Chapter 13 specifically. Although it could just be the serve I am using.
For the Republic: A History of the Second American Civil War
- Thread starter The Angry Observer
- Start date
Weird. I’m seeing problems with that one too. I’ll look through it sometime on my desktop.
Skimmed through the chapter, and genuinely have no idea. When I tried to edit it, it just showed blank space. That entire chapter was composed by @GaysInSpace, word for word, and he provided the images to me through Discord. I would've just copied the URLs and uploaded them to this site. The other two chapters he wrote and I posted with his images seem to have the same problem. So that seems like the best bet, but I'm really not sure how all that works.
Apparently the problem is that Discord no longer allows it to be used as an image server, the strange thing is that I have used it once to upload flags and it hasn't given me any problems.
It won't allow images, yet it seems fine with memes.
Wonder how the differentiate the two.
Maybe the difference is if you upload the image file in Discord or just copypaste the link of the image saved in places like Reddit or Deviantart
"The Arsenal of Democracy" (Chapter 22)
“The Arsenal of Democracy”
"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers." - Amelia Earhart, Republican aviatrix.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson, architect of the Republican strategy
Secretary of War Henry Stimson, architect of the Republican strategy
The most important component of the Smith Administration’s plan to defeat fascism was attrition. Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s goal was “total victory achieved by overwhelming military superiority, on the land, at sea, and air, leaving the enemy without a single acre of high ground.” This, the Republican high command believed, would assure a sound and thorough victory that would also set the Republic up for whatever came next. Washington D.C itself was not far from the front in Philadelphia, and the border between the National-Corporate Regime and the southern bloc wasn’t much further than that. If this military superiority could be achieved, the regime would fall quickly and swiftly. To do this, the Republic’s considerable industrial reserves had to be harnessed on an unprecedented scale, and enormous resources had to be poured into developing its military technology. Here, the Republic had several advantages observers on all sides originally missed. Unlike the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy was relatively evenly split and while much of it was invested in the Pacific and therefore initially was neutral, the majority had evaded Natcorp control. Even though James Dozier captured Norfolk and other southern ports, the Republicans started off with the powerful shipyards in the Northeast. Thus, while the war on land was marked by a string of lopsided Natcorp victories, the war on sea was far less dramatic. The Natcorps had no advantage to press and the Republicans were focused on playing defense.
Heading the Republican naval effort was Philip Andrews, a senior seaman dragged out of retirement by the Smith Administration. The most esteemed naval commander in America, Andrews was 69 during his tenure and would die in December of 1935. While historians do not question Andrews’s competence today, and praise his leadership in the Jersey Sea campaign, the old admiral did not inspire the confidence in his subordinates he used to. “I cannot tell,” one captain fretted to The New York Times, “when he is commenting in our meetings versus when he is snoring.” The Smith Administration censored the story, successfully arguing in Court that it undermined the war effort. In the chaos, the captain’s name was discovered by naval authorities but is unknown to this day. In Stimson’s hammer and anvil strategy, the U.S. Navy was the anvil. It was to soak up the Natcorp regime’s fury, keeping any surprises from materializing on the coastline, and maintaining the Republic’s lifelines to Europe. As such, they avoided direct conflict as much as possible. The action in south Jersey was the largest and arguably the only naval battle of this phase of the war. MacArthur and Chester Nimitz hoped for a definitive pitched sea battle where the Natcorps could shatter the Republic’s access to Europe and make it a rump state for good. However, even MacArthur could not find a justification for such an action. After all, why opt for a pitched showdown in the north Atlantic when he could find one in the Northeast or Midwest with similar consequences, where the Natcorps were more likely to win?
Admiral Philip Andrews
So, the two fleets stalked each other in the New England mist for the year of 1935. MacArthur kept his focus on a showdown with Smedley Butler that could shatter Republican resistance in the Midwest. The Republic wanted a stab into the Chesapeake and Nimitz dreamed of a blockade of New York City, but neither side was able to realize their goals. President Smith appointed publisher and soldier Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy, a move that was initially decried as cronyism (Knox had no experience at sea) by his opponents. Knox, a GOP member himself, proved an able organizer and worked well with Stimson. Under his leadership, the Republican Navy continually frustrated Nimitz both by denying him appreciable victories and continuing to grow, which sapped Natcorp resources in an arms race at sea. While the Navy was not the Smith Administration’s first priority, the enormous wartime buildup in the Northeast did not fail to deliver for it. In particular, the government focused on aircraft carriers, newcomers to the naval world that Knox and Stimson correctly believed would come to dominate the seas soon. The Republic’s fleet in the Northeast grew exponentially, as did the Natcorps’ in Maryland, and both sides worked tirelessly to poach resources from the Pacific Fleet under Admiral Reeves. The Northeast, shepherded by the Republican government, embarked on a rearmament program so huge that it was initially presumed to be impossible. Most members of Smith’s circle doubted the Republic could find the resources to generate the industrial output Smith wanted, much less do it in enough time to swamp the Natcorp invaders. At any moment, the situation in Philadelphia could burst into flames and MacArthur would once again be days from capturing New York. But Smith, Vice President Garner, and the other cabinet members, whatever their differences, agreed broadly that the Republic’s industrial war machine needed to quickly grow exponentially. The President was determined to act with or without Congress’s help.
Perhaps here more than anywhere else, Smith was uniquely qualified to take the initiative. His background was in urban politics, and he intended for his Presidency to be that of a reformer that could work with the private sector and alleviate the common man’s suffering. Smith and his underlings scraped money from wherever they could find it, whether it was Natcorp contraband or a fleet of war bonds. They put it to work financing the kind of massive projects any New York governor in the 1920’s had to be familiar with. Except “the only true full employment economy in American history” was not to construct the Empire State Building, it was to massively industrialize nearly the entire Northeast for the singular purpose of building war fodder. Armed with the finest minds in the Republic, Smith and his government orchestrated huge public works programs that dwarfed any previous state efforts at employment. Corporations that created useful material, war or otherwise, were bribed or bullied into the position of junior partners. Firms that didn’t were saddled with war taxes. Americans in the Republic that weren’t on the front and weren’t on a farm were sent to the factories. This created a slough of logistical problems. To provide for mothers, the government used infrastructure from public schools to piece together the first national childcare service in U.S. history— one that was fraught with complications and was a hectic nightmare to administer.
The beginnings of a wartime school erected in New Hampshire
Even more problematic was rationing. The kind of mass rationing necessary to win the Second American Civil War was something the average American hadn’t gone through, including during the Great War twenty years ago. Nonetheless, it had to be done. Every single scrap of food was needed at the front. Even cigars weren’t safe, as the Republican armies at the front consumed a staggering amount on a daily basis. Not only did this require infrastructure to exact and enforce levies on millions and millions of people, it also required that the Administration and cooperative state governments brainstorm creative solutions to get beef from Augusta to the line of fire in Wilmington. Manned almost entirely by civilians and local officials that had no military experience, the Northeast’s population pushed themselves beyond the brink of ruin to rush food and weaponry to the front. Organization wasn’t just chaotic. With ecological disaster looming in the Midwest and the Northeast facing the full fury of MacArthur’s war machine, the resource situation in the Republic was on the verge of disaster for much of 1935. “They’re demanding things of us we don’t have,” wrote one New York official. “Beef, cheese, salt, cigars, scrap-metal— there’s only so much of it they can bleed us for.” Smith, Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, General Marshall, and the other architects of the scheme were not oblique to this fact. Eleanor Roosevelt, according to one Secret Service agent, couldn’t go “a single morsel” without bringing up the pains that rationing and the food situation was inflicting on her home state.
Even so, while there were exceptions, the push to build Smith and Stimson’s “arsenal of democracy” ground on. There were multiple anti-rationing riots across the Northeast, including in New York City, but scholarship suggests that this was instigated by a small minority and typically was motivated by momentary anger rather than persistent anti war sentiment. These nuances were lost on some participants at the time. Herbert Hoover wrote that “the people have definitively and desperately made clear that they prefer the negotiating table to the Administration’s arbitrary imposition, justified through a rump Congress and hollowed out Supreme Court [the fate of the Hughes Court was not known for certain at this point, and it was popular to suggest that they had never been in the Natcorps’ grasp to suggest with, a disproven conspiracy theory that has adherents to this day] of duties, quotas of men and even women, and indefinite wartime law retained at the pleasure of one man. Heeding their voice is not merely a matter of political wisdom, it is necessity if the American Republic is to persist. The question before us— whether Al Smith prefers his own power or peace.” But Hoover’s political strength was weakest and Smith’s strongest in the Northeast, particularly in cities.
Ku Klux Klan members demonstrating against the war in upstate New York
New York City was Smith’s home base, and it was one of the few places he could consistently depend on politically and militarily. In the 1930’s, America’s largest city was under the stewardship of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Nominally a member of the GOP, La Guardia was a left wing populist. A blustery and intense speaker, La Guardia knew the City’s politics like the back of his hand. And although nominally a Republican and politically sympathetic to the Farmer-Labor platform, La Guardia was a staunch supporter of Smith’s and did everything he could to mobilize New York City’s considerable resources for the Republic. La Guardia’s management of New York’s shipyards and industry was impressive enough, making the City by far the largest single contributor to the Republican cause. He also was an indispensable player in making the City the terminus through which all aid heading to Philadelphia proceeded. This made New York City even more strategically important than it might be in a vacuum, as would be reflected by future developments. Charismatic and fiery, La Guardia did not share any of the President’s tolerance for dissenters. The New York City Police’s powers dramatically expanded, to enforce wartime regulations and fight DOJ sabotage, but also to crush any potential agitation from Peace supporters. All this was in spite of the fact that La Guardia had staunchly opposed the Espionage Act of 1917. “The question’s one of survival, in this war,” snarled La Guardia, “either you support New York City surviving, America surviving, or you don’t.” NYPD operated with such heavy handed autonomy that it stood out even amongst similar cases of Republican repression in the Second American Civil War, and in more recent years has drawn scrutiny, particularly his management of the City’s ethnic politics. Even so, very few question that La Guardia was a key player in keeping Smith’s base, the City’s Irish, Catholic, and Italian working immigrant community, intact and mobilized for the Republican cause. It also made La Guardia an obvious contender for President in 1936 or beyond, calls the Mayor was not deaf to.
Domestic administration in the Republic was a synthesis of maintaining civilian government (something Smith and his liberal Democrat allies believed was necessary to preserve the American Republic’s values, even if it created inconvenience or even danger— such as the possibility of Herbert Hoover becoming President again) and military necessity. While Smith, against the calls of certain elements on all sides of the political spectrum, refused to suspend American federalism and elections, he also went to extreme lengths to secure the Republic’s domestic position. Alan Brinkley contends that “what the government did during the Second American Civil War is totally unrivaled in the study of American censorship and suspension of normal civilian government, with the obvious exception of the heinous crimes committed by the Natcorp regime. Even similar measures undertaken by the Abraham Lincoln Administration are difficult to compare, in principle but especially in scale.” The hardship Smith’s wartime measures created for everyday people in the Republic prompted resistance, whether this was petty crime, draft evasion, or lying to government inspectors. These were not abstract problems. The fighting in Philadelphia was so savage and miserable that Smith and George Marshall feared at multiple points in 1935 that the Republic’s troops on the ground could simply disintegrate or even mutiny. Harsh deterrence was needed to keep order, which lead to Smith, by executive order, directing the Secret Service to indefinitely imprison anyone undermining the war effort, a sweeping emergency power Smith claimed from Congress’s authorization of suspending habeas corpus, and bolstered by the dubious claim that the entire Republic could reasonably be called a warzone. “And unlike Lincoln,” writes Brinkley, “Smith had no Roger Taney to thwart his aims.” Throughout the war, the Black Court, handpicked by Smith and the staunchest GOP Republicans in the Senate such as Borah, practically gave the Administration license for every single one of its actions. And while Borah protested, the Court wasn’t his to command anymore than it was Smith’s. “Undermining the war” could include anything such as stealing ration material. Detainees were tried before military tribunals and entirely at the mercy of government officials. All prisoners were put to work laboring in Smith’s industrial programs. When state governments didn’t enforce the military’s orders to the extent it seemed necessary, the Secret Service simply bypassed them.
Fiorello La Guardia
Much more dangerous and more politically troublesome were labor strikes, which were far greater of a complication than petty theft in New Hampshire. They threatened to seriously derail the war effort, and a lot of Smith’s measures to boost the Republic’s industry stepped on laborers as much as management. Hours became longer, pay became less, and quotas got taller. There were many strikes throughout the war, such as the Hartford Shell Strike of August, when workers in Connecticut refused to make shells unless they were given pay that resembled that at the beginning of 1935. Smith acted swiftly, using precedents established by his more conservative predecessors and his own wartime powers to arrest labor leaders. In the Hartford case, the War Department took over and manned the factory by itself, forcing the union to beg for their jobs back— which they were granted with a pay cut, and with many members fired or arrested and forced to serve the Republican war machine without pay. This, of course, infuriated the left. Combined with his refusal to nationalize, it was viewed as blatant and shortsighted favoritism to the same wealthy elites that overthrew the Republic and were still shirking their war duties. However, conservatives in Congress reluctantly praised Smith’s firm hand in the matter, and many historians contend that his good relations with affluent Northeasterners and belief in the ability of government and capital to work together made the War “remarkably free of the strife that defined the Great War,” as one union boss that cooperated with the Administration admitted.
The hazards of building a war machine were not limited to rationing. The Natcorps had similar programs, which were of course fueled by slave labor. Entire communities were walled off in what were practically prison camps, forced to work for almost nothing. This was particularly prevalent in the occupied Midwest, and practiced “systemically” in Ohio. Politically, it was very important that the Natcorps shift the burdens of war onto dissident populations as much as possible, such as heavily unionized industrial workers, African-Americans, and Catholics. Such atrocities are beyond the scope of this chapter to cover. In any event, the kind of total mobilization Smith engaged in was not something the Natcorps were able to do themselves in 1935. Thus, MacArthur sought to destroy the Republic through other means. His favorite was the air war. MacArthur was not only impressed by aviation technology, he interpreted the bombing campaign as a way to maintain the regime’s industrial superiority without exacting the kind of demanding sacrifices from his subjects that could endanger him politically. One DOJ memo, straight from Hoover’s desk, simply reads: “normalcy.” As a result, MacArthur pared back the offensive in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware at the critical moment, counting on LeMay’s planes to give him the edge. MacArthur had accepted total war long before most of the highest ranking Natcorps, and was fond of invoking Sherman and Grant to justify his actions. Natcorp air power hammered every single industrial center in the Northeast. LeMay ordered his pilots to make “no distinction” between Republican regulars on the field and the factories supplying them. He was able to establish a bombing radius that covered basically the entire Northeast, and raids were a major threat for the duration of the war. “It’s all gone,” wrote one family in western Connecticut, “the house, the shop—jackboots brought down the lightning of Zeus.” Families that could afford escape fled to Canada, while the less well off sent their children to the countryside, where they labored on farms. Many were forced to rely on the government’s emerging network of boarding schools, which remain a staple of New England life.
Woonsocket children following a Natcorp bombing
The Republic’s industrial initiative needed to persevere through a near daily hailstorm of death. Smith believed this was a problem that would eventually solve itself. As war output increased, LeMay’s planes would be needed elsewhere. As the Republic closed the gap on military technology, they would be in a better position to drive off the bombers. Thus, the problem of too many Republican civilians working long hours in treacherous conditions was addressed by “Harder Work”, as one infamous Republican propaganda poster in New York City advised. Meanwhile, the Republican military did its best to alleviate the suffering on the ground through its own ambitious aerial warfare program. The Republic, at least on paper, held many stark disadvantages. The most striking one was in aircraft, where MacArthur’s collaborators seized the huge majority of planes in the war’s opening phase. Of all the factors that spelled death for Republican regulars in the first string of battles, this was perhaps the most important one. As George S. Patton had warned years before the war, the enemy was able to easily thunder through green recruits that hadn’t even faced real bullets before, much less bombs from above. While the psychological factor was important— the Natcorps bombing campaigns became gradually less effective at forcing the enemy to immediately scatter as the Republicans became accustomed to them— Henry Stimson recognized very early into the war that the Republic needed an aerial force of its own. Congress, in the summer of 1934, passed the Air Force Act, establishing a fifth branch of the rump U.S. Military, the U.S. Air Force. Staffing the Air Force while weathering a dire shortage of pilots and planes was a much more complicated matter.
The War Department spared no pains to find airmen, no matter how few actual qualifications they had. Great War veterans were drafted and given particularly attractive compensation. Air schools sprouted out of nothing all across the Northeast, and one of President Smith’s main priorities diplomatically was bringing in more planes, engineers, and pilots. This, recalled the Soviet ambassador, was always the “meat and potatoes” of the Republic’s dealing with radical left: Soviet pilots, who Smith and Stimson continued to put to use even in the face of massive political backlash. Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of men and women in Republican crews slaved through dangerous missions with minimal training and high casualties. To them, the question was not whether there would be bombing. It was whether they’d be bombing the enemy heartland or watching their homes go up in flames. As graffiti on one Tupolev TB-1 read, the American Republic preferred to “bomb on our feet not our knees”.
Soviet aircraft in northern Michigan
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The solution seems to be to just find the images’ original source, and use then replace them manually. I’ll have to do that sometime.
Just imagine how brutal World War II will go if the Natcorps successfully win the Second American Civil War.
Franklin Roosevelt’s single best deed for America was discrediting isolationism for nearly a century.
And the world, of course. While I’ve got my criticisms of certain domestic actions of his, Roosevelt’s internationalism was one of the better developments of the last hundred years.
I wouldn't say discrediting isolationism was all good. There was still the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and later the wars in the Middle East.
Basically the problem with isolationism is that people seem to understand only two extremes: either do nothing and be totally indifferent to the rest of the world to the point of shooting on sight any ship that enters their waters...
...r be the typical hyperpower hyperaggressive that is constantly launching wars of aggression against countries on the other side of the world for stupid reasons and has 80% of its soldiers deployed in bases outside its own national territory. That is because its military doctrine is based more on attacking much smaller countries to force them to submit than in anything related to national defense.
Almost as if people believed that there is nothing intermediate between both options.
...r be the typical hyperpower hyperaggressive that is constantly launching wars of aggression against countries on the other side of the world for stupid reasons and has 80% of its soldiers deployed in bases outside its own national territory. That is because its military doctrine is based more on attacking much smaller countries to force them to submit than in anything related to national defense.
Almost as if people believed that there is nothing intermediate between both options.
Oh, no question. Even so, in my opinion this is by far the lesser of the two evils.
Which is how smart policy ought to work. Narrow fundamentalism is a really bad way for a nation to conduct itself.
Sometimes, it’s good to go to war, and other times (probably the majority of times) it’s not. These two points are not contradictory.
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Indeed…though I think the Republicans will win. The chapter says that La Guardia/NYPD’s heavy-handedness during the war is being scrutinised now, if the Natcorps won it’d have been screamed about and propagandised to hell and back as soon as the war ended.
Anyone have a preference on what should be done next?
I’ve got:
1 - a more in depth analysis of the fighting in Philadelphia during the summer of 1935
2 - civil rights during the war, which would be a neat way to segue back to the south under Huey Long
3 - the retcon of the France chapter, particularly the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine
4 - how MacArthur balances keeping his own power with winning an increasingly catastrophic war
5 - the spy craft and intelligence operations employed by the DOJ and Secret Service
I want to do all of these in some capacity, and then finish this phase of the war by going back to Minnesota and the Johnson Offensive. Thoughts?
I’ve got:
1 - a more in depth analysis of the fighting in Philadelphia during the summer of 1935
2 - civil rights during the war, which would be a neat way to segue back to the south under Huey Long
3 - the retcon of the France chapter, particularly the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine
4 - how MacArthur balances keeping his own power with winning an increasingly catastrophic war
5 - the spy craft and intelligence operations employed by the DOJ and Secret Service
I want to do all of these in some capacity, and then finish this phase of the war by going back to Minnesota and the Johnson Offensive. Thoughts?