fierce urban struggle that would see much of the city destroyed.

As the Russians closed in on Berlin, a large force under the highly skilled General Ivan Bagramyan embarked southward from the Danish border and began marching through the industrial heartlands of northwest Germany. The German Army was still in retreat, but as they evacuated the towns and cities, the SS (German secret police) began to tear up the railroads and strip the factories of their machinery to slow the Russians down and prevent them from taking anything useful. This succeeded in slowing the Russians down, but it also turned many of the towns' inhabitants against their authorities so that they put up far less resistance to the Russians than expected.

By August of 1942, German resistance was at its end, German military strength exhausted after four long years battling the world's vastest military empire and propping up weak allies. Most of the Army's elite troops had been sent to defend Berlin and captured in the Russian encirclement, and the capital itself had fallen after a three-week struggle that leveled much of the historic city and took 270,000 casualties (most of whom were German civilians). With the surrender of the German puppet regime in the former Yugoslavia and the fall of Prague after a mere two weeks of siege, all German holdings east of Germany itself had collapsed, and its western conquests were soon to fall. Hitler himself had escaped Berlin and fled south with a clique of generals, but his orders of constant attacks were beginning to wear on his military companions.

The Russians occupied France and the Low countries.

As more of western Germany came under the Russian thumb, the Russians turned to their next objective: Germany's diminutive northwestern neighbors. As in 1940, the Belgians and Dutch were essentially powerless to resist the Russian advance; Russian supply lines were, naturally, far more overstretched than the Germans' had been two year previous, but this was of little importance, as Russian armored vehicles and infantry marched leisurely along the vast plains of Holland and Flanders, no force able or willing enough to stop them.

Finally, after a long summer spent expanding throughout the industrially useful portions of Germany, the Russians were prepared to enter the last great bastion of fascism: France. Since its defeat at the end of 1940, France had been squeezed mercilessly by the Germans to provide for their war effort: French factories had been put to work producing armaments for the German Army, French coal had been used not to heat French homes but to temper German iron into steel. Hundreds of thousands of French men had been sent to Germany to labor in furtherance of the war effort, and France's army had been dramatically shrunk to prevent rebellion to German hegemony. Though official under German occupation, northern France was mostly protected by French troops, nearly all German divisions having been recalled to their homeland to defend it against the Russians. Therefore, France was even less prepared to resist Russian invasion in 1942 than it had been to resist German invasion in 1940.

By early September, when Russian soldiers crossed into France through Belgium and the Rhine, their supply lines had been seriously compromised by military actions within Germany. But in the end, it didn't matter: after a few divisions of half-hearted French troops were defeated northeast of Paris at the end of the month, Marshal Pétain (chief of the collaborationist French State) ordered all French troops to lay down their arms, fearing no reprisals from the crippled German Army and wanting to spare his beloved homeland from suffering through the ravages of war once more. Russian troops slowly moved to occupy Paris the rest of France, and though they encountered resistance from La Milice (a fascist paramilitary group affiliated with the French State) and disgruntled citizens, it was clear that France was out of the war.

Norway submitted to Russian occupation.

As Germany was being brought to its knees, the Red Navy embarked on an excursion to pacify Norway, which had been under German domination since 1940. It had put up little resistance to invasion then, and was even more passive now: after Russian long-range bombers did superficial damage to the cities of Bergen and Stavanger on July 15, 1942 and some troops crossed the border with occupied Sweden and approached Oslo, the collaborationist government of Gulbrand Lunde surrendered unconditionally by August after a few weeks of half-hearted resistance, being practically defenceless against a seemingly unstoppable military empire. Hitler was furious, but had no way of punishing the Norwegians for their surrender as Germany itself was ravaged by Russian invaders. The Swedish officials who had fled there after their own country was conquered (including Birger Furugard, the deposed Fuhrer) were captured and imprisoned.

Hitler was killed and Germany surrendered.

By October, the Russians had made the most of the temperate season to capture as much territory as possible in northern and western Europe. Germany had essentially been brought to its knees, with the countryside pacified and all of the major cities occupied by Russian troops or under siege and on the verge of surrender. Partisan resistance to the Russian occupants was underwhelming compared to the expectations of the high German leadership, owing largely to the fact that the German people had had their sense of political initiative and ability to resist authority stamped out of them by twelve years under the Nazi regime.

Hitler and his inner circle, including secret police chiefs Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich and Generals Erich von Witzleben and Paul von Kleist, attempted to flee to Italy to continue directing resistance to the occupation. By that point, however, Voyindel operatives had infiltrated the headquarters of Abwehr (the German military intelligence) in Berlin and had broken all of the German ciphers using information that had been improperly disposed of during the evacuation. As a result, the wires sent between the General Staff in Bavaria and Mussolini's government in Germany were intercepted and decoded, and the planes carrying Hitler and most of his top advisors was shot down by a Soviet warplane over Switzerland and the Führer was killed. Some expected that the news of their beloved leader's death would whip the German people into a fury of vengeful hysteria, and for a few weeks there was a marked increase in isolated partisan attacks against the occupiers; But as the winter set in, the German national mood was one of defeated exhaustion, and in those early months there seems to have developed no large and organized campaign of popular resistance against the invaders.

Despite persistent attempts to fight on, Germany was defeated, and most of its leadership knew it. In early December, what remained of the German government approached Field Marshal Ivan Belov to negotiate for terms of surrender. Six days before Christmas, General von Witzleben, acting in his capacity as chief of the Army, signed a Contract of Surrender; the SS, however, was represented by its highest surviving officer: Hermann Fegelein, a man who was widely regarded as disreputable and incompetent and did not command the respect of the apparatus he supposedly governed, despite his pleas for the SS to surrender to the invaders. This was to play a role in the events to come.

A new front opened in Asia.

Since 1938, the Russians and Japanese had been stuck in an uneasy peace. After the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Khalkin Gol in November of that year, neither power had been particularly willing to engage the other further in combat, each being preoccupied with other adversaries. In April of 1941, Japanese soldiers had massacred a village of nearly three thousand civilians—men, women and children alike—near the Chinese village of Handan who had been presumed to be rebel members of the Chinese Communist Party; this event would have been unremarkable in the context of that atrocity-laden war, but for the fact that a photographer for a popular American magazine happened to have been present. Despite best efforts by the Japanese to destroy it, photographic evidence of Japanese brutality was plastered all over the global press, to the disgust of non-belligerent countries. In particular, Russian Premier Trotsky announced that his regime would not rule out the possibility of intervening in the war to defend the Chinese people from further abuse; few had believed, however, that Russia would actually go honor this announcement. On October 11, with Germany nearly pacified, Russia suddenly declared war on the Empire of Japan, and invaded the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo the following day.

Though the winter was fast approaching, Russian troops under General Georgy Zhukov (whose forces had been secretly mobilizing on the Russian border for many months) swept across the desert plains, aided by the proximity to their home country. Most of Japan's troops were tied down in more southerly parts of China or in the Empire's new conquests in southeast Asia, and a lack of infrastructure made it difficult to move them in a timely manner, so that once reinforcements arrived two weeks after the initial invasion, Zhukov had already crossed the River Yalu into Korea. The Japanese troops there were ill-equipped for a momentous invasion, having been installed for the purpose of occupation while the real action went on in China and Indochina.

By November, however, it became clear that this invasion would not be as easy as the German one had been. Reinforcements were beginning to arrive from the Home Islands, and were beginning to pose a significant challenge, defeating Russian troops in various minor skirmishes. Zhukov's units began to experience supply difficulties, as they were based in a remote part of Russia and their lines stretched across hundreds of miles of barren desert. Worried that it had overstretched itself, the Russian High Command began desperately searching for a means to bring the Japanese to a quick and irreversible surrender.



[1] IOTL, Siam became a constitutional monarchy after a military-civilian coup in 1932. ITTL, after the USSR's agitprop tendencies crystallized during the 1920s and it became clear that Soviets were trying to place communist elements into power in foreign countries, the young and paranoid King of Siam, Rama VII (acting on deathbed advice from his late father, Rama VI) initiated a small-scale purge of his bureaucracy and army during the early 1930s, eliminating the elements that led to the Revolution in OTL; he followed up with restrictions on media and information that prevented further anti-monarchist sentiment from growing too strong in the population. At the top, conflict between pro-monarchist and anti-monarchist elements in the Siamese political atmosphere, as well as sycophants being put in control of the Army, prevented any chance of a military or governmental coup for the rest of the decade. Thus, by the time 1941 rolls around, Siam is still under a weak absolute monarchy rather than a confident, fascist military dictatorship.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

Washington, D.C.
January 20, 1941

Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice of the United States, raised one hand and held a Bible out with the other as an icy palm was rested on the cover. The esteemed jurist opened his mouth to speak.

"Do you solemnly swear that you will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and that you will, to the best of your ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?"

"I do."

The assembled crowd expectantly turned its gaze toward the neatly-assembled speaking platform on the ridge of the Capitol balcony. But rather than stepping forward and commencing his inaugural address as anticipated, the freshly-anointed President turned and strode over to meet the ear of his Vice President. "Remember what I told you," the President whispered, the frigidity of his voice supplementing the January chill.

As he turned, the President was deafened by a colossal explosion. He managed to whip his head away before the worst of the splinters hit, and so his eyes were in pristine enough condition moments later to survey the scene in absolute clarity: the shattered concrete crater where his podium had sat moments before, the shocked throng below that had already begun to scream in fear that the attack had accomplished its objective.

As Norman Mattoon Thomas, President of the United States, was rapidly jerked out of public sight by the powerful arm of a bodyguard, he just had time to spot the mangled, shrapnel-ravaged corpse of Chief Justice Hughes, razorlike shards of wood embedded deep within his torso, leaking blood onto the white concrete.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

Wait, 'where are they now' on various people?

Joe louis
J.R.R. Tolkien
Babe Ruth
Mikoyan
Chiang Kai-shek

How about C.S. Lewis or Jack Dempsey?

Oh shit, thanks for the reminder! Okay, here we go:

JOE LOUIS reigns supreme as the world's champion heavyweight boxer, having attained that status after defeating South African Ben Foord in 1939 (Max Schmeling was unable to compete, having perished in a Soviet bombing raid earlier that year). JACK DEMPSEY, a strong supporter of President Thomas, retired from the sport over a decade ago to move into politics, and in 1938, he won election as the first Socialist senator from his birth state of Colorado.
J.R.R. TOLKIEN's novel Dragonmount, an epic work of high fantasy recounting the harrowing quest of a troupe of dwarves to return a sacred artifact to the peak of the titular mountain, was published in 1937 to widespread critical acclaim, and he has already begun working on a sequel. Some readers have noticed what appears to be veiled criticism of several European political movements, including Nazism, Trotskyism and the British socialist movement, in Tolkien's book, although the Oxford University professor has fervently denied it all. His friend C.S. LEWIS, on the other hand, has no such qualms about his politics, publishing several essays and books which openly criticize the British Socialist Party for some of its members' strongly atheistic leanings.
BABE RUTH's career as a professional baseball player may be over, but he has transitioned comfortably into a management career, taking over as manager of the Philadelphia Athletics in 1936 after his predecessor, Connie Mack, resigned to run for Governor of Pennsylvania against Socialist candidate J. Henry Stump. Ruth isn't quite as good at managing as he was at playing—the A's came within a hairsbreadth of the American League pennant in 1939, only to lose 5-4 to the Chicago White Sox. Still, he remains extremely popular among fans of the A's and of baseball in general, and his visibly energetic coaching style has helped keep attendance high despite the team's less-than-stellar record.
ANASTAS IVANOVICH MIKOYAN was appointed to the Sovpol in 1923 by his close friend and ally, Joseph Stalin, and immediately began colluding with Stalin to oust General Secretary Trotsky. After the plot was exposed the following year, Mikoyan was arrested and executed for treason alongside the rest of the Sovpol's members.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK's Nationalist Army is as much at war with the Japanese now as it was at any point since 1936. The last couple years have not been good: without a War in the Pacific to worry about, Japan can focus nearly all of its resources on subduing the Chinese, and attempts to secure military aid from the United States have fallen on deaf ears in the Thomas administration. Indeed, Chiang's coalition is beginning to crack under the pressure, with relations between the CCP and the Kuomintang growing increasingly hostile; even the left-wing of the KMT is beginning to exhibit a startling uppity streak.

Any other names you want me to explore? That was pretty fun to write!