For the Republic: A History of the Second American Civil War

[The Angry Observer]

“The Plot Against America”​

“Americans play to win at all times. I wouldn't give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor ever lose a war.” - George S. Patton

The 1932 United States Presidential election​

Alfred Emmanuel Smith had fought for twelve years to be President of the United States. When he finally achieved victory in 1932 he was left with the task of stitching up a ruined and hungry nation. Four years earlier, he lost in a landslide that had nearly torn his party in two. But then, the happy times dried up and President Herbert Hoover’s popularity imploded. It was under these terms that Smith, with the surprise death of presumptive frontrunner Franklin Roosevelt, was able to win his party’s nomination again and defeat Hoover.

Smith took the oath of office on March 4th, as the first Catholic President— a fact that made much of the country bitterly hate and distrust him. Even Hoover, widely blamed for the wholesale destruction of the U.S. economy and having overseen one of the most tumultuous terms in office since Abraham Lincoln, had made a credible showing against Smith. The new President's faith and his east coast accent made him anathema to the rural heartland. He was a devoted urban progressive who envisioned good governance as a beneficial partnership between the state, the working man, and big business. In the desperate times following the 1929 Stock Market Crash, Smith’s pushes for sensible reform satisfied nobody and infuriated many. From the angry generals watching their gallant veterans starve to the business tycoons terrified of leaving the gold standard to the fiery evangelists raving against papist influence, Smith’s country was filled with his enemies.

The failure of the proposed 20th Amendment, thanks almost entirely to anti-Catholic opposition to Smith, kneecapped the President’s ability to respond to the ongoing crises. Smith proposed a wide range of reforms to heal the nation. They fell mostly on deaf and suspicious ears. When the Glass-Steagall Act faltered in Congress because of Smith’s opposition to an insurance clause, the public blamed him for prolonging the mess he was elected to clean up. Meanwhile, another Amendment, the 21st, which would have ended America’s disastrous flirtation with Prohibition, had stalled in the states thanks to anti-Smith backlash. The many economic programs that did make it to Smith’s desk in the year of 1933 were not enough to end the American people’s woes. And what good they did was drowned out in the noise of sprawling unemployment lines and angry demagoguery.

Al Smith, the 32nd President of the United States​

They did, however, make an enemy of America’s invisible branch of government: the titans of industry, who had controlled it completely for the latter half of the nineteenth century and whose influence had waned but never vanished entirely. Smith’s agenda frightened big business. With millions out of work and the employment lines stretching through whole cities, big business concluded that democracy as it stood was mostly untenable. The ultimate example of this was Smith, foisted on the nation by a rabble of immigrants, progressives, and shiftless vagrants. The inevitable result of this would be a socialist revolution as seen in Russia, or a revolution of an entirely different sort.

J. P. Morgan Jr. famously told a confidante that, “democracy has given us Al Smith, who shall surely give us inflation, which shall surely give us Bolshevism.” Of the many forces that sought to destroy Al Smith, business that was the brains of the operation. They were hardly alone, however. A fellow Catholic known for his progressive economic views, the radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, broke with Smith early and decried him to his millions of listeners as a “tool of the international bankers and Judeo-Bolsheviks!” America’s then nascent and repressed communist and socialist parties also were witheringly critical of the Smith administration, calling him the "feeble peace offering of a dying system". But the most obvious obstacle for Smith was how widely he was distrusted by America’s white Protestant majority, particularly in the western and southern United States. South Carolina evangelist Bob Jones had fumed four years earlier that, “I'd rather see a saloon on every corner of the South than see the foreigners elect Al Smith president.” Little had changed— only now Americans were hungrier and more desperate than they were in 1928.

Millions of Americans feared that Smith took direct orders from the Pope, and that he would soon begin taking bloody vengeance on Protestant churches. When he won, it became common practice in many communities to openly flaunt his authority. He represented the beginning of a heinous plot against America that involved the subversion of its character and institutions and consolidation under transnational elites, including the Pope in Rome and the Bolshevik government in Moscow. As economic malaise raged on, the nation slipped out of Al Smith’s fingers.

The men that shared Morgan’s sentiment about the crossroads the nation was at had long admired the workings of fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, which in their view had achieved order and harmony and warded off communist insurgency— at the expense of its people’s liberty, but with the stakes so high, what other options were there? More encouraging for them still was Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s ascent as German Chancellor two months before Smith was inaugurated. Hitler rapidly consolidated power and would soon become the unquestioned dictator of Germany, a development that these men saw as especially promising. “America,” said businessman Gerald C. MacGuire, “needs a Hitler of our own. Just for a little while.” President Smith’s chief focus had been installing his government and putting the nation back to work again. He had done his best to ignore attacks on his patriotism and the unhappy mutterings of big business, who he viewed as a partner to be cooperated with and not an enemy to be destroyed, as they viewed him. He found himself isolated in many of his own government’s corridors of power— viewed as a foreigner in his own country, particularly to the United States military’s leading men. This is what convinced many of them that it was acceptable or even necessary to intervene.

European dictators Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler (right)​

Much ink has been spilled as to when this stopped being wild talk at champagne dinners or in raging Sunday sermons and became a concerted plan to overthrow the government of the United States, but by Christmas all of the major parts and players were in place. Bankers under Morgan, industrialists under automobile titan Henry Ford, and a host of political leaders ranging from fire-breathing populists to strict conservatives were united in ousting Al Smith from the White House. And in the first weeks of January, they did exactly that. Another Bonus Army, like the one that had crippled and embarrassed Hoover, descended on Washington. As it marched, it rapidly snowballed into something much, much more than Great War veterans angry that they had been stiffed again by the government. They reached the city in full force on January 19th.

And on January 20th, Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur announced to the whole country by radio that sudden developments had forced an interim government’s formation. It was not a particularly rousing speech and was almost completely devoid of details, lasting for under a minute. In fact, in the postwar period, this lead to much speculation that MacArthur had not participated in the initial coup and was only brought into the new government later. In the confusion, some even alleged that the speech was not MacArthur’s, or that the speech had not even been given at all. MacArthur, on the radio to millions of listeners, declared simply that:

In light of the emergency which has taken control of Washington D.C., I General Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff of the Army, have been left with no choice but to honor our Constitution and our Christian God by putting down the lawlessness and conspiracy of my own accord. Al Smith has fled Washington D.C. after it was discovered he was in league with the Pope and Moscow. In the interim, an emergency joint resolution from Congress has vested government power in me.

There was no such joint resolution. The exact events of January 19th have been heavily scrutinized and debated, with historians unlikely to ever discover the full truth. Smith was quite clear that he received many contradictory updates as to the progress of the Bonus Army’s march. He dispatched MacArthur, as President Hoover had in 1932, to keep the peace. MacArthur apparently joined the demonstrators just before sundown, and Smith fled the White House with his family and cabinet. More curious is the role of J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Bureau of Investigation. Among those who sponsored the March on Washington, Hoover’s motives are the most difficult to discern because of the Director’s own paranoia. He was perhaps the only person in Washington who could have realistically captured Smith before he fled, which would have dramatically altered the course of world history. If Hoover was in on the planning, then how was Smith able to escape? And if Hoover was left out in the cold, then how did Smith remain unaware of the coup until it had seized the White House itself? And how did Hoover assume the leading role in MacArthur's regime he is now notorious for? Nonetheless, Hoover was instrumental in rapidly locking down the city of Washington and capturing many of its important men before they were able to grasp the full ramifications of what had happened. His services went far in establishing the new government. Most notably, Hoover arrested all nine members of the Supreme Court, even Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes.

General Douglas MacArthur, 1930​

MacArthur was a man that believed himself firmly destined for greatness. He was born to General Arthur MacArthur, who fought in the Civil War and Philippine War with distinction. MacArthur grew up in a western military family where he learned to shoot before he could read and graduated from West Texas Military Academy at the top his class, going on to serve with valor in the Great War. He was known for his flamboyant persona and disregard for civilian authority. Following his service in the Great War, MacArthur became Superintendent of West Point, and later Commander of the Philippine Department. In 1930, he became the Army's senior most officer. An aide called him, the most "flamboyantly egotistical" man he had ever met. And indeed, in the Army, MacArthur was most famous for his long-winded orations and fondness for pompous dressing. Nonetheless, he was an extremely talented commander that had proven himself many times over. And he also had political ambitions, although nobody, probably not even MacArthur himself, could have imagined where the general would be in 1934 and what place in American history he would carve for himself.

The mass psychology of the March on Washington has been covered ad nauseum, and many competing explanations have been offered for how it managed to get as far as it did. The general consensus among historians is that while MacArthur had many supporters in the general public and in high places, more importantly great fear, apathy, and confusion paralyzed the many men that were capable of stopping the putsch in its cradle. In many quarters, MacArthur’s coup certainly was welcomed. One preacher in southern Virginia praised MacArthur for, “his firmness of constitution, in saving the republic from the twin evils of romanism and Bolshevism.” And indeed, there were millions cheering Smith’s overthrow. More common, however, was muted alarm. The state governments, particularly those in the west, did not know what to make of the President’s sudden flight or the dashing MacArthur declaring his own government. Governor William H. Murray of Oklahoma said it most frankly to a member of his state’s National Guard: “We do not know where Alfred Smith is or what General MacArthur intends.”

The reaction of the military men in the coup’s opening hours and days can be genuinely bewildering to observers. In the leadup to January 19th of 1934, there is a shocking absence of serious insurrection plans or even particularly anti-Smith sentiments in what papers survived. MacArthur’s aid, Dwight D. Eisenhower, is on record screaming at his superior hours after the March on Washington. “You dumb son of a bitch,” fumed Eisenhower, according to defectors, “you just waged war on the most ancient republic on this earth! Don’t you fucking understand that this means war and revolution?” Eisenhower probably represented the majority of the military, particularly the army. But nearly all of its members had, if nothing else, respect for MacArthur’s abilities. Consequently, few generals fled Washington when President Smith suddenly did. While few openly supported the coup and many actively dreaded it, few of the Washington institutions and military hierarchies had been seriously disrupted in January of 1934. Consequently, inch by inch, the military of the freest republic in the world found themselves serving a coup. Diarist Mary Dothan, who was in Washington, recorded that “it is as if the whole nation has fallen into a stupor. Everyone agrees that Gen. Mac’s rule is benevolent or that he is a miscreant who shall surely be cast out without delay and without any trouble.”

The United States Capitol immediately prior to the March on Washington​

Congress was out of session, and therefore was unable to coordinate a unified response. This was intentional, as the men that orchestrated the March on Washington believed Congress would be the main obstacle to their designs— as with Smith, their strategy was to force them out and seize legitimacy through the virtue of raw control over Washington. Senator Huey Long was the first to bite, permanently fleeing to his base of power in Louisiana and rapidly assembling a council of his allies. Hiram Johnson of California did something similar, far out of both Smith and MacArthur's reach. Around a fourth of Congress remained in Washington, and these men either fled or fell under MacArthur’s control. Republican leader Charles McNary was among those that refused to flee the city, either due to underestimating MacArthur or believing such a thing was beneath a member of Congress; he was never seen again. Nonetheless, many denounced the coup in the strongest terms and immediately got to work at picking up the pieces, outside of Washington. William Borah of Idaho declared that the "Nika Rioters" would be crushed with all haste and faced no prospects but unconditional surrender.

Well before the end of January, as baffling messages raced across the country and the world, a new power ruled the seat of the republic. The National-Corporate government had no constitution, no convention of state delegates, and no official proclamation date but within days its existence was hard, established fact, far more than the rival Smith government being hectically assembled in New York. MacArthur was hastily declared President of the United States.

Under cover of darkness, Smith and his wife Katie were ferried to his home base of Albany by plane. He was received by Eleanor Roosevelt, a close friend who had succeeded her late husband as governor of the Empire State. He was more unsure than anyone what had happened— someone, something, had run him out of his palace like a disgraced emperor. No one had rushed to his defense and nobody knew what had happened. Some members of Smith's entourage patently refused to believe that MacArthur had betrayed him, while others viewed the general's acts as no more than McClellanesque insubordination and not an intentional attempt to drive Smith out of office. None suspected that a whole new regime was breathing its first breaths in the very seat of American democracy. President Smith had no way of knowing that he had been victim to an American coup, the first shot fired in the Second American Civil War.

New York Governor A. Eleanor Roosevelt​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“A House Divided”​

"It is a simple matter before us: will our children choose their leaders by the ballot or the bullet?" - Eleanor Roosevelt​

By February, the United States had two Presidents: Al Smith in Albany and Douglas MacArthur in Washington. The March on Washington, which began as a veterans’ demonstration and rapidly snowballed into the fascist coup that deposed Smith, is the opening event of the Second American Civil War. The War was fought between the Republican faction loyal to Smith and the Constitution (derisively called the Bolsheviks, yankees, "rumpublicans", or sometimes simply “traitors” by opponents) and the National-Corporate or Natcorp regime under MacArthur (called the fascists or jackboots by Republicans). It was in the two months immediately following Smith’s escape to Albany and MacArthur’s triumphant broadcast that the battle lines took shape.

Historians have divided the United States into four distinct geopolitical zones during the War, which will be addressed in detail later. The Republicans and the Natcorps aside, Senator Huey Long rapidly established a delicate but undisputed rule over nine states in the American south under his particular brand of populism. It was held together mostly by the naked force of Long’s personality. The governments of the western states, meanwhile, where Smith had lost in a landslide, embraced a much simpler kind of cynicism. As Senator Hiram Johnson, who became their de facto spokesperson, plainly articulated: “Good people have different opinions as to the General or Smith, but it’s plain to me that our best path is neutrality until one side or another is obvious in control of the country.”

California Senator Hiram Johnson​

The possibility of U.S. states in the year 1934 abandoning the federal government in the face of a naked coup was inevitable because of the decisions both MacArthur and Smith’s respective governments made in the months of January and February. Smith, landing in Albany, immediately declared MacArthur and his partisans to be traitors and the Natcorp government to be as legitimate as a pirate ship. Both in public announcements and official directives, he ordered the military to treat MacArthur as any common criminal who had stormed the White House. “Smith and what army?” jeered one DOJ agent in a telegram. And indeed, that was the problem. To call the vast majority of American military talent supporters of the coup would be highly misleading. But it was certainly true that they were, at the very best, sluggish to go to Albany and wage war on Washington D.C. This was the source of Smith’s issues. He was bottled up in New York, his base of power, while an illegitimate President with much support among the Army and business occupied Washington and proceeded as if everything was normal.

The days following the coup were surreal for Americans everywhere. Dothan recorded that “the vast majority of persons in Washington continue about their days as usual” and that “D-Mac is seen by many as another, perhaps better President that will not have to deal with the trivialities of a Congress or an election”. In the following days, the Natcorps held fabulous parades, sent official government telegrams, and threw wads of dollar bills into cheering crowds. Meanwhile, MacArthur’s allies used their extensive control of the press and the radio to rally support for the new order. “Our choice is Christ, or the red flag of communism!” Memorably roared Coughlin. “As it was after leaving the land of Egypt that the Israelites despaired, so must we hold firm and not be given to the desert.” The problem was that the glorious new regime controlled a single city. MacArthur and Smith had very similar geopolitical problems in the March on Washington’s immediate aftermath. Neither had the power or the leverage to assert themselves across the whole country or even far outside their immediate nucleus. The men that orchestrated the March were not in contact with MacArthur any earlier than October. Post-war propaganda portrayed MacArthur as a Caesarian figure that masterminded the plot mostly on his own, but more recent research suggests that not only was MacArthur a relatively late addition, but he also had not contemplated a genuine dictatorship until Christmas or so. “MacArthur,” according historian Alan Brinkley, “believed most of his public statements immediately following the March on Washington.”

In any event, Douglas MacArthur had crossed the Rubicon and now had to destroy the main threat to his newfound power, Smith in Albany.

MacArthur, apparently thanks to the influence of Morgan, agreed that his "Vice President" would be the aging intellectual and politician Nicholas Murray Butler. Butler had been the running mate of President William Howard Taft, and was so widely respected that the New York Times had printed his Christmas greetings to the nation every year. Butler was also sympathetic to fascism, which he viewed as necessary to protect conservatism. Butler accepted, declaring that he was “honored to be a part of the great project of harmony between the classes,” to raucous crowds. Butler’s presence in D.C. was an early and major victory for the Natcorp regime. It granted them legitimacy and served as the springboard for MacArthur's next moves. He set to work building his quasi-formal cabinet, which existed entirely to enforce his edicts and at his pleasure. Members included Henry Ford, the antisemitic automobile baron who had played such an integral role in financing the March, numerous members of the Morgan clan, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, a host of his fellow generals, 1924 Democratic nominee John W. Davis, and banker Thomas Lamont. Most important, however, was indisputably J. Edgar Hoover. The federal government during this period was weak enough that something like the March on Washington was possible, but it was strong enough that Hoover’s DOJ was able to purge itself of republican sympathizers in a matter of days, and quickly turn its guns on MacArthur’s enemies across the country. The Director was MacArthur's most dangerous and important enforcer by far.

Nicholas Murray Butler​

“I am the only man,” said Douglas MacArthur grimly to Eisenhower sometime in February, “that can save this country.”

Smith, meanwhile, had secured the immediate loyalty of New York and New England. He called Congress into session and sent out a general call for volunteers— which, astoundingly enough, was completely ignored in many corners. MacArthur fever set in across the United States, and the new regime’s adroit usage of the airwaves had much of America convinced that theirs was a temporary coup, meant only to put an end to the Catholic Smith’s treason and restore the economy. Even elected officials were not safe from the madness. “MacArthur,” reasoned Montana Representative Joseph P. Monaghan, “is better as President than not.” Fanatical loyalty to MacArthur and his regime was not widespread during the War’s early days. Rather, most Americans viewed MacArthur with apathy. “Smith’s medicine has failed us after all,” wrote a Kentuckian. A Kansan was more blunt: “Why should I fight for the Pope against Mac?”

With much of the nation successfully convinced that he was indeed an emperor in exile, Smith was left with limited options. These views were articulated to him by the two highest-ranking generals who found themselves in Albany. The first was Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine in U.S. history. Remarkably, Butler had been business’s first candidate for leading the March on Washington despite his open affiliation with leftist causes. Butler had reported on this to the McCormack-Dickenstein Committee, whose investigation was ongoing when the government was overthrown. Butler told Smith very plainly that the iron was hot, and if he allowed MacArthur to continue to act as President he’d quickly become one and become impossible to dislodge. The other was George C. Marshall, a key player in the Great War’s Meuse-Argonne Offensive but at that moment notable for being the highest ranking soldier to come to Albany. Marshall’s advice to the President was to rebuild the government in Albany; MacArthur would certainly come for him, but with a firm hold on the northeast, it was possible to repel MacArthur even outgunned and with inferior numbers. MacArthur, Marshall reasoned, would be unable to project power to the Pacific Coast or into the Deep South. Therefore, if Smith held his current position, MacArthur would be very weak in the long term. This, true, would put the nation in bona fide interregnum and war and concede that Smith had indeed been overthrown, but after months of warfare Smith’s faction would inevitably gain the upper hand over D.C. Marshall warned Smith, “Mac has more than the United States right now, and refusing to hunker down means he will kill you and conquer it.”

Smedley Butler​

Smith followed Marshall’s advice, which perhaps is the most controversial decision made by the man who was America’s most controversial President during his lifetime. The so-called “Marshall Plan” as its detractors called it would be Albany’s strategy for the duration of the war. It was a tacit and humiliating admission, seeking not to retake Washington from the coup immediately but mostly to protect the Great Lakes and Northeast wherever possible, and eventually break MacArthur through weeks if not months of Civil War. And as Smith’s pleas for help went ignored and he buckled down with what he had in the northeast, another peculiar emotion emerged that strengthened Douglas MacArthur’s regime: mockery. Papers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, sometimes in league with MacArthur’s business allies, ridiculed Smith as a beggar President while anti-MacArthur papers ridiculed him as a coward and a fool that had single handedly surrendered the United States to fascism.

The country did not think of itself as at war yet, and even in the heart of Natcorp Washington censorship hadn’t yet been introduced in any major capacity. Among foreign dignitaries, Germany and Italy were preaching war. “General MacArthur has begun the struggle in America,” a German newspaper wrote gleefully, “and can now be called his country’s great leader in the quest against mongrelization and Jewry!” The former Allied powers, most importantly Great Britain, were not any quicker than the United States in grasping the full implications of the MacArthur regime’s sudden emergence. While the United Kingdom and France had their fair share of fascist sympathizers their governments were unanimous in supporting Smith, at least nominally. Confusion ruled, with the British foreign minister sending an angry telegram about the coup— to Washington D.C. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s private papers indicate that he and most of his cabinet did not believe that the March on Washington represented anything more than a “Nika Riot”.

Meanwhile, Smith had called Congress into an emergency session, viewing them as the first step to tying the nation back together. His calculation here was correct. While hardly unanimous, Congress was furious at the loss of D.C. and overwhelmingly opposed MacArthur, even if for some it was simply a matter of protecting their own power. Over the next few months, around sixty percent of it would slowly trickle to session. With the help of Vice President John Nance Garner, a conservative southerner that had long distrusted Smith but who also evaded Hoover’s nets and followed faithfully to Albany, Smith contemplated how he would go about rebuilding the country. “I intend,” he told Katie, “to live to see America rebuilt.”

Vice President John Nance Garner, a.k.a. "Cactus Jack"​

MacArthur and Hoover correctly believed that killing the rump Albany government was the next step to securing their power. The DOJ and the U.S. armored cavalry, the ones that were MacArthur’s staunchest loyalists, anyway, were assembled to march into Albany and disperse whatever the pitiably weak Smith still had left. “We’ve got to kill this thing quickly,” MacArthur told John Davis. “If not, we’ll have years of Americans dying.” They assembled a battalion of under three hundred, intending to roll through New York by tank and apprehend the President of the United States like any common criminal. The goal was to avoid the many, many headaches associated with invading the state of New York, which MacArthur accurately predicted would become a “goddamned mess”. Like Smith, MacArthur had a logistics problem. The entire United States military numbered little more than 100,000 men in 1934. MacArthur probably had no more than 30,000 immediately on hand, not counting those involved in the March on Washington. In any event, it was not enough to wage a Civil War and doing so would require a buildup.

The yeomen recruits the U.S. military had traditionally relied upon in times of emergency were initially nowhere to be found for either side, but particularly in the northeast where there was still a foot of snow on the ground. Smith was forewarned of the column’s advance, but knew of little he could do beyond defend himself. Retreat from Albany to Boston or his native New York City would doom the country. He, nonetheless, had no army at all. It would be Governor Roosevelt, not the United States Army, that stopped MacArthur. Roosevelt quickly assembled the national guard and demonstrated an uncanny ability to sniff out potential traitors. “If Hoover’s rats were there they didn’t last a damn second after she called us in,” recalled one captain. When MacArthur’s tanks crossed the New York border on February 7th, hundreds of New York national guardsmen were waiting for them. At the little town of Forestburgh, the guard used small artillery and the local terrain to destroy the Natcorp armor. There were thirty two dead between the two sides. And with a scorching radio broadcast by the Governor less than an hour after the fighting, the Second American Civil War had begun.

“MacArthur fever”, which wasn’t just support for MacArthur’s regime but also the mentality that it was somehow a trifling issue that was to be ignored or tolerated or compared to Smith, dried up that day as the United States realized that it was at war. Nearly everyone agrees that Douglas MacArthur, who has escaped reliable documentation following the March, was perhaps the only member of the Natcorp government that was more sullen than angry. “God fucking dammit,” MacArthur allegedly told major Jens Doe. “Now they’ve done themselves in. I’m going to have to conquer them.” The Natcorp press flagrantly refused to report on the Forestburgh setback, but MacArthur had stopped being amusing to Washington D.C.’s denizens. On February 9th, there was a large-scale riot in the sole city under MacArthur’s control— he put it down brutally, as he had in July of 1932. MacArthur personally took charge of two thousand some soldiers, who quickly crushed the unrest with bayonets. They put the city under lockdown, where it would remain for the duration of the war. DOJ agents rushed through the city on horseback or in plainclothes, to terrorize not merely suspected agitators but anyone who could be trouble down the road. “The DOJ dragged away my husband,” wrote Mary Dothan very plainly. She would not see Chester Dothan, a smalltime reporter, again. The crackdown was not merely a reaction to the riot, but because MacArthur had concluded what he would do soon after he received news of Forestburgh: he would assemble whatever allies he had, establish a firm base of power wherever he could, and then capture Albany at the head of an actual military offensive.

Douglas MacArthur in military regalia​

MacArthur took what forces he had— certainly above 25,000, excluding what was left to keep D.C. under his thumb— and rapidly got to work spreading his rule. He dispatched Adjutant General James C. Dozier from Fort Jackson to establish control over the south with around a third of his forces, beginning with Virginia. MacArthur himself went to Maryland. Both of these were largely bloodless takeovers, as there was at that point no rival faction in America south of Albany that had access to the type of armor MacArthur did. This and the Natcorps’ own sympathizers in the states they encountered allowed them to rapidly take control of the area surrounding D.C. and put the state civilian authorities under close supervision. His goal became to lock down the border states and the Great Lakes to create a “wall” with which New York could be rapidly and hopefully bloodlessly snuffed out. It also allowed MacArthur to begin raising his army, mostly through his allies’ enthusiastic campaigning and the economic stagnation the border states had endured. MacArthur probably raised over a hundred thousand new recruits within two months, exponentially increasing the size of the Natcorps' military.

Meanwhile, he enacted the domestic regressions he'd been made dictator to and righted the sins of the Smith Era. MacArthur ordered the absorption of all labor unions into the Department of Labor, which was reorganized under General and close friend Hugh S. Johnson. Strikes, now, would be illegal and the National-Corporate State would mediate all disputes. Labor leaders too would fall under the DOJ's purview, marking the beginning of one of American history's most horrifying chapters. The fledgling programs Al Smith had enacted to relieve the nation’s poor would have to go, too, as they threatened the sanctity of business. MacArthur had them phased out in favor of attractive benefits for those that enlisted in the U.S. Army, a bitter pill that he ensured was sugarcoated in outright lies for his subjects’ benefit. MacArthur and his clique reorganized the military rapidly and effectively. It’s thought that out of the 100,000 some U.S. Army regulars before the March on Washington, they split for MacArthur around two to one, mostly thanks to their commanders’ more uniform support for him. Many of these, however, were in the Philippines or in Latin America and the U.S. Navy ended up splitting more evenly. MacArthur paid little attention to domestic affairs outside of the war, usually leaving it to his undefined and marginalized cabinet to sort matters out.

Shortly after the disturbance on the 9th, MacArthur secretly had the Supreme Court evacuated from the city, ostensibly for their own safety. In reality Hoover was ordered to gun them down in the Virginia countryside. The nine most esteemed minds in the nation quietly met their end in ditches and wouldn't be discovered until the war's end. Many, many more would join them after MacArthur invaded New York.

Snow in Albany, New York​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“Bloodshed and Snowmelt”​

"It was when I heard that unearthly scream and did not even think about it until two days later, and never know whether it was the tanks, airplanes or the other men or the earth himself exposing the devil's fire that I realized the true meaning of war." - Unknown New York City private​

MacArthur needed to crush Al Smith’s nascent rump government, and to do that he needed New York to be overrun. Unique among the members of the newly formed National-Corporate regime, MacArthur had already begun thinking in terms of the long game: a war of not weeks, but possibly months or even years. The Smith Administration, which had escaped mostly intact, had chosen wisely in foisting the Republican flag above Albany. The terrain was relatively defensible and gave the Republicans a reasonable chance at projecting power over New York— from which, of course, they could extract much blood and treasure, enough to rival what MacArthur had already mustered. New York also gave the Republicans an ideal vantage point from which they could defend New England and New York City, also highly populated industrial centers the Republicans needed in order to win.

And to overrun New York, MacArthur needed to conquer Pennsylvania. Gifford Pinchet, the Governor of Pennsylvania, openly defied the National-Corporates. But with the nation in a hazy standstill there was little Pinchet could do beyond what Smith was advising him to— assemble recruits, a tall order for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. As for Smith, he and Secretary of War George Dern were left with few options: “Pennsylvania is not defensible if Mac decides to launch a full-blown invasion of the north,” said Dern, articulating the completely unthinkable. “We would be better advised picking our battlefield in New York.” As the spring crawled on, the Natcorps were able to consolidate control over the states near Washington D.C. through military force and raw propaganda, while it became painfully clear that the south and west would not intervene to stop MacArthur. It was through this and an economy doped up by the efforts of business that allowed MacArthur to quickly raise, train, and arm the beginnings of the massive force he would wage the Second American Civil War with. At the beginning of April, MacArthur personally assumed control of an army numbering north of 120,000. It was hastily assembled and the vast majority of the recruits were green. Access to weapons was, at best, tenuous, but MacArthur knew quite well that Al Smith was in no better position. He left Baltimore and crossed the Mason-Dixon line on April 6th, beginning the Pennsylvania Campaign.

Natcorp tank outside of Baltimore​

Over the months following the March on Washington, there had been fighting between pro-MacArthur and pro-Smith groups as the federal government’s absence was felt, although in terms of scale and brutality these incidents were nothing next to what would come in the war’s later phases. When the Pennsylvania Campaign began, most of the country was at peace. Unwilling to totally surrender Pennsylvania, Smith promoted Omar Bradley to general and dispatched him with 40,000 troops from West Point. He intended for Bradley to link up with the Pennsylvania National Guard and run a “mobile campaign” designed to slow MacArthur down. Pennsylvania’s government fled Harrisburg for Philadelphia, meanwhile, basically surrendering the entire central part of the state to MacArthur. Bradley attempted to direct partisans to destroy the rails, but this failed thanks to disorganization and MacArthur’s own engineers. Bradley, furthermore, discovered that the War Department had dramatically underestimated the strength of MacArthur’s army. Early hopes that it could be shattered evaporated. MacArthur was acutely aware that the Republicans sought to cut off his line of retreat. Here the General’s instincts from the Philippine War kicked in— he dispatched one part of his army to invest in Philadelphia and another to secure central Pennsylvania, leaving him with some 75,000 troops.

Believing MacArthur had made a fatal mistake, Bradley attempted to stop his advance before MacArthur could cross the Susquehanna, which would put him within range of New York. The result was the Battle of Danville on April 15th, where Bradley and his army of 40,000 Pennsylvanian recruits and U.S. Army regulars faced off against the Natcorps. “We were butchered,” wrote one Pennsylvania recruit, “it was as if I could no longer control my legs. We all ran.” Bradley hadn’t even intended to win, but to harass MacArthur with artillery and delay his advance as long as possible. But exploiting relatively new technologies such as the airplane and armor, the Natcorps were able to throw the Republicans into the disorderly retreat they’d hoped to avoid. The Battle of Danville was over well before sunset, with Bradley given little choice but to flee. MacArthur ruthlessly pursued, scuttling Bradley’s entire army and sending what remained of it into a pell-mell retreat to Princeton. Bradley would meet physicist Albert Einstein there, a refugee of the new Nazi regime, and tell him very plainly: “Humanity is losing all across the globe right now.”

This sent a wave of panic throughout the Republican government in Albany, but the immediate issue of the war gave the Smith Administration its first break. The remnants of the 73rd Congress, in rapid succession, gave the Administration practically unlimited war powers to defeat MacArthur. “Until the rightful President and Congress of the United States is returned to D.C.,” declared Senator William Borah, a staunch critic of Smith, “there are only two factions: patriots and traitors.” Thanks to the efforts of Garner, a host of southern conservatives remained in Albany, even though their own constituencies were outside the government’s control. Indeed, while Smith’s Catholicism had destroyed the heartland’s trust in the government and led to the March on Washington, it had given him the best performance of any Democrat since the Gilded Age in New York and New England, the places he sought to defend. Organized labor, too, was strong in New York. Even in the staunchly Republican and conservative parts of the state, there was no need for conscription as thousands upon thousands of young men flocked to the draft offices.

Outraged Manhattanites enlisting​

Smith and Dern divided the emerging battlefield into two theaters: defending New York City and Philadelphia would be the responsibility of George Marshall, leading to the construction of the so-called Marshall Line. Defending the west and confronting MacArthur’s immediate advance north to Albany would be Smedley Butler. As for the wave of new recruits, rapid reorganization was necessary and the Republicans were short of military talent. They did not even have the weapons to properly arm the recruits flooding into the Republican Army, leading to many simply bringing their hunting rifles. Indeed, the U.S. Army basically abolished racial segregation within the first battles of the war, ironically enough, made possible thanks to its control extending only over New England and the industrialized north.

As for Douglas MacArthur, he was met with good news from the south. Republican naval commanders had tried to seize the Chesapeake, and been beaten off by the Natcorps’ own fleet. It made for splendid press, with the Natcorps’ broadcasts and newspapers invoking the Battle of Fort McHenry and blaring The Star-Spangled Banner through D.C. James Dozier’s easy seizure of Norfolk from an abortive Republican revolt there had basically guaranteed the safety of D.C. from a seaborne assault and keeping open the possibility of a Natcorp one on New York. “We have North Carolina and Virginia,” happily reported Dozier to his President. However, MacArthur had a dilemma on land: he was certain that taking Albany would crush the Republicans in the crib. The problem was that MacArthur’s own West Point, by a hair, had been seized by Republican partisans in the military thanks to the timely intervention of Governor Roosevelt in January. A direct march to Albany would mean going through the Hudson Valley, which would put MacArthur between the Taconic and Catskill Mountains. It would expose his flank to Butler, a tenacious commander known as “Fighting Hell-Devil”, and play into the Republicans’ strength: their army was composed almost completely of locals. In the Valley, even the Republicans’ much smaller Air Force would be of value and could harass the Natcorps.

A much more attractive target was Syracuse. MacArthur could regroup, flesh out his forces, and follow the rails north. This would force Butler, who was doubtlessly concentrating the majority of his strength in the Hudson Valley, to come to him, flipping Butler’s defensive advantage on his head. MacArthur could easily maintain supply lines and continue to enjoy a numerical and organizational edge. He could further secure his control over Pennsylvania, basically severing the state in two and guaranteeing that the Natcorps would keep the majority of it. If MacArthur took Syracuse, he would control the Mohawk River, and that would cut the rump government off from anything coming out of the Erie Canal. If Syracuse could be taken, MacArthur would also turn the Republican flank, bypass whatever defenses Butler was setting up, and make Albany completely untenable. It would also give his troops a convenient winter base, if there was even a war to be fought come winter.

Rail map of the Midwest​

Of course, MacArthur knew his opponents well, and understood that Butler would not take such a maneuver lying down. He deceived the Republicans by making it look as though he intended to assault Philadelphia and New York City, which inspired hectic, panicked preparations by both commanders. MacArthur separated from his army on May 2nd and went south. His gambit paid off. Republican high command, still in flux and sorely in need of manpower, anticipated exactly that maneuver. New recruits were directed to the east coast to man the Marshall Line. Meanwhile, under Leland Hobbs, the Natcorps took around 80,000 men to move on Syracuse. The Republicans would have had no warning whatsoever if it weren’t for the timely intervention of a passing unknown Canadian citizen, who communicated to their government that the Natcorps were moving north— getting the news to Republican high command and Butler in the nick of time, only a week behind Hobbs. “It was the most splendid race we’d ever run,” wrote one of Hobbs’s aids.

Butler rushed to defend the city, but there simply was not time. Butler rushed to attack Hobbs, practically making his own already disorganized army fall into pieces as he did so. The rest was in Albany’s hands— General Lloyd Jones was ordered to leave Fort Drum for Syracuse with 15,000 and recruit from the locals. Meanwhile Butler, unwilling to be cowed, covered an impressive amount of ground in his own right during May of 1934, executing Natcorp partisans and recruiting angry New Yorkers under his banners. Hobbs was forced to delay his path to Syracuse to face Butler, only to find that the general’s aggressive pace had separated him from the bulk of his army. The fighting was ferocious, and the Battle of Cortland concluded with thousands dead and wounded, with Butler losing nearly a third of his army and limping to Utica. Butler had failed to stop Hobbs and nearly seen his whole army destroyed, but inflicted hideous casualties on the Natcorps in spite of his many disadvantages. Natcorp tanks pushed so deep into Butler’s flanks that when Butler personally buggied to the front to rally his center, they were able to stop the encirclement and almost break the Natcorp lines. Natcorp airpower arrived in the nick of time and Butler’s green troops routed, his ambitions of relieving Syracuse finished.

Smith understood the strategic value of losing Syracuse. “Am I to be the last President of the United States?” He mused to a Secret Service man multiple times during the summer. Butler was despondent, writing that his failure to destroy Hobbs had doomed the Republican cause. Meanwhile, Jones was left with the task of linking up with Syracuse and presenting a passable defense against Hobbs’s forces. The two armies spent much of the summer dueling on the way to Syracuse, with Butler and Jones attempting to force themselves between the city and Hobbs and Hobbs attempting to leave them in the dust without positioning himself between two hostile forces. They weren’t alone, however. Smith had promoted Major George S. Patton to general and dispatched him from Albany with an even bigger force of 30,000, raised thanks to legions of angry recruits from New York City. He would meet up with Butler in Utica. While eager for a command of his own, Patton was initially disappointed that he was roped to an army of “sluggish sonsofbitches that couldn’t kill a fly”. The campaign was “a horse-race”, wrote Patton, “that the prestige of the United States depends on.” And indeed, after many brave New Yorkers died slowing Hobbs’s advance, the Republicans were able to link their forces. They were 50,000 strong when Hobbs shelled Syracuse in late August. Two weeks later, Hobbs radioed MacArthur: “We’ve weakened Gen. Butler and co. as much as we can hope to.”

George S. Patton​

Hobbs advanced into Syracuse. The bloody, urban fighting that followed was much more vicious than anything the war, even after a whole season of continuous pitched fighting, had seen and it would pale in comparison to future battles. It still rattled Americans everywhere— and for New Yorkers, only stiffened their resistance to the Natcorp regime. Syracuse proved highly difficult to penetrate. The Natcorps’ main advantage in the war’s early stages, heavy armor and targeted airstrikes, were less valuable in Syracuse thanks to the Republicans’ own air advancements and the dense urban terrain. Fighting went on for two weeks, before Patton scored a lethal blow by beating the Natcorp armor outside the city on September 7th. Perhaps the most colorful and fascinating figure of his era, Patton was among the minority of officers that stayed loyal to the Republic. A southern-born army brat, Patton was a glory-hungry Olympic athlete and Great War veteran that emerged as one of the leading theoreticians in mobile, armored warfare. Patton was in New York during the March on Washington, which some biographers have rather cynically suggested was the only reason he offered his services to Smith. In any event, Patton could barely contain his jubilation when the war began. “I must admit,” he wrote to his wife in June, “as dismal as my post is, I know for a fact that there is something pure and great deep in the American character awakened when we are at war. I am confident now is no exception.” When Lloyd Jones was killed by a Natcorp sniper, Butler personally authorized the experiment. It was a resounding success. Patton successfully routed MacArthur’s heretofore invincible tanks by catching them by surprise with pure aggression. It was the final blow in the Battle of Syracuse, mostly securing the Republic’s position before the winter of ‘34. “I had an army of girls, Jews, and men of eight different religions and colors and we sent every single one of those superior race peckerheads to hell,” he would later brag.

Meanwhile, George C. Marshall, despite heavy casualties and heavy disorganization among his forces thanks to Natcorp artillery had successfully established a series of fortifications snaking around Philadelphia, Scranton, Allentown, and New York City that kept the Natcorps from immediately entering them. MacArthur, however, was able to dispatch Eisenhower to Atlantic City in October. The surprise seaborne attack was a resounding success for the Natcorps and put the pressure on the Republic from two sides. MacArthur grasped the strategic necessity of turning the Republic’s flank. He remained supremely optimistic, telling a subordinate that “We have planted bombs into the belly of the beast.” For the war’s next year, 1935, MacArthur intended to choke the Republicans away from any potential help and beat them into submission. This, of course, would require renewed offensives in the northeast, but the failure at Syracuse had resulted in another issue for the Natcorps: volunteers and supplies poured in from the midwest, which served as a vector point for anyone and anything coming into Republican territory. It connected New England and New York to invaluable manpower and industry to wage the coming war, in addition to giving the Republicans multiple fronts to attack the Natcorps on. MacArthur’s next objective would be securing the industrial Midwest.

Atlantic City, pre war​

Politically speaking, Smith got much needed breathing room thanks to the victory at Syracuse. He had been left with a peculiar problem as the 1934 elections approached— many members of the 73rd Congress were westerners disinterested in fighting the war or men from constituencies that were overrun by MacArthur’s troops. The 73rd Congress, under the careful stewardship of men like Garner, John McCormack, and Wallace White gave Smith the powers to fight a long and hard war. Syracuse finally gave Smith’s allies the capital to pass impressment, even if the measure only made western governments more convicted in their noninvolvement, and the controversial Coolidge Resolutions which ceded considerable power to Smith in the event that a majority of Congress was absent in the upcoming session. Congress also began using the war as a litmus test for membership, having multiple pro-MacArthur members expelled and going so far as to have the pro-peace “Coward Caucus” members from the west arrested when they couldn't be ran out. Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette Jr., who had criticized Smith from the left before the March on Washington and in the spring of 1934 openly contemplated the pros and cons of accepting MacArthur, was staunchly in the President’s camp by the first snowfall. “MacArthur,” he warned, “has started this war with the sword and now he must die by the sword!” Smith recruited elder Republican statesman Henry Stimson to become Secretary of War, while Dern entered the field as a general.

Estimates suggest a staggering 60,000 had been killed in the 1934 campaigns, including civilians. The hideous fighting in Syracuse, Danville, Cortland, and Atlantic City had rattled the Republic and convinced many of its citizens that they stood little chance against the well-oiled fascist machine. But these battles also inspired a wave of volunteers, not only in America but across the world. “New Yorkers,” said one man from Buffalo, “protect their own.” Already, there were perverse stories coming out of territory under MacArthur’s control. The very fact that an openly fascist dictator had brazenly taken control of the American capital was outrageous to most of the world, and so-called “International Brigades” assembled to come to Smith’s aid. Usually, these were radical leftists that viewed alliance with the Republic as necessary to protect labor from MacArthur. “We can,” said Smith to Dern, “spare absolutely no one.” Smith, by fall, had even opened limited conscription to women. Many now-famous names, from George Orwell to Barry Goldwater, flooded in from all over the world to bolster the Republic’s armies. The Republic was not the only one to benefit from foreign attention. The Natcorps received some of the finest weaponry and advisors in the world from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which would prove vital in training their forces for the coming offensives.

Map of the leadup to the Battle of Syracuse​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“The Blind Leading the Blind”​

“[MacArthur] would’ve thrown Washington into less chaos if he’d burned it.” - Prescott Bush​

As MacArthur did battle with Marshall and Butler, his new America left its honeymoon phase. Before April, it had become clear to everyone that the Natcorp regime was there to stay and it would fundamentally transform American society, although few could’ve predicted to just what extent it would do so. The Natcorps acted quickly. Nearly all newspapers that were not owned by the regime’s enthusiastic supporters were seized at the point of a gun, as were all broadcasters that they could reach. MacArthur’s government abolished the power of individual states, dividing up America into various military districts and putting its spheres under the supervision of regime members. While the Natcorp government’s supporters praised it for its efficacy, the reality is that it was anything but. There was no formal structure or law governing the actions of MacArthur’s minions beyond what MacArthur told them to do. And when MacArthur, who had never been that interested in governing to begin with, left to conquer Albany the divisions within the Natcorp government manifested. But throughout all the chaos and tumult of this American fascism, the many factions that had raised MacArthur to the throne were united by one thing: raw will to crush their enemies.

Nicholas Murray Butler did not assume a role like second in command in the absence of MacArthur, who, by the end of summer, was known as the “Supreme Commander” in Natcorp media. He remained a useful public face for the regime, but wielded very little power behind the scenes. When MacArthur was absent, either physically or spiritually, it “was a complete unknown who lead the Natcorp government” according to Alan Brinkley. John W. Davis, nominally the new Secretary of State, was quite effective at capturing the ear of foreign diplomats. This bought the Natcorp government invaluable time, and as Germany and Italy played an increasingly large role in Natcorp politics, Davis emerged as one of the most powerful men in the regime. Aside from its fanatical partisanship towards business, the Natcorp government originally had very little in the way of ideology during its early days. MacArthur, almost certainly, saw questions like this as useless and saw little reason to do anything other than ignore them. Of course, his “royal court” had other ideas.

This was the first of many schisms in the Natcorp government, and it orbited around a question of philosophy. J. P. Morgan Jr., Thomas Lamont and their associates had bankrolled the March on Washington and were now bankrolling MacArthur’s entire regime to protect their massive fortunes. The war was about money as much as it was about ideology, and therefore there was little point in winning the war if it would destroy capital. And if the war was to last over a year, the cost would skyrocket. This, even among business, was something of the minority opinion by summer, however. Indeed, all the powerful men that stood behind their new Supreme Commander had their own agendas and they rapidly got to work implementing them. Doing so, of course, first required a political base of support so massive it could uphold a dictatorship in the world’s most prominent republic.

J. P. Morgan Jr.​

Here of course the central contradiction in the Natcorps’ regime emerged again: victory required money and business did not want to fork any over. Even before the invasion of New York, a general grumbled to MacArthur that “the men we are killin’ for won’t make the measliest sacrifices for victory.” Meanwhile, business’s demands very plainly undermined the Natcorps’ political and military standing, such as strict adherence to the gold standard and doing away with Smith’s anti-poverty programs. Morgan, now the Natcorps’ Treasury Secretary, made sure of this. This earned him the irritation of some of his fellows, as it was feared this could inspire revolt in Natcorp territory. While, of course, failing to do as Morgan suggested would shoot the Natcorps’ legs from under them and possibly result in a bloodier March on Washington. The problem was at least partially resolved thanks to John W. Davis. Davis’s suggestion to MacArthur, basically, was naked theft. He proposed massive redistribution of wealth— of “traitors” to fund the war effort and fill the gaps, and for the Natcorps to kickstart the economy through the war effort. MacArthur heartily approved. As the Natcorps assembled division after division of Kentucky and Maryland boys to invade New York, they were also building a new economy. It was, according to Hearst’s papers, “one with money and a job on the table for any true American”, so long as they fought Douglas MacArthur’s war.

For this reason, Natcorp America initially saw massive industrialization, which both put people to work and generated fresh fodder for the war effort. Davis was optimistic about the program, writing MacArthur that it was “putting the entire nation to work and satisfying would-be agitation.” Davis was (in the immediate short-term) correct and the result was an upswell of pro-Natcorp sentiment. The complete destruction of opposition voices in the territory under the Natcorps’ control created the impression that the nation was in lockstep. And before long, it actually was. The new regime’s Vice President, Butler, had marketed it as a continuation of the same government and the same Constitution, one that had simply resorted to extraordinary measures to defeat creeping communism. It simply had no patience for “disorder” and “obvious treason”, and hence had shed itself of the burdens of opposition parties and Congress. “The MacArthur Administration,” banally said Butler in a radio broadcast, “hopes to be a continuation of the prosperity and dignified government we enjoyed under Mr. Coolidge’s tenure.” Meanwhile, thousands of civil servants that had no knowledge of the coup were now along for the ride. “It was around seventeen months before I did anything other than mail,” grimly recalled one Richmond postal employee.

There was also heavy repression even very early on. The central player in it was the enigmatic J. Edgar Hoover, a lawman not even forty years old, who rapidly consolidated power over the DOJ and turned it into the Natcorp regime’s main enforcement arm. Hoover’s role in the regime’s workings has always been a subject of fascination and debate. He was not an official member of MacArthur’s junta and rarely communicated with its other members, or even with MacArthur himself. Hoover mostly acted independently, until he was called upon by MacArthur. Few in Washington trusted the Director while all feared him. He and MacArthur’s communications were barely documented beyond the banal. Their relationship is unknown, which hasn’t stopped (understandable) speculation that Hoover was the real power behind the throne. Hoover was active in rooting out MacArthur’s enemies and setting up the prison apparatus that would become a symbol of the Natcorp regime’s worst excesses in the post war period.

Director J. Edgar Hoover​

DOJ agents combed the cities with hectically assembled and not entirely clear lists from Washington. Hoover’s thought process, as always, is obscure to historians. His targets were those seen as potential Republicans, those that would be most resistant to the MacArthur regime’s machinations. Anti-Natcorp sentiment existed openly for part of 1934 and was never suppressed completely. “They are Confederates,” said one West Virginia paper. This made the most vocal opponents easy to identify throughout the border states and the upper south. And as the summer campaign heated up, Natcorp media blasted the miraculous recovery and the stunning victories in the Pennsylvania and New York theaters, lead personally by the Supreme Commander. Parades were organized, presided over prominent Natcorps and featuring everyone from creaking Civil War veterans to the Ku Klux Klan to the Boy Scouts of America. It was designed to generate enthusiasm and optimism, and overwhelming quantities of it to bury whatever second guesses the public had. It succeeded— and provided perfect cover for the Natcorps’ purge.

The historiography of the Natcorp purges remains a contentious issue because it is difficult to separate one purge from another. Nonetheless, it’s generally accepted that after the Battle of Danville the DOJ felt emboldened enough to truly rough its critics up. The locale of the hits indicate that MacArthur played a larger role than he usually did in these decisions, as it was in rural areas where disinterested countryfolk could evade conscription the easiest and foment lasting dissent. MacArthur feared the industrialized cities and countryside equally, the cities because they were where the backbone of Republican resistance would naturally be found and the countryside because it had the potential to bleed his forces dry and deny him manpower he couldn’t afford to lose. “These villages in Tennessee have a dagger to the heart of Washington,” he reportedly told Eisenhower before dispatching him to Atlantic City. In any event, Hoover and his DOJ struck throughout the border states at every level of government. Copious rewards from the money the Natcorps shoveled out of the federal treasury were given to informants. Hoover and his men didn’t content themselves with merely removing the agitator. They didn’t view their work finished unless it destroyed any possible source of resistance. Entire families were snatched in the night and dragged out of town, either to be shot in ditches like the Supreme Court had been or taken to the new Natcorp work camps thrown together in rural Kentucky and Missouri. These camps, too, were mostly secret, their stated purpose that they were simply temporary detainment facilities where work opportunities were offered to those who needed it.

“We didn’t know where we were going anymore than they did,” recalled one soldier who had been brought along with the DOJ. “We asked Hoover’s boys where we were going. They wouldn’t say. They wouldn’t say whose house we were breaking into. When they were screaming at us to shoot, they didn’t tell us who we were shooting.” Some offered a fight, but organized resistance was unable to accumulate thanks to the Natcorps’ complete control of media and superior organization. “You’re all going to hell for this,” allegedly snarled Judge Harry Truman of the powerful Jackson County before being shot in the brain, “But before you do, you’re facing the noose with MacArthur and Morgan!” The total number of those shot in their sleep or hauled into work camps was anywhere between 700 and 10,000. MacArthur considered it a resounding success. In his radio broadcasts, he frequently alluded to the Natcorps’ “knights” “in New York and in D.C.” bringing America’s enemies to justice. Hoover and his DOJ rarely went mentioned publicly. They became an implied threat. It was in this way that the Department of Justice, once the Attorney General’s main enforcement arm for bringing fugitives to justice and making the nation safer, became a bona fide secret police force. Psychologically, another peculiar effect of the Natcorp and other fascist regimes' secret police was that their threat became more distinct the less and less they were mentioned. And the less and less they were a stated part of public life, the more the gilded image of a crimeless, flawless utopia where American families worked everyday but Sunday and answered to a government divorced from partisan bickering.

It was an attractive vision, one that a DOJ defector would call an “anthill”.

Natcorp prisoners posing for a photo in the summer of 1934​

Hoover’s main targets, however, the ones that justified MacArthur’s faith in him to begin with and convinced whatever members of the business community still had doubts in an American Imperator, was organized labor. The Communist Party and more or less every socialist organization was banned outright within hours of the March on Washington. But it wasn’t until later in 1934 the hunt for reds became secret repression. Lists were compiled, as with the case of other dissenters, and midnight raids organized to terrorize them and their families. The DOJ, however, took a noticeably stricter line with suspected labor leaders. They correctly identified organized labor as the Natcorp regime’s most dangerous and capable domestic foe. Labor leaders were dragged from their houses, brutalized until names were extracted from them, and then put in concrete chambers. Directives encouraging the use of torture, often informal and destroyed after their distribution, shot through the DOJ’s corridors. Information gained under such methods was of dubious reliability, but in Hoover’s mind it was simply less potential communists to deal with. In conjunction with this, the DOJ embarked one of the regime’s more infamous crimes against humanity: the pink scare, which saw Hoover’s in-government enemies branded as homosexuals and given grisly fates.

Of course, it was a wide and diverse crew that had stood behind the March on Washington. As the months marched on, that diversity became a weakness. There were, in fact, key disagreements, including those that had endorsed the overthrow of Smith not because he represented a threat to business but because he was not socialistic enough. Foremost among those was Charles Coughlin, the Detroit-based radio broadcaster and a Catholic priest much like the ousted President. He was originally a fanatical backer of the new order. Coughlin’s fiery broadcasts put the coup in starkly moral terms. It was MacArthur, or hellfire. MacArthur was all that stood between the United States and Jew-inspired anarchy in these broadcasts, and they went a long way in securing the everyman in Natcorp territory for MacArthur’s cause. Indeed, Coughlin’s broadcasts were so influential that they may have persuaded westerners to pursue nonintervention. Angry Coughlinites even went so far as to storm the North Dakota capitol in the spring of 1934, after which the legislature narrowly voted to embrace self-determinism until the “eastern dispute between Smith and Gen. MacArthur” could be resolved. Nonetheless, the priest was a leftist as much as he was a nationalist and a reactionary. His publication, Social Justice, had often criticized Smith for his failure to take the bankers, who Coughlin associated with Judaism, to task. And when MacArthur, who was now indisputably a dictator thanks to the efforts of men like Coughlin, sponsored a rigorously conservative economic program that was simply too much. Coughlin had originally believed that MacArthur truly was a “man of the people and of firm anti-Bolshevik Constitution” and that he was merely using business for his own purposes.

By summer, however, all that had happened was that the Natcorp government had handed the country back to big business. Coughlin gave a broadcast decrying the “ungodly thievery” which had consumed the Natcorp government, charitably adding that “as Gen. MacArthur fights to secure our destiny against the Russians in New York, the same bankers that brought us to the ruin that he saved us from are looting our sacred capital.” The hint, and the nuance, was not appreciated by the Natcorp government. The Natcorps, within nights, descended into chaos as their nationalist, leftist, and Coughlinite factions were rapidly consumed. It was not a particularly hard thing to do, given how conservative in character the regime had been since its onset. Coughlin himself was dragged out of his parish by a squad of DOJ agents that rampaged their way through the Catholic Church they so hated. Neither Hoover nor MacArthur could bring themselves to have him killed, and instead committed to an insane asylum in Washington, where he would remain for the war’s duration. He was replaced with a more reliable and orthodox Natcorp broadcaster the next day, with Social Justice declaring that Coughlin was a homosexual. The purges had resulted in many Natcorps, some under completely false pretenses, killed but also gave the regime an important pretext to centralize and to flex its power into the industrial midwest. And in response there were riots, which justified more crackdowns. The DOJ chartered its own lower level police, made entirely of hired thugs loyal to them and them alone. They got to work using bullets and bayonets against any agitators that were bold enough to rally in public, and within days any noise from Coughlin’s wing was smothered.

Charles Coughlin​

DOJ agents had little trouble getting across the country, and Hoover’s liberal and aggressive use of brazen murder and kidnapping, as he employed on Coughlin, yielded fruit. Nearly all the state governments were terrified of speaking out, and this solidified the entire American west as a neutral zone. As one Oregon legislator mused, “What is the point of supporting a war that does not have support and one that we cannot fight from so far away if Hoover’s dogs will come for your children?” They’d effectively put the governments of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana under their supervision in conjunction with the Pennsylvania campaign. This would be important as popular sentiment in the midwest turned against the Natcorps following the abuses as well as Republican victory at Syracuse. “We need the Great Lakes,” MacArthur was fond of saying. “We need to choke Smith while we beat him.” And consequently, as MacArthur, Hobbs, and Eisenhower advanced on the Republican strongholds in the east, securing the midwest became equally important if the Natcorps were truly to command a national mandate to govern. Placed in charge of this complex task was General Hugh Johnson, an enthusiastic supporter of the regime that had been one of Morgan’s first choices for an American Caesar should MacArthur fail for whatever reason. Johnson was the new regime’s Labor Secretary, which in practice meant that he was tasked with utterly destroying organized labor. In the fall, as Leland Hobbs limped away from Syracuse, the Natcorps abandoned soft control over Ohio and Indiana for hard, raw power.

The state and local governments had, over the course of the months, either been thrown into impotent chaos by or outright subverted by Natcorp agents. Hoover’s DOJ bullied or bribed most legislators and officials capable of disrupting his schemes. Those that remained, as was the case with many politicians across America, believed that they had bought peace for their states. In reality, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill would later say, they had attempted to “bribe a crocodile by feeding him.” The end of 1934 saw hastily assembled Natcorp tank columns rush into Ohio and Indiana as the DOJ threw their governments into chaos. The takeover was complete in days, with local and out-of-state recruits alike following to secure Columbus, Indianapolis, and Springfield. Johnson assumed full control of the war zones and divvied them up into over a hundred highly compact military districts. Unions were, of course, destroyed within days of the takeover. Ironically, most of the states’ key industries were seized and redistributed to Natcorp loyalists. Potentially disloyal businesses were looted and destroyed, their funds dumped into the Natcorp coffers. Johnson, anticipating unrest, readied even more nefarious plans to beat the soul out of the midwest’s labor movement and make its industrial machine hum along for the Natcorps. “Communism in Ohio,” he said, “must not merely be overrun, but eradicated.”

MacArthur, now in Pennsylvania, had intended for the invasion to cut the Republic off from potential support in the west and to prevent the conflict from pouring into other theaters. It had the opposite effect— horror stories from Natcorp territory energized the midwest’s progressive political machines and the flagrant act of aggression from Johnson’s stormtroopers lit the entire midwest into a fury. Effigies of MacArthur and Butler were lit across Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. “If you support fascism,” one man at a demonstration in Madison plainly said, “we will lynch you.” The rage caused Philip La Follette of the Progressive Party to win the November Governor’s race in a commanding landslide. La Follette declared, “we shall fight the Morgan oligarchy today, we shall fight it tomorrow, and we shall fight it forever!” Similarly, Floyd Olsen in Minnesota triumphed over the conservative legislature. Both states pledged themselves to the Republican cause and raised hundreds of thousands of recruits within weeks.

This meant that MacArthur would invade them next, of course.

Floyd Olsen and Philip La Follette​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“Crude, Rattlesnakes, Alligators”​

“I bring ‘em in from all over the country, Burton.”
“They come to see you for the same reason they look at animals in the zoo, Huey.”
“True. But I bring ‘em all the same.”
- Huey Long and Burton K. Wheeler prior to the March on Washington

Huey Long of Louisiana, also known as the Kingfish​

The political world Senator Huey Long had climbed to the top of was one of naked fraud, illegal violence, and all-powerful political machines that transcended normal law. The populist lawyer embraced these tactics to triumph and become the undisputed ruler of Louisiana, first as Governor in 1928 and then as Senator after his term expired. His enemies were the corporations that gouged his impoverished constituents, particularly Standard Oil. When Al Smith ascended to the Presidency, Long immediately turned his eyes to the 1936 DNC. And when Douglas MacArthur ousted Smith, Long’s instincts kicked in and he grasped the true nature of the March on Washington before most of his colleagues. His sudden abandonment of his senatorial duties was initially met with ridicule across the country, until MacArthur’s troops were shot down at Foresburgh. The Shreveport Caucasian asked simply: “Has anyone seen or heard from the Supreme Court since Gen. MacArthur’s announcement?” Long was not idle during this time, rapidly assembling the Louisiana political machine for his next move. Dating back to the first American Civil War was a peculiar sense of “southern nationalism” fueled by resentment of the industrial north and fiery racism. It was for this reason that the Southern Democrat bloc in Congress overwhelmingly chose not to go to Smith in Albany or make their peace with MacArthur. Most returned to their bases of power, like Long, and those southern authorities made it immediately clear that they had no intention of submitting to MacArthur and even less intention of putting their necks on the line for the romanist President. In a handful of relatively bloodless weeks, the south achieved a de facto independence that four years of bloody war could not. The federal government, which at that point still existed as an organized entity and hadn’t completely been severed by the Natcorps and Republicans, ceased to seriously contest southern control of the south.

It was a new order that, like Natcorp Washington and like the brutal arena Long had won his spurs in, was governed by no formal rules beyond who held the guns. And Huey Long held the guns.

Unique among the great men of the south, Long was not motivated by racism. He was a brilliant orator that mesmerized nearly everyone who listened to his speeches. Chief Justice William Howard Taft had called him, “the most brilliant lawyer to ever argue before the Supreme Court.” Prior to the March on Washington, Long had earned the nation’s attention thanks to his incendiary speeches against the trusts and his devotion to Louisiana’s poor. Long viewed himself as the one man that could truly ensure prosperity and order for the common people of the south. Curiously, sources close to Long almost unanimously agree that he predicted MacArthur would rapidly set up a dictatorship and become bogged down in a war in the north. “Now here in Louisiana,” he said to a friend, “nobody asked for that jackbooted serpent’s opinion.” Long saw the south as “sittin’ on a razor’s edge”, with race wars and miserable poverty awaiting any possible failure on his part. Without the federal government to intervene, Long nationalized most of Louisiana’s major industries. The National Guard marched on Standard Oil’s facilities, looted its managers, and sent them north in buggies. And then he, like Douglas MacArthur, expanded his operations. A large part of Texas and Oklahoma, in conjunction with the Stock Crash of 1929, had suffered from a horrific series of natural disasters known as the Dust Bowl that uprooted farms and left thousands destitute. The governors of those states, Miriam Ferguson and William Murray, found in Long a leader that could shield them in the treacherous new order.

Standard Oil facility in Baton Rouge, which Long nationalized​

Long’s radio broadcasts raced across the Panhandle’s deserts, finding desperate and angry farmers eager for hope. He delivered. Starting with his nucleus, the Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma governments rapidly handed out farm aid that dwarfed Smith’s paltry reforms. This gave Long capital, and when the southern states formally held conventions to decided what was to be done he dominated them. In fact, recent evidence that was ignored in the post war period suggests that Huey Long was the deciding factor in the south opposing de jure secession. His powerful oratory successfully bullied the south’s conservative establishment into accepting his treatments: pragmatic neutrality and buildup. “What do y’all want?” He roared before a crowd of Mississippi sharecroppers, “the stars and bars or $5,000 for you and a college for your children?” Long rapidly consolidated power over the deep south, balancing the interests of its traditional white elite with the poor farmers and sharecroppers. He even quietly earned the loyalty of the south’s black population through his economic promises. Brinkley noted that when compared to MacArthur, Long was “by all measures, the more capable dictator.” Long had no formal role beyond Senator in an institution that the south was no longer heeding, but quickly made himself the most powerful man in the south. Armed with the wealth of the trusts he’d dismantled at gunpoint, Long got to work fulfilling his promises: giving every white southern man a payout and massively investing in the south’s underdeveloped infrastructure. In this way, he won the immediate loyalty of most of the poor yeomen even if the long term consequences of some of his actions would be disastrous.

Conservatives in the south distrusted Long and initially tried to stop him. Georgia’s Governor, Eugene Talmadge, decried Long’s public works programs as undermining the old individualism of the south and empowering Georgia’s black population, which at that point existed as second class citizens. “Huey Long is a black rabble-rouser in spirit,” he snarled to a friend. At the same time as this, through much of the south the March on Washington was followed by rumors that a federal invasion was coming to overthrow white supremacy. Panicked white mobs had rampaged throughout the countryside, lynching dozens and inflicting countless millions in property damage. The Ku Klux Klan took the opportunity to assert itself, becoming the dominant power in the south once again. Long ignored and arguably even enabled the racial violence, instead focusing on his economic promises— which appealed to enough whites and blacks alike to consolidate his power. “The Negroes get the idea,” he said. “They know that I’m best for ‘em.” The second part of his plan involved MacArthur himself. Through a highly informal, secretive, and disorganized grapevine Long was able to reach an implied understanding with MacArthur or perhaps James Dozier: while the Natcorps were fighting in the north, the Deep South would largely be ignored. This too served Long’s purposes, as Dozier rapidly consumed much of the upper south, weakening the conservative establishment and forcing them to seek refuge under Long’s umbrella. Governor Talmadge, for his part, resigned after Long’s rangers found themselves in the Georgia Governor’s mansion. Long employed, as he told his wife Rose McConnell, “every damned dirty trick Satan conceived of” in keeping his subjects in line. Nothing was truly beneath Long. Recent historians are uncovering growing evidence of extensive contact between Long and Dozier. This means that when Natcorp tanks and planes crossed the unofficial and always contested border, Long not only knew about them but likely had actively sponsored them to give the people of the south another opportunity to hand him power at the expense of white supremacist militants and the conservative establishment.

Governor Miriam A. Ferguson​

Long was a fiery leftist, but similarly to MacArthur ran his government like a protection racket. The trusts and wealthy that bent the knee could expect amnesty and even profitable cooperation. Long would, of course, liberally dip into their funds as much as he saw fit but it was better than liquidation or Long’s rangers failing to overlook violations of the wealth cap. Long put southerners to work on the big farms and properties that he seized, appropriating the defunct federal bureaucracy to do his bidding. He bribed potential enemies by putting them in prominent positions, warding off the threat of race war by keeping black southerners under the government’s heel, and used his machine ruthlessly against whoever was left to oppose him. “King Huey,” remarked Murray, “has the allegiance of every decent hearted southern man.” Long was fond of going to public festivals in Louisiana and basking in the riotous applause of the common people. His loyalists, meanwhile, quickly wielded power on par with the civilian governments of other states in the deep south. “Every man a king,” Long famously proclaimed, “but no one wears a crown!” Long was the supreme ruler of the entire south long before the end of 1934, credited with warding off racial chaos, keeping the federal jackboot as far off as possible, and putting economic malaise to death. While he wore no crown, every man in the south knew who their master was.

As a Senator Long was an early critic of Al Smith, viewing him as an untrustworthy and corrupt politician that would give the working man only the feeblest of consolation prizes. For Long’s own political prospects, Smith’s victory had been a godsend and allowed him to raise his profile even before the March on Washington. “Let me tell you all something,” he told ravenous group of reporters in Washington D.C. before Congress went into recess in late 1933, “if our next options for President are Al Smith or Herbert Hoover again, I’ll have to get involved myself!” Long had more than enough skill and capital to rapidly consolidate his rule across most of the south, outflanking the old aristocracy at every turn. Long’s kingdom of “crude, alligators, and rattlesnakes,” as an Italian diplomat sent to survey his progress called it, was remarkably unstable in truth and held together only by Long’s personality and continued promises of bread and circuses. And of course, that required a prosperous economy in the long term and like MacArthur Long could not create that at gunpoint.

In fact, there were multiple immediate, disastrous consequences of Long’s autocratic rule of the south. Nationalizing Standard Oil and the general effects of the Republican and Natcorp armies duking it out in the northeast caused the oil market to turn on its head. Strict price controls from Long, enforced by paramilitary rangers that answered personally to him and sometimes directly competed with state authorities, would effectively destroy the south’s crude exports. They would never recover entirely, inflicting the entire Pacific with oil scarcity. Long hiked prices for Texas crude, directly subsidizing workers that were out of luck and sending others to the Panhandle to farm in the Dust Bowl. It stemmed the bleeding in the short term but destroyed the international oil market, with Long using confiscated funds to pay oil workers to not produce oil. “I wound't [sic] toil in the oil fields from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents a day when I could get $1.30 for pretending to work on a FARM!” bragged one worker in a letter from the Oklahoma panhandle to his family in Houston. Long had more than enough oil to field what equipment he’d been able to salvage from the U.S. Army and Navy units that fell in with him, but the international oil market was left in shambles. The Empire of Japan, which had a rapidly growing jingoist faction, was forced to table its grand visions of conquest because it simply did not have the fuel to reach them.

A dust storm in Oklahoma​

Meanwhile, Long’s decisive seizure of power had stopped complete anarchy, but there were still an abundance of mass killings. The Ku Klux Klan and the fascist Silver Legion rode through the south with impunity, inflicting open and illegal violence on black civilians. Long did not condone the violence, but often he did little to stop it. “Don’t they know what I’m doin’ for ‘em?” He asked his brother rhetorically, not clarifying which faction he was referencing. He used the massacres as yet another pretext to seize power. In September, Camden Alabama exploded into violence when Klansmen were killed by the town’s black residents, who had taken up what arms they had in self-defense. In the eyes of white southerners, this threatened to throw Alabama into race war. White Alabamians assembled militias and dozens of their black neighbors were lynched. Long, who like most white southerners saw race war as an existential and nightmarish threat, sent in rangers on horseback first. They reached Camden before the white supremacist militias, and restored “order” by massacring civilians until they had no will to fight back. “It was the dirtiest thing I have ever done,” recalled one Baton Rouge man, “I will go to hell for it.” This satisfied Alabama’s lust for a crackdown— putting the loudest agitators in the minority, and allowing Long’s rangers to turn their bayonets on them next. With each massacre and each confiscation, King Huey’s power only grew.

Long understood that the sovereignty of his new empire would depend on having bargaining chips against whoever won the conflict, which was rapidly becoming known as the Second American Civil War. Following the Battle of Danville, nearly everyone in the world believed that it would be the Natcorps. So Long assumed that he was operating on borrowed time. And that led him to do something quite ambitious.

Blanton Winship had been appointed as Governor of Puerto Rico by President Smith early into his term. This was because Smith feared strikes and wanted the Nicaragua veteran’s firm hand in place in case of potential agitation. The island was seized during the Spanish-American War at the closing of the nineteenth century and had been under military rule since then. It was hit particularly hard by the economic misery that followed the Crash of 1929. Its traditional industry, sugar, was lucrative for the island’s ruling caste and a select group of financial elites on the mainland. However, most of its population lived in poverty and was neglected during the wreckage of the early nineteen thirties. And after Douglas MacArthur proclaimed himself ruler of the United States, Blanton Winship was left on an island full of malcontents far removed from Albany and Washington D.C. with a large military contingent. The part of the Army that did join forces with MacArthur overwhelmingly tended to be within his direct orbit, and thus were pulled in by sheer inertia during the coup’s early stages. “In the Army,” writes Brinkley, “the song ‘The Army Goes Rolling Along’ was ironically sung by many army dissenters in the weeks following the March on Washington.” The United States Navy sided with the Natcorps in much smaller portions than their Army counterparts did, and as a result the U.S. soldiers left on Puerto Rico were overwhelmingly neutral— and left in dangerous territory, cut off from any real support. Winship moved quickly to restore order, putting the firing squad back in use for deserters. This only inspired still more desertions. With ships in short supply, that meant leaving one’s post with a gun and settling down in a Puerto Rican village until the storm blew over. The storm never would end, and by winter it was clear that Puerto Rico's denizens weren't going anywhere and Al Smith wasn't on the way with reinforcements.

Puerto Rican Governor Blanton Winship​

This only made Winship more desperate. Seeking to protect business interests in a way to leverage support for himself, perhaps from the Royal Navy, Winship sent what troops he had to keep sugar plantations safe. And this, too, backfired when it inspired open revolt in the local Puerto Rican populace. With Washington D.C. thrown into chaos and America sinking into Civil War, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party under Pedro Albizu Campos hoped to seize the moment and oust Winship. Nonetheless, the large contingent of U.S. troops present on Puerto Rico made this impossible. Campos’s party incited mass protests all across the island, which further crippled its already flailing economy and made Winship panic. The result of this was the Ponce massacre, which saw Winship order police to open fire into demonstrators in Ponce, Puerto Rico. The Ponce massacre only fanned the flames of rebellion and within days there were guerilla battles throughout the Puerto Rican countryside. “Our situation is desperate,” said Winship in his private memoirs. “The locals are rebelling en masse. We are out of money. Troops are leaving every day.” He urgently sent messages to his comrades in Nicaragua for relief. They were busy with similar uprisings. The British government, still stunned by developments in America, had its eyes on Puerto Rico’s wealth but it was Huey Long that moved first.

Long’s rangers, bolstered by armed recruits throughout the south, were hastily assembled and sent through the Gulf of Mexico with the splinter of the U.S.N. Long had managed to seize during his chaotic rise to power. They arrived in San Juan in October, as the frontline in New York ground to a bloody standstill. Long’s rangers were very effective in taking control of Puerto Rico, not just from the Puerto Rican Nationalists (Campos fled the island for Venezuela), but also from Winship. Winship received a telegram from Long the next day. “Play nice,” it said, according to legend, though its actual contents are known to none other than Winship. Winship and every other man, woman, and child in Puerto Rico and in other U.S. holdings throughout Latin America fell under the protection of King Huey. With a notable military, his main rivals bitterly split, and the wealth of the Caribbean under his thumb Long had succeeded where Jefferson Davis had failed. The South had risen again, at least for a short period of time, under the iron fist of Huey Long.

States under Long's control by the end of 1934​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“All Quiet on the Northeast Front”​

“We find ourselves locked in the greatest struggle of our times— a product of a generation of godlessness and lawlessness. The fate of the American nation depends on how long we shall fight under the glorious banner of General MacArthur.” - Nicholas Murray Butler

George C. Marshall​

During the Great War, Erich Ludendorf, who by the March on Washington was an aging but prominent supporter of the Nazi regime, had scoffed at the possibility of American outrage costing Germany the war. Americans, after all, were locked behind the Atlantic Ocean. Even if they did have the muscle to defeat the mighty German Army, there was thousands of miles of ocean between them and whatever America could muster. Among other things, by making this statement Ludendorf had profoundly underestimated American industrial capabilities, which would become the most powerful in the world by the outbreak of the Second American Civil War. At the same time, the world was on the brink of a military revolution dominated by armored warfare and airpower. And while capable commanders on both sides would quickly discover that revolution, before they did the Second American Civil War saw a rehash of Great War tactics with 1930’s arms. The result of this was heavy casualties and mass disorganization.

MacArthur, who had inherited most of the Army’s equipment, initially benefited the most from this. The Syracuse campaign had mostly ended any hopes of a quick and easy war, but in the Winter of 1934 the Natcorps still had reason to believe that they could ensure the Republic’s defeat by breaking the Marshall Line. Locking the Republic into New England and especially capturing New York City would turn the war into a siege, with the Natcorps doing the besieging. And for any hope of that, the Natcorps would need to muscle through New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. MacArthur, whose regime was being hastily assembled across the country, reorganized his faction of the United States Army into ten Corps. He took control of the III Corps himself for the winter of 1934, which was stationed in eastern Pennsylvania. Coordinating with Eisenhower’s I Corps in New Jersey, MacArthur intended to crush the green Republican recruits through raw force. The result was fighting so hideously bloody that nobody could’ve predicted even a year beforehand that such a thing was even possible in America. The finest artillery pieces the Army had were quickly put to work by both sides to obliterate enemy territory. What was “enemy” territory was never entirely clear to anyone and constantly changed. The result was a high collateral game that turned eastern Pennsylvania into a wasteland.

Artillery aside, the Second American Civil War initially left commanders with little idea of what to do with their infantry. Tanks and airplanes shattered most green recruits they encountered. George C. Marshall despaired that, “a million men, two million men— if I had ten million they’d still break before the Jackboot tanks.” And this was much of the challenge of upholding the Marshall Line. Republican high command managed to muster hundreds of thousands from New England farms to New York City slums, but it was all they could do to even delay MacArthur. Meanwhile, equipping this army aside, it needed to be fed and housed through the winter. No area in America was prepared to do that, meaning troops lived off the land and even when commanders on both sides were discouraging outright brutality it happened regularly. Theft was the most common offense, but murder and rape were all too common as well. The result was two ragtag, mismatched armies duking it out in bitter cold with weapons neither side truly understood.

Natcorp recruits in Delaware​

Under joint attack from Eisenhower and MacArthur, the Marshall Line buckled and in many places broke entirely. Marshall recognized the importance of not being boxed into the Northeast alone, and endeavored to hold anything in the Mid Atlantic he could. Philadelphia, for both strategic and sentimental reasons, was a city he and President Smith absolutely refused to see fall into Natcorp hands. For this reason, when the Republican position in southern New Jersey became completely untenable Marshall prepared for the unthinkable: a siege of the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed. This was a decision that very nearly resulted in Smith dismissing him, but there simply were not other generals to be found as Smith wanted Butler transferred to the Midwest. Nonetheless, Marshall’s early preparations were vindicated. MacArthur turned his sights on the City of Brotherly Love, pounding any Republican formations with heavy artillery. Marshall suffered many defeats on many fronts. The Republican recruits were often no match for what MacArthur and Eisenhower had, and the result was continual collapse around Philadelphia. But, steadily, the delays played into the Republicans’ hands. In November MacArthur launched a major offensive into the suburb of Pottstown, and this time the Republican recruits held their ground and were able to compete with the Natcorps for air superiority. The sheer mass of raw recruits coming in from both sides meant that while the Natcorps were not by any means outnumbered, the bulk of their army was as green as the Republicans. And the Republicans quickly learned the ways of war. “There is so much butchery,” wrote one Irish American private in Quakertown to his parents in New York City. “I believe firmly in the Lord and Virgin whenever the whistling begins. I fear the engines of hell themselves but I hate them too. There is kerosene that we use for our night fire, and unlike in July I will never break for hope that I can one day cook a jackboot alive in his tank.” In the Midwest, British volunteer Eric Blair, also known under his pen name George Orwell, wrote simply: “Every one of us has vowed to kill at least one fascist. If we do so, they shall soon go extinct.”

The venom and hatred from the Natcorp side was equally powerful after several rounds of hideous fighting. “They turn their guns on their own cities,” wrote a colonel in MacArthur’s army, “they loot their own food stores. When fighting starts they break and loot— and neither women nor children are safe when they do. We have seen firsthand the despotism and government-by-thief the Romanist has planned for every corner of our fine country should we fail.” “I wish to kill Smith and that whore Roosevelt,” wrote another. “And I would consider it my honor to do the same to any rumpub. in my path.” The stories of the battles, rather than cause the population to turn on MacArthur, polarized his base of support. Even as the stakes became impossible to avoid, MacArtur’s partisans became even more fanatical, which enabled the DOJ to ramp up the crackdowns on his domestic opponents. The staunchest of MacArthur’s enemies formed resistance movements, which were of course encouraged by Republican authorities. Before Christmas of 1934, Mary Dothan was such a participant, sending parcels of information from D.C. socialites on the tenuous road to Albany. “I have invested in the pineapple trade,” she wrote bluntly. The DOJ, meanwhile, would engage in unprecedented subterfuge under Hoover’s stewardship.

George Marshall was successful in plugging the leaks north of Philadelphia. Despite heavy losses, the Republicans were able to stop the Natcorps from breaking into New Jersey and meeting up with Eisenhower to encircle Philadelphia. Republican artillery and airpower, while at a clear disadvantage to the Natcorps, was able to keep MacArthur’s various subordinates from linking up and completely cutting off Philadelphia. Like George Washington before him, it made MacArthur’s chances of crossing the Delaware River successfully incredibly low without a military victory first. The Republicans in Philadelphia understood that evacuation would probably lose the war and give the better armed and more numerous Natcorps a straight line to New York City. “We are in check if we should move our rook,” explained Marshall to Stimson. Well before Christmas, however, it was clear that Marshall had won the maneuvering game, keeping the Natcorp armies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania from cutting Philadelphia off completely. This prompted MacArthur’s next move: seize the city by raw force and destroy the Republicans through bloodletting. In November, days after Thanksgiving, MacArthur sent orders to invade Philadelphia through West Chester. And thus begin the Battle of Philadelphia, among the war’s most infamous.

Carnage to the west of Philadelphia​

In the midst of a bitterly cold autumn turning into an even colder winter in a country already wracked by poverty, Philadelphia was subjected to a savage artillery barrage. This was pulled straight from MacArthur’s Great War manual. It was, according to him, an “unfortunate but necessary way to soften ‘em up.” These were followed by air raids, which were new to the world of warfare. Both sides quickly grasped their value, and for MacArthur they were a fine way to target military structures in Philadelphia. His hope was to demoralize and wound the Republicans enough to destroy them in a pitched battle, separate Republican formations in Philadelphia and Wilmington, and then strangle what was left like a python. The Natcorps understood that this would mean extensively bloody fighting with very high civilian casualties, unlike anything the war had seen so far, but also knew that if they could seize Philadelphia that New York City and then Albany would not be far ahead. The best case scenario was taking New England early in 1935. The worst case scenario was protracted war, which was what the Natcorps would surely face if they did not attack Philadelphia to begin with. The Natcorp bombings— followed by an invasion on the city’s western fringes that was resisted as savagely as it was conducted— were successful in putting the defenders through hell, but the result was they only became further indistinguishable from the civilian population. The Battle of Philadelphia was widely called the “Bloodletting of Philadelphia”, and consumed the largest amount of troops of any single engagement in the war. By Christmas Day of 1934, Philadelphia was a ferocious stalemate. The Natcorps were grinding their way into the city, but the war most certainly would not end in 1935.

During the winter of 1934, MacArthur ordered a new theater of the war to be opened in order to box in Smith. The victory of Philip La Follette in the 1934 Wisconsin Governor’s race solidified that state and nearby Minnesota and Iowa as Republican bastions. As Hobbs had failed to take Syracuse, this meant that the Great Lakes was a viable route for men and treasure to reach the Republican cause. General Hugh Johnson, also the Secretary of Labor for the Natcorp regime, was directed to take the Midwest at any and all costs. The Natcorps were successful in deposing the governments of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan but large portions of those states were outside of their control. These states also had powerful labor movements, which were, as Brinkley writes, “the backbone of Republican resistance.” The DOJ already had a decent idea of who the strongest supporters and organizers of labor were. Fast arrests drove unions underground, but many leaders had fled ahead of the Natcorp takeover. And this did not stop massive strikes from forming within days of the coup, joined by angry citizens everywhere. Johnson saw this as the greatest threat to the regime’s legitimacy, and understood that it would be impossible to prosecute a war against La Follette and Olsen without the states they already had completely pacified. Furthermore, outside of the major population centers the Natcorps had no power at all. They were unable to exert power any further north than Lansing in Michigan, allowing for Michigan politicians that had escaped to form a rump government in Marquette.

“Ohio,” wrote Johnson, “must be destroyed, not overrun. Only that way can we hope to rebuild it.” Strikers were brutalized. Rioters were shot. When Ohio and Indiana were engulfed in strikes, Johnson, who had divided them into tiny militarized districts, responded quickly and harshly. Green Natcorp troops fought laborers hand-to-hand with bayonets. Cities like Cincinnati, Columbus, and Gary were severely damaged, but the Natcorps were on top by the end of the struggle. The winter revolts were useful to Johnson, who quickly discerned which troops were truly loyal to the regime and which weren’t. Ordered to fire into crowds, the hectic environment saw most Natcorp soldiers doing as they were told. “The devil owned us from that day forward,” recalled one sergeant who survived the war, “and his name was Hugh Johnson.” All urban centers with high union populations saw mass demonstrations followed by crackdowns. Johnson’s actions earned him a moniker from his new subjects: the Butcher of Ohio. Johnson promptly forced strikers back to work at the point of a gun and cut pay to help finance the war effort. He was advised by Hoover to create work camps for agitators, where they could become useful. According to anecdote, Johnson simply smiled at one of the Director’s agents and said that “we have Ohio for this purpose.” Although the savagery in 1934 and early 1935 would pale next to actions further into the war, the stories nonetheless horrified many everywhere, even though Johnson and MacArthur were not without their supporters. Organized labor and the radical left across the world flocked to the Republic’s banner. When Philip La Follette was tasked with defending his state, he had so many volunteers that the Republic could never hope to arm them with the majority of its industrial might on the other side of Michigan.

Photo of Eric Blair, a Republican volunteer​

MacArthur sensed weakness. He instructed Johnson to take whatever hard equipment the burgeoning Natcorp war machine could spare and carve a path of fire and blood to Minneapolis. A winter attack was thought to be best— here as in other areas, the Natcorps gambled that their superior training would carry the day and that the winter would be more burdensome for the Republicans than for them. Immediately after La Follette’s victory, preparations were made. Johnson himself was to lead the expedition. Speed would be the most valued element, with MacArthur wanting a decapitation strike that would destroy the left wing governments in the Midwest before they could become a serious threat to the Natcorp war effort. The expedition would begin with 100,000 troops and was to be reinforced from divisions coming in from the east and new recruits. Within days, Johnson had already secured favorable automobile routes that could bring transfers from Pennsylvania to Illinois in days. He flooded into northern Illinois on November 10th, crushing the sparse Republican units that came into conflict with his men. Floyd Olsen, who assumed de facto control of the Midwestern Theater, ordered a general retreat to Madison. The Wisconsin legislature, meanwhile, unanimously passed an emergency bill investing authority in La Follette, who declared a state of emergency.

Mayor Cermak of Chicago, who had been in office for a little under two years, was openly defiant in the face of Johnson’s army, penning an obscenity-laden reply to Johnson’s offers of clemency in exchange for surrender. As Johnson’s army made its way north under increasingly hostile conditions, like subzero temperatures and multiple feet of snow, it could not hope to take Chicago. As a result, Johnson decided to simply bypass the city and leave a small force to surround it and ensure that his rear was secure. In reality, Cermak's bluster aside, Chicago had nothing in it resembling an army. This was the first mistake Johnson made, weakening a force that was already thoroughly miserable thanks to the winter. “If only Mac knew of our conditions” wrote one Maryland private. “I apologize for the state of my handwriting as I have lost a finger.” The Republicans, meanwhile, scrambled to arm and train the ragtag horde of men and women offering to fight for them. The Johnson Offensive, as it came to be known, wanted chiefly to capture Madison and Milwaukee, seizing southern Wisconsin much the same way that the Natcorps had captured southern Michigan. If nothing else, Johnson would have a base of operations to subdue the midwest and could easily keep Olsen from reinforcing Smith in Albany. The Republicans prepared to make a fight of it. Personally surveyed by La Follette, they hastily constructed fortifications in and around the town of Rockford, with the hope being that they could keep Johnson at bay and use that as a springboard for keeping Chicago safe, much as Marshall was seeking to do in and around Philadelphia. The Republicans managed to arm a force of 70,000, close to what Johnson had in total and with the defensive advantage.

Johnson, nonetheless, feeling the bitter cold with his army, felt he had little choice politically but to make the offensive work lest he return to MacArthur empty handed. This was a recurring issue for the Natcorp commanders— few had regular access to the flamboyant and egotistical MacArthur, and therefore scrambled not to disappoint him, Hoover, or anyone else that could take their power from them or do worse. Later in the war, it would result in commanders taking extravagant and unnecessary risks which often backfired. Johnson, however, was correct that he was facing the Republican army at its weakest. The idea of potentially capturing La Follette also whet his appetite for battle. In any event, he ordered an attack on December the 10th, with the spirited backing of the Natcorp air and armor. The Republicans in the Midwest, like the Republicans at Danville, had more or less no response to these. Military theoreticians had long believed that the intense fortification that had dominated the Great War would give way to a new, mobile era defined by the ability to shatter infantry and artillery formations. As previously explained, at the war’s beginning the Natcorps were the ones better poised to exploit this new reality. “They have the guns,” Stimson grimly explained to President Smith. “All we can do is hold out until more can be constructed.” The Battle of Rockford was a strategic blunder on the Republicans’ part because La Follette played a huge part of his hand without understanding this.

Natcorp airpower at the Battle of Rockford​

Consequently, Johnson scored a massive victory for under 5,000 casualties. La Follette barely escaped to Madison and prepared to flee further north, and probably half of the Republican army scattered, was captured, or was simply killed. Natcorp airpower here was the decisive factor, with timely bombings obliterating Republican defenses. “They were like fire breathing dragons,” recalled La Follette, who personally witnessed a strafe not far from his position. “I lost all hope at that moment because I’d never seen anything like it. I can’t even begin to explain what those boys were feeling when they belched flame on our ranks.” “Uncomfortably,” wrote Eric Blair, who suffered a gunshot wound to the neck, “we were slaughtered.” The victory, meanwhile, was helpful politically for MacArthur. He abandoned his post in eastern Pennsylvania and returned to D.C. to truly govern, according to some reports because he felt so alarmed by the extent of J. Edgar Hoover’s purges of supposed homosexuals and communists in the regime. There is at least some evidence to suggest that MacArthur feared that the associates of John Davis were trying to marginalize him. Others have suggested more base motivations: MacArthur, although much preferring to lead in person and receive the adulation of his new army, wanted to bask in the power and glory of his new empire even more. Whatever the case, MacArthur did not spend Christmas with the men and instead went to D.C. with his entourage. “Ours is a new America,” said MacArthur to a parade of newly minted Natcorp soldiers who would soon be in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, “evolved, but as intrepid as the old. And although before me is the greatest threat to the supremacy of the American nation since Lincoln, seeing you here today I abound with confidence that our flag shall prevail once again.”

Meanwhile, Smedley Butler was spirited through Ontario to put the Midwestern Theater back in order. Tens of millions of Americans would find themselves in a war no one could have hoped to predict a year ago, and froze in drenches or went hungry in the ruins of their houses. And all of this American carnage was inflicted at the hands of their countrymen, and as the New Year approached most understood that the very worst of the Second American Civil War, however long it would endure, was yet to come.

Smedley Butler​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“The Terrifying World of 1935”​

"Given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation." - President Herbert Hoover, 1929

German dictator Adolf Hitler​

Almost a year after Al Smith was ejected from the White House and General Douglas MacArthur formed a rival, fascist government in Washington D.C. the world had been thrown into tumult unseen since the end of the Great War. On top of the economic ruin that had followed the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the world order shifted drastically thanks to the sudden rise of fascism in America. Completely open in their support for the Natcorp regime and gleefully celebrating the seeming turn of the tide were the fascist governments of Germany, under Adolf Hitler, and Italy, under Benito Mussolini. These two nations, which collectively made up a massive part of the industrial might of Europe, wholeheartedly and fanatically backed the Natcorp cause. “There is in America a solitary great man that has the skill and fortitude to stop that country’s mongrelization,” intoned Hitler, “and that is Douglas MacArthur. While perhaps an unusual candidate for the role destiny has foisted on him, under wise counsel he will be an anchor on the other side of the Atlantic to offset Jewry’s power.” Hitler, who had consolidated power in Germany much more quickly and with far less issue than MacArthur in America, put the German economy to work for the Natcorps. Organized resistance to the Nazi regime within Germany’s borders was completely gone by the end of 1934, with Hitler’s opponents in camps. The Nazis broke the terms of the Treaty of Versailles by pursuing intense rearmament and a platform of subduing Germany’s neighbors, under the pretext of reunification. But before Germany was fully prepared to wage war on the free nations of Europe, it needed allies and resources. The Second American Civil War was a natural starting point for Europe’s fascists. In flagrant violation of international law, German volunteers, weapons, and military advisors flooded into Natcorp America. “The Krauts have occupied D.C.,” wrote Mary Dotham. “It would seem that Woodrow Wilson is a fanatical rumpublican.”

The Natcorps already enjoyed a considerable advantage in terms of trained personnel and weaponry. The German and Italian aid added to this by quite a bit, and would make the fighting in the Midwest and around Philadelphia even more hellish. It’s estimated that German and Italian made equipment killed up to one in five Republicans, civilian or military, that lost their lives in the war. Of the Natcorp military, the Hitler and Mussolini contributed approximately five percent, or one in twenty, of all active Natcorp units. Their public rationale was anti-communism, which made certain sections of the British and French public willing to forgive the fascists for their crimes. Intervention on the part of European fascist powers was infuriating to Republicans and Republican sympathizers, both in America and abroad. “The German dictator has suddenly and deliberately attacked America,” fumed then Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton, holed up in Syracuse for the winter, “it is clear to me that the next target following Washington D.C. ought to be Berlin.” Republican propaganda was fond of portraying the Natcorps as puppets for the Germans, for whom there was still considerable distrust due to America’s role in the Great War. It also helped Republican propagandists retaliate by questioning the Natcorps’ patriotism. Republican America was not the only nation left with a bad taste in its mouth from Hitler’s meddling. Hitler lost considerable goodwill in Western Europe, with one English publisher noting that “overnight editorial submissions in defence of Herr Hitler have vanished. It is a dry day indeed.” The war encouraged the British government to begin the rearmament process. It was also the straw that broke the camel’s back and threw the United Kingdom’s government into crisis.

Depiction of Germans fighting for the Natcorps​

The Prime Minister at that point was Ramsay MacDonald, who, although a member of the Labour Party, had formed an alliance largely with the Conservative Party to repair the ruined British economy. His efforts, up to the Second American Civil War, hadn’t been as fruitful as Parliament would have preferred and left most British people wanting. The emergency in America was not only alarming geopolitically, it also savaged Britain’s economy further. Thousands of jobs went up in smoke, and the London stock exchange panicked again and ruined thousands of lives within a few weeks. “The panic,” one economic historian notes, “was a raging oil-fire rather than an explosion.” As in America, due to sheer shock or simply not taking MacArthur’s putsch seriously, the British government was slow to truly grasp exactly what had happened across the pond. When the Natcorps prepared the invasion of New York in the summer, Parliament was howling for new blood. MacDonald, whose health was declining, stepped aside in favor of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin, meanwhile, continued to see the emerging Second American Civil War as a mere “cacophony” rather than a hideously destructive war that would last years and leave no stone in America unturned. He did, however, regard the war as “as much a signal as any to keep the German Chancellor at arms’ length” and embarked on a program of rearmament in case something similar were to happen in his country, or, god forbid, if war between Great Britain and Nazi Germany were to break out. In conjunction with this, Baldwin’s national government began rebuilding Britain’s armed forces and bolstering defenses in Canada. Meanwhile, the British government automatically declined to get involved and deploy troops on United States soil, but pointedly refused to stop British partisans from becoming involved on either side (the overwhelming majority fighting America were fierce leftists that sided with the Republic) and kept the possibility of aid open. Diplomatically, Baldwin sliced the Gordian Knot by treating the Natcorps as nothing more than a disturbance such as a riot which had seized large parts of the country. Despite John Davis’s protestations, the Natcorps were ignored by the British government. Huey Long received considerably better treatment, with the British unofficially dealing with his share of the south for crude and other resources.

Britain, however, had more than a few Natcorp sympathizers. They formed a powerful minority that, combined with the memory of the Great War and a chaotic situation in government created by the deteriorating health of King George V kept British involvement on the Republican side minimal. The general population was fiercely Republican. Percy Collick, a British MP for Liverpool, wrote that “It is as if a lightning bolt has struck the people’s constitution. Their troubles have vanished into thin air now and they stand wholly unified in support of the American Republic.” There were fascist organizations in Britain, most famously the Union of British Fascists under Oswald Mosley, but they were a minority of the general British public. The strongest and most notable Natcorp partisanship in Britain came from its ruling classes. Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman seated in Parliament and one infamous for antisemitism and anti-Catholicism, remarked that “MacArthur has put us to shame already!” In political and business circles, many Englishmen sympathized with the Natcorp cause and lauded MacArthur’s ruthless crackdown on the American labor movement. He was, in the same vein as Hitler and Mussolini, seen as a strong leader that would ward off Bolshevism and restore America’s economy.

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin​

It was the issue of communism that was, perhaps more than anything else, the casus belli for the Natcorps’ war. MacArthur firmly believed that the events that resulted in his rapid ascent to the dictatorship made the choice between his rule or communism and anarchy. The Natcorps, as has been previously established, killed, brutalized, and enslaved real or suspected communists. They identified the Soviet Union as their worst enemy and the one backing the Republic. Views in Moscow itself, however, were much more convoluted.

Among communists, the prevailing dogma was that defeating MacArthur and fascism was the first priority and that doing so would not only strengthen left wing movements in the Republic but also give the Soviet Union a toehold in America. The Communist Party of the United States, mostly out of direct self interest as the DOJ targeted them perhaps more than anyone else, raised money and recruits from around the world for the Republican war machine. The CPUSA was of course bankrolled by Comintern, which was bankrolled directly by Moscow. Attitudes in Moscow, which was then firmly under the control of Russian dictator Josef Stalin, were quite a bit less idealistic. Indeed, the Politburo viewed the March on Washington as a strategic coup because of the sheer damage it would do to the United States. Stalin’s inner circle believed that the chaos would weaken the western bloc. The Soviets, ironically enough, did not take the threat posed by Hitler and MacArthur seriously enough to see them as anything other than another wave of bourgeoisie dictators that would impoverish their people and make revolution all the more inevitable. As German communist Ernst Thalmann said, “let Hitler have his ten years and then we’ll have our hundred.” Similarly, some communists were hesitant to aid the Republic against the Natcorps because they saw Smith as what had made fascism possible to begin with. Organized communist groups that did fight for the Republic, which at the end of the day would be most, did so with the overt goal of gaining power through the war and eventually bringing about a revolution of their own.

It was this last point that became a particularly thorny political problem for President Smith and his rump government. Stalin, in a move that was more designed to appease those in the party outraged by MacArthur and Hoover’s behavior rather than actually protect the American laborer, authorized considerable aid for the Republic. This mostly came in the form of equipment, which in 1934 the Republic could still make use of due to its rather severe deficit in military technology. Also dispatched to America were advisors to make up for the fact that many of America’s finest military minds had joined MacArthur. The idea of open communists, many of whom were shamelessly organizing troops and laborers to their cause and promoting revolution, participating in the Republican war effort was simply too much for many prominent Americans. Notably, Vice President Garner threatened to resign over Smith tacitly cooperating with them. He ultimately did not, because of fears that the chain of command could be destroyed by the DOJ. The scheme nonetheless earned Smith the ire of Congress and put him in a thorny political position: for the war effort, he could not afford to decline help from any major power. However, accepting help from the Soviets didn’t just infuriate the other Republicans, but undermined his legitimacy with the public, which of course undermined the Republican war effort.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin​

Smith would ultimately bite the bullet, declaring his “resolute opposition” to communism as an evil comparable to fascism— but also accepting that the Republic needed all the help that it could lay hands on, and that diplomatically recognizing the Soviet Union was a fair price to pay for victory in the war. This, in 1934 when many Congressmen were preparing to flee to Canada, was less of an issue than it would later become. It nonetheless was one of the most persistent propaganda attacks on the Republicans, and would become more or less the Natcorps’ official justification for the war. Even as German and Italian papers boasted of the exploits of their “legionnaires” in North America, they complained of the presence of a Russian army in New England (there was no such army, or even anything resembling one). Natcorp leaders constantly warned the public that this was the final proof that Marxism had triumphed in the Rumpublic, and that if it was not conquered a communist state that burned churches and seized the property of the thrifty would exist in the heart of the American nation. To substantiate this were the Smith Administration’s confiscations of Natcorp businessmen’s property, ironically enough a mirror of exactly what the Natcorps were doing to Republican sympathetic businessmen. And this serves as another reminder that many oft-perpetuated narratives regarding the war by propaganda on both sides were false, such as the Natcorps framing it as socialism against americanism or the Republicans framing it as wealthy puppeteers against the working man. The Rockefeller family, led by its nonagenarian patriarch John D. Rockefeller, was staunchly Republican. It donated its fair share of blood and treasure to the cause, and perhaps equally notably heavily profited from open partnership with the Republican government. The most famous example, however, was Joseph P. Kennedy, a wealthy Massachusetts investor whose role in the Republican government is now known by all.

In addition to this, the aftermath of Huey Long’s takeover of the south’s oil markets severely disrupted the world economy. Most heavily affected was eastern Asia. In particular the Empire of Japan, which had seized control of Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria (renamed “Manchukuo” by the Japanese occupiers and headed by former Emperor Puyi) was forced to table its plans for conquering the rest of China. This gave considerable financial capital to businesses in the western U.S., which as the only area of the country that wasn’t affected by war or other dramatic, destructive changes was an attractive place for refugees. This lead to considerable ill feelings between the west and the rest of the country after the war, with former Republicans and Natcorps alike fuming that the western states had chosen to simply stand back and profit off of the conflict. To this day, raising one’s hands in surrender is sometimes called “the Californian salute” by detractors.

Japan's Okada Cabinet​

Western neutrality was basically based off of the principle that there was no sin in abandoning Al Smith, who had performed worse in he weest than anywhere else in the country. The only states west of the Mississippi he had won were comparatively Catholic North Dakota and heavily Mormon Utah. Among western, white Protestants antipathy to the war was strongest. “Put simply there’s no will to bleed on Albany’s behalf in my state,” said William Borah of Idaho, himself a staunch Republican. Like the south, the west hoped to keep neutrality up as long as possible and maintain autonomy in the event of a MacArthur win. There was also a high degree of naievity as to exactly what the Natcorps were capable of. “A careful perusal of the facts tells us that General and Secretary [Hugh] Johnson has offered the working-man of the midwest precisely what he has cried for: shelter and employment, and he has done all of it with strict adherence to the principles of capitalism,” said the Los Angeles Times. Oregon Senator Frederick Steiwer called the stories of DOJ agents brutalizing innocents in secret dungeouns “fabulous tales”. There was, early on, a curious dynamic where western Congressmen didn’t surrender their seats and continued trying to participate in Congress even as they actively “paraded themselves in their home states as autonomous satraps,” according to Vice President Garner. They became known as the “Coward Caucus”, and were the spiritual leaders of western neutrality.

The most important members of the so-called Coward Caucus were the two Californian Senators, Hiram Johnson and William Gibbs McAdoo. Both aging and highly respected progressives, they were considered serious Presidential contenders earlier in their careers. McAdoo had been Treasury Secretary under his father in law Woodrow Wilson, while Johnson was Theodore Roosevelt’s running mate in 1912. A common tactic used by the two and their acolytes was, outrageously enough, to accuse Smith of failing to negotiate with the Natcorps, which inspired multiple members of Congress to threaten to whip both on the Senate floor. Even so, Congress didn’t have the capital to punish McAdoo and Johnson and their followers. This wasn’t just because the two remained influential, it was because without the Coward Caucus’s members Congress would truly be a rump, as it wouldn’t even constitute a majority of the country. Smith, in a move that earned him much grief from stalwart Republicans, decided to “play ball” and avoid entirely the issue of the western states’ treason, a strategy that he and Garner were of one mind on. This tacit admission that the Republic could not project power into the west was one Smith was often mocked for at the time. “What difference is there between a treacherous devil and a jackass with a cigar in his financier’s mouth?” Asked Floyd Olsen, himself facing the complete conquest of his state by the Natcorps. It did, however, accomplish Smith’s goal of getting the western members’ assisstance in expelling open Natcorp sympathizers from Congress and soliciting their help in rebuilding the Supreme Court. This helped drive a wedge between the Natcorps and the west. MacArthur himself had to face a very similar issue, and had basically decided by the end of 1934 to allow the DOJ to terrorize potential troublemakers in the west while accepting their tacit neutrality. This was done with the assumption that the Republic would soon be crushed and the west would probably surrender peacefully, with minimal leverage.

A youthful William Gibbs McAdoo​

Western neutrality was mostly popular, overwhelmingly so the closer to the Pacific. As would become particularly important later in the war, states closer to the fighting had considerable Republican segments that waxed and waned with MacArthur’s fortunes. During the war, state governments were often hostile to refugees, which became another source of distrust for the west after the fighting had concluded. Refugee laborers, if not expelled, were often exploited and “treated like foreigners” according to one Wisconsin woman. To this day, the Coward Caucus’s depiction in western states’ history remains controversial as they reckon with the full implications of neutrality. Johnson and McAdoo are often lambasted as cynical opportunists and borderline traitors, particularly in more recent works, but traditionally it was popular to portray them as level headed reformers that helped make the Pacific Coast as prosperous as it is today. Indeed, there is no doubt that western neutrality allowed Johnson to orchestrate public works projects that put much of what Long was doing in the south to shame.

By the end of 1934, it was clear that the entire international order had been upended. Contrary to entering into the peace that would follow the War To End All Wars, the Second American Civil War had kickstarted perhaps the most troubled period in modern history. What had begun as a veterans’ march on the American capital had rapidly snowballed into the beginning of a new order none of its participants could truly understand.

Refugees in California​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men”​

Governor Eleanor Roosevelt rose from her bed to the roar of carols. In her waking dream, the carols had been cannons. Frank was there— or maybe it was Elliot, James, or perhaps even Anna. It wasn’t important. It scared the shit out of her. It was those dreams that get the Governor out of bed more than the advancing fascist armies.

Syracuse will hold, she reminded herself. Anything could happen. Those dreams of hers, with the cannons and her children on the front, could become reality any day. Syracuse could fall, too, but it wasn’t likely. Not at that point. That George S. Patton had the jackboot on the run and Marshall had them bottled up in Philadelphia.

The President had told her as much. The frontline was emerging from a crucible of blood and death stretching from the Atlantic Coast to Lake Superior. With each passing day it became more defined, and Stimson had more and more confidence where the flag of democracy flew. Roosevelt picked out a simple but striking purple dress and wrapped herself in a fur coat.

It was also abundantly clear that the vast majority of the country was lost, under one dictator or another, and that was why four of her five children were fighting a war nobody had thought possible last Christmas.

Her youngest, John, was the only one she could possibly excuse keeping at her side and not in the trenches or behind a turret. He was in the foyer, studying a telegram. His brother’s, she guessed, knowing full well that the boy would be rushing to the frontlines if Mac wasn’t defeated sometime in the next year or so.

“Quite alright?” Eleanor said.

“Merry Christmas,” replied John. He didn’t give her an answer. John was her youngest, an eighteen year old man who had his father’s coiffed hair and penchant for wriggling out of troublesome questions. We’re a fine pair that way. And they had business with Al, as another fine speech was needed on the day of the Savior’s birth. More pointedly, the National Corporates or whatever the Nazi imitation in D.C. was calling itself wouldn’t stop the war. They knew they would end it in 1934, or Governor Roosevelt would be there shouting orders to generals and making speeches with Smith or Garner or Herbert Hoover until the flames were out.

It looked an awful lot like it would be the latter.
Waiting in her foyer were two other men. Art Holmes and Oak Stevens were two big gentlemen from upstate. Eleanor knew them and trusted them. Knowing her state so well was how she and New York had made it thus far through this strange and terrible war, side by side, all the way to Christmas Day. “Our automobile is ready for us, Governor.”

Eleanor wasn’t in the mood to give the two orders and would rather crack open a Merlot with them. There aren’t many commanders that do that nowadays. Not even Al. But there was a war raging almost within earshot of Albany, and she was now a leader in that war…

There was no snow outside, just dirty ice to vex hundreds of passerbys in their coats. In previous months there had been a small troupe of boys, certainly under eighteen but all obviously over thirteen, that used to congregate under some of the shops adjacent to the Executive Mansion. They weren’t there by Christmas of 1934. They’d been replaced by dirty ice and a much smaller troupe of carolers.

“Peace on earth with good-will towards men,”

“Mother,” said John, “what’s the holdup?”

Eleanor sighed and listened to the automobile’s engine struggle in the winter. She felt, even knew, that there was something she was supposed to say before proceeding to Al’s headquarters. It was lost in the bitter cold of Albany’s December. Even the snow had had enough.

Then the automobile exploded.

Eleanor woke up in a cot. John, she thought in a panic.
“You emerged almost completely unscathed, Governor,” said a male voice. “You were out for an hour or so. Your son is fine, also. His injuries are a little more serious and he is still unconscious but in no serious danger.”

The doctor was an older man with burly arms and eyes surrounded by purple sacks. “Shouldn’t you be on the front?” Asked Eleanor.

“It didn’t pan out that way,” said the doctor. Eleanor closed her eyes. “Who lost their lives?”

“Nobody,” responded the doctor, “other than the driver, who the Secret Service believes was in league with the DOJ. Holmes had his left arm amputated, however.” He left her to her thoughts. The DOJ, mused Eleanor. Who else? And J. Edgar Hoover himself had bothered to put a bomb in her automobile on Christmas morning…

Before she could fully even form the thought, the doctor re-emerged, briefly. He was holding the door for Al and Katie Smith, the President and First Lady of the United States.

Al Smith had a huge cigar in his mouth and was shambling about like he’d aged ten years on the journey over. He lost a few of those years when Roosevelt sat in her cot, grinning broadly and heartily. Katie’s face was broad and pasty, too, like she’d half expected Eleanor to be dead.

“I can’t describe how relieved I am to see you awake and well,” said the President. He took a seat at Eleanor’s bedside. Katie kissed her on the cheek. “Oh, and Merry Christmas.” His face went bleak again. “Merry Christmas indeed, because Stimson was just telling me the front has held. And MacArthur’s chances of a major breakthrough before the spring, well, he’s on the wrong side of our state’s winter.” He left the rest unsaid: this meant long, brutal war in America’s beautiful heart, fought by Americans against Americans.

“We’re at war with these Natcorps because of my faith,” said Al. “Because I’m a Catholic.” He shook his head. “I’ve never wavered. Never will. But someone sure wants me to.” He paused and Katie touched his shoulders. “Don’t spend all this time pontificating about yourself now, Al.”

The President gave an exaggerated sigh. “Ah, and I was becoming so good at it.”

Eleanor smiled, wishing she’d gone for that Merlot. “You’re our commander in chief, Al. That’s all that can be said on the matter.” She sighed. “My oldest son is twenty six— twenty seven as of two days ago. I never understood the workings of young children and was uniquely unqualified to nurture them. You and Katie knew us quite well. I wasn’t prepared for that anymore than my station in the fight against the American dictator.”

Smith nodded, like he was reading her thoughts. “Franklin foisted quite a few roles that you wouldn’t have otherwise taken on your shoulders, didn’t he?”
No, Al, you are the reason why I’m here. He’d sold it as a fabulous idea after Franklin died, even a moral obligation. What better way to properly divide up her fallen husband’s empire than his mentor for the Presidency and wife for the Executive Mansion? Now look at us, thought Eleanor bitterly. Cringing against the Canadian border like beaten dogs. There was a carol playing in the distance. O Come, O Come Emmanuel, if the explosion hadn’t messed with her ears.

“Consensus seems to be that it was Hoover’s handiwork,” said Al, munching on his cigar. “The Secret Service says it’s a little sloppy for him. Looks like it was a bad bomb. Most likely his contact in New York tripped up.”

Or maybe J. Edgar Hoover is as blind and stupid as we are, thought Eleanor. There were rumors that the endless quest for reds and fags had taken out more than a few of the DOJ’s best and brightest. And Hoover after all had handed in his title as one of the most respected and valued men in government for war. He’d done it for dictatorship. Like MacArthur, even more well respected, had done. Like Caesar and Napoleon and the Italian duce had done. Eleanor supposed Hoover was only as stupid as they were. “The plan looks like it was to kill you, me, Katie, and maybe Jack too if they were lucky.” The President’s face became old and sappy again. “They’ve cleared the area, though. I think it’s wise to strike while the iron is hot and keep spirits up. I’ll deliver my planned Christmas Day address, but at—”

A Secret Service man muscled his way into their room. He had guns on his waist. “Mr. President,” he said, “urgent news from— urgent news from Congress and Stimson.”

Smith looked like he was going to melt like so much wax. “Both, huh?”

“It’s about Madison. Well, Madison is being completely abandoned. La Follette is fleeing to Minneapolis.”

“I gave no such order for this,” grumbled the President, who surely understood that since the Rockford disaster Madison was as good as under the Jackboot. “Fine. What else?”

“The Californian Senator is taking advantage of the disaster and the House delegation from that state is organizing impeachment.”

“McAdoo,” snarled Smith. “What I wouldn’t give to roast that muckraking rat with a spittle up his ass.” He seemed to be reenergized by the thought. Not even three more years, Al, thought Eleanor, who had won re-election unopposed a month ago, before your labors will be finished by law. “Eleanor, you know I wouldn’t ask this of you in the state you’re in if it wasn’t desperate, but I firmly believe someone must deliver that address.” He gestured at the Secret Service. “You— you said it’s safe, no?”

“Nothin’s safe right now, sir. But we’ve done our best.”

“I’ll do it,” said Eleanor evenly, who was already organizing the rest of her Christmas. The speech first. Then John— no, Holmes first. Holmes lost his arm. Then John. That wold all go down the drain if there was another debacle to the south or if J. Edgar Hoover had an ace up his sleeve.

When Al Smith shambled out of her room, muttering things like “you’re a good kid,” to the Secret Service and hugging on his wife, Eleanor found herself wondering what could’ve been. She considered Franklin the first earnest casualty of the war. Her private war, anyway, which seemed totally inseparable from the Jackboot tanks at the front and leering coywolves like McAdoo and Johnson in the rear. When she rose, she resisted the urge to see John and instead made her way to the automobile parked outside once again. It was flanked by stone-faced Secret Service. Do they hope to stop a bomb with their flesh? That was an analogy for something, she knew that much.

Someone had taken the liberty to pack Smith’s and her speeches. Stevens, she thought, vowing to send him a bouquet. It wasn’t snowing on the way to Lincoln Park. It was more like the chill was secreting from the streets and pedestrians. At Lincoln Park itself, there were something like a hundred people assembled. A quarter were wounded men, another quarter were children, and the rest were women. She spotted around five state senators.

Governor Roosevelt had perused the two speeches. They don’t have time for this, she thought. John was at the front of her mind again. She didn’t have time for this. Holmes was in the crowd, blank faced and nursing a stump under a ratty blanket.

“My friends and fellow citizens,” said Eleanor, meeting the hollow and hungry eyes of her people, “we do not meet today in celebration and proclaim peace and good-will towards all men. On the contrary, we meet today under the shadow of death because eleven months ago our country was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the pawns of Europe’s Great Dictators. What was once the treasured heartland of the great American republic is now a miserable series of battlements where brother blasts brother from the sky.

“I don’t imagine you need to hear this from me. Standing before me are people that have lost everything and today, on the day Jesus Christ was born, I have nothing to offer but more loss. Months, years— however long it shall take. Under what pretenses, some” the bastards from California, “ask, do consecrate this day with one promise: more death and suffering? I wish I could offer an answer that would ease the sufferings of those of you that have made the ultimate sacrifice for the cause of republican democracy. I cannot.

“I can say one thing, however, as a mother with every one of my living children serving the war effort and in the line of fire, whether here in the way of Hoover’s rats or struggling manfully through frozen mud and German bullets— here in this bountiful cradle of democracy, in this Empire State, it is both practical and worthwhile to prosecute the war, wherever it will take us. I do not seek to persuade you of anything because I do not believe you need to be persuaded of anything. The Constitution I swore on is worth perishing for, and the disgraced ex soldier that occupies Washington right now will learn the true worth and mettle of New Yorkers defending their homeland.” Polite applause ensued.

“He has fled the battlefield to pursue the dictatorship, feeding his war machine with the flesh of an American generation. J. Edgar Hoover’s rats attempted to take my and my youngest son’s lives this morning. Multiple men suffered injury they will carry with them their entire lives.” Holmes looked like a corpse. Even his mouth was hanging wide open and his eyes seemed to be staring at something a hundred feet behind her. “The American experiment can persevere and will persevere. A statesman whose name I bear, who occupied the same Executive Mansion I do and swore on the same New York Constitution I did, once said of the American spirit that it is at its finest when we ‘shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified.’

“As for whether we can be certain this monstrous conflict we wage is justified, this is evident in the manner that we fight: it is feasible that the Jackboot could find it desirable to make peace with us— to arrange an agreement where we are left with what we have and they are left with they have, perhaps if we were to ward off whatever invasion they send next year. We will never accept such a peace and would regard it as tantamount to all of us going to Hoover’s camps. Those Jackboots in the field, they are bleeding for the ambition of one man. We are bleeding for a cause composed of the hopes and dreams of the whole human race, and it is worth every single one of us and then some.

“Let us then approach this Christmas and the year 1935 with resolve rather than revelry, determination that the United States will wage this war for a year or a century, however long it will take to drive the dictator from D.C. and put the people’s representatives in the seat of democracy once more. And until the day comes when we can honorably celebrate Christmas away from the ghost of war, let us who are lucky enough to live wholeheartedly support those that are our first line of defense: the humble and steadfast infantryman struggling in the trench, the industrious engineer mastering the tank and airplane, and the brave volunteers from everywhere in the world at the forefront of the cause of liberty.

“Merry Christmas, ladies and gentlemen, and may God protect the American republic.”

The children in the crowd had already lost their patience with Eleanor and her speech. Most of everyone else simply looked cold. But everyone applauded all the same, including Holmes, who shot out of his chair and shouted, waving his bandages stump. Eleanor could’ve sworn she heard him say “mother of the republic” or something like that. She stayed to shake hands and offer meaningless words of condolence and encouragement. Afterwards, she would deliver a similar speech on the radio to counter whatever tripe Butler or MacArthur had released. And after that, if there was time, she’d treat herself and John to that Merlot.

Sergeant Franklin Roosevelt Jr. would die of sepsis in northern Iowa, after being ravaged by shrapnel. He lost his life in June of 1935, the first of Roosevelt’s children and one of six million to perish in the Second American Civil War.

 

[The Angry Observer]

“Bandito”​

"My men don't dig foxholes. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and showing MacArthur that we've got more guts than he has or ever will have. We're not just going to shoot those jackboot bastards, we're going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy fascist cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket."
- George S. Patton

George S. Patton​

George S. Patton won the title of General in the aftermath of his lopsided victory over Leland Hobbs in the Syracuse campaign. It was a time when Republican prospects were seen as dismal, without a doubt much more dismal than they actually were. Patton, an intensely talented military theoretician with an inclination for open battle, was an attractive figure to his superiors because he “promises results and gives us ‘em”, as Henry Stimson said. The forty nine year old Patton was an adventurer, lifelong soldier, and Olympian that made for an unlikely champion of the Republican cause. He was, in western New York, the highest ranking Republican. His opponent, Hobbs, retreated from Syracuse in good order and fell back on Ithaca. MacArthur, when faced with defeat, tended mostly to give his subordinates the “cold shoulder” and focus on more promising theaters. As a result Hobbs and other Natcorp commanders that didn’t deliver instant results were left in the dark to interpret MacArthur’s whims and in Hobbs’s case rebuild a potential road to Albany. With Pennsylvania rapidly falling under Natcorp control, Hobbs believed he had the capital to eventually renew the attack on the Erie Canal, which was becoming a matter of particular importance with the Midwest turning into a battlefield and Republican volunteers swarming through it.

To this end, Hobbs wanted to capture Rochester, which remained under the tenuous but obvious control of the Republicans. He linked with a collection of Natcorp commanders that had just finished pacifying central Pennsylvania, which proved relatively easy thanks to Marshall’s decision to fall back on Philadelphia. Hobbs, now a general, intended to exploit the local terrain and outrun the Republicans in Syracuse. He wanted to move to the east of Lake Seneca, creep through the Finger Lakes, with the goal of eventually capturing Rochester and cutting Syracuse off from Buffalo. The logistics, of course, would be exceptionally challenging and the Republicans would once again be left with the home field advantage. But Hobbs, like MacArthur, was an army man that was ahead of the curve, embracing the new world of mobile warfare to the best of his abilities. A common doctrine adopted by the Natcorp commanders in the Second American Civil War was to err on the side of aggression and assume that, as Ulysses S. Grant once said, that “the enemy had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him.”

Leland S. Hobbs​

Hobbs being aggressive and bold could very well have born fruit if it weren’t for his choice in opponent. Patton bypassed Stimson and sent a message to President Smith himself, saying that “I’ll have them whipped.” General Patton, in Christmas of 1934, was left with the unenviable task of turning the so-called Fourth Army in Syracuse into a fighting force that could face Hobbs, one of the Army’s more respected commanders and a talented organizer in his own right. Patton, after the Great War, had become one of the Army’s most notable theoreticians. He was a pioneer of the armored warfare doctrine, spending the interwar years pushing for more development of the nation’s mobile forces. Patton and none other than Dwight Eisenhower had lobbied the War Department for an expansion of the armored program in the 1920’s, only to find Washington devoid of political will for anything that stank of war. As a result, Patton was left exiled in his own Army in D.C. and West Point, increasingly pessimistic that another conflict where he could prove his worth was in the cards. Then, within a year of Herbert Hoover’s ascension to the Presidency, the economy crumbled and the U.S. was propelled into a new era of chaos and uncertainty. “I knew then that we were knee deep in a war,” mused Patton later, “although I could not, even then, have guessed the fucking bastard we would be fighting.”

In 1932, the bottled up resentments that would eventually become the March on Washington briefly simmered to public view with the Bonus Army’s mass demonstration in the capital. Patton did little to hide his sympathy for the demonstrators, who he viewed as good soldiers that had been shafted by an increasingly decadent and out of touch Washington. Nonetheless, he believed strongly that the U.S. government needed to maintain its sovereignty in the face of pressure, and when his superior, Douglas MacArthur, ordered him to suppress the Bonus Army Patton obeyed. He personally led the Third Cavalry down the streets of D.C., putting down agitators, including men he’d served alongside in the Great War. Patton called what he had done at MacArthur’s behest “distasteful”, and according to some this was a turning point that would eventually lead to him offering his services to Al Smith despite heavy lobbying from the Natcorps. In any event, in the winter of 1934 Patton didn’t waste a second in rejuvenating the Fourth Army. Perhaps more than any other Republican commander, Patton was lethally effective in transforming the trickle of recruits into an actual army. “When he was among us,” recalled one lieutenant, “it felt less like a war and more like a jolly crusade.” Patton had an uncanny knack for outrunning his enemies and understanding when he had the advantage in equipment, one he rapidly set about creating for himself. “Patton was rarely in Albany,” recalled a New York State Senator and Roosevelt confidante, “but every day, often multiple times a day, the War Department and even the state government was laid siege to by the General, demanding more tanks and more planes.” With what limited resources the Republicans had before New England’s industrial machine was able to fully kick into gear and fuel the war effort, Patton proved a wise investment. While his initial theater was much less important than the smoldering Battle of Philadelphia or the Midwest, he was a consistently effective thorn in the Natcorps’ side.

Female soldiers in Patton's Fourth Army​

By 1935, the Fourth Army had weathered the winter more ably than most of the other Republican contingents. It was also ready to move in a way that Hobbs, not completely without reason, never saw coming. While Hobbs had mustered considerable numbers for his Finger Lakes campaign, he was at least partially left in the cold due to MacArthur’s focus on more favorable battlefields. His army also had considerably worse understanding of the terrain they were marching through compared to Patton’s. Perhaps most importantly, however, Patton “had the juice,” as Hobbs himself would later note. “Bandito”, a nickname Patton acquired from shooting one of Pancho Villa’s Lieutenants in the U.S. intervention in Mexico a generation before, had been dying to move ever since the Battle of Syracuse and only had a few minor skirmishes to tide him over. Hobbs moved north, his ranks having swelled since his defeat, feeling that his own departure on the one year anniversary of the March on Washington was making good time in its own right and also reasonably confident in Natcorp air superiority. The second that the War Department received news of Hobbs’s departure from Ithaca, Patton was able to obtain authorization for confronting the Natcorps well before they could reach a potential target, such as Rochester.

Patton concluded that “the best defense is a strong and healthy offense,” and intended to crush Hobbs before he could get out of Lake Seneca’s shadow. Patton reviewed what he had in Seneca Falls, and by February 10th with the rest of the war looking like a dismal slogging fest when it wasn't an outright disaster for the Republicans, the Fourth Army was ready to rumble. Giddy at the prospect of being the only Republican commander to enjoy success at the opening of the new year, Patton himself was in an almost ghostly state of ecstasy even as he upheld fierce military discipline in the Fourth Army. “This is the moment where the American character thrives most,” cantillated Patton to an aid, “where there are a bunch of fuckers trying to kill us under the open sun and we beat them to it.” His boundless confidence exuded to his army, even as they remained mostly outgunned by the Natcorps. Patton’s bigotry before the war, in particular his racism seemed to die off after the Syracuse campaign. By 1935, the Fourth Army was perhaps the most diverse in the developed world, with roughly twenty percent being women. Patton, meanwhile, had previously held the conviction that “negroes do not have the intelligence to operate heavy machinery such as the tank” but had changed his mind after the wintertime preparations. On the morning of the 10th, as the first black tank operators in American history prepared to mount an ambitious surprise attack on the mostly white and segregated Natcorps, Patton declared to them that, “Men, you're the first Negro tankers to ever fight in the American Army. I would never have asked for you if you weren't good. I have nothing but the best in my Army. I don't care what color you are as long as you go up there and kill those jackboot sonsofbitches.” The general went on to snarl that, “Everyone has their eyes on you and is expecting great things from you. Most of all your race is looking forward to your success. Don't let them down and damn you, don't let me down!”

Insignia used by primarily black tank operators in the Finger Lakes Campaign​

On the morning of the 10th, Patton’s army fanned out between Lake Cayuga and Seneca. Patton, who had made able use of local intelligence, called the battle his “Leuctra” in that he intended to attack the Natcorps near Cayuga, where they were weakest, and gamble on the element of surprise to carry the day near Seneca. The Natcorps, who at this point were accustomed to being the attacking party basically everywhere in the war, were wholly taken by surprise by Patton’s inferior numbers and ruthlessly bold usage of tanks. It was a “mad dash south on an open road,” recalled one tank commander, “and I’ve always supposed that was why Mac’s boys didn’t see us coming: they never thought we were this fucking crazy.” In any event, the Natcorps were thrown into momentary chaos by Patton’s attack and were much less aware of his whereabouts than he was of theirs. Patton enjoyed the most success that day at the Battle of Fayette, soundly defeating the Natcorps and putting them on the run. The flanks were much less lopsided, with Hobbs quickly reordering his army and putting them on the defensive, where they were able to inflict heavy damage on the Republicans. Patton’s Fourth Army, in fact, was dangerously close to shattering when Natcorp air power came in to save the day once again.

Patton, stationed near Silver Creek and holding little regard for his own safety, has been credited with keeping the Republicans from breaking with little else but the raw force of his personality. He refused to retreat in spite of mounting casualties and ultimately forced Hobbs to blink first. After heavy casualties, Patton succeeded in driving Hobbs back down south. The battle itself was not particularly consequential, as even Patton recognized that he was incapable of going on the attack immediately afterwards or even holding everything that he’d managed to seize. Nonetheless, it won the Republic a victory when it was in great psychological need for one. It gave Patton, who had already been turning heads both in Washington and Albany alike, the full attention of the Smith Administration. It also gave Hobbs little choice but to go back to the drawing board, his aims of a conquest of Rochester decisively thwarted. The Finger Lakes campaign would rage on for the better part of Spring of 1935, and the steady stream of equipment (including planes supplied and manned by the Soviet Union) and manpower coupled with Natcorp high command’s own failures to resupply Hobbs would force another organized but fruitless retreat to Ithaca. Perhaps most importantly, though, the Finger Lakes campaign established Patton as the Republic’s “knight in shining armor”-- albeit a “foul mouthed” and occasionally “downright brutal” one.

A Natcorp Martin B-10 Bomber​

Bandito’s oft lauded exercise in mobile warfare was not the first on the Republican side, however. And in other theaters the Natcorps had good reason to believe that Patton besting Hobbs was simply one setback in a mostly successful war. Following Rockford, General Hugh Johnson’s Natcorps looked mostly unstoppable as they moved for the Midwest’s centers of power. Philip La Follette and Floyd Olsen, after Johnson razed Rockford, which killed thousands of civilians and practically destroyed the entire Republican army, had little choice but to evacuate Madison and Milwaukee. This was done without notifying Albany, the beginning of a longstanding feud and mutual feelings of enmity between the Republicans in the midwest and in the east. This was the mess that General Smedley Butler, who by default was one of the highest ranking Republican commanders and at the time the most decorated marine in U.S. history, was left to clean up. In some respects, Butler, who like La Follette and Olsen harbored anti-capitalist sympathies, was grateful for the chance to forge his own place in the war away from Smith and Stimson’s meddling. “This is what I always wanted to fight for,” wrote Butler to one of his children, “our rights.” He was given a high degree of latitude by Albany to keep the Midwest from falling into Natcorp hands, being told only to delay and prevent outright disaster. Butler quickly got to work arming, training, and organizing the demoralized and scattered Republican troops. He had less access to armor than Patton did, but as a marine understood the value of swift infantry raids and properly utilized shock troops. As the months ticked on, Butler would stop the bleeding in Wisconsin.

On New Year’s Day, Hugh Johnson occupied Madison to little fanfare. The army that made it into Madison numbered only a total of 50,000, was mostly out of supplies, and suffering from the bitter winter’s cold. He considered his progress, even by MacArthur’s standards, completely satisfactory and hoped to make his conquests into a vector for more Natcorp units to flood into the Midwest. “As I’ve informed Mac,” explained Johnson to an aid, “we are stretched too thin to march further north.” La Follette and the Wisconsin State legislature fled to Eau Claire, which of course was woefully undefended. Johnson, in a move whose merits are still debated to this day, decided not to press the offensive and instead hunkered down for the winter and began expanding laterally. As both sides prepared for a fight in the spring, Johnson consolidated his rule over the Midwest. Aided by the DOJ, he scattered Iowa’s Republican government. Natcorp tank columns seized Des Moines, Davenport, and Cedar Rapids with relative ease and installed a military dictatorship under himself backed by 20,000 troops from his army and reinforcements brought in from Natcorp controlled Missouri. Here Johnson, to sustain the new order, began the mass looting of Iowa and Illinois’s prodigious food stores. The so called “Rape of Iowa”, in which the Natcorps stole millions worth of food from Iowa and Illinois farmers, left mass starvation and chaos in its wake. It was also brutally effective at shoring up the regime’s support elsewhere, proved Johnson’s logistical talents, and quickly beat large swathes of the Midwest into submission. A more comprehensive analysis of Natcorp as well as Republican war crimes in the Midwest will be included in a later chapter. Militarily, Butler prepared to defend what was north and west of the Wisconsin River. With the Republic surrendering much of the Midwest and the Natcorps widely reviled and facing severe difficulties in projecting power, there was widespread breakdown of ordered society. Militias, Republican and Natcorp, filled the gaps.

Natcorp partisan taking grain from a farmer in western Illinois​

What followed was a rehash of Bleeding Kansas from eighty years prior, with Natcorp and Republican militias inflicting gruesome violence against other belligerents or sometimes simply against whoever was nearby. Both sides were helpless to put a stop to the violence, and implicitly encouraged it where it benefited them. Republican volunteers such as the International Brigades, particularly those affiliated with CPUSA or other groups that had more cosmopolitan and radical agendas, were especially inclined to defy President Smith and the Secret Service by waging their own covert wars in the occupied Midwest. Natcorp detachments were ambushed and killed to the last man, Natcorp collaborators were savagely tortured and their bodies displayed on scarecrows, and Natcorp prison camps were destroyed. The Natcorps responded with even more brutality. Johnson had taken great pains to ensure that anywhere in his new domain could be struck by Natcorp planes at a moment’s notice. The Natcorps had the response time to raze a town where wrongdoing was reported within hours, and thousands of civilians would perish under German and Italian manufactured bombs. Armed with Johnson’s intricate knowledge of logistics, Natcorp troops were never far behind Republican incursions. Real or suspected militia members were killed or enslaved by the thousands. Alan Brinkley writes that, “the brutality, even to the Natcorps, was shocking to the public and hitherto completely unheard of for American citizens to endure themselves. The result was a ‘haze’ accompanied by a general collapse in normal communication lines.”

But, of everything that the war had destroyed in the Midwest and of everything that would be destroyed, perhaps the most gruesome suffering and devastation would be found in Chicago. Chicago, under Mayor Anton Cermak, was openly defiant of Johnson’s order to surrender. During his 1934 invasion of Illinois Johnson had been too preoccupied with the Rockford campaign and eventual occupation of Milwaukee to take Chicago by storm. It was this pivotal delay that allowed the city, with aid from Smith, countless volunteers from Canada, and the Marquette Government in upstate Michigan to assemble a passable defense. Without the capital to assault the city, Johnson was forced to lay siege to it. This rapidly rendered it impregnable— but of course, at the expense of most outside aid. When the Natcorps captured Milwaukee, the only possible resupply for the Windy City’s more than three million inhabitants (perhaps as much as five million thanks simply to the sheer number of refugees fleeing Natcorp rule) was by Lake Michigan. Johnson, meanwhile, devoted considerable resources from Milwaukee to destroying Republican relief efforts. Chicago would not have reliable access to food by the summer of 1935, which would result in the city’s denizens rapidly turning to whatever was possible to eat, from dogs, to rats, to wallpaper, even to their fellow citizens. “I’d rather go back to Gillmore,” lamented one escapee from a Natcorp work camp. Johnson’s intention was to wait until Chicago, with its millions of inhabitants, was simply starved into submission. He was correct that as determined as Cermak and the Republicans were to resist, the city’s days were numbered. And as Chicago got more desperate the Republicans came up with increasingly creative ways to get the city the relief that it needed.

Perhaps more than anywhere else, the Midwest would be utterly destroyed by the Second American Civil War’s excesses. “No stone has been left unturned,” mourned La Follette, “and if we are even capable of surviving we’ll do so covered in scars from Mac’s brigands.” Stories of atrocities and the numerous belligerents participating in them served to further harden and radicalize the War’s many combatants, which paved the way for some of its better known acts of aggression and inhumanity.

Republicans in Chicago​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“Divided We Fall”​

“General, what shall I do? The people are impatient; Chase has no money and tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?” - Abraham Lincoln

President Al Smith​

President Al Smith was surrounded on all sides in 1935. Alan Brinkley describes the mood around the March on Washington and the war more broadly as “jaunty fascism”, the tendency to treat the war as more of an article of fascination or amusement rather than the serious threat to the existence of the American state that it was. After six months of hard, brutal, total war the country was completely unrecognizable. And the Natcorps’ string of victories in Wisconsin was the last of many last straws for the Smith Administration, whose existence was already in jeopardy and whose position went from “dire” to from much, much worse. The majority of the 73rd Congress had trickled into Albany following the Civil War’s commencement. There were more than a few direct defectors to Washington, and more or less the entire southern delegation fled for their seats of power, but on the whole the overwhelming majority were nominally aligned with the Republic. Historians still debate whether or not this was a good thing. Congress’s continued existence granted the Republic much needed legitimacy and, of course, the legal justification for the Smith Administration to prosecute the war against MacArthur. Ordinances passed by the 73rd Congress, including authorization of confiscations for Natcorp partisans’ property and other war powers, were vital in staving off total collapse as the Natcorps marched north.

Congress’s loyalty was also just nominal in many cases, and while Smith could fairly claim to wave the flag of the same American republic kickstarted with the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Philadelphia Convention, he also had to deal with constant attempts to knife him and undermine his power. The most egregious examples where the directly anti war members of Congress allied with William Gibbs McAdoo and Hiram Johnson, and across the board Smith’s troubles with Congress were perhaps the most striking part of the entire war’s domestic politics and made ample fodder for the giddy Natcorp press. “The corpse of so-called liberty and so-called democracy is torn apart by jackals,” sneered one editor. “General Mac has defeated the Rumpublic without exerting a finger.” History has been very unkind to the 74th Congress, but the general consensus is that machinations by bad faith actors, some of which were affiliated with the DOJ, was only one part of the unprecedented struggle between the Legislative and Executive. “With defeat staring the Republic down the barrel and the U.S. looking smaller with every day, many simply panicked,” writes Brinkley. John Nance Garner was considerably less generous when he fumed that Congress “isn’t worth a warm bucket of piss.”

Vice President John Nance Garner​

The first issue that the Republican government faced was that many of its members were from areas under direct Natcorp control or active war zones, which made elections extremely complicated if not completely possible. Between that and the southern and western blocs, it was quite realistic to say that a majority of the 74th Congress’s, and therefore Republican democracy’s, clientele was illegitimate. This had forced the 73rd Congress to cede considerable power to Smith. In 1935, however, they were howling for blood. Smith and Congress frequently stepped around one another through executive orders and joint resolutions, and as relations deteriorated between the two they became less likely to find common ground, even on vital issues of the war. Congress began to suspect that Smith was a Bolshevik, and Smith dramatically blew out of proportion the operating power of the DOJ in Congress.

Douglas MacArthur had declared that “the National Corporate government is, above all else, stable” and one of the Natcorps’ favorite subterfuge techniques was to cause as much chaos as possible among the Republicans to further justify the dictatorship. This lie of stability almost seemed believable as Albany multiple times came within inches of complete disintegration. The DOJ under Hoover spearheaded complex operations to exert pressure on Congress, with DOJ agents going on the hunt for Congressmen’s family members and threatening them with torture if they weren’t given what they wanted. The Secret Service, which rapidly took on the function of a federal police force and investigative agency for the Republic, was well aware of the scheme and even knew who some of the main figures under Natcorp pay or blackmail were. What they could do, however, was often limited, as losing Congress completely would arguably be a more serious blow to the war effort than whatever Hoover had planned. The Director maintained a sizable force of “sleepers” in Congress numbering several dozen. He was fond of keeping votes “in reserve” and deploying them where Smith least suspected it. The DOJ’s scheming provided constant fuel for the very real anti-Smith sentiment that Congress and most of America, the Republic included, felt.

DOJ agents​

Smith’s issues with Congress directly correlated with the Republican armies’ success in the field. And in the spring of 1935, when the Republicans were on the run and enduring casualty intense defeat after casualty intense defeat, Albany was in shambles. After the war fury that followed the March on Washington petered out, cabin fever set in and Congress wanted a more active role in how the war was fought. Garner was initially successful in tiding them over. The Johnson Offensive and particularly the Battle of Rockford lit a fire that never truly went out, however. Investigations into the competence and loyalty of Smith Administration officials were easy to do, and contributed to the overall atmosphere of mutual distrust between the two factions. This united with another lightning rod, Smith and Stimson’s complicated series of informal alliances with the Soviet Union for military aid in exchange for executive action like recognition for the U.S.S.R. It was this that would lead to Congress impeaching Smith. Impeachment was not a new idea. It had been floated by Protestant zealots the day Smith stepped into office, and had alternately been suggested by both sides of the political spectrum even before the March on Washington. After the beginning of the Second American Civil War, the idea that Smith’s inability to stop the coup had amounted to criminal incompetence was also one frequently brought up with varying degrees of accuracy and seriousness. The Californian delegation had organized the first attempts to assemble a committee to study the issue in December of 1934, and afterwards combined with the Natcorp victories in the Midwest and constant anticommunist paranoia Smith’s removal snowballed into a genuine issue for the new year.

The initial strategy the Administration was to use their increasingly dwindling number of allies in Congress to defuse the threat. The Democrats captured the House and Senate following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, but the aftermath of the War’s beginning, particularly the mass bolt of the southern Democrats, gave the Republicans a narrow plurality that through alliances with conservative Democrats would make the lion’s share of the 74th Congress. Bertrand Snell was poised to become Speaker when Congress came back into session, if there was to be a session at all. Henry Thomas Rainey, the Speaker when Smith entered office, died in August and had left Smith entirely reliant on Garner to control the House. Garner attempted to bypass a floor vote, which could have potentially humiliating consequences for the Administration, by having the lame duck Democratic leadership settle the matter behind closed doors. The strategy backfired when the committees refused to close the door on wrongdoing.

Speaker of the House Bertrand Snell​

Smith faced many charges from Congress, but the one that united all of his many opponents were the actions of a Russian pilot named Aleksander Shyetzkin, part of one of many Soviet detachments in America— and one that had received direct orders from Secretary Stimson to “harass the enemy as we retreat foremost, and make no regard for our troops or there [sic]” The result was Russian pilots bombing advancing Natcorps in a minor skirmish outside of Chicago, killing hundreds on both sides. Shyetzkin was notable for failing in his mission, accidentally targeting the Republicans (who didn’t have the proper armaments to ward off an airstrike) apparently due to the influence of alcohol. The War Department was furious, obviously, and intended to cover up the debacle. To avoid complications, both from the embarrassment of accidentally causing a foreign pilot to bomb their own ranks and an unwillingness to get into any deeper drama with the Soviets, the War Department intended to simply send Shyetzkin back to Russia. News of this, however, was leaked to the public.

The Natcorp government actively intervened to destroy Smith politically. Beyond the DOJ’s chicanery, MacArthur believed that then was the time to “twist the knife”. He gave Hugh Johnson direct orders to ramp up the war in the Midwest, despite the fact that the Natcorps were already spread thin and waiting for reinforcements. MacArthur also ordered an air war against Republican holdings in the Northeast, basically expanding what the Natcorp air fleet had done to Philadelphia to the entirety of New England and New York. The Natcorps’ raids intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure, with the goal being to “break the Rumpublic’s will to fight”. Each passing week loaded with devastation and defeat further damaged the Smith Administration’s credibility. There was rioting and protesting against the Administration in every major urban center in Republican territory for nearly every conceivable cause. Many, of course, were against the usual devils of “Romanism and Bolshevism”, sometimes overtly pro Natcorp. The Secret Service responded with arrests of prominent “agitators”, while protests frequently turned into riots that required military retaliation. These retaliations were chaotic and bloody, hardening the opposition and inspiring gleeful accusations of hypocrisy from Washington.

Demonstrators gathering in Albany​

“I do not know how I will live much longer,” wrote Smith to a confidant. “They intend to eject me from the Presidency. Between the Jackboot and my heart I am sure I will not live to see their designs fulfilled.” Even victories came in a poisoned chalice for Smith. In March, thanks largely to the dangerously overextended Natcorp lines in Wisconsin, Smedley Butler scored a victory. The Battle of the Grand River saw the Natcorps under Johnson’s indirect control whipped by a larger Republican force. The Republicans compensated for their lack of heavy equipment with discipline and ferocity, allowing them to get the jump on better armed opponents. And in doing so, it raised the profile of Butler— whose real or perceived competence and ability to deliver for the Republican cause made him an attractive leader for those dissatisfied with Smith’s comparative political moderation. “Butler’s better than that jackass,” said Floyd Olsen, whose home state had at that point been omitted from direct devastation by the Natcorps thanks to Butler’s efforts. Socialist organizations accused Smith of deliberately undermining his generals and credited successes as something that came in spite of his efforts and not because of them. Some went further still: one editorial demanded a “Butler, or perhaps George S. Patton, dictatorship/junta until the war is returned to a stable place.” Mass racial unrest also wounded the Smith Administration’s leadership. Early in 1934, Smith had desegregated the armed forces, which he saw as a measure that was no longer practical and was immoral. It was true that integration was a boon overall for the Republicans, but it also created backlash the government couldn’t afford. “During the course of the war,” writes Brinkley, “every city where there was a considerable black population exploded in racial violence at one point or another.”

Perhaps the most notable of these incidents was in the battleground of southeast Michigan, in the city of Detroit. Like many other cities in the northeast United States, Detroit had witnessed a significant increase in its black population following the so-called “Great Migration” of southern African Americans. In 1934, the DOJ had successfully destroyed the government of Michigan, capturing Lansing and driving Republican elements into the fringe north. Charles Coughlin, notably, had been arrested and brutalized from his home in Detroit. In spring of 1935, MacArthur ordered the Natcorp rule over Michigan secured. That meant capturing the industrial Detroit, which was home to a large organized labor presence and a hotbed of Republican sympathy. Smith loyalists in Detroit prepared to make a fight out of it— only for their attempts to draft the state’s black community sparking mass rioting, and for black Republican troops in white areas to face violent backlash. Republican units, numbering in the thousands, were quickly swamped and scrambled to escape to Canada. Soldiers, who did not universally have access to uniforms, shed what military insignia they had and joined or ran from angry mobs. A fire was started at some point, and by the time Natcorp tanks had reached the city outskirts it had descended into total chaos. They restored order at gunpoint, immediately purging it of organized labor and brawling with communists in the streets. This made for good press in Washington, which portrayed the Rumpublic as one continual anarchy fueled slaughter dominated by godlessness and communism.

A Natcorp soldier in the aftermath of the fall of Detroit​

It was all of this combined that left the Smith Administration not just weakened politically, but completely hobbled. Garner’s strategy had been to bypass the general House, which he saw as harder to deal with and more susceptible to DOJ meddling than leadership, in hopes that he would be able to kill the threat of potential punishment before it could snowball into something he wouldn't be able to control. Here he dramatically miscalculated: in January, the House voted to open an impeachment inquiry into Al Smith and Henry Stimson. In March, two years after Smith assumed the Presidency, the House committee found sufficient evidence to impeach them in the Shyetzkin Affair. However, it was not Stimson’s head that Congress wanted. The next month, the full House voted by a margin of three quarters to impeach Al Smith, making him only the second President along with Andrew Johnson to be subjected to such an attack. It also made for a grim prognosis in the Senate, which by a vote of two-thirds had the Constitutional to remove a President. Garner, who stood to become President if the attempt would succeed, saw his relationship with Smith irreparably damaged. Garner believed that Smith had made impossible demands of him and marginalized him when he failed to deliver. Smith, for his part, suspected deliberate sabotage in Garner's failures. Garner had “stringently objected” to chartering Soviet pilots to begin with and was kept in the dark about the Shyetzkin incident until it was too late. Smith thought Garner was intentionally trying to oust him, an assessment most modern scholarship agrees was completely false. The damage was done, however, and the two men would seldom be in the same room together after the incident.

It seemed, in the spring of 1935, exceedingly likely that Smith would be removed from office. Smith did not have particularly good relations with the Senate to begin with, and losing the Southern Democrats along with the debacles of 1934 had left Republicans with much more strength in the upper than lower chamber. Progressives and leftists were, at best, apathetic to Smith’s plight. Robert La Follette Jr., the Progressive Senator from Wisconsin, plainly told a crowd of enthralled reporters that he would make his decision “based on whoever could shoot better” during the trial. Conservatives in the Republican Party were hostile to Smith, preferring Garner, while conservatives in the Democratic Party that had previously been Smith’s closest allies had deemed him too sympathetic to communism and a weak leader. Smith’s most notable backer in both his 1928 and 1932 successful bids for the Democratic nomination, John J. Raskob, had written him off and was unnerved by his perceived embrace of radicalism and property confiscations. Perhaps the most notable enemy of Smith’s in the Senate and a consistent thorn in his side throughout the duration of his Presidency was the staunch Progressive Republican from Idaho, William Borah. The aging legislator had basically become the Senate’s most important man after Democrats lost control of the chamber and as the Second American Civil War changed the face of the political map. Borah had actually been an early proponent of diplomatically recognizing the Soviet Union. He nonetheless saw Smith’s unilateral, purely executive dealings with them as “highly improper”. The news that Republicans defending Chicago had been bombed by fighters Smith brought to America from its enemy under dubious legal pretexts was the breaking point. Borah made no secret of his desire to have Smith removed. He did not see a conviction as a serious detriment, and perhaps even as a boon, to the Republican war effort. Perhaps most importantly, Borah was an idealist and a romanticist that believed firmly in America’s innocent character. There was no tolerance, in Borah’s worldview, for secret deals with Soviet thugs that backfired and killed Americans fighting for their freedom. Borah’s influence crossed party lines, which made him the single greatest threat to Smith’s Presidency in the impeachment trial. The sixty nine year old Senator had served since 1904 for Idaho, and was a staunch dry and progressive that had put aside his doubts and enthusiastically supported Herbert Hoover against Smith in both his runs. He sparred with Smith frequently in 1934 over the question of how to rebuild the Supreme Court, and had felt his response to the banking crisis in 1933 was "wholly inadequate to the point of being cowardly". While he was out of his element in Albany, he knew the Senate’s members like the back of his hand and whipped votes in both parties to oust the President. When asked if he played a role in rallying prominent Republicans for impeachment, Borah joked that “it’s easy when you live in the same building.”

William Edgar Borah​

The war remained grim. Philadelphia was a meat grinder comparable to the Somne campaign in the Great War, eating into both sides' manpower reserves through extensively bloody fighting that left most of one of the nation’s original capital in ruins. Civilian casualties were rapidly becoming difficult to calculate. In the long term, the Natcorps were becoming overextended in Wisconsin and Butler was turning the Republicans into a force that could seriously contest their control of the Midwest, but these efforts wouldn’t bear fruit until the future. Michigan, of course, had fallen and George S. Patton’s Finger Lakes campaign was perhaps the only bright spot in the entire war for the Republicans. Facing almost certain ruin, Smith nearly contemplated resigning. He was reviled through most of the world, especially in his home country, and just a little bit of bad luck would leave him with no choice but to flee or be executed by MacArthur. He had few allies. He needed only to avoid being completely conquered by MacArthur’s armies in the field and find a measly third of the Senate to keep his office, and even those tasks seemed nearly impossible. He was inspired to stay and make a fight of it by his wife Katie’s urging, and also, as he would later comment: “Hoover’s rats going after me made me think I was onto something.” He dug in, rallying whatever allies he still had and making it clear that he would not bow out willingly. Smith’s political strength was on the eastern seaboard, with immigrants and Catholics. He reached out to leaders of those communities, correctly assessing that keeping that region in his pocket would give him a reasonable shot at cobbling together enough Senators to avoid being convicted.

When the trial commenced in April, Smith submitted to Congress's whims, personally testifying to investigators. His war-weary appearance was mocked by his opponents, particularly the Coward Caucus. This backfired, raising sympathy for the President in a time of war. He and Stimson passionately defended their conduct. Smith’s many enemies, meanwhile, got to work whipping votes. Here, of course, was their main issue. It was impossible to conceal the complex and extensive operations the DOJ was masterminding to destroy Smith. “I’m no fascist,” said one Senator to the Secret Service. “Seems that’s the company I find myself in when it comes to this impeaching business.” The complex array of factions that wanted Smith gone found themselves struggling under their own weight. As the trial commenced, presided over by Chief Justice Hugo Black, chaos reigned on the Senate floor. The Secret Service worked furiously to snuff out traitors, drawing livid denunciations of intimidation. Hiram Johnson made a speech advocating for impeachment which drew a wave of jeers from his colleagues. The many factions that wanted Smith gone struggled under their own weight. When the smoke had cleared, Smith evaded impeachment by a mere five votes. Smith survived thanks to the staunch loyalty of both Republican and Democratic Senators in his native Northeast. After his acquittal, he appointed as Secretary of State one of his closest allies, a wealthy donor who had long been in Smith's camp and who went to great pains to win over reluctant Senators, Joseph P. Kennedy.

Joseph P. Kennedy, Secretary of State​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“Rats, Thieves, Dogs, and Criminals”​

“The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police.” - George Orwell

A young J. Edgar Hoover​

When examining the actions of the MacArthur regime in the United States, there is perhaps one element that goes further than all others in explaining its behavior and contrasting it to the Republic: it was not a nation of laws. As in the case of other fascist (and more broadly totalitarian) regimes that came to power during this time, it was not governed by any kind of meaningful Constitution and had basically no formal legal structure. It was ruled by raw power, with General MacArthur himself at the center. A flamboyant and whimsical man, MacArthur had long been convinced that he was destined for greatness. After the March on Washington, he had proclaimed himself “America’s savior— the only man that can rise to these times.” Some of the March’s original backers, such as J. P. Morgan Jr., had believed that MacArthur was an ideal candidate for their aims precisely because his delusions made him easy to manipulate. They were correct that MacArthur’s ego made him susceptible to being used, but this is precisely what most historians have criticized MacArthur for in terms of wartime leadership. After seizing power, MacArthur rarely communicated with subordinates, tended to be unforgiving when he was presented with failure, and had very little time for anything that didn’t pertain to the war.

As a result, the policies of his regime were incongruous and sometimes a complete mystery even to the highest ranking Natcorps. The members of his supposed cabinet served completely at his pleasure, and he rarely bothered to even give them formal titles. In the Natcorp government, its senior officials often had no idea what they were actually in charge of and lower level Natcorps didn’t know who they answered to. Nobody in the regime was completely certain exactly what their ideology was, or why they were fighting the Republic beyond vague allusions to Wall Street elites, international Bolshevism, and the Pope in Rome. This was a benefit early on, as it allowed the Natcorps to impose intolerable burdens on their own subjects without their coalition shrinking in any significant capacity, but it was also a massive albatross in that it encouraged bitter infighting and often made it hard for the Natcorps to rally Americans to their cause. “We all support Morgan and gold,” writes diarist Mary Dothan, “And we all hate. I wish I could tell you more.” In constant competition for MacArthur’s favor, his so called “royal court” was constantly at one another’s throats and always sought to undermine each other and advance their own standing in his eyes. It’s long been debated whether or not MacArthur deliberately encouraged this as a means to secure his own power and fan the flames of his own narcissism, or whether this was simple the product of his often absent leadership and poor communication with subordinates. In any case, the consensus is thatthe Natcorp government was engulfed in eternal chaos.

The newly completed DOJ building, 1935​

There was one common thread in the Natcorp government, beyond MacArthur’s dictatorship and the coup’s backers looting the treasury, and that was J. Edgar Hoover’s Department of Justice. The Department of Justice was formed in 1870 by President Ulysses S. Grant to prosecute white supremacist terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstructed South. Its functions gradually expanded as time went on. After the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 by an anarchist, his successor Theodore Roosevelt wanted a completely autonomous investigative agency that would report directly to the Attorney General. In 1908, he was given his wish, with Congress authorizing a “Bureau of Investigation”. The Bureau was the nucleus of the police apparatus that would eventually become the backbone of the Natcorp state. Hoover found work with the Bureau at age 22 in 1917, thanks largely to the ongoing Great War. He quickly proved himself, and President Woodrow Wilson granted his Division’s Enemy Alien Bureau extensive powers to arrest real or perceived threats during the War. Hoover rose rapidly through the DOJ’s ranks, and after the War’s conclusion he was assigned to monitor domestic radicals once again. This period of U.S. history, the Great Red Scare, saw Attorney General Palmer and the Wilson Administration extensively target communists and anarchists in the U.S.’s borders due to the widespread paranoia that followed the October Revolution that installed communism in Russia. Hoover was a key player in the “Palmer raids”. While the Raids would quickly fall out of failure with the public due to their massive overreach and the general collapse of the Wilson Administration’s popularity, Hoover’s place in the government was secured. Republican Senator Warren G. Harding would sweep the 1920 election. After his untimely death in 1923 and a series of corruption scandals clearing out his Administration, the road was paved for Hoover to assume control of the Bureau itself.

During the Roaring Twenties, his main activity was targeting gangsters. Organized crime thrived due to the passage of the 18th Amendment, which politicians like Al Smith would bitterly resist. With each booze runner arrested and each mafia boss put behind bars, J. Edgar Hoover’s power only grew. By the end of Calvin Coolidge’s Presidency and the beginning of Herbert Hoover’s, the Director was as much of an institution as a single man. This is what made him so appealing to the March on Washington’s original instigators. It still is not known how far back Hoover’s involvement in the coup went, but there’s no question that he was wholeheartedly on the Natcorps’ side when morning broke. In the next few days, the Bureau of Investigation would practically absorb the Department of Justice. It shed its original purpose, enforcing the laws, and devoted itself entirely to targeting regime enemies across the country. Like the rest of the Natcorp government, the DOJ was constantly engulfed in chaos. Multiple times in the conflict’s opening months, it was consumed by purges of the potentially disloyal. Rather than leaving it paralyzed, this gave Hoover even more control over what remained of the organization. While its early attempts to become the American Schutzsaffel were clumsy and frequently backfired, they were lethal and terrifying as well. The massacre of the entire Hughes Court is perhaps the most infamous example, but the DOJ caught most of the country unawares in its campaign of terror. They found it remarkably easy to intimidate state legislators, and although it was dangerous and risky the rubicon had long been crossed. Hoover masterminded a complex, highly convoluted campaign to destroy the new regime’s enemies wherever they reared their heads. Some of these were simple tactics, such as how Charles Coughlin was dealt with, with DOJ Agents riding into his home and brutalizing him. But the DOJ also trafficked in “every kind of spycraft then known to man and quite a few new modes,” according to a defector.

Prohibition Agents pose with confiscated alcohol​

Hoover, by default, was one of the highest ranking Natcorps from the very beginning. The execution of the Supreme Court was a turning point. At that juncture, there were still many in the Natcorp junta that remained “squeamish” about the potential ramifications of the coup. By doing what he did, Hoover established himself as MacArthur’s attack dog, a position he would hold for the duration of the war. As such, he was more or less the most powerful man in Natcorp America aside from MacArthur himself. Both then and today some dared to suggest that Hoover was the real power behind the throne and MacArthur was simply his puppet. “Whatever the case,” writes Alan Brinkley, “there is little doubt that during their rule, MacArthur seemed to be genuinely apprehensive of Hoover and was careful to keep his ambitions sated. No other member of the Natcorp regime truly seemed to command MacArthur’s respect and wariness like the Director.” The DOJ can accurately be described as a “regime within a regime”, as Stimson described it. Hoover rarely asked, and rarely needed, permission from MacArthur to do as he pleased. He tirelessly worked at installing the police state that defined the Natcorps, unencumbered by the old laws of due process and habeas corpus. As opposed to MacArthur, Hoover as a leader was intimately involved in the doings of his subordinates and came to understand the DOJ’s reorganized form like the back of his hand. He was an ideal candidate for this task, gifted with a mind that responded well to subterfuge and blackmail.

At MacArthur’s behest, Hoover and the DOJ embarked on another particularly important quest: keeping Republican movements from seizing power in the western states. Were the western states to join the war on the Republic’s side, the Natcorps would almost certainly be doomed. The status quo, in which western leaders tacitly accepted Natcorp rule while still being represented in the Republic’s governing structures and outright refusing to support a side through arms, favored MacArthur. Hoover set to work keeping the Natcorps in the west’s good graces and terrifying anyone that might speak up. Famously, the Salem Massacre in February of 1935 saw DOJ affiliated mercenaries kill ten state legislators in Oregon that were planning to introduce resolutions to support Al Smith and condemn Natcorp atrocities. DOJ Agents planted bombs in the automobiles of several, shot one in his apartment, and stabbed another in front of his wife and children as he made his way to the Capitol. This of course enraged most of their colleagues, but also terrified them into submission. What did it profit, after all, to try to join a war Oregon couldn’t make a difference in just to be put in Hoover’s sights? The DOJ also forged alliances with groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which were sprouting up across the west even before the war and which became a blunt tool to terrorize the Natcorps’ enemies and who temporarily seized control of Oregon's government during the war. Over the course of 1935, dozens of Republican sympathizers, some of whom were prominent members of government, would be killed by Klansmen. This included encouraging Klan activities in the south, as well as those of the fascist Silver Legion. Huey Long was much more cunning in staying on top of potential threats, but even he was unnerved by Hoover’s schemes. He famously brought on multiple food tasters to snuff out potential poison, and declared that “I can’t be of no help to nobody dead!”

Members of the Silver Legion during the Second American Civil War​

But perhaps Hoover’s most infamous deed as the Natcorp regime’s enforcer was the construction of its network of prison camps.

The Natcorp camps were created under the simple principle that if there were “unproductive” members of society, they could be made productive again by serving the Natcorp war machine for no pay. It was a simple way to deal with agitators and gave the Natcorps much needed manpower, especially as the war became a long term fight. The camps were mostly designed to target organized labor, which Hoover correctly identified as the most serious domestic threat to Natcorp rule. Well before the end of 1934, the secret police organization that Hoover had long envisioned for the United States was put to work against them. “Everyone is an informant,” wrote Dothan, “in one way or another. There are the actual informants, of course, and if they fail Hoover they will vanish one night and cease to be mentioned. And aside from them, if the ear is unwilling the DOJ will pry something out of the mouth. Something. They will find someone that belongs in a camp.” A favorite tactic of the DOJ, mirroring strategies used in other totalitarian regimes, was to “unperson” whoever they targeted. Records were destroyed. The daytime authorities played coy. Anyone that dug into the matter too hard, or dug into it at all, was sent to a camp as well. Prior to the war, there had been many in the DOJ that had complained of their inability to clamp down on organized crime due to the presumption of innocence. With that out of the way, when suspects were located, they and anyone that was thought to be associated with them were arrested, put before Natcorp appointed military judges, and quickly sentenced to hard labor.

The DOJ as a result maintained significant support within territory controlled by the Natcorps because of how quickly they cracked down on organized crime. The mob bosses and their accomplices that had vexed Hoover as a mere federal law enforcement officer were simply shot, with DOJ agents armed with automatic weapons breaking into mob layers and firing at whoever they laid eyes on. The official pretext for crackdowns on the general public was always chasing after the mob when it was not organized crime. However, within the Natcorp bureaucracy, Hoover’s favorite targets were either communist spies or homosexuals. This so-called “pink scare” was another defining characteristic of the Natcorp regime, and was almost certainly fueled by Hoover’s personal neurosis as much as his political ambition. It became an ideal way to destroy political opponents. Gerald MacGuire, one of the original ringleaders of the March on Washington, met his end sometime before the summer of 1935 after a rumors about his sexuality were spread by Prescott Bush, a Hoover ally. This lead to the rise of an entirely new phenomenon in Natcorp America: the Natcorp death camps, which were a publicly denied state secret, and where “undesirables” were sent to be exterminated rather than enslaved. Their use— and the categories of persons sent to them— gradually expanded as the war ground on and the power of more bigoted agents like Henry Ford grew in the Natcorp government.

Prisoners in a Natcorp camp constructing barracks​

There were Natcorp prisons wherever there was a Natcorp presence. But the most famous hub of Natcorp domestic repression was the state of Ohio and the Midwest more broadly. Under Hugh Johnson, the once prosperous industrial heart of America was stripped for resources to fuel the Natcorp war machine. It was effectively a single, great prison in its own right. The industrial Midwest’s inhabitants worked long hours for artificially low pay. Striking was of course completely forbidden, and as a “temporary war measure” Hugh Johnson and the DOJ singled out the industrial districts in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Illinois for centralization of most business under Natcorp allies followed by severely punishing the “indolent”. Barbed wire fences were erected in many neighborhoods, manned by recruits from other districts. Government issued identification numbers were mandatory in many districts in 1935, a practice that would steadily expand as the war progressed. The full horrors of the Natcorp prison camps would not emerge until after the war’s conclusion, but the ongoing information drip of Natcorp atrocities rarely failed to infuriate Republican partisans. They were also, perhaps understandably, doubted in many circles. “Are we really to believe,” said Oregon Representative Walter Pierce, typically regarded as a swing vote in the western bloc, “that MacArthur operates ovens for sallies?” This heinous repression was highly effective in the short term in mobilizing manpower and resources for MacArthur's cause.

The exact aims of the Natcorp purges and exterminations were malleable and often depended on who held MacArthur or Hoover’s attention at any given moment. There were consistent fears from basically anyone from a cause associated with the political left that they would face repression, however. These were generally justified, as the DOJ would terrorize prominent suffragettes and civil rights activists simply out of fear that they could show solidarity with the Republic— which many did. The NAACP’s W. E. B. DuBois called the Natcorp regime the “ultimate act of aggression of property against the rights of man.” More recent scholarship suggests the north’s black population was almost universally Republican with some notable exceptions, while women in Natcorp territory were considerably more balanced but still skewed towards Republican sympathy. A result of this blanket repression, of course, was a mass of refugees fleeing for the south and west. Those fleeing to the south were dealt with severely. Huey Long judged that his enclave barely had the resources to feed its own people. As a result, he and his minions were extremely harsh with refugees, on multiple occasions opening fire on crowds trying to escape through Alabama’s northern border. The Natcorps, too, dealt brutally with anyone caught trying to escape. MacArthur and Hoover wanted attempted escapees sent to camps, where they could be useful. It was not uncommon however for things to escalate even further than that, which lead to the Massacre on the Mississippi.

The party that sought to escape from West Virginia was able to forge Natcorp papers sometime in July of 1934. The absolute breakdown of order in the federal bureaucracy, probably accentuated thanks to Hoover’s purges of homosexuals, allowed them to avoid detection. Pretending to be a detachment on transfer, the party meandered through Kentucky over the course of several months, eventually entering southern Illinois. They were identified as they attempted to escape into Missouri and from there Nebraska, which was a fool’s errand as the Natcorp occupation in Missouri was considerably more brutal and severe than the one in Illinois (at the time). The party was apprehended by Natcorp regulars at a checkpoint in the Mississippi River. Someone attempted to fight back, and in the chaos the furious Natcorps killed over a hundred mostly unarmed men, women, and children on the banks of the Mississippi. The Massacre grabbed headlines, and although modern research has suggested that the perpetrators went so far because they were angry that they did not have the chance to escape to Nebraska themselves, it made for angry press in the Republican northeast— in the places where the story was believed, and where it wasn’t drowned out by news of an increasingly dire war situation.

John R. Brinkley, 26th Governor of Kansas​

The attempted escape tilted the balance of Kansas politics and reopened a long sealed wound. In congruence with Al Smith’s Presidential victory in 1932, which mobilized the Catholic vote basically everywhere in America, the Kansas governor’s race was won by independent John R. Brinkley in an upset, defeating Republican Party nominee Alf M. Landon. Brinkley was a radio quack that was infamous for prescribing the bodily infusion of goat testicles as a cure for a variety of illnesses. He was also a Natcorp sympathizer, and when fighting broke out in 1934 he ran on neutrality as an overt way to help MacArthur smoothly win the war. As in many other states west of the Mississippi, Kansas’s domestic politics were totally upended by the war and saw members of both parties come together to form “Republican” and “Neutrality” tickets. Landon, a staunch opponent of MacArthur and fascism, was brought back to run against Brinkley. While the white Protestant makeup of Kansas had made it difficult for Smith’s Democrats to make any inroads, they were considerably stronger in the legislature than they had been before Herbert Hoover’s Presidency. This made Kansas’s government fairly evenly divided. The outrage generated by the Massacre scared the Natcorps, who saw Brinkley’s potential defeat as a disaster waiting to happen.

As a result, the DOJ stole the 1934 Kansas gubernatorial election and narrowly failed to kill Landon. An assassin severely wounded the Kansas Republican, permanently disabling his right arm, but he survived— Landon escaped to the northern part of the state, a Republican stronghold, and a Natcorp division crossed the Kansas border and installed Brinkley as Governor again in Lawrence. Swathes of Republican volunteers, such as the International Brigades, spilled in from nearly all sides to join the fray. MacArthur was somewhat wary of inciting a larger war in the west, but one broke out in Kansas all the same between Landon and Brinkley partisans, backed by Republican and Natcorp regulars when they could be spared. It sparked a general breakdown of the food chain in Kansas, inciting a conflict reminiscent of the one that had erupted between free soilers and border ruffians eighty years before. It was a stark reminder that, as President Smith said, there were no innocent bystanders in the Second American Civil War: there were only fascists and republicans.

Alf Landon, hero of the Kansas War​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“Marchin’ Through New York”​

“From Albany west, across various places in New York whose names I do not know but whose places I have removed, the trail of this army is marked by countless white crosses.” - George S. Patton

Infantry in Patton's Fourth Army
​

As the winter snows melted in western New York, General Patton was the only notable Republican commander to enjoy major successes in the field. Groundwork was being laid in Philadelphia and the Midwest for the tide to eventually be turned, but Patton’s dramatic and stunning victory over Leland Hobbs and the Natcorps immediately turned heads in both Washington and Albany. The General’s own colorful, profanity-laden outbursts to the press quickly made him a figure that was known as well among the general public as in military circles. The government press, desperate for something to tout as a success, quickly turned him into their cause’s champion. “And this peculiar knight’s favorite dragon to slay,” wrote an editorial in Republican-controlled Delaware, “is Douglas MacArthur, who his joust is leveled against and at whom he will presumably continue to charge until he has reached the steps of the White House.” The Natcorps more or less refrained from mentioning him at all in the beginning of 1935, and as his exploits became impossible to ignore they viciously defamed him. But whatever the case, George S. Patton quickly emerged as one of the most dynamic and notable figures in the entire saga of the war. Just as important as his pioneering of the armored warfare doctrine was his intense charisma, which whipped the haphazardly assembled Fourth Army into one of the most serious fighting forces in the world. Following Patton’s aggressive strikes against Hobbs in the Finger Lakes campaign, by the middle of April the headwinds in that theater were obviously at the Republicans’ backs.

The only issue was that Patton was still facing one of the U.S. Army’s more talented commanders, and now he was no longer in the open field where he excelled, but going up against a fortified city backed by superior air forces. Patton certainly had the equipment to prosecute a siege, but he lacked many of the elements that traditionally produce successful ones: while he certainly was not “ass-naked and neck-deep in Pennsylvania shit with no gun and no bullets” like he constantly told his superiors in Albany, the Republicans as a whole enjoyed less armor and less artillery and less airpower than the Natcorps did. Patton did not have the overwhelming numerical superiority usually necessary to win a siege. Between these two factors, and his own somewhat unreliable supply lines, Patton’s odds of successfully cutting off Ithaca from Natcorp controlled territory in Pennsylvania were low. Doing so, of course, would have been a long and arduous endeavor without any guarantees of success. Patton would’ve been out of his element, surrounding and starving a city rather than fighting a slower and more cautious commander in the open field. There remained the possibility that the Natcorps could have a breakthrough in Philadelphia that would free up forces that could relieve it— throwing Patton back to square one, trying to defend the Erie Canal from the Natcorps. Furthermore, the General appeared to have been genuinely loath to inflict such suffering on a city filled with civilians. Especially “dyed in the wool rumpublicans that could be better used manning tanks for us.”

Natcorp tank outside of Ithaca​

Nonetheless, Ithaca needed to be taken from Hobbs. Failure to do so would have allowed the Natcorps to “keep a dagger in the heart of New York,” like President Smith was fond of saying. Philadelphia had become a meat grinder that was rapidly reducing one of America’s largest cities into utter rubble, but the Natcorps had failed to shatter Republican resolve there. Despite their best efforts, they’d also failed to break the web of Republican supply lines keeping the city’s defense afloat, which mostly went through New York and could never be used to the fullest as long as the Natcorps had a serious chance of invading the state. There was also the question of the Midwest. The War Department had simply been in no position to make serious troop transfers to the temporary command Butler and Olsen had set up in Minneapolis. This was through no fault of its own, but the Republic eventually needed to link up with its other half. Doing so would require, eventually, serious offensives through the Great Lakes, and that wouldn’t be possible as long as Hobbs was holding on in the belly of western New York. Hobbs understood his duty quite well. He also knew that all of Patton’s talent in the field was of little use in a siege, and believed the fiery general could be taken advantage of in a stalemate. Hobbs, who had received the “silent treatment” from MacArthur due to his failures in the field, had no choice but to go his own way. He cut down on the raw amount of troops he had on hand and expelled many of the city’s inhabitants. He was fully prepared for a siege, and was probably correct that this was the best way to preserve his position. How Patton would have fared under these circumstances remains unknown, because the General had made the same calculation as Hobbs— and did something extraordinary to avoid getting caught in one.

Patton made his move on April fifteenth, knowing Hobbs’s forces were contracting and dealing with the wave of refugees from Ithaca. He enjoyed the overwhelming support of the local people. While intelligence was never Patton’s strong suit and the Secret Service was not yet able to match the DOJ’s capabilities, the Fourth Army made do with a sprawling network of local informants that quickly gave the Republicans more knowledge about the Natcorps than the Natcorps had about them. This was the deciding factor in enabling the last stretch of Patton’s Finger Lakes campaign, a rapid pincer designed to catch Hobbs in the awkward transition between commanding an army in the field and hunkering down for a siege. This was no small feat, as hitting Hobbs from the northeast required doubling back and circling around Lake Cayuga. It would have taken speed, audacity, and high morale among the Fourth Army, as well as a commander clever enough to keep Hobbs on his toes for however long it would take to complete the march. George Patton, thankfully for the Republicans, could provide all of these. He divided his army into two parts, sending the contingent with more armor and weaponry north to begin the long hike to Ithaca. Here he gambled that his forces could pick up adequate recruits on the way to bolster their numbers. Patton took the remainder under his command. To ensure that their activities stayed mostly unnoticed and to keep Hobbs from continuing to build his defenses, Patton launched a full frontal offensive against Hobbs so ferocious that even after months of facing Patton the Natcorp commander was caught off guard, and certainly did not know the true number of Republicans he was facing. Hobbs, like most of his colleagues, had heard of Patton and understood something of his military theories. He fully believed that this was the General’s last play, a blowhard’s desperate attempt to keep the battle in the open. Hobbs’s plan was to slowly retreat and inflict maximum casualties on Patton, putting him in a weak spot for the inevitable siege.

“Patton you magnificent bastard,” chuckled Hobbs to a lieutenant, “I read your book.”

A victorious Patton in Ithaca​

Hobbs was taken by complete surprise on April twentieth, when Omar Bradley swept in from the north with as little warning as an army with thousands and thousands of troops and vehicles could feasibly give. The Republicans quickly turned the Natcorp flank, making Hobbs’s strategic withdrawal degenerate into a panicked rout. By night, the Natcorps were still trickling into Ithaca, and Patton now had enough of an edge to take the city by storm in the near future. Hobbs (likely correctly) estimated that he would lose that match up, possibly handily, and that the units he had dispatched south were too far and not in the state to return and relieve him. With MacArthur unresponsive and Hobbs himself unsure exactly who to answer to, he judged that it was better to lose the city and save his army than lose both. He slipped out as quickly as possible, managing to mostly evade the Fourth Army. Patton, for his part, viewed every wasted second as more American blood shed. He fully intended to pursue Hobbs the next morning, but the administrative concerns alone in absorbing Ithaca and restoring order to the city covered the Natcorps’ retreat to Binghamton. Patton delivering a third, consecutive victory made him cause celebre in Government America even more than he’d been before. Of course, it is worth noting that after months of tireless work, by the time Patton attacked Ithaca the War Department was competing with the Natcorps for air superiority, which probably made his brutal frontal offensives possible to begin with. Leland Hobbs, meanwhile, had failed MacArthur for the final time. Without any elaboration whatsoever from Natcorp high command, he was immediately transferred to West Virginia. His army was dismantled and sent to Philadelphia. Hobbs himself wouldn’t see combat for the rest of the war. This provoked the first of MacArthur’s infamous command shake ups, which have long been studied for their lack of strategic merit and whose rationale remains mostly inscrutable. MacArthur rapidly put Brigadier General Lloyd Fredendall in Hobbs’s place, overseeing most operations in Pennsylvania and New York— of course, the issue being that Fredendall was no more likely to conquer New York than Hobbs was. And indeed, as spring gave way to summer, Fredendall had little choice but to delay Patton as the Fourth Army finally secured a mostly unoccupied Buffalo and ended any serious threat to the Erie Canal. Patton and his soldiers were welcomed as liberators by cheering crowds of Republicans. The Natcorp administrators and collaborators that they could mop up were court martialed and hanged.

Meanwhile, the Battle of Philadelphia continued to rage on a scale completely unheard of in U.S. history. By April of 1935, it was already the most utterly destructive single engagement in United States history, claiming as many lives as the Battle of Antietam when factoring in civilian casualties. For the Republic, the Ninth and Sixth Armies were lodged in the city’s eastern limits, knowing full well that losing control of the Delaware River likely meant the collapse of their whole cause. The Natcorps, meanwhile, were pushing from two sides. Of course, MacArthur had been frustrated at Pottstown, but the Natcorps’ superior organization, training, weaponry, and numbers due to mass recruitment in the Upper South had forced the Republicans into a steady retreat. The destruction inflicted on the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed during this is almost impossible to fathom, as the Natcorps were aided by a huge bombing campaign of unprecedented scale. Masterminded by a young officer named Curtis LeMay, known as “Bombs Away LeMay”, the Natcorps razed much of the Republic’s fledgling industry in addition to hitting military formations. LeMay heavily targeted Philadelphia in particular, and while the Republicans were slowly catching up in terms of air technology they did not have the resources to stop him from wreaking havoc on their exhausted recruits. “Philadelphia is a hell on earth,” said George C. Marshall, leading the Republican resistance there. “It is a city of monsters. There is no humanity in Philadelphia.” It was also, however, a “city of courage— every man and woman in Philadelphia knows the stakes of losing and fights manfully to keep the Jackboot from crossing the Delaware.” Even so, by May of 1935, the Natcorps’ spring offensive (code named Operation Vespasian) had driven the frontlines to King of Prussia and Springfield. The Natcorps were particularly determined to cut Wilmington and Philadelphia off from one another, and in the spring of 1935 they had good reason to believe this was possible. The casualties they were suffering, however, were highly unsustainable and both armies were at the point of mutiny during multiple junctions in the war. But Marshall proved a wily defender and a highly competent organizer, which was why he kept Smith and Stimson’s confidence. Philadelphia’s units he did his best to rotate, ensuring that no single soldier was kept in “the Philly bloodletting” for too long. He kept enough bodies and equipment in Chester to prevent the Natcorps from severing the spine of his defenses, and masterminded several complex operations to keep the Republican forces there intact despite savage Natcorp bombing. At particularly desperate points in the fighting, Marshall famously had transports intentionally beached by Natcorp artillery in the Delaware so infantry could reach the other side.

Natcorps in Philadelphia preparing for a Republican counterattack​

From the southeast was Eisenhower, whose progress was much more alarming because it threatened to capture or destroy the apparatus east of the Delaware that Marshall was depending on to keep his troops west of it afloat. And Eisenhower of course was in a similar position to Marshall in that the Republicans’ naval forces had made it very complicated to resupply his army. This forced him to live off of the local land, which was to both the detriment of the civilian population there and his own troops. This limited his movements more than anything, and is what ultimately prevented Operation Vespasian from snowballing into capturing the city center at first. Marshall and Eisenhower were similar commanders in many ways. As opposed to the flamboyant personalities of men like Douglas MacArthur, Smedler Butler, and George S. Patton, the Generals that faced one another in southern New Jersey saw the war through the lens of long term strategy and logistics. And both understood that they occupied very perilous positions and were at the mercy of many factors they could not control. Eisenhower understood the war through a curve. The longer that the Republic fought on, the closer it would come to bridging most of the Natcorps’ advantages. However, a prolonged war would demand unfathomable resource commitments from both sides— and in 1935, if the Natcorps could hold America’s heartland and continue to extract resources from it, they would be in a much better position to weather the storm.

Eisenhower, however, needed relief, and this is what triggered MacArthur’s authorization of the Battle of Cape May in June. The strategy was simple enough. To give Eisenhower relief that could probably turn the tide, MacArthur wanted the Natcorps’ navy to concentrate on southern New Jersey with overwhelming force. Up to this point, the war’s naval theater had been a stalemate. Both sides had seized shipyards that left them with limited but notable sea presences. The Natcorp air bombing campaign had left no major population center in the northeast unmolested. On top of this, MacArthur’s allies harried Republican ports from sea. New York City and Boston were the most obvious, but Hartford, Providence, Portland, and Plymouth were also easy targets that the Natcorps could pound and keep the Republican Navy constantly scrambling to cover its bases. But this went two ways, and as 1935 proceeded Republican raids on Natcorp ports and operations to bring in resources from southern ones escalated. The Chesapeake remained almost completely secure, but that required a considerable capital commitment with ships that would better serve the cause in the northeast’s chilly waters. MacArthur hungered for a knockout blow. Under Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Natcorps assembled what ships they had on hand and barreled towards the Delaware. It was the killing blow in the Philadelphia campaign, at least it would’ve been had it succeeded. This, of course, was something Republican high command grasped as well as Washington did— and why they prepared just as well, in a field of warfare where they and the Natcorps were considerably more evenly matched. The Republicans had an armada of their own prowling near Eisenhower’s Atlantic City Headquarters. It was modern, equipped with the most recent sonar technology and armed with the U.S.N.’s finest weaponry, plus supplements from the United Kingdom and France. When the two fleets engaged near Cape May, Nimitz realized very quickly that shattering the Republican Navy was not an attainable goal at that moment. He broke off after both sides suffered moderate losses, which allowed the Natcorp press to spin the engagement as a draw. In reality, it was a strategic Republican victory, as it certainly staved off death in Philadelphia.

A young Chester Nimitz​

The Second American Civil War at this point was a total war. While the fighting in Philadelphia was particularly destructive, the Marshall Line snaked north through Pennsylvania’s eastern enclaves and New York’s southwest. Everywhere there was fighting, there were two massive armies occupying land that didn’t have the capacity to support them. The Natcorps’ air campaign destroyed much of the Republic, but as the Republicans’ air capacity increased they too inflicted chaos and havoc across the American heartland. The reality is that nearly everyone in America was living in a state of war of some kind or another. And while not everyone fought, everyone felt the ripples from the March on Washington. Most commonly, this was through rations. The Republic in particular suffered horribly when 1935 opened. Nearly everyone that wasn’t actively fighting MacArthur on the front was serving the Republican war machine by helping the northeast’s industry get off its feet, even as LeMay intentionally targeted factories and other civilian installments that could bolster the Republican war effort. President Smith had initially believed that staking the war effort on these measures would “make us like the foolish man who built his house on the sand”, but when he was forced to adopt them they were overwhelmingly followed in government territory.

“It’s the least we can do,” one woman said at a town hall, “when freedom in America is being trampled on by the Jackboot. Eating less is an easy thing when you think about all this destruction happening in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.” She went on for some length, but concluded by saying, “you hear people complain about hard biscuits washed down with warm water. Like a lot of people have said— Americansare going to fight through, like we always have. We’ll make do. I think we ought to while our children are dying in the field for us, as long as it takes until Al Smith is back in the White House and every single Natcorp’s in the gallows.” And indeed, while the armies of the American Republic came close to, and at some points did completely break during 1935 the war’s second year, they didn’t bend. Unlike in 1934, it was rare for Republican recruits to scatter when they were hit with hellfire from above or from fresh German panzers. “There’s iron in their blood,” said one black Sergeant from Connecticut. “You can depend on them now. Nobody’s running.” The same thing was true of the other side. While Americans living under fascist control were much less miserable from the direct consequences of the war (with the exception of those in prison camps), nearly all of their labors too came to be consumed by it. There was a temporary illusion of stability and unity the Natcorp takeover created. And through this, MacArthur commanded the genuine devotion of most of their new subjects. The Natcorps’ propaganda arm, arguably the most efficient piece of the whole regime, had millions of Americans utterly convicted that their nation needed a strong leader to protect itself from the twin evils of communism and international capitalism, an all-American supergenius that could “reorder a collapsing society under the principle of class harmony,” as Nicholas Murray Butler said in one of his addresses, “and who has the steely will to face our country’s enemies down and do what needs to be done.”

A woman making munitions in a northeastern factory​

 

[The Angry Observer]

"White Sun Over China"​

"When the nation can act freely, then China may be called strong. To make the nation free, we must each sacrifice his freedom." -Sun Yat-sen

Chiang Kai-Shek
​

To call the Chinese Civil War complex is a massive understatement. The wild and tangled web of personal and political relationships that spanned the twenty-year conflict has been the subject of numerous books whose veracity ranges from reasonable at best to outright propaganda at worst. Therefore, a summary of the Chinese Civil War up to the Xi’an Agreement of 1936 is necessary.

Following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Sun Yat-sen, the father of Chinese republicanism, assumed the presidency of China as a member of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party. He was followed thereafter by Yuan Shikai, who attempted to restore the empire with himself at the head.

This brief restoration failed, resulting in a chaotic period in China known as the Warlord Era, whereby dozens of competing governments spanning the whole of the political spectrum squabbled amongst themselves. The Warlord governments ranged in size from large portions of the country to handfuls of impoverished villages, and their lifespans could often be measured in days, weeks, or even mere hours.

From 1916 to 1928, the Warlord Era raged across China. In the southern city of Guangzhou, Sun and the KMT gathered to reform a new government. They purged or aligned with various warlords in the region, eventually mustering control over the south of the country. Meanwhile, a rival government known as the Fengtian Clique, so named for its origins in the eponymous Manchurian province, occupied Beijing, the traditional Chinese capital, and enjoyed the most recognition as the legitimate government of China.

In 1925, with the groundwork laid for the Kuomintang to begin its reconquest of China, Sun Yat-sen died of natural causes in Guangzhou. His successor was Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the KMT military and close confidant of Sun’s. Chiang would declare the Northern Expedition, seeking to eliminate the Fengtian Clique, which was in a weakened state due to its infighting with the Zhili Clique, which had previously been aligned with Fengtian in an arrangement known as the Beiyang Government. With the Zhili forced to retreat to their mountainous holdfast and the Fengtian still licking their wounds, Chiang struck.

When the Northern Expedition was launched in 1926, the KMT first went against the wounded Zhili, targeting its leader, Zhang Zuolin, in Hunan. In the Second Fengtian-Zhili War, Wu had been within mere inches of claiming victory over the Fengtian, only for a betrayal to result in his army being devastatingly routed and forced to retreat to Hunan. The first two month campaign of the KMT’s Northern Expedition ended with the total annihilation of the Zhili forces and Wu’s surrender. However, troubles on the home front would soon result in further strife for the KMT and China at large.

Throughout most of the 1920’s, the small but growing Chinese Communist Party had been in alignment with the Kuomintang. They, and the other various leftist factions within the party became known as the Left Kuomintang, while Chiang’s faction was known as the Right Kuomintang, or the LKMT and RKMT, for short. After Wuhan was captured in 1926, the Kuomintang relocated to the city, and a government soon cropped up which was dominated by the LKMT.

While nominally loyal to Chiang as their leader and generally cooperative, the LKMT did not shy from defying him when they felt strongly enough. With the main party organs under explicitly leftist and pro-Soviet control and the army under Chiang and the RKMT, a clash seemed inevitable. The taking of Shanghai in March of 1927, the latest in Chiang’s successes, saw a communist-backed general strike turn the city over to chaos as the Beijing government failed to defend it.

This strike, while paramount in allowing a swift capture of Shanghai, made Chiang and the rest of the RKMT extremely wary of their leftist allies, fearing the same betrayal that had cost Wu Peifu and his Zhili their victory over the Fengtian Clique earlier. Thusly, at the same time that the rest of the party voted to expel the LKMT from its ranks, Chiang began a purge of the left known as the Shanghai Massacre in April of 1927.

The slaughter and expulsion of the LKMT permanently shattered the big-tent coalition of the Kuomintang. The RKMT, outnumbered in Wuhan, relocated to Nanjing, while the LKMT remained, still insistent that they were the legitimate Kuomintang. Chiang’s betrayal was condemned by numerous members in the center of the party, and many who had previously toed the line between one side or the other found themselves forced to choose.

The most important of these figures who found themselves caught in the middle was a thirty-four year old woman. Soong Qingling, also known by her baptismal name Rosamond, or Rosie, for her English-speaking friends, was the a member of the extremely prominent Soong family of Shanghai, and the widow of the late Sun Yat-sen. Their marriage had been a political one, but one which was well-suited to the extremely political Qingling.

Soon Qingling​

Soong Qingling, and her sisters Mei-ling and Ai-ling, were all Methodist daughters of Shanghai businessman Charlie Soong, and they, along with their brothers Tse-vung, Tse-liang, and Tse-an, were educated in the United States. The three sisters, all fairly close in age, studied at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. Consummate English-speakers, the Soong sisters were all famous for the southern drawl that accompanied their speech, a linguistic idiosyncrasy which would one day serve them well.

For Rosie, the middle of the sisters, she had always had the strongest affinity for the LKMT. She voiced that her late husband, the founder of the Republic of China, possessed strong socialist sympathies which were reflected in his Three Principles of the People, particularly in the principle of Minsheng, roughly translated as ‘Welfare Rights,’ which were a critique of unregulated capitalism and called for land and wealth redistribution.

All of this was made much more complicated by the interpersonal relationships at play here. Just as Qingling was married to Sun, Mei-ling was engaged to Chiang. The two sisters now found themselves on opposite sides of a gulf forged by Mei-ling’s intended. With a final, furious denunciation of Chiang as a butcher and traitor to Sun’s ideals, Soong Qingling fled Shanghai for Moscow, and that December, Chiang and Mei-ling married. The Soong sisters would not reconcile for almost a decade.

Wedding photos of Sun Yat-sen and Soong Qingling and Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling​

The Chinese Communist Party did not simply take the Shanghai Massacre and their expulsion from the Kuomintang sitting down. In August of 1927, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, two of the CCP’s most famous generals, led the Nanchang Uprising, moving down from Wuhan to seize Nanchang, with intent of moving on Guangzhou and establishing control over southern China as Chiang moved northward. This ultimately ended disastrously, with Zhou and Zhu joining the communist guerrilla Mao Zedong in the southern province of Jiangxi, establishing the first all-communist claimant government to China, the Jiangxi Soviet.

Meanwhile, in the north, the Beiyang Government found itself handed defeat and defeat by Chiang. Zhang Zuolin, the longtime leader of the Fengtian Clique, was killed when the Kwantung Army, Japan’s armed forces stationed on its leased territory in Manchuria, planted a bomb on his train as he fled Beijing for his base of power in Manchuria. Zuolin’s son, Xueliang, assumed leadership over the clique and formally surrendered to Chiang on December 29, 1928, nominally reuniting China under the Kuomintang.

Zhang Zuolin​

This victory was not to last. Japan, with its imperial ambitious, staged a false flag attack in its leased territory in Manchuria in September of 1931. The Mukden Incident, as it is now known, resulted in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet State of Manchuria, known today as Manchukuo, in early 1932. To add insult to injury, the former Xuantong Emperor of the Great Qing, Aisin-Gioro Puyi, was first declared Head of State of Manchuria, and then crowned as its emperor in 1934.

A second Japanese puppet state, Mengjiang, formed out of the parts of the Inner Mongolia region that bordered Manchukuo. The ceasefire deal between Japan and China also gave the Japanese control of the city of Tianjin, which was Beijing’s primary means of seaborne economic activity. Given its proximity to Japanese-controlled territory, Beijing was no longer a suitable capital for the KMT government, which elected to remain in Nanjing.

The fortunes of Chiang Kai-shek and China at large would soon turn, though. Japan, heavily dependent on American oil and steel to fuel its war machine, was suddenly out in the cold as the Second American Civil War broke out. In particular, the nationalization of the Texas and Gulf oil fields by Huey Long dealt a crippling blow to Japan’s ambitions. When the Japanese Imperial Navy attempted to move on the American island of Guam, it found itself repulsed by the military detachment there, despite controlling its sister islands to the north and south.

Emperor Puyi and Empress Wanrong​

With Japan now reeling from the loss of its primary source of oil and iron, Chiang decided that the time was ripe to finish off the warlords who still controlled western China, including the Ma family in the center of the country, along with the separatists in the Xinjiang region. Two regions would frustrate him, however. The first, Tibet, had been independent since the initial chaos with the failure of Yuan Shikai’s attempt at imperial restoration. Dirt poor and sparsely populated, it was the sheer lack of passable roads and the brutal climate of the Tibetan Plateau that prevented the KMT from moving in on Tibet.

Meanwhile, in the north, Outer Mongolia had become the Mongolian People’s Republic, ruled as a Soviet proxy state. To strike at the communist-ruled nation would mean all-out war with the Soviet Union, and Chiang knew that, regardless of their shortcomings in materiel, the Japanese would not pass up an opportunity to attack if China found itself in combat against the Russians.

Leaving Tibet and Mongolia to their own devices for the time being, Chiang focused first on rooting out the Xiebei San Ma, as the Hui Muslim warlords of central China were known. The nominal leader of the family, Ma Bufang, was cooperative with Chiang’s demands, while his relatives were often not. Most notably, Bufang’s cousin, Zhongying, was known as a particularly brutal man who had slaughtered his was across western China.

Ma Bufang, head of the Xibei San Ma and his unstable younger cousin Ma Zhongying​

Ma Zhongying had been loyal to the Kuomintang, but soon found himself consumed with delusions of grandeur, that he would found a Hui state which would go on to eclipse Central Asia. It was alleged that he had even begun to compare himself to the old Khans of the Mongol Empire. For many, they were confused how this young man who, only months earlier, had seized the city of Kashgar and fought off the Soviet invasion of the region in the name of Nanjing, had now believed himself to be a future ruler of all Muslim Asia.

When Chiang came to seize direct control of the region, Ma Zhongying rose in rebellion, moving quickly to meet the coming Kuomintang armies in the Hexi Corridor. Badly outgunned and outnumbered, what little terrain advantage Zhongying had evaporated as his cousin Bufang had assumed command of the KMT forces, and was just as familiar with the area as Zhongying was.

Ultimately, Zhongying was defeated in the Battle of Hexi. His fate is something of a mystery, but it is generally accepted that he was dead by no later than 1936. Subsequent uprisings in Xinjiang by both loyalists to their former leader and the remaining communists in the northern portion were put down with prejudice. At last, Chiang was ready to move on the Jiangxi Soviet.

The overwhelming attack came in mid-1934, and was a total rout for the communists, who fled Jiangxi in October of that year. With this flight began a journey that is legend even today–the Long March. For a year and a half, hundreds of thousands of communists were chased across China to a stronghold in the north, suffering horribly along the way. They eventually reached the city of Yan’an, which was both defensible from a terrain perspective and due to continued instability in the region despite the KMT’s better efforts.

(L-R) Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, and Zhu De during the Long March​

By 1936, the Yan’an Soviet had become the CCP’s stronghold in China, and Chiang would have none of it. In August of that year, the KMT struck hard on the communist enclave, bringing with it a terrible air campaign heretofore unseen in China’s history ahead of the most intense shelling barrage that either side had ever witnessed.

At some point during the Bombing of Yan’an, the leader of the communists, Mao Zedong, a former teacher, of all things, who had demonstrated astounding leadership skills during the Long March, was killed. His death reportedly broke many, who threw down their weapons and streamed out of the ruined city on foot. Many of these defectors would be slaughtered by the Kuomintang, one of the most heinous war crimes of Chiang’s Pacification Campaigns.

Zhou Enlai, a hero of the Nanchang Uprising, managed to smuggle thousands of Chinese communists northward, seeking shelter in Mongolia and generally acting as a nuisance on the Sino-Mongolian border for years afterwards. Meanwhile, his counterpart, Zhu De, held composure and continued to resist in Yan’an to the last. Finally, after more than four months of assault, the city fell in December, and Zhu De surrendered alongside the last of his troops. The single greatest surprise awaiting Chiang Kai-shek in the fallen city, however, was none other than Soong Qingling.

She was bloodied, half-starved, and had the partially crazed look of someone who’d spent half a year under constant artillery fire, but the woman hauled into Chiang’s command tent was undeniably his erstwhile sister-in-law. They had only seen each other twice since her defection from the party in response to his purge of the left. The first time, in 1929, had been when Sun Yat-sen’s remains were moved to a newly-built grand mausoleum in Nanjing, and the reunion had been extremely tense. At the time, Qingling did not deign to speak to either of her sisters nor any of her brothers, and reported only hissed curses at Chiang.

The second time had been only marginally better, in 1931, when the Soong sisters’ mother Ni Kwei-Tseng died. At that time, Qingling was much more civil to her brother-in-law and did speak to her siblings. She had decided to remain in Shanghai, ostensibly removed from politics, and Chiang had been content to assume she remained there, little more than a local celebrity. That she had been in Yan’an at all proved to be an incredible shock for him, and it left him holding a terrible political grenade.

Executing Qingling was off the table. As the wife of Sun Yat-sen, who Chiang’s government continued to revere and honor, she could not be killed. The people would riot, and worse, it would shatter his relationship with Mei-ling. Not to mention, Qingling’s death would drive the very powerful Soong family out of his government altogether, a loss it absolutely could not bear. No, dead, his sister-in-law would be a martyr and her ghost would topple him from power, Chiang was sure of that.

Total clemency would also make him look weak, not to mention leaving Qingling, whose eyes blazed at him in defiance, free to cause even more headaches for the Kuomintang. Instead, Chiang took the middle road, sensing opportunity. His sister-in-law would undergo an extensive sequestration in Nanjing, and, after a period of time, she would rejoin the Kuomintang, and she would bring the surviving military talent of the vanquished communists with her.

This agreement was made in secret at nearby Xi’an. What exactly was said remains a mystery even today, but Zhu De and Soong Qingling, alongside dozens of other communist officers, agreed. They would remain hidden until tempers had cooled after the defeat of the CCP, and then, ever magnanimous, Chiang, now styling himself as the Generalissimo and acting ever more like a dictator, would welcome them back as prodigal children with one goal–the liberation of all of China.

The Xi’an Agreement was not the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning for Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. All of China that was not under foreign boots had come into the fold by hook or by crook, and his greatest rivals were either dead, fled, or bound now to him. For the first time in twenty-five years, perhaps for the first time since the Century of Humiliation began, China could look to the world beyond, and look it did.

China looked with hateful eyes across the sea to Japan, and vowed to drive it and its puppet states from Chinese shores forever.

 

[The Angry Observer]

“The Battle of Wisconsin”​

"Look around us! There are those preening about a peaceful resolution to this war, but the scars on our own bodies and the tombstones in our backyards bear witness against such a farcical and insulting idea. Listen to the roar of MacArthur's planes the next time someone lectures you about peace! The only peace for Minnesota is the one that ends with fascism's total destruction!" - Governor Floyd Olsen

Smedley Butler
​

The Natcorps held several obvious advantages in nearly every theater of the war, such as better training and better equipment. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in the Midwest, where the Natcorps rapidly seized the industrial base and with varying degrees of effectiveness severed the Republican governments of Philip LaFollette and Floyd Olsen from Albany. For much of the campaign, the Republican holdouts were dependent on what they could scrounge from the west. It’s important to note that attitudes in the west towards the Natcorps and Republicans were incredibly varied and diverse, perhaps even more so than anywhere else in America. Everywhere that there was still democracy, there were staunch Republicans in the general populace and state legislators constantly agitating for opposing MacArthur. The further one got from the west coast, the stronger anti-Natcorp sentiment was. While many western farmers, particularly Protestants, were suspicious of Smith and had voted against him in the largest numbers, many also loathed the MacArthur regime’s industrial centralism. This would be the lifeline the outgunned, outnumbered, and desperate Republican contingents in the Midwest depended on as Hugh Johnson pounded them.

Historians have long debated whether or not MacArthur’s complete refusal to accept anything less than total conquest of Minnesota was uncanny intuition or madness, but whatever the case the Republicans simply had no answer for Johnson’s advances in 1935. “Hit them,” MacArthur said whenever someone involved in the theater approached them, “hit the sonsofbitches until they can’t move. We can’t have any trouble over there if we intend to box the reds into the Empire State.” Both armies were heavily disorganized, scrambling to arm and train an influx of new recruits. But Johnson maintained the obvious edge, and by the time the last year’s snow began to melt his supply lines were firm enough to bring in tanks, artillery, supplies, and thousands upon thousands of reinforcements all the way from Berlin. The Republicans, put simply, did not have the capital to compete with this. But there was one advantage Smedly Butler had, and that was that the freezing wasteland the war was reducing Minnesota and Wisconsin to was inhabited by millions of loyalists to his cause. More than anywhere other than perhaps New England, the American Republic enjoyed the most overwhelming support in the free Midwest. A wave of refugees escaping Natcorp horrors in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio weighed down and stressed what meager resources the Republicans had, but they also gave them a massive pool of very eager partisans with little to lose. “I've done a lot more with a lot less,” said Butler, a grizzled veteran of countless engagements in the Marine Corps, “as a hired thug for capitalism. Now we’re fighting for our survival, against a merciless fascist that will stop at nothing but our total annihilation.”

Natcorp soldiers in an M1 Scout Car, in Indiana​

Of course, no matter what MacArthur demanded, some things were simply not possible, and an immediate conquest of the Midwest was one of those things. Despite vastly superior Republican numbers, the Natcorps had triumphed in the engagements following the Battle of Rockford and seized south Wisconsin’s population centers without much trouble. Neither Hugh Johnson nor Douglas MacArthur had much option beyond basically repeating the same campaign in Minnesota, hopefully seizing Minneapolis. The Olsen government, like the La Follette government, could flee to its rural, agrarian, and radical base. Johnson understood that the “total subjugation” his opponents feared and MacArthur needed could only be achieved through lengthy, bloody conquest. He was more than willing to deliver on this. In fact, Johnson’s papers suggest he was downright thrilled to till the soil where the seeds of the fascist future could be planted. But that required preparation, and preparation required time, which Smedley Butler and the Republicans took full advantage of.

Following Rockford, Butler went about doing basically what Patton had done following Syracuse. His goal was to turn the haphazardly organized Republican recruits in the Midwest, almost all of which were still green, into a genuine army that could protect the Republican allied governments of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan while eventually driving the Natcorps back down south. MacArthur, who was always fond of articulating his destiny through the heroes of the past, liked to invoke Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan as a metaphor for his ambition of separating the various Republican holdouts and then beating them into submission. Similarly, Butler’s hope was to drive the Natcorps out of the Midwest entirely, which would have severely compromised their position in the war. But he needed to do so at a severe equipment deficit with no hope of help from Albany. This wasn’t for lack of effort. Even as President Smith fought for his life in his impeachment trial, the Republicans were organizing humanitarian and military aid packages “completely unprecedented” in size, according to their chief sponsor, Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. What Albany could do, however, was limited, given the Natcorps’ power in the Midwest. Complicating matters was Curtis LeMay and the Natcorp bombing campaign, against which the Midwestern Republicans had very little defense. Hard and soft targets throughout the Midwest’s major population centers were bombed constantly. “They can’t fight,” explained LeMay grimly, “if we’ve knocked them back five centuries.” Butler, therefore, took advantage of his numerical superiority by taking a page from the Great War. Mimicking the Brusilov and Kaiserschlacht Offensives, Butler personally organized “shock trooper” detachments of infantry. As in the Great War, their purpose was to weather heavy casualties and overwhelm enemy structures. When they could not beat the Natcorps in the open field, an inevitability given the situation Butler was facing, his troops were to fall back and harry the advancing Natcorps as much as possible, taking advantage of the terrain to maximize casualties and narrow the enemy’s equipment lead. The other goal was double envelopment. The Midwestern “front”, in total, was over five hundred miles of ill defined borderlands throughout Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan.

Republican shock troopers​

Butler’s and Johnson’s calculations were roughly the same. Johnson believed his best shot at an easy capture of Minneapolis was a blitz that took advantage of the Natcorps’ superior weaponry, punching through Eau Claire and into St. Paul. He understood what the Republicans’ strengths would be, however, and it was why he went to the extensive lengths he did to “pacify” the country that he encountered. With southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois under his immediate control, Johnson established a regime so brutal in reputation that it had a bad name even among other Natcorp commanders. Johnson often did not bother with the prison camps that had defined the Natcorp regime in other areas, instead employing forced labor and ghastly punishments in plain sight. He did not recognize the difference between civilian and soldier. As one Natcorp colonel recalled, “General Johnson liked to say that military values needed to go national if we wanted to protect the American spirit. So, we turned Madison into a barracks.” Suspected dissidents were shot in their homes. To up the ante, Johnson’s most loyal soldiers would conduct “full strikes” that killed entire families and in some cases created generations of orphaned children. “Every method of torture” was employed extensively by Johnson, according to a Secret Service asset.

But perhaps the greatest and most lasting of the Wisconsin Butcher’s crimes was his lootings of farmers. To sustain the Natcorp army and pound the locals into submission. Johnson understood that socialist leaning Republicans in the countryside couldn’t be given any reprieve. Otherwise, Butler would always have a knife pointed right at his headquarters and the better intelligence apparatus. So, Johnson’s troops, operating under the cover of chaos, looted farms en masse and seized their food stockpiles for themselves. Estates were put to the torch and entire families left to starve to death. In trucks, Johnson’s troops marched through Iowa, destroying what they could not take. The intention was to force the local populace to rely on him. “Even a serpent,” he explained to a high-ranking DOJ official, “does not bite the hand that feeds it.” It was also to make sure his army had the appropriate supplies to fight the war. Of course, as the war spiraled well out of either side’s control, the eventual result would be America’s breadbasket empty in its darkest hour. The Midwestern Famine would kick into gear soon, permanently scarring the region and leaving countless dead. Johnson, meanwhile, was one of the richest men in the world from his headquarters in Madison. “He’s a butcher and a monster,” one DOJ telegram reads, “who has picked the poor farmer’s pocket to teach him who his master is. Wisconsin under this Devil is more tyrannical than Soviet Russia.”

A farming family looted by Natcorps​

And as soon as he could, Johnson prepared for another armored strike designed to basically repeat the success at Rockford. He was not naive to the dangers that he faced and knew that his very skilled opponent was doing everything he could to prepare for such a strike. But Johnson, under heavy pressure from MacArthur, had few better choices. MacArthur himself, without a sudden breakthrough in the east, didn’t have other options, either. Minnesota had to be taken. And that’s what lead to the Johnson Offensive, with Johnson assembling an army some 60,000 strong and marching north. What lead to contemporary observers and historians alike throwing such praise on Johnson was his savvy development of supply lines, which kept the Natcorp lines from overextending and buckling under their own weight. The huge numbers of tanks, with modern aircraft thundering over farmhouses to hail their advance, made for an impressive sight. “Gog and Magog are bearing upon us,” one Republican recruit grimly wrote. Butler ordered for “all cylinders to fire from cannons we don’t have”, which resulted in a dramatic escalation of the Midwestern War. Through intricate communication networks sustained by a fanatically Republican local populace, Republicans throughout the Midwest organized counterattacks. The First Army was stationed in the Michigan Panhandle, the Second was stationed in northern Wisconsin, and the Third in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa. All launched massive, predominantly infantry counter offensives into Natcorp occupied territory. With the borders so unclear, not much truly changed hands. Butler’s preparations hadn’t changed the rules of warfare, either, and much smaller Natcorp forces lodged behind fortifications were able to easily repel the Republican hordes. In fact, technological advances since the Great War had left Butler’s tactics even further out in the cold.

Nonetheless, they succeeded in scaring the hell out of the Natcorps, forcing a flurry of last minute preparations and troop shifts to beat off the attacks. They also ignited a simmering guerrilla war between Republican partisans, who quickly discovered that asymmetrical warfare simply made more sense given the dynamic, and the Natcorp occupiers responded with even more repression and brutality. Republican partisans in Wisconsin, both during the Johnson Offensive and all other campaigns that went through the Midwest, were a persistent headache for the Natcorps. The more tenuous Natcorp supply lines became and the more Natcorp equipment was destroyed by raids, the less pronounced their superiority in armored vehicles and weaponry became. Which was one of the reasons why early victory was so crucial for Johnson— the Natcorps’ odds of conquering Minnesota went down the longer he tarried. Johnson knew full well that the counterattacks were designed to rattle and distract him. Butler probably bought himself no more than a week. He, meanwhile, was left to defend central Wisconsin against all odds. He prepared to make his stand in Fort McCoy, from which he believed he had a reasonable shot at beating back the Natcorps and complicating their march towards the Mississippi River. On the morning of the 16th of March, Johnson wasted no time. After the Republicans had been treated to a full night’s worth of harassment by Natcorp bombers that, in Johnson’s estimation, had them on the brink of breaking before the first shot was fired, Johnson directed an early tank offensive. The Republicans were only saved from total collapse by the morning fog, which didn’t make the Natcorps’ tanks completely useless but certainly made them less effective. The Republicans, meanwhile, had been living on low rations and fighting a battle many thought was doomed. They were as furious as they were afraid, and by noon the Republican counterattack was so ferocious that Butler’s plan had actually succeeded. In a pitched battle, Republicans had held their own. And they’d done so while weathering thousands of casualties in under a day, something that they simply could not afford to do twice.

Natcorps near Fort McCoy​

Johnson continued to pound them from afar, giving Butler little choice but to evacuate as quickly as possible. He was hesitant to do so very quickly, though, knowing full well that this could give his wily opponent an opening to attack from the back and turn an ordered retreat into a route. Therefore, he did so slowly— and in the morning, Johnson smelled what was a foot and launched another, full-out offensive that did deal the diminished Republican ranks a stinging defeat. Fort McCoy fell into Johnson’s hands, but to Butler’s credit, even before the battle much of the valuables had been whisked north and west. Johnson nearing the Mississippi, combined perhaps with George S. Patton’s own demands for men and resources, “put a spring in Stimson’s step” as La Follette recalled. More tanks, more planes, and more artillery pieces were on the way, being smuggled through Canada, snuck through Lake Superior, and even airdropped when possible. Butler needed only to make do with what he had until they were in his hands, but even that was a daunting task. “They want magic,” complained Butler to his brother, “they want me to take warm bodies and turn them into something that can resist the most modern army in the world. Every day, there are German-built fire breathing dragons cutting through these men I command. It doesn’t matter how ingeniously and manfully we’re going to fight. I may as well have butter to slow the Jackboots.”

Even so, Butler had a lifeline to Minneapolis, and more volunteers were still pouring into his ranks. He felt letting the Natcorps go much further than Fort McCoy meant losses in Wisconsin that they couldn’t soon make up and which would seriously endanger Olsen. As a result, Butler prepared an ambitious enveloping maneuver. He arrayed his troops between the Mississippi and McCoy, correctly anticipating that Johnson wouldn’t delay long and he could count on another simple, brutal frontal offensive from the Natcorps. Butler was right. Days later, Johnson renewed the attack, setting up Sparta as his forward base and pounding Republican formations from the air. And once again, there was little Butler could do to mitigate casualties other than spread out and weaken his formations, which made resisting Johnson go from difficult to impossible. But this time, when the Natcorp columns made their move and the Republicans retreated, it was far too easy. Between Rockland and Bangor, the Republicans pointedly attacked the Natcorps from three sides. It was a familiar dynamic for those that would spend much time fighting the war. The Republicans swarmed the Natcorp armor, doing as much damage as possible and inflicting chaos wherever they could. They even succeeded in causing momentary panic in Natcorp command— before the steely Johnson ordered reinforcements dispatched and Republican infantry was once again left helpless. They weathered thousands of casualties yet again in the days of desperate fighting that followed, and could only delay rather than temporarily derail the Natcorp advance. Nonetheless, Butler bought himself more valuable time. “More victories like this will finish us long before the Natcorps will,” he remarked. “We need more of everything even as we run out of everything.” Nonetheless, the mass of Republican recruits was able to relatively quickly erect fortifications stretching across much of central Wisconsin and snaking into Iowa’s staunchly Republican north. This “Olsen Line” became the backbone for the Republicans in the Midwest. The recruits that manned the Line were subject to constant Natcorp air raids. They had scarce access to weapons beyond machine guns and their infantry rifles. Ammunition was always in short supply. Johnson’s vicious looting campaign left them dependent on supplies from Canada and sympathizers in the west.

Republicans near Burns, Wisconsin​

“It was the formative period of my life,” recalled Barry Goldwater, then a twenty-six-year-old man. Goldwater left his family in Arizona and made the long trek to Minneapolis. “And you know, you expect all the shooting and the hand-to-hand combat and that whole hell to be what sticks out to you most, but really, it was the weariness of barracks life. You know, waking up and seeing your face in a mudpuddle and thinking, ‘wow, it looks like someone’s drilled holes in my eyes’, having ditches filled with, well, excrement behind you, all the time. The whistling airplanes stick out to me way more than the times they actually dropped bombs on us, for instance. But the part that I’ll carry with me to my grave, what all of us who were in that region will carry with us to our graves, is the food. There was none of it. You just went, whole days doing all of this labor in the trenches, and maybe without any food at all. You aren’t going to feel the light if you’ve gone that long without food.”

Starvation was Johnson’s favorite tool, and he used it with cruelty that astounded even hardened Natcorp administrators actively running work camps and torturing political enemies. He turned the once prosperous breadbasket of America, which exported food all over the world, into a hungry warzone lorded over by himself and his minions. And while Johnson succeeded in inflicting immeasurable suffering on the Republican sympathetic populace, he did not make them any less likely to resist his rule. Many historians believe that Johnson’s use of starvation permanently rewrote the Midwestern consciousness, as it became such an ubiquitous experience during the war. Whether it was in Chicago or in isolated farming communities in southeast Wisconsin, every Midwesterner felt the sting of hunger. “Johnson’s brutality became inseparably linked to capitalism,” writes Brinkley, “with hired thugs constituting a tiny minority of the total population looting and displacing in what would ultimately be a very short-sighted bid for political power was seen as the natural extension of government by robber barons.” And it was very short sighted indeed, something everyone would end up realizing once the record-smashing cold that came with 1935's winter arrived in the Great Lakes.

Historians disagree on whether or not Johnson’s brutality against farmers was necessary to establish Natcorp rule. Some suggest that this was he only way he could ever hope to weaken Republican resolve enough to conquer the region. But one point against Johnson is that his actions gave Lydia Cady Langer and Warren Green, the Republican Governors of North and South Dakota, enough capital to win over their legislatures and commit troops and resources to Olsen’s side. Meanwhile, Johnson saw little value in pushing to the temporary Wisconsin capital of Eau Claire, instead deciding he would continue the offensive over the summer, invading Minneapolis and presumably repeating what he had done to Wisconsin all the way to the Pacific Coast. “We have made progress,” he told one of MacArthur’s confidantes, “and given the state of affairs we have observed in the Rumpublic, and the reassuring efficiency we’ve restored to Wisconsin, I believe it would take an act of God to dislodge the offensive.”

Iowan children orphaned by the Johnson Offensive​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“The Sun Never Sets on the American Empire”​

“There are hidden riches, out west. We want them. We need them.” - Douglas MacArthur

Teddy Roosevelt Jr. with his family​

Ted Roosevelt Jr. was destined for greatness. Before the March on Washington, however, it had eluded him in favor of his famous father. Beyond the New York State House, the most prominent roles in government he’d held were those that the Republican Presidents between Woodrow Wilson and Al Smith had seen fit to put him in. Under Harding and Coolidge, that meant being in the cabinet. And under Herbert Hoover, that was managing the many far-flung colonial outposts where the stars and stripes flew. Beginning in 1932, Roosevelt was dispatched to the Philippines as Governor-General. The islands, geopolitically, were particularly important for America’s long term interests. Seized during the Spanish-American War by George Dewey and occupied by Roosevelt’s father, the Philippines were America’s gateway to the riches of China. By 1932, however, it was the burgeoning Japanese Empire that was the U.S.’s main strategic concern in the region. There were ongoing plans to grant the islands independence, which would eventually be tabled thanks to the outbreak of the Second American Civil War in January of 1934. This was what Ted Roosevelt was left to administer in the Hoover Presidency’s latter days. In the months leading up to the 1932 election, it had seemed obvious that Roosevelt’s distant cousin, New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt, would sweep the DNC against Smith, Garner, and ‘Alfalfa Bill’ Murray. It was a prospect that Ted’s wing of the Roosevelt family, staunch conservative Republicans, feared immensely. Franklin Roosevelt was charismatic, very well connected, and staunchly progressive. His death, paving the way for Al Smith to win the nomination again, gave the Republican Party a temporary sigh of relief. “I don’t think a brazen creature of Tammany Hall like that has a chance,” his half-sister Alice Longworth wrote to him, “Smith is simply too mean and not brave enough at the same time.” Roosevelt himself had lost the 1924 New York Governor election to Smith, which he blamed on his cousins Franklin and Eleanor’s meddling.

Smith, nonetheless, surprised Roosevelt and the entire nation with a healthy victory over the embattled incumbent. As the incoming President, Smith would replace most of the important appointees in the federal bureaucracy, particularly Hoover’s supporters. This would include Roosevelt, who would have to wait until the next Republican President. Or not— Roosevelt wrote to his sister that “the degenerating situation in Europe presents more than ample opportunities for a man that looks to make a name for himself.” He prepared to vacate his position in the Philippines, unsure of what the future had for him. But then President Smith personally intervened. Open defiance of Smith didn’t just come from the furious pulpits of Protestant churches. He was held in contempt by much of the federal government, up to and including the outright defiance from military officers and other administrators that would eventually snowball into Smith’s overthrow. In 1933, his goal was as smooth of a transition as possible so his Administration could get to work addressing the fallout from the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Consequently, the President personally appealed to Roosevelt’s sense of patriotism, imploring that he stay for the duration of Smith’s term and keep the ship of state steady. Roosevelt found the “clinging” amusing. His public words indicated that Smith’s pleas made him an even more disreputable creature than he’d previously thought. But on the inside, Roosevelt obviously understood the gravity of the situation, proven by the fact that he heeded Smith’s words and canceled his plans to return to the U.S. mainland or Europe.

U.S. bases in the Philippines​

He remained on the troubled islands, which had now been under American control for a generation, and which overwhelmingly supported independence. The occupation was expensive, requiring a large Navy and Army contribution to keep the islands in order. Men like Roosevelt, who had no connection to the islands beyond political convenience, were its main administrators. Both Americans and Filipinos were in agreement that independence needed to happen eventually. None other than Arthur MacArthur Jr., the father of Douglas MacArthur and a Governor-General himself, wrote of the overwhelming Filipino desire for independence that: "Intimidation has undoubtedly accomplished much to this end, but fear as the only motive is hardly sufficient to account for the united and apparently spontaneous action of several millions of people. One traitor in each town would eventually destroy such a complex organization.” This was not something that Washington was deaf to, but the true nature of the situation was lost in the chambers of power. America’s protectionist lobby, fearful of Philippine sugar, passed an independence bill over the veto of President Hoover. In a twist of irony, this was gutted by Filipino Senate President Manuel Quezon, the de facto leader of the independence movement, as the bill kept naval bases in U.S. hands. The Democrats seized the entire government for a brief period beginning in 1932. True Philippine Independence finally was on the docket, resulting in the Tydings–McDuffie Act which gave the islands a ten-year transition to independence and civilian government. The bill, however, along with much of President Smith’s agenda was stalled through 1933. And when Congress went on break through the winter, the March on Washington tabled it indefinitely. The Second American Civil War destroyed much of the federal government’s authority. This meant Huey Long seizing power in the south, and many state governments in the west falling into limbo. For the notable American resources stretched across the Pacific Ocean, whether it was in Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, or the Philippines, it meant being completely stranded. In Roosevelt’s case, he and the U.S. assets in the Philippines were stranded in hostile territory.

Whatever his issues with Smith, Roosevelt became violently angry when he heard the news of what MacArthur had done. Like many, in the days following the coup he had assumed it was an escalated version of the Bonus Army demonstrations MacArthur himself had put down. In fact, he hurriedly prepared to leave his station and join the unfolding Pennsylvania campaign. He was stopped, again, by the personal intervention of Smith. Smith gave Roosevelt firm instructions to remain in the Philippines and keep outright disaster at bay. “If the American republic is to survive,” Smith’s telegram read, “it is imperative that we not lose our holdings in the Pacific to nefarious powers. I implore—demand—that we have the Pacific’s aid in this fight. This is why I insist that you personally secure the fleet, secure the army, etc. and keep Mac or Japan from taking control of it.” More cynical explanations have been offered for this move. Filipino historian Vicente L. Rafaul bluntly said that Smith’s letter to Roosevelt was a “bribe” to keep a notable conservative Republican who he personally distrusted away from the battlefield, where he could defect to the Natcorps or win the 1936 election. Whatever the case, it was not inconsistent with the broader pattern of Smith’s strategy, which was containment and mitigation. He accepted early on that he did not have the military capacity to control the country outside of the Northeast. This earned him widespread mockery across the entire world, and accusations of treason and cowardice from Republican holdouts far from Albany. Historians still debate the merit of the American Republic’s early strategy, and how differently the war could’ve gone if it pursued a different route. In any case, Albany’s maneuvering had the exact drawbacks its critics, such as Smedley Butler, warned it would bring: federal authority vanished in the majority of America and the Republic was left in the humiliating position as a rump state. It also kept invaluable American infrastructure intact, even if the Republic would not immediately reap the rewards, and let Albany’s embattled defenders concentrate on a relatively narrow front.

U.S. Soldiers in the Philippines after the war began​

The March on Washington and the ensuing Proclamation of the National-Corporate Government was mostly an Army affair on the mainland. The American leaders in the Pacific were almost completely left in the dark. “We knew no more,” recalled Joseph Reeves, “than anyone else outside of Washington.” But the March’s orchestrators, speaking on behalf of MacArthur, were quick to try and poach Pacific Command. Of course, the March obliterating authority swung two ways. The Natcorps had little way to project power west of the Mississippi anymore than Albany. As a result, a potential coup in Pearl Harbor or Manila needed to be done with inside help. And this is where Smith keeping Ted Roosevelt in the Philippines, whether it was motivated by cowardice, self-interest, or careful strategy proved to be a very wise decision. Roosevelt was a step ahead of J. P. Morgan’s cronies, securing much of high command for the Republic and quickly disposing of Natcorp sympathizers. This cut off one of the Ntacorps’ main possible sources of expansion. Of course, Roosevelt was not successful in taking the entire Pacific Fleet, but he did take enough of it to prevent a real Natcorp force in the Pacific from assembling. What part of the fleet he didn’t take remained neutral or moved east to Albany. Linking up with the Republicans in the Northeast was easier said than done, but at the end of the day the Natcorps were not able to stop the bleeding. Roosevelt was left with the thankless task of keeping the Philippines under control with one hand and reinforcing Albany with the other. He resolved an increasingly tenuous political situation by taking matters into his own hands. With dwindling troops available and discontent on the rise, Roosevelt, without a single telegram to Albany, unilaterally created a civilian government in the Philippines. This was no act of generosity. It was unadulterated pragmatism, embraced purely because it could secure Roosevelt’s home base and make him more useful to the war effort. Albany, wrestling with the question of President Smith’s impeachment and unwilling to sign a true independence deal just yet, didn’t assent to the move while the war was ongoing. Even so, the Philippines now had a government of its own, and with that government came domestic politics.

The two competing leaders for President of the Philippines were famed revolutionary and statesman Emilio Aguinaldo and Quezon. Mired in controversies dating from the country’s unsuccessful war against America, such as his alleged role in the assassination of fellow general Antonio Luna, the sixty-six-year-old revolutionary was seen as mostly irrelevant to the Philippines’ future. That was derailed by Quezon’s own role in derailing Filipino independence, and made worse by the fact that the U.S. authorities actively courted Aguinaldo’s help. “He’s the most troublesome,” wrote an American major to Roosevelt. “In terms of potential for military damage, at any rate, his followers are the most likely to exploite [sic] a disaster.” For Roosevelt, reaching out to Aguinaldo’s faction quickly and early was a good way to stave off a Filipino revolt. And giving the islands unilateral, if not particularly meaningful, independence drove the nail through the coffin. In the unofficial Filipino elections that came later in the year, Quezon’s powerful Nacionalista Party lost to Aguinaldo’s National Socialists (no relation to the German Nazi Party), almost certainly thanks to his bargain with Roosevelt. This, of course, would have long lasting repercussions for the islands. And even though, as Quezon complained, the Philippines had no legal independence and the elections that were conducted under American supervision, Aguinaldo and his left-wing allies came to power anyway for the first time since the war thirty years earlier— where they would remain. “The work,” said Aguinaldo to an ally, “can now begin.” And whatever the irony of Aguinaldo serving as an American junior partner in an American installed government after winning an election thanks to American politicking, he proved a faithful and capable one in a time when the Republic was in desperate need of a break.

Aguinaldo and Quezon during the 1935 campaign​

Hawaii and Alaska, along with a large portion of the Pacific fleet, simply became neutral havens, ruled by whatever military authorities didn’t abandon their stations to fight in the war. Assets in the Pacific that sought to make their way east had a complicated journey ahead of them. Indeed, some western governments sought to protect their neutrality and implicitly aid MacArthur by stemming the tide of volunteers bound for Albany. The man who perhaps did more than any western politician to gut this was none other than California’s governor, the socialist Upton Sinclair, who won the 1934 election in an upset amidst the chaos of the Second American Civil War’s opening phase. Sinclair, unusual among his state’s political class, made very little secret of his Republican sympathies. He was outflanked at every turn by the California legislature, dominated by the political machine of Hiram Johnson, but he held his office nonetheless. And when a contingent of soldiers landed in a port from the Pacific, with the intention of going east and stopping Hugh Johnson’s vicious advance into Minnesota, Sinclair was careful not to resist and in many cases flagrantly defied California laws passed over his veto requiring him to do otherwise. Governor Sinclair evaded something worse than simply being boxed out by rallying the common people to his side, who had elected him in 1934 to rescue their economy. Nonetheless, whatever political career he had was completely finished, what he could do to stop the fascist invasion of the Northeast was limited, and his own survival looked uncertain if the Republic lost. He had little support in California, even in the working class Democratic strongholds in the state’s agrarian heart. His argument that California’s long-term survival was connected to Smith’s, who lost the state by twenty points to native son Herbert Hoover, was not a popular one. “It is very difficult,” Sinclair became fond of saying, “to get a man to understand something when evading a camp depends on him not understanding it.” California is the face of western neutrality in the history books, represented by Johnson and McAdoo. But California maintained a mostly normal democracy during the war. Oregon to the north was much less lucky, with the Ku Klux Klan seizing power in the state through naked terror and violence. Backed by the DOJ and following its execution of several state legislators, the Klan’s loyalists were able to seize the levers of Oregon’s government for the duration of the war. Business proceeded mostly as usual in the heavily white state, with the caveat that opposition candidates were now violently run out and there was no federal government to come to their defense. The harassment minority groups in Oregon faced pales when examining the horrors of the Natcorp regime, but its government embraced a targeted campaign of marginalization designed to intimidate those perceived as inferior. The unconstitutional Oregon Compulsory Education Act was returned, weaponizing public schooling against Catholic and Jewish communities. Oregon’s Indian tribes faced widespread harassment. “Thugs showed up every month,” recalled Coquille elder George B. Wasson, “sometimes a dozen, sometimes more. We knew what the consequences of resistance were.” As a rule, neutrality’s main constituency in the west was the white middle class, particularly women and progressives. Non-white, working class, and agrarian communities tended to back Al Smith and the Republic, sometimes in overwhelming numbers. “We don’t want his simpering about keeping the peace,” sneered a rancher in western Nevada about his powerful Senator, Key Pittman’s, dogged attempts to force Smith to seek a ceasefire. The end result of this was Neutrality candidates triumphing over Republican candidates in most electoral contests, but huge swathes of western territory being Republican-allied. This made Neutrality politicians’ efforts to keep people from moving to the battlegrounds in Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota like retaining water with film. “The farmers stand with President Smith,” said Governor Charles Bryan of Nebraska, brother of the late Presidential candidate. “And in truth, the American heartland does as well.”

Ku Klux Klan members marching in Ashland, Oregon​

The highly localized nature of western politics makes it difficult to pin any activity on a single leader or governing structure. There was, however, one man that came to dominate the scene through virtue of simply being the last one standing. That was Admiral Joseph Reeves. Reeves’s motives remain somewhat inscrutable, but he took a large fraction of the Pacific fleet and never left Pearl Harbor with it. As the months ground on, with federal authority never truly returning west of the Mississippi, Reeves became the Pacific’s kingmaker. “Joseph M. Reeves would never again hold a military rank,” wrote Brinkley, “but nearly all interstate decisions in the west passed under his eyes somehow or another. Most famous, of course, was when Reeves and his fleet quietly convinced California’s government to accept a compromise with Arizona over rights to the Colorado River. He took it upon himself to continue bolstering the U.S.N. and, like Ted Roosevelt, saw the value of warding off threats from the Empire of Japan.” And indeed, the Pacific Fleet under Reeves successfully stood down the Imperial Japanese Navy at Guam. Ironically enough, the nightmare scenario all sides feared— the Japanese spilling out of their empire in the northwest Pacific and conquering America’s holdings thanks to the war— was stymied by the war itself. Japan could have become a major military threat that rapidly would be positioned as the dominant power in the Pacific, but its empire was a house of cards entirely dependent on imported steel and oil. And when the war in America broke out, it sent those markets into a death spiral. The actual damage from the war was extensive, of course, but the killing blow came from Huey Long’s nationalization of the southern crude markets. The economic tailspin that followed saw Japanese buyers and southern producers utterly destroyed. It also saw Long’s grip over the south rapidly become impossible to dislodge.

The Republicans and Natcorps both invested heavily in intelligence apparatuses that could project power outside of their immediate borders. These were the Secret Service and Department of Justice, and both rapidly took on responsibilities neither was prepared for. The result was a very messy “private war” between competing intelligence agencies, which often meant shooting in the dark in hostile territory. Bombings were orchestrated by both sides, and both backed violent militias in disputed zones to bolster their side’s prospects. Accountability was low. Leadership often had no idea what it was supposed to do. In the DOJ’s case in particular, J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous secrecy made him the only person that truly understood its inner workings, perhaps as an intentional mechanism to keep himself in power. And it succeeded. While many of Hoover’s reports on secret weapons and hidden Russian armies being developed in the Republic were accurate, every enemy arrested and every new scheme to kill western Republicans chartered increased MacArthur’s confidence in, and arguably his deference to, Hoover. And Hoover’s intricate network of Natcorp minions and DOJ agents in the west and Pacific was successful in cowing the Natcorp regime’s enemies, at least temporarily. It also sparked a massive arms race and mass produced the concept of the police state as we currently understand it. But perhaps most revolutionary, the Second American Civil War’s intelligence competition accelerated the development of a new, destructive form of warfare that would ultimately change human life forever.

Joseph Mason "Bull" Reeves​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“Old World Blues - Paris is Burning”​

“Our spirit of enjoyment was stronger than our spirit of sacrifice. We wanted to have more than we wanted to give. We tried to spare effort, and met disaster.” -Philippe Pétain.

NOTE: This is a retcon of a prior draft, one that was up for quite some time before we, the authors, decided a rework was necessary. As a result, some major plot points in the previous draft were changed.​

Breaking out in 1934, the Second American Civil War sent the already apoplectic global economy into further convulsions. Of those hit hardest were the United States’ closest trading partners, Canada, Mexico, Britain, and France, with France in particular suffering as due to its lack of highly industrialized colonies to fall back on to support the economy in the Métropole.

An already difficult economic situation became even harder as the French mobilized to lend what little support they could muster for the Albany Government. The causes for this were not rooted in a lack of preparedness, but rather in a lack of noted leadership. Albert Lebrun, the President of France, would one day be spoken of in simple but blistering terms by Charles De Gaulle– “As head of state, he lacked two things: there was no state, and he wasn’t a head.”

Albert Lebrun, final President of the Third Republic
​

Lebrun, in truth, bears both more responsibility for what was to come for France than most think and less blame than he is often given. For years, the French Communist Party (PCF) had been growing in strength, and though the party won few seats in the 1932 election, the French left dominated. The center-left Republican, Radical, and Radical-Socialist Party (PRRRS) won only twenty-eight more seats than the socialist French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO). It was therefore understandable that the center-right Lebrun might hesitate in throwing his weight behind Al Smith’s government as the PCF and SFIO demanded that France do so when the Soviet Union began supporting Albany in earnest.

Likewise, the situation in the United States was frequently confusing, as formal diplomatic relations mostly collapsed for the war-torn nation. The French ambassador, André Lefebvre de La Boulaye, had fled Washington as MacArthur began his fateful march upon the city, winding up at the French consulate in New York, where he would stay until his removal from the post in 1937. Nominally, the French government considered Smith to be the rightful leader of the United States. However it would communicate with the neutral western states through its San Francisco consulate, Huey Long’s southern fiefdom through the New Orleans consulate, and even with MacArthur’s regime via unofficial backchannels with Benito Mussolini’s Italy.

Domestically, the loss of the overwhelming majority of American trade was a bodyslam to the fragile French economy. In an era of extreme protectionism, any hits to trade could be extremely significant. Manufactured goods and other luxuries saw massive price hikes, but it was the loss of most tobacco imports that hit the French people the hardest. Cigarette smoking had skyrocketed amidst the outbreak of the Great Depression, and the United States had been France’s primary supplier.

By late 1934, with prices on the vice sky high and supplies painfully dwindling, protests, strikes, and even riots began to break out. In truth, cigarettes were only a relatively small part of these disruptions, but the designation Cigarette Riots was coined by the leading French newspaper, Le Figaro, and the name stuck. The broader causes of the upset were both economic and political, as the French left agitated for France to stake a more aggressive role in combating authoritarianism, especially as Germany used its support for the National-Corporate regime as an excuse to aggressively rearm in wanton violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

All of this instability came in the aftermath of the Veterans’ Riot, a violent response to the discovery of breathtaking levels of corruption within the French government that saw far-right protesters clash with left wing counter-protesters in the Place de la Concorde, spiraling into a riot. The chaos was eerily reminiscent of the Bonus Army in the United States, which had of course decapitated the Smith Administration. Ultimately, the fallout of the riots was sufficient to remove the center-left Prime Minister, Édouard Deladier and see him replaced by the conservative Gaston Doumergue.

The Veterans' Riot - February 6th, 1934​

The Cigarette Riots would intermittently flare throughout the second half of 1934 as economic hardship grew. Due to growing dissatisfaction with the existing government, which was dominated by conservatives despite the center-left having won the prior election, the government was pressured to amend the constitution to allow for the president to force new elections.

Shortly after this amendment was passed, under immense pressure from all sides, President Lebrun dissolved the French Parliament and ordered new elections, anticipating a grand coalition from the center-left to center-right. Indeed, this was the general perception amongst most of the French press and the upper class. “A government to represent the sensibilities of all sensible Frenchmen,” proclaimed Prime Minister Doumergue, “That is what the people shall return to us!”

That was not what the people returned at all. When the results were totaled on May 9, 1935, the newly-minted Popular Front of France, composed of the PCF, SFIO, and left-wingers from the PRRRS, had won a commanding victory, and in a brutal shock to Lebrun himself, the French Communists had won the most seats. The next morning, Maurice Thorez, the leader of the PCF, would hold a victory rally at the Place de la Concorde, the site of the Veterans’ Riot a year prior.

Maurice Thorez (right, with arm raised) at his fateful victory rally​

On the morning of May 10, 1935, tens of thousands of Parisians streamed into the Place de la Concorde to witness France’s presumptive Prime Minister deliver his victory speech. Many were jubilant, while others anxiously awaited. Would Thorez declare a total takeover for the communists, turning France from a democratic republic to a Soviet-style dictatorship in the span of a single speech?

After brief speeches by other factions of the Popular Front that lacked much in the way of substance and instead were mostly self-congratulatory odes to their supporters and organizers, Maurice Thorez took to the stage at precisely twelve o’clock to deliver the main event. One attendee described how a seemingly unnatural calm descended over the plaza, in contrast to the frequent cheers and applause in response to the prior speeches.

Thorez, a gifted and charismatic speaker known for his ability to stir crowds, was cordial in victory. He vowed that the intent of the PCF was to preserve the republic, not to annihilate it. “The revolution,” he said, “Does not need to come violently to France. Indeed, this election constitutes the first step in a long road to the revolution. Democracy is our most cherished possession as a free nation, and its preservation is paramount. This government comes to improve lives, not disrupt them. We come to put the common man to work, not put him to the sword.”

Thorez’s speech continued, vowing to work within a constitutional framework and strongly encouraging the defeated parties to join them in passing common sense reforms and improvements. The further along he went, the more the crowd’s mood improved. Thorez was a known quantity for the people, and he certainly wasn’t perceived as a lapdog of Stalin’s. The sense was that change was coming to France, a revolution of the ballot box, not the bullet.

Then, at 12:38, shots rang out from the front of the crowd. The first struck Thorez in the shoulder and the second in the right lung, sending him stumbling backwards into the arms of his partner, Jeannette Vermeersch, who was pregnant with their son at the time. The third shot would strike just below his left eye, killing him instantly.

The identity of Thorez’s assassin was lost to history, as he was immediately swamped by the crowd around him and beaten to death so severely that his features were unable to be identified. All that is known is that it was a young man in his late teens to early twenties, and that he bore paraphernalia of the Jeunesses Patriotes, the Patriot Youth, a far-right paramilitary youth organization with similarities to Hitler’s Brownshirts.

It took only a few minutes for the Popular Front’s victory rally to spiral into yet another riot on the steps of the French Parliament. This one, unlike the prior crisis of February 6, 1934, would successfully storm the building while further rioting spread across Paris, driven by vengeful supporters of the Popular Front attacking the offices of various rightist organizations, and even the residences and businesses of prominent members. This, of course, resulted in those rightist groups fighting back. By nightfall, Paris had fallen into chaos.

President Lebrun and his cabinet fled the city for the Palace of Versailles in the Parisian suburbs, joined by elements of the military, including the famous Lion of Verdun, Marshal Philippe Petain, who was the chief of the French military and Minister of War. Alongside the Marshal were his two greatest protégés, Charles de Gaulle and Henri Mordacq, both celebrated heroes of the Great War.

Lebrun and the civilian members of the government wanted to wait out the situation in Paris, figuring that by morning, the fighting would be done and the military could sweep in to restore order. Petain, de Gaulle, and Mordacq protested that this would be tantamount to surrendering the capital, and the longer that they were gone, the more likely that they would be unable to retake the city without severe fighting. They, of course, were referring to the communists.

Unfortunately for both parties, other elements in the French military had other plans, as did the communists. With Thorez dead, leadership of the PCF fell to his deputy, Jacques Duclos. Unlike Thorez, Duclos was a more traditional communist, and a known Stalinist. Infuriated, Duclos, having been a part of the storming of the French Parliament, disavowed Thorez’s political revolution, proclaiming that the bourgeois would never permit a peaceful transfer to socialism. On the morning of May 11, 1935, Jacques Duclos stood on the steps of the occupied Palais Bourbon and declared before a crowd of thousands the death of the French Republic and the birth of the French Commune.

Jacques Duclos, Deputy Secretary-General of the French Communist Party​

Duclos’ proclamation didn’t meet with universal approval, not even amongst the ranks of the Party. Many of the moderates within the PCF had shared Thorez’s vision of socialism born through democratic choice, not armed struggle. Duclos had, in their eyes, betrayed everything they had believed in. In the end, nearly half of the PCF’s parliamentarians, and almost every member of the other parties of the Popular Front, fled Paris for Versailles to join the rest of the government.

In response to Duclos’ speech, General Maurice Gamelin, who had not fled to Versailles, assembled a regiment of soldiers stationed in nearby Saint-Denis to move against Paris and smother the newborn French Commune in the cradle. He acted unilaterally, rallying the troops against the U.S.S.R. and communism, and moved onto the city that afternoon. Gamelin was notable for his staunch defense of the republican system of government. But even so, the circumstances convinced him drastic measures, if only for one day, were necessary. "Like General Mac," he said, "action needs to be taken, however strenuous and awful it is at the moment. Shall the Republic be the noose the communists hang it with?" This action, taken while the government dithered at Versailles, would seal France’s fate. When word of Gamelin’s actions reached the other divisions stationed around Paris, nearly all of them not already at Versailles rallied to his side. Lebrun was ignored.

General Maurice Gamelin​

Gamelin and his divisions stormed the city, bound directly for the Place de la Concorde and the Palais Bourbon. The communards inside the city attempted to mount a defense in what amounted to a haunting repeat of the Paris Commune of 1871, right down to the ending. The ramshackle barricades raised on the major avenues were no match for the tanks that rolled through the capital city, and the small arms and single-shot rifles its defenders held were nothing compared to the army’s automatic weapons and shotguns.

The streets of Paris ran red as Gamelin carved a bloody path for the center of the communist insurrection. By sunset, the still-beating heart of the revolution had been carved out, and Jacques Duclos and the other members of the PCF who had proclaimed the French Commune had come to their bloody ends in the chambers of the French Parliament. With Paris in hand and the support of most of the local military compared to only the couple thousand troops that had followed Lebrun and the government to Versailles, Gamelin summoned Lebrun back to the city. Viewing his actions as nothing more than temporary measures to reclaim the French state from communism and for the Third Republic, Gamelin prepared to surrender his power back to the civilian government.

Lebrun emerged from Versailles to reassume control, with France’s capital in ruins. The image of their doddering President crawling out of Versailles after the army men had restored order with the sword and cannon was the boiling point for some of those who rallied to Gamelin’s side. It was the final spit in the face after a succession of civil disasters, including some directly induced by the government’s poor relations with the Army. And of course, there was the elephant in the room: that across the Atlantic Ocean, the American Army had overthrown its own weak and chaotic government in favor of something harder and stabler. There were open calls among those at Gamelin’s side to install a corporatist or military government, one that could permanently keep the peace in Paris’s streets.

This put the embattled French President in an awkward position that would’ve taken a master statesman to resolve. Lebrun owed his authority to these members of the Army that had just defused the crisis, albeit through dubiously legal brutality. And Albert Lebrun was no master statesman. Advised to put the Army to order, he dismissed Gamelin. Cautious, cerebral, and a devoted supporter of republicanism, whatever his subordinates were saying, Gamelin was no threat to the Third Republic’s integrity and in that moment was perhaps the only thing that stood between it and implosion. Leading historians in French history are basically unanimous that this was one of the worst blunders in that nation’s history. “I cannot believe my ears,” fumed Maxime Weygand, Gamelin’s immediate predecessor. “He does not merely fail to appreciate, but punishes the men that saved the backbone of the country in the nick of time!”

The city of Paris was still bloodsoaked and blanketed in military occupation. The simmering unrest that exploded after Thorez’s murder remained, barely suppressed under the Army’s boot. The status of the civilian government was now unclear. Lebrun had now totally and completely lost the confidence of the French public and political sector. And with Gamelin dismissed, there was a power vacuum in the Army, and one of its cooler heads was no longer in the room. The Army was desperate, and saw that the stars had aligned. They’d been given license to kill and crush the Communists. The government had never been weaker. There was already a force of armed, like-minded men in control of Paris. And perhaps most importantly: Maurice Gamelin and Albert Lebrun were physically in the city, though for how much longer nobody could say. The Army acted fast. On the morning of May 13th, as Lebrun prepared to replace Gamelin with Petain, the Officers’ Coup went into motion. It was over within an hour, with Gamelin, the President, and most of Parliament put under house arrest.

It was the retired General Weygand, still highly regarded and active in the Army, that made this possible. Without him, the Army may have shirked away from arresting the Hero of Paris, which would’ve destroyed the Coup’s legitimacy but his presence kept the Army men together. By the end of the 13th, Lebrun signed away powers to an emergency military government, and with the blood in Parliament still fresh the Third Republic ended and the French State began. A junta was formed between the Army’s leading men in Paris, and a Constitution drafted that granted them sweeping powers for the duration of “Cette Grande Urgence”. For his integral role in the Coup and respected position in the Army, Weygand successfully maneuvered to become the new regime’s leader.

But obedience was not universal. The Versailles Faction, so called because they followed Lebrun’s orders to retreat, recognized no such new authority. “Naturally,” recalled De Gaulle, “those of us more predisposed towards the Republic’s continuation were not in Paris.” Petain and his two apprentices had a simple choice— submit to the new government or face bloody consequences. Grimly, Petain realized that he had no choice but to flee France for the colonies with what he had. The Versailles Faction, which began as the officers that followed Lebrun to Versailles and would eventually become a far-reaching coalition from all walks of life and both ends of the political spectrum, fled the country before Weygand could stop them. This ceded France to Weygand, but gave the Versailles Faction perhaps the best it could hope for after Lebrun’s surrender: a fighting chance.

The news that France, right after the United States and Germany, had fallen to dictatorship sent much of the world into panic. The British economy imploded again. Of this moment, Prime Minister Baldwin said:

I was so horridly ill that I burst the vessels in my face. How could this have happened? Would fire and suffering rage on all sides surrounding Britain? Would we lose our truest friends to the jackboot in less than two years? When I was finished being sick, I turned to Anthony [Eden, the British Foreign Minister] and barked out, “This cannot happen! Get action— a Caesar cannot occupy Paris!”

But, the British were in no position to help France. The French State did a far better job at securing its position from its democratic dissent than Douglas MacArthur did in America. Unless the B.E.F. intended to invade France and depose Weygand, there was nothing to be done. But, when Petain and his allies fled France for Algeria, they did so with the tacit faith of the British Empire. Other democratic loyalists fled Paris for London, and as much as the Baldwin government needed France for geostrategic purposes, turning over the Versailles Faction’s collaborators was a political and moral bridge too far. Thus, the Coup also paused the period of unusual closeness London and Paris enjoyed following the Battle of Waterloo, even if both sides were shamelessly pragmatic in their dealings with one another. This opened the door for the ambitions of the German dictator Adolf Hitler, whose country had long been kept in check by French power.

A central tenet of Nazi doctrine was unification with Austria, a concept it referred to as Anschluss. Only a year prior, the Fatherland Front, Austria’s fascist government led by Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, had endured its own period of turmoil in an attempted overthrow of the government by pro-democracy forces, which was brutally suppressed. Schuschnigg and the Fatherland Front, although German-speaking and fascist, were opposed to unification due to Austria being majority-Catholic and Germany being majority-Protestant.

Kurt Schuschnigg, fascist dictator of Austria prior to the Anschluss​

An Austrian Nazi Party had existed nearly as long as its sister in Germany, and was vehemently pro-unification. Austrian Nazis had used the chaos of the brief Austrian Civil War to assassinate the prior Chancellor, but had failed in seizing the government and went underground. Ironically enough, this caused a dramatic turnabout in the public’s opinion. British historian Ian Kernshaw notes that the Austrian public favored annexation by as much as eighty percent before the attempted coup, and opposed by as much as sixty afterwards. Austro-fascists were fast to ally themselves with Italy for protection against Germany, and cracked down on Austrian Nazis as hard as on social democrats.

However, Austria’s position was tenuous. The European powers overestimated how easily cowed Hitler actually could be, and with the Anglo-French alliance in chaos, the German Fuhrer made his move. Like every other developed nation, Austria had suffered woefully following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and if there was light at the end of the tunnel the American economy’s nosedive smothered it. Hitler’s minions speedily pressed their advantage. With France and Britain distracted and Germany’s economic wrath too much to bear, Schuschnigg believed he had no choice. By the end of May, Austria had de facto become a protectorate of Germany, although nominal independence would persist for much longer. The Nazis were fast to consolidate power, rewarding Austro-fascists that bent the knee and rapidly purging those that didn’t.

Peace would not come to France. The colonies, already a frequent headache for the authorities of the Métropole due to their worsening economic circumstances, were rocked by further turmoil as pro-independence forces sought to capitalize on the chaos to break away. In the end, the French colonial empire shuddered, but did not fall, and Petain was able to beat Weygand to the kill in many of them and win their allegiance. In one of only a few boosts for the Free French, as they came to refer to themselves, nearly the whole of the French Navy, most of which was moored in the Mediterranean, was won over by Petain. However, the Free French lacked the immediate strength to retake the mainland and depose Weygand, and perhaps equally importantly, still were receiving mixed signals from London. Over the protestations of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, the Baldwin government adopted a pragmatic course to relations with Paris to contain Hitler’s ambitions. The merits of such actions have long been debated, and remain a sticking point in relations between the two countries.

In Algiers, Petain did not have enough of the Third Republic on hand to even begin rebuilding it. Even so, he felt he had little choice. The Free French quickly organized a rump government of their own, with Petain as a President and Mordacq as Prime Minister. Charles de Gaulle, meanwhile, was given command of the Free French forces. These three are known as the Triumvirate, and they would go on to lead the Free French for more than a decade through the coming fires.

 

[The Angry Observer]

Old World Blues - Dieu Et Mon Droit​

"Since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine." - Stanley Baldwin
​

The year of 1935 marked perhaps the worst that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had endured in more than a century. Amidst cascading economic failures brought on by the Wall Street Collapse of 1929 and made even more severe by the outbreak of the Second American Civil War, Britain now watched as France, its other closest ally, was consumed by the radical fascism that had taken Germany, Italy, and most of America.

Winston Churchill, who had been appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty as part of Stanley Baldwin’s cabinet shuffle after the outbreak of the Second American Civil War, said the following only a handful of months prior to France’s partition:

“There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective strength. There is a nation which, with all its strength and virtue, is in the grip of a group of ruthless men, preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by parliament, or by public opinion.”

After their ally was left gouged between Free France and the French State, Churchill could only be described as despairing. He made no secret of his intentions, telling the Prime Minister that he unequivocally supported a British invasion of France to depose Maxime Weygand to restore Lebrun to power. This, of course, was as politically challenging as it was militarily. France's government had signed its power away already. The Triumvirate and Free French were the outlaws for all intents and purposes. Churchill initially offered to resign, but Baldwin would have none of it. Both men broadly agreed, once invasion was off the table, that pragmatism was the better part of honor. The Germans moving on Austria only vindicated this course of action, leaving the Baldwin government with the unenviable job of keeping relations with Paris good enough for further cooperation.

Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin with First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill​

Churchill’s immediate superior, Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Third National Union Government, as history has christened his third tenure as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was an experienced and respected leader general perceived as being capable of rising to the dangers threatening the British Empire. He had been brought in with the beginning of the Second American Civil War and the economic turmoil that the conflict dealt to the Britain, and since then had charted a cautious course in handling relations with the United States.

Baldwin, a lifelong Conservative, lived up to his party’s name, but was also a particularly wily man in his dealings with the two rival governments in the early days of the war. The British Ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay, was ordered to remain at his station in Washington and report back to London on the disposition of MacArthur and the new National-Corporate government.

There were those in the British government had seen Al Smith as a potentially unreliable partner, and, like the Natcorps themselves, had wondered if his Catholic faith would lead to him making decisions that aligned more with Catholic nations than Protestant ones such as the United Kingdom. This was a minority. More common, however, was the sentiment that fairly or not MacArthur was for all intents and purposes the ruler of America, something reinforced by MacArthur's control over Washington and Smith’s total inability to project power beyond the boundaries of the northeastern states.

That said, throwing their full support behind a government established by coup d’état in the world’s oldest democracy was not something that the Baldwin government was willing to do without assurances that MacArthur would prove a reasonable and even-handed leader for the United States. So, as a backup, Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, was dispatched to Albany to very quietly represent British interests with Smith’s rump government there. And when the American Republic fought on and held its ground, and when the true nature of MacArthur's regime became evident to the world, the British government's gamble paid off.

The decision to keep the official Embassy of the United Kingdom in Washington, D.C. constituted one of the first major cracks between the British and their Commonwealth subjects in Canada in the realm of foreign policy. Under the order of Prime Minister Richard Bennett, the Canadians were the first to relocate their embassy to Albany in reflection of Canada’s outright refusal to treat with the MacArthur regime.

This move was criticized as rash at the time, but as the conflict progressed and the scale of Natcorp-inflicted horror became clear, Bennett was praised for his foresight. By the time the first reports of Hoover’s death camps had reached international papers, Britain had followed already suit and recalled Lindsay from Washington while officially naming Halifax as Ambassador to the United States in a scathing denunciation of MacArthur personally which reportedly rattled the man so badly that he ordered the vacant British embassy razed to the ground in a fit of pique. To this day, eighteen nations, the United Kingdom and Canada among them, maintain consulates in Albany out of nostalgia, and the city remains a popular site for diplomatic events such as summits and treaty signings.

Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, Ambassador to the United States​

The situation within Canada as the fighting in the United States unfolded was incredibly complex. At the time, Canadian politics were deeply divided, and ethnic tensions between English-speaking Canadians and the Québécois were at an all time high. The economic blowback from the United States’ descent into civil war was felt most acutely in its northern neighbor, as the war-torn America constituted the overwhelming majority of its international trade.

Surprisingly, refugees were not nearly as large an issue as many had anticipated. This was mostly for geographic reasons, as the Great Lakes and Mississippi River constituted enormous barriers to the flow of refugees, often tragically. Many times throughout the course of the war, the Canadian Navy in the Great Lakes responded to ramshackle boats being torn apart by the often tempestuous waters of North America’s inland seas. It is estimated than no less than fifteen thousand people drowned attempting to cross into Canada by water. Meanwhile, the refugees who managed to make it across the Mississippi often went west, resulting in a population boom across the sparsely-populated Great Plains, while those able to make it to the Republican core of New York and New England were resettled deeper into safe territory there rather than being exported abroad.

The economic instability due to the war, along with domestic sentiments that Bennett was not taking the potential threat to Canada should MacArthur triumph seriously led to a devastating rout for the Conservatives in the 1935 elections, ejecting Bennett from the Prime Minister’s post and re-empowering Liberal leader Mackenzie King. The other party to significantly benefit from this was the newly-formed Co-operative Commonwealth, a social democratic party which entered into coalition with the Liberals.

King began a two-fold approach to handling the crisis to the south. First was aggressively stepping up arms production to export to Smith’s government, to the point that New York State Route 9, which runs from Manhattan through Albany all the way to the Canadian border, became jokingly known as “Remington Road” in reference to the Remington bolt-action rifle, a staple of the Republic’s arsenal.

Secondly, and more controversially, he began a limited conscription program and laid down heavy border defenses, even on the border with the Republic. This came as an about face to King, who had been strongly opposed to conscription during the Great War.The British Royal Navy lent two destroyers which were sent into the Great Lakes in anticipation of a potential incursion by the Natcorps via water.

Canadian Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie inspecting recruits during the Second American Civil War​

King also implored the people of Canada to provide whatever humanitarian support they were able to. As the blisteringly cold winter of 1934-1935 raged, coats and heavy underwear were being sent to the Republic by the truckload, while Canada also acted as a middle man to allowed food grown in the neutral western states to be sent across the 49th Parallel and back east to the Republic.

In return for the enormity of Canada’s support, the Smith government slashed tariffs with Canada to near-zero, and gave Canadian shipping companies and the Canadian Royal Navy automatic docking rights in all Republic-controlled ports. This was done rather quietly, as domestic opinion in the United States still strongly favored tariffs and protectionism, but the gesture’s intent was received well in Ottawa.

Support for Albany was not unanimous in Canada. A small but extremely vocal faction of far-right ideologues and outright fascists expressed admiration for MacArthur, and some even became part of the legions of foreign volunteers aiding the Natcorps in their battle in the Midwest. Of these, the most prominent was the National Unity Party of Canada, a National Socialist movement lead by the Québécois fascist Adrien Arcand.

The NUPC gained significant prominence by preying on the fears of Canadians who were wary about the level of cooperation their government was showing with Smith given his apparent precariousness. Even the most vocal advocates for aid to Albany privately admitted that the odds seemed long and that MacArthur would waste little time in exacting vengeance on Canada should he win out. Events to be addressed later, however, would see the NUPC decimated as part of the closest that Canada has ever come to a true political purge.

National Unity Party of Canada Leader Adrien Arcand​

A similar vein of response to the events in the United States in Canada was seen in Australia, where the convulsing global economy resulted in Prime Minister Joseph Lyons’ conservative United Australia party lose the September 1934 elections to the Labor Party. Longtime Labor leader James Scullin had presided over a split in Labor between its more conventional majority and the state Labor Party of New South Wales, under John Thomas Lang, which advocated for much more direct and controversial action in response to the economic crisis.

When the economy worsened with the fall of the United States into chaos, Lang’s radical plans, which included Australia willingly defaulting on its foreign debts and abolishing the gold standard in favor of a currency standard based on the amount of goods produced within Australia, seemed more attractive. Ultimately, Lang’s “goods standard” did not come to pass, but many of his proposals did, marking a serious leftward shift for Labor, which is credited with carrying them to victory.

The New South Wales Labor Party, known colloquially as Lang Labor, ultimately reached accord with mainline Labor, whereby Scullin would return to the backbench. Labor’s new leader, John Curtin, was not expected to win the election to replace Scullin as he was a much more left-leaning figure, but he ended up with a comfortable victory and was able to form a government. Curtin would serve as the Australian Prime Minister until his death in 1945.

His tenure as Prime Minister would see extensive military cooperation between Australia and the American Pacific Fleet, as Curtin was just as concerned about the potential for Japanese expansionism in the Pacific as the de facto leader of the neutral west, Admiral Joseph Reeves. Curtin would follow Reeves’ example by expanding the Australian fleet and, with British permission, establishing multiple bases across the United Kingdom’s island possessions in the South Pacific.

John Curtin, Prime Minister of Australia​

The leftward shift seen in Canada and Australia, was not replicated in South Africa, however. Here, the rise of the National-Corporate regime in the United States saw Afrikaner nationalists, particularly the Dutch-descended Boers, grow emboldened.

James Barry Munnik Hertzog, a former Boer rebel who had managed to rise to the station of the Prime Minister of South Africa, particularly was known as having strong sympathies with Nazi Germany, considering the Soviet Union to be the greater threat. Hertzog and the South African National Party began laying down the foundation stones for what would become the brutal racial segregation system known as apartheid.

As Hertzog attempted to establish a basis for South African neutrality in the event of Great Britain going to war with Germany, Boer nationalists began a campaign of terror and violence against non-whites in South Africa, and even whites who were perceived as being too sympathetic to non-whites. The Hertzog government officially condemned these acts, but otherwise did little to actually stop them.

Meanwhile, in the British Raj of India, the Second American Civil War saw little in the way of actual repercussions beyond a strengthening of the nationalist movement, as Britain’s distraction with the debacle in France gave the nationalists more breathing room. The overwhelmingly agrarian Indian economy was relatively insulated from the shockwaves which echoed throughout the industrialized world, however a downturn did occur, which saw the province of Bengal pushed to the brink of famine in 1935. This, however, would be only a precursor to the devastating Famine of 1943.

By late 1935, Prime Minister Baldwin reached out to his counterpart in the Republic of Spain, Joaquín Chapaprieta, quietly urging him to “…gut the right. Your government has ignored the Carlists and the fascist sympathizers for far too long, and there are those who would happily play the part of the Spanish Weygand.”

In reality, a purge of the far right had already been under way since March of 1934, albeit a very quiet and slow-moving one. The Sanjurada, a 1932 coup attempt by General José Sanjurjo, had been a devastating failure for the Carlists who sought to restore the Spanish monarchy, and its ringleader had been sentenced to death for his part. The government of Alejandro Lerroux had been contemplating amnesty for Sanjurjo, but ultimate proceeded with the execution in April when public opinion swung against the right, particularly the monarchists and Falangists, as a result of the March on Washington.

Although Sanjurjo was the only execution carried out to this point, other prominent rightists in the military saw themselves sidelined and demoted. Chapaprieta, and his successors throughout the turbulent political crisis which saw multiple leaders throughout 1935, especially focused on the Spanish colonies in Africa, which saw massive reshuffles in the military leadership there, as they were seen as hotbeds of Falangist support.

In particular, Emilio Mola, widely seen as a figurehead for the Spanish far right, saw himself stripped of his position as Director-General of Security and sent to head the military garrison on the Canary Islands, effectively exiling him from the mainland. Mola, however, would not be counted out, nor would another prominent conservative in the military, Francisco Franco.

Emilio Mola (third from right) and Francisco Franco (center)​

Franco had successfully suppressed a socialist insurrection in Asturias in 1934 by the use of brutal tactics which embittered the Spanish left to him and left Franco himself a hardened warrior prepared to “use troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy” and with a deep suspicion of even moderate leftists. He had expected that the right-wing government would reward him with a significant promotion. Instead, shortly after Mola was exiled to the Canaries, Franco was also exiled, this time to the minor Catalan city of Girona.

Catalonia, at the time, was a hotbed of the radical left, particularly the anarcho-socialist movement known as the CNT-FAI. There, Franco had virtually no political allies and was under the extremely careful watch of the CNT-FAI, who reportedly had no less than five men tailing one of the so-called “Butchers of Asturias” at any given moment. Despite this, amid growing discontent with a worsening economic situation and anxiety over the sudden rise of military rule in France, Mola and Franco began a correspondence in the utmost secrecy following President Niceto-Acalá Zamora’s announcement of the dissolution of the Cortes Generales and elections to come in February of 1936.

 

[The Angry Observer]

“A Boy in Ohio”​

“Johnny! Johnny, wake up!” Jean Glenn’s fourteen-year-old brother had never heard her voice like this before. There was another sound that followed her cries, one like a constant roll of thunder.

John rolled over in his bed, covering his head with his pillow and swiping in the air to shoo his sister away. “S’the middle o’the night, Jeanie, go back t’bed,” he slurred, “Jus’ a storm.”

“It’s them,” she cried, “They’re bombing!”

John sat straight up in bed, wide awake. “Why?!”

Jean shook her head, tears streaming down her face, “I don’t know!”

There was no mistaking it now that he was awake, the drone of plane engines and the concussive sounds of bombs falling. They’d heard it at a distance before, back when there were still Rumpublicans loyal to Albany in Ohio. Zanesville, not even twenty miles away, had been bombed more than once since fighting had broken out.

That was nearly a year ago, when they heard Douglas MacArthur announce a provisional government over the radio.

No time for waxing poetic, he thought to himself. John sprang from his bed, immediately throwing on the first pair of pants he could find over the boxers he slept in, along with his heaviest winter coat and the single pair of work boots he had. “Where are Mom and Dad?!”

His question was answered when his father appeared in the bedroom doorway. John Glenn Senior was a strong man, a man who’d served proudly in the Great War and founded a plumbing company. The Stock Market Crash of 1929, and everything that followed hadn’t eliminated the need for someone to lay pipes or snake drains. The Glenn Plumbing Company was one of the few businesses still standing in Muskingum County.

But now, John’s father did not look like a strong, proud man. He looked every bit as terrified as his children felt. John Glenn Jr. would never forget the ghastly terror on his father’s face illuminated by a flash outside the window.

“Basement! Now!” their father barked, and the two children heeded his orders.

Clara, their mother, waited at the top of the stairs, her hair still in curlers and housecoat still covering her nightgown. She placed a hand on each of her children’s shoulders, clinging to them with all the power in her slight frame. She guided them down into the foyer and then into the basement, the bombardment growing ever louder.

“Why is this happening?!” John cried, looking at his father. John Glenn Sr. was barely visible through the basement’s single bad bulb.

He just shook his head. “I don’t know, kid. I haven’t a fucking clue.”

The whole house shook, and dust fell from the low ceiling, and all John could do was throw his arms around Jeannie and his mother as the lights went out and the bombers roared.

Pale dawn sunlight streamed through the glass on the basement door. The Glenn residence was built on a hill, and the basement had one wall which exited at ground level. As John sat up, he found himself wondering when he fell asleep. Jean was still passed out, clinging to him, and his mother was the same, her head in his father’s lap, while the elder John simply sat against the wall of the basement, looking exhausted.

“Mornin’, Johnny,” he said quietly.

John looked around, and saw no obvious signs of damage to the basement, aside from some spidery cracks running down one wall. “Is it over?”

His father nodded. “Mm-hmm. Last bombs fell a couple hours before daylight broke, you’d all been asleep a while by then.”

“You been upstairs, outside?”

“Nah, not yet. Didn’t wanna wake you yet, but since you’re up, might as well get the girls awake,” he answered, before gently shaking his wife’s shoulder. “Honey, wake up. It’s okay, it’s over.”

John did the same for his sister, and once Mom and Jean were awake, the Glenns ventured upstairs. Glass littered the hardwood floors of the living and dining rooms from where the shockwaves had blown out the windows, and the curtains were little more than gossamer tatters. They fluttered limply in the cool April breeze. But otherwise, their home was intact.

The same could not be said for the neighbors. The Millers’ place across the street was little more than a pile of rubble whose shape hinted at once being a house, while the Desjardins’ house, located kitty-corner to their own, was a blackened husk of still-glowing embers wreathed in smoke. There was a crater in the Glenn family’s front yard, and twists of metal scattered throughout the grass was all that was left of the explosive that had missed their home by a mere thirty or so feet.

“God almighty,” Clara gasped as she took in the sight before her.

All John could think of was Annie Castor.

He’d known Annie all his life, literally could not remember a time without her, and had sworn up and down that he was gonna marry her someday. Imagine his thrill when finally, when he was a freshman and she a sophomore, she’d agreed to be his girlfriend. They’d been dating for more than six months, and he was terrified that she lay dead under a pile of rubble.

“Get dressed, all of you. Johnny, there’s some sheets of plywood in the garage, I’m gonna need your help getting them cut to size so we can plug up the windows,” John Senior said.

“Dad, I—” he began to object, but his father cut him off with a raised hand.

“I know, son, but we gotta take care of things here first. We’ll go check on the Castors as soon as we’re done, and then we can go make sure the company’s okay.”

“Okay,” John answered, nodding to himself and pressing down the growing panic in the back of his throat.

They had to cover the windows on the house’s entire front side, including in John’s room as well as the master bedroom. To make matters worse, water and electricity were completely out of service, jeopardizing the Glenns’ ability to keep what little fresh food they were able to get these days.

Just as the four of them were preparing to venture to the Castor residence a few streets over, a soft-skin cargo truck, painted in standard military green, rolled up outside of the Glenn residence. In the back of the truck were stricken-looking townsfolk, many of whom John recognized, but he did not see Annie nor her family. Exiting the truck was an officer, who marched up to them. Out of sheer reflex, John Senior snapped to a salute, which was returned by the interloper.

“Sir, my name's Captain Aaron Summers. By order of the Interim Military Administration for Central Ohio, the town of New Concord has been ordered to be evacuated after last night’s bombing due to infrastructural damage beyond our capacity to repair at this time. I need you and your family to pack your things as quickly as able, bringing only what is absolutely necessary, and we will relocate you to a temporary housing area in Columbus before reassigning you.” His voice was soft but left no room for argument.

“Do you… do you know why this happened?” Clara asked, her voice unsteady.

Captain Summers shook his head. “I’m afraid not, ma’am, but I can tell you that the air raid was carried out by the bastards in Albany. Anti-aircraft defenses managed to shoot down some of them, but those commie planes from Russia are built to take a beating, and they don’t care much about sending their men to die.”

“I see…” John’s father muttered, “Alright, Captain, just give us some time to get our stuff together.”

“But, Dad…”

“I’m sure we’ll be able to catch up with Annie and her family,” he said firmly, “wherever it is they’re taking us, Johnny. Now, we don’t want to hold these people up.” But John could see the uncertainty in the older man’s eyes as he spoke.

He did as he was told, quickly throwing a handful of outfits into a bag, alongside what few personal effects he could squeeze. Among them a photo of himself and Annie when they were toddlers, and another of his entire family at Christmas just before the war broke out. After that, he helped Jean with hers. After only fifteen minutes John Sr. locked the deadbolt on their front door, and the Glenn family was swept into the truck alongside their neighbors. They were bound for Columbus, and beyond that, some unknown destination that promised safety. Somewhere the government promised them they would be safe.

East Ohio smelled like hay and bugs during the springtime. The truck broke out into gasps at the sight of a large aircraft’s smoldering ruins near the edge of New Concord. One of the grunts riding in the back with them gave a humorless laugh. John’s blood ran cold.

“Yep,” the Captain said. His voice didn’t rise a note. “There’s one of the bombers who did this to y’all. He earned his place, alright.”

“Dad…” John whispered, “Dad, I know that plane. That’s not a Soviet bomber.”

“The hell are you on about, kid?”

John kept his expression as placid as he could manage. “You know I love planes, Dad. That isn’t a Soviet plane. It’s a Dornier Do 11.”

John Senior looked at him with confusion. “So?”

“The Dornier is a German line.”

John’s ears were ringing. He didn’t dare make eye contact with his father. The countryside was zooming behind the truck. A German line. What could that mean? Why would a German plane be shot down above New Concord? There were stories, of course. John was well-versed in the unfolding war’s details, at least as well as anyone could be. And of course, he knew planes. Russia was on the Rumpublic’s side, and the government Washington had the backing of Germany, Italy, Britain and the other great powers.

But mostly Germany.

Suddenly, John desperately wanted out. He wanted to climb out of the bed of the truck and make a beeline for Annie Castor’s. He wanted away from the soldiers, and away from all those people stuffed with him in the truck’s back. The government, bombing them? It didn’t make sense. They had nothing other than the house and the company. What was there left to bomb in Ohio that had survived the last six years to begin with? Just shops and farms and houses.

He felt squeezed. When he spared a glance at his father and mother, their faces were tired and hard like eroded stones. His sister was gnawing on her nails. Like most children of what followed the Stock Market Crash of 1929, John had an acute sense of helplessness, knowing full well what parts of the world his parents couldn’t control. And he knew, as he and his father dwelled on the implications of that plane being German, that once again the Glenn family’s destiny was far outside of its own hands.

They drove for another hour, surrounded by carnage from the bombing runs. John could only think one thought: who would bomb us?

“Yankees,” he heard a soldier with a Tennessee accent saying to Summers, “I buy what command had to say. They’re out there, we just have to smoke ‘em out.”

Summers shook his head, paying no mind to the truck’s passengers. Just over the travel din, John made out his voice. “No. Rumpublicans are licked. We’ve got 'em on the run.”

The other man snorted. “Then why’re we here?”

That bothered Summers. “The Big Man knows what he’s doing. We’re here to keep the Rumpublicans licked, didntcha know? Do you doubt Mac or something?”

John Glenn rarely left his hometown. His family hardly had the means or the time to do it regularly, and it was not long until he had no idea where they were. It was close to the day’s zenith and the sun was beating down on his eyes and bare neck. He didn’t recognize a damn thing, and couldn’t make out any signs or landmarks that could help.

It was strange— like a peppering of destruction everywhere there were villages to be found. Jean wiggled her fingers around John’s hand and held on for dear life. She was squinting and had dirty sweat pooling on her upper lip. We look like refugees, thought John. Like the floods of people that showed up in or passed through New Concord after the Crash, when John was ten. Or the mass movement and quiet, confused pandemonium that followed General MacArthur’s announcement.

There was a town racing into view. He couldn’t tell which, but it had buildings and military formations. John spied landing strips infested with planes, all facing northeast. There was a pit in his stomach. The town or whatever it was, had been transformed by war. There were tent sprawls stretching in every direction and buildings of all kinds being thrown up everywhere. Their truck wasn’t the only one racing in and out of it, either. The faces peeking out of the tents were dirty, tired, and care-worn. And afraid.

What are we in the middle of?

They stopped in front of a courthouse and John lurched into his mother’s back. That courthouse was the hub, the center of whatever was going on there. John saw soldiers and people alike, some dressed well and others clothed in rags while barefoot. They were all standing, talking idly or smoking. It looked more like a joyless holiday than taking shelter from Bolshevik raids.

Captain Summers climbed onto the truck’s roof and put his hands in the air. He reminded John of the stories of Moses speaking to the angry and tired Israelites, under the oppressive desert sun. “Folks— you’ve been brought here by the orders of General Hugh Johnson. You’ve been brought here because your own government, the people you elected, sided with the enemy.” A woman three heads to John’s right had a baby in her arms. The baby had kept quiet for the entire voyage, squirming in the sun but otherwise not making a sound. It was like it was used to being on the road. But when Summers spoke, it squalled. “The government in D.C., operating under the National-Corporate structure, is workin’ quickly to deal with threads within our borders. As you all know, the reds have been on the move. We’re lockin’ ‘em down as fast as we see ‘em, and in this last week there’s been a silent insurgency through most of Ohio. You’ve been moved away from your homes and properties as a safekeeping measure. This is a temporary war measure, this processing center we've brought you to. I wish there was more I could say. You’ll be housed and fed during your stay here, to the best of our abilities, and the Army’ll put down whatever’s going on out there in short order. Okay? Now you’ll be staying in barracks.” He and all the soldiers seemed to be smiling tightly. “File in.”

At first, John was confused as to what they meant. File in where? But, in the corner of his eye, he saw them: the barracks looked like cabins that had been thrown together sometime in the last few hours. His mother burst into tears when she saw them. Barracks, he thought. Me and my sister are living in the barracks.

And the “barracks” were lined with bunks. There was this fresh, irritated disgust on his father’s face. After the dozens of Ohioans the soldiers had mopped up file in, John saw his father’s hands curl around Jean’s shoulders. Living in a shelter, even for one day, was one of the few humiliations the Glenns thought they would be exempt from. Inside, there were rows of bunks. Not enough, thought John. The Glenns hunkered down on the first two beds they saw.

They spent the rest of the day in silence. John did his best to entertain Jean while his parents whispered fifteen feet away. He didn’t hear a word of it over the noise the other refugees were making. He didn’t need to, to get the point. All he could do was think about Annie Castor and her family, a pit of dread growing in his throat. He wanted to see with his own eyes, whoever had bombed people that didn’t have enough food in their bellies to hurt someone if they wanted to.

It was a German line. The Dornier was a German line.

Some kind of worker, a nurse with a broad face and dull, brown hair handed out soup and bread for dinner. John was sitting on his bunk, and leaned forward to get on his feet. The mattress creaked under his weight, and he fell straight on his ass.

John broke the fall with the front of his wrist, which hurt like hell. But it wasn’t a splinter he’d landed on the wrong way. It was something metal. A tiny skewer, or maybe a pick. John’s hand was a little bloody. He wiped it on his shirt and shoved the thing in his trouser pockets. The Glenns ate chunky soup and crunchy bread together without saying a word. After that, John went exploring while his mother talked with some neighbors of theirs, the Cunningham family. He didn’t expect to find Annie hiding somewhere among the other refugees, but he figured it wouldn’t hurt. It gave him time to think, too.

That night, the Glenns had little better to do than go to sleep and hope there’d be more information in the morning. John and Jean were lying back-to-back, facing in opposite directions.

Jean blurted: “Does anything in this country go right?”

That drew a chuckle from their father. “You were real, real small the last time I was prepared to answer that.”

John waited hours and hours and hours with his eyes wide open, until he could feel Jean’s breathing grow even and all was quiet other than the soldiers outside. And when they too got quiet, he made his move. He certainly had no intention of running back home without his family. John just wanted to look, to go outside and see what he could learn.

As he’d suspected, there was a lock on the door a little smaller than his fist. John held it in place with his fingers and slid his needle into the bottom, his heart thumping in his throat. His fingers were aching when it finally popped open.

John slowly and gently kneed the doors open, shoving the skewer back into his pants. He was hit in the face with starlight and cool air. It almost made him miss the figure ten feet to his right.

She was a dainty woman under thirty. She had dirty, blonde hair and a rifle that glistened in the moonlight.

“You’re not supposed to be out here.” John realized she was a guard.

She’s going to shoot me, thought John, who didn’t have time to scream, run, or charge her.

“Hey! Hey! Hell are you doing, Parker?”

It was Captain Summers. The woman put her gun back into the resting position. “He got out,” said Parker blithely. Summers shook his head. “Jesus Christ. This kid can’t be far above fourteen. Bitch. Why’d you leave it unlocked, anyway?”

Parker looked at him like an insolent schoolgirl. Summers’s expression, who was wearing spectacles and his uniform, softened. “Don’t go nowhere, but when shift’s up, get Clyde for early mornin’ duty, wouldya?”

That woman went back to her station and stared at the sky, rifle slung over her shoulder. Summers closed the doors. “Now son, why’d you try and leave?”

John shrugged, his nerves going crazy. “Just wanted to get out.”

Summers nodded. “Of course. Yeah, no, nobody’s too happy about this. Any of this.” He paused. “Don’t try and make it harder than it needs to be. Go back in there, go back to sleep, and in the morning we’ll have things for you to do.”

Apparently Summers guessed what John had to say back. “Work. Like I said, nobody’s happy about any of this. These measures we’re takin’, we’re takin’ ‘em just to keep everything together until the storm blows over. And as long as you’re here, I’m afraid you’ll have to earn your keep.”

“My family are plumbers by trade,” said John, his mind glued on that Dornier that caused all of this.

“Oh yes,” said Captain Summers. “You’ll be of great service to your country.” He smiled. “Americans always do best when they’re under fire and workin’ to advance a great cause.”

John slunk back into the barracks, a small handful of people awake and staring at him. Summers and Parker waited outside, and later in the night he heard new locks being installed. He curled up next to Jean and went to sleep a few hours later.



The Natcorps, to consolidate their control over Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states, extensively targeted the civilian population in a short-sighted bid to destroy leftist resistance and keep a consistent source of manpower. John Glenn and his family were one of countless to be interned during the war.

 

[The Angry Observer]

“The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave”​

“Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten by the machinations of the cosmopolitan elite and under fire by socialist tyranny, look to me alone for guidance and a protection of our natural order. I can do nothing but pledge myself to a new deal for the American people and save the old order.” - Radio address by Douglas MacArthur

MacArthur, making a speech where Congress once sat​

The period of American history in which the National-Corporate government dominated the country is universally considered its most painful chapter. This is both due to the enormous physical destruction the country endured and because of how psychologically difficult it has been for many Americans to come to grips with how many of their ancestors or contemporaries enabled, encouraged, or directly supported the regime. “We sit at a crossroads,” mused William Borah sometime in the summer of 1934. “For the foreseeable future, every one of our actions will be judged by how we reacted to these events.” The March on Washington’s greatest success was in creating the illusion of legitimacy for MacArthur. By successfully positioning himself as America’s legitimate authority, Douglas MacArthur was able to keep the allegiance of the military chiefs and other federal enforcers he would depend on during the war. In this way, despite being created out of open insurgency, the Natcorps became widely accepted as, for all practical purposes, America’s government. MacArthur and his backers were able to very quickly mobilize huge masses of manpower and weaponry, which forced President Smith and the hollowed-out War Department to adopt a strategy that remains enormously controversial to this day. The Republic stopped contesting most of America outside of the Great Lakes and Northeast as part of a grand plan to grind down the Natcorp advance, allow the fascists’ idiosyncrasies to catch up with them, and eventually win the war.

In the short term, though, this allowed MacArthur to get away with establishing himself in D.C. and set the terms of the war. The March on Washington was followed by denial and chaos. When MacArthur’s troops, fanning out from Washington, seized towns and installed military governments they put an end to this chaos. Within days, he was able to prop up himself and the Natcorp government as the legitimate authority in the U.S. Smith was held in nigh-unanimous contempt, at the time, for fleeing to Albany like an exile. The nickname “the Rumpublicans” stuck. Where there were not socialist rebellions to justify crackdowns, MacArthur and his allies invented them. Natcorp troops always brought brutality and oppression wherever they went, but early on much of that was directed at undesirables in society. Organized labor and organized crime, the two “Grand Organizations”, as Republican leftists came to call them, were the first targets and their resistance efforts will be covered extensively in the next chapter. Many communities the Natcorps initially encountered looked on as they put an end to the madness of the Hoover and Smith years, and then proceeded to make the “problems” of unions and bootleggers vanish overnight. Washington D.C. based diarist and resistance operative Mary Dothan wrote that while the “conflagration has put a smoke-screen on the country, by all accounts Mac’s men are simply shooting socialists and mob bosses in the head, or otherwise putting them in places where they can, on pain of death, be productive members of society.”

Natcorp troops with machine guns​

The apparatus of oppression that has become the Natcorp regime’s hallmark was justified under these terms. Natcorp soldiers quickly brought order to the streets, crushing left-wing agitators and dismantling the mafia. No matter how disorganized, frazzled, and fragile the Natcorp bureaucracy was thanks to constant purges and MacArthur’s own hectic leadership style, this apparatus remained in place, and with it the illusion of the Natcorp state as a continuation of or an heir to the United States. The ruined American economy went ablaze again after the March on Washington. Already, there were many desperate enough to accept radical new solutions, whether that was leftism or rightism. Governor Franklin Roosevelt had pioneered these sentiments before his surprise death, while Senator Huey Long had intended to position himself as a populist hero in the 1936 Presidential election. The Natcorps’ conquering armies, as a result, were met by many people desperate enough to simply give them a chance. MacArthur rescued America from his own mess. The coup was generally interpreted as a favorable development for business, which encouraged spending. Of course, this was founded on lies, and ignored the fact that the deposed President Smith himself was very friendly to business in many contexts. In any event, through early 1934 the American economy saw a “recovery” that tightened MacArthur’s control on the country.

Equally important were simpler, less subtle methods of keeping power. Armed with a host of well respected American icons, such as Nicholas Murray Butler and Henry Ford, the Natcorps’ lies swarmed the airwaves. Their all-star cast was on the radio for most hours of the day, cautiously modifying its message for whatever audience was most likely to be listening. The Republicans were blindsided, and although figures like Roosevelt consistently went out to bat for the cause, they were drowned out. William Randolph Hearst’s media empire, while far from its zenith, further fanned the flames of Natcorp lies (even though many of Hearst’s outlets were based in New York City and therefore liquidated by Republican authorities). Alan Brinkley called it the “original modern disinformation campaign”, and it would serve as a model to the fledgling Nazi German regime across the Atlantic. Leftist rebellions were spun out of little to nothing. The true size of MacArthur’s empire was flagrantly lied about and presumed to cover the western and southern blocs as well. Foreign governments, in the Natcorp propagandists’ telling, were all unified behind MacArthur. The economy was on the mend, too, and the war was always within shooting distance of being won. One consequence of this was the recovery that wasn’t. To some extent or another, the Natcorps’ propaganda was effective in convincing the regime’s subjects that their lives were better off than they actually were.

Tuning into the radio during the 1930's​

This is another area of contentious debate for scholars of the Natcorp Era: whether or not Natcorp rule actually benefited its subjects. As with many of history’s more fascinating chapters, the answer is not straightforward. Earlier historians tended to depict the Natcorps as kleptocratic in soul, blatantly defrauding the common American in favor of a small clique of oligarchs. They were kept in line through pathetic lies about Catholicism and socialism. There is certainly truth to this, and there is no question that the Natcorp coup ultimately put America into a state of unprecedented ruin and that its economic recovery was a mirage. However, recent historians have argued that while Natcorp initiatives were enormously harmful for some members of society they benefited many others. During the war, there certainly were many fortunes made, not just thanks to Natcorp looting. Taken altogether these factors made a plurality of people in Natcorp occupied areas (not counting direct warzones like north and eastern Pennsylvania, Ohio, northern Illinois, and Wisconsin) willing to give MacArthur and Nicholas Butler’s promises of class harmony a chance. And that number only grew as the war ground on.

The Natcorp takeover was, as historian Amity Shlaes wrote, “a free-for-all, many oligarchical cliques given unlimited helpings to all the wealth in America.” Overwhelmingly, the original Natcorps were exceedingly wealthy men. After the takeover, they adopted all the pretensions of nobility. These Natcorp elites were probably encouraged by the behavior of their leader. MacArthur had a decades-long army career and was infamous among his peers for his whimsical and flamboyant personality. Aides would recall with wonder and derision his pompous, self-important donning of military regalia and grandiose orations, before he crossed the Rubicon. Following the Pennsylvania campaign, MacArthur fell back to the White House and rarely left. According to one popular story, he spent much of the morning after the coup staring at himself in the mirror. The gravity of his situation seemed to set in by summer of 1934. “We’ve burned our ships,” he said to Eisenhower. “Thankfully, God’s put the wind at our backs.” MacArthur was notoriously difficult to reach for subordinates, which made his grasp on reality debatable and left other regime members to interpret “absolute fucking gobbledygook orders”, as one Republican spy put it. Businessman Prescott Bush, during the war, became one of the wealthiest men in the world thanks to his access to MacArthur. Grand strategy served MacArthur much less well than the field did, and he spent much of his time in the White House, or whisked to various military installations via plane. His daily radio addresses to the American people were typically delivered as a passive monologue on the progress of the war or the economy. These “Fireside addresses” didn’t just consolidate MacArthur’s support, making him much more than the figurehead J. P. Morgan Jr. and his allies had hoped, but also led to a peculiar situation where the common people had a much different image of MacArthur than the reality.

The White House MacArthur dwelled in​

With the exception of Hoover, who was the only person that rivaled MacArthur’s power, there was only one Natcorp that had the courage to speak out against their dictator. That was his beleaguered aide, Dwight Eisenhower. In many ways MacArthur’s opposite, the analytical and procedure-oriented Eisenhower was used to cleaning up for his boss. After MacArthur brutalized the Bonus Army, Eisenhower ran interference with the War Department despite being privately furious. Eisenhower was apoplectic after the March on Washington, personally forcing his way into MacArthur’s entourage. The two generals engaged in a shouting match, with Eisenhower blasting MacArthur for his vanity and foolishness. He was perhaps the only man to confront MacArthur and live during the Second American Civil War. Black Jack Pershing, MacArthur’s mentor, and Charles Coughlin, who MacArthur owed much of his dictatorship to, were shown no such mercy. But like so many military leaders, Eisenhower stayed at MacArthur’s side out of a sense of duty and that whatever his faults MacArthur was America’s de facto leader. “That stupid son of a bitch,” fumed Eisenhower to then Major Mark Clark. “He ruined it all. A hundred and fifty years of continuous democracy, and he toppled it in an evening!” Eisenhower’s beliefs, actions, and legacy are still intensely debated. Anna J. Merrit’s book The Eisenhower Myth sums up public opinion best: “There has always been desire to, fairly or not, distance Eisenhower from the Natcorp regime’s legacy as much as possible.” Whatever the case, once the war had exploded around them Eisenhower again served MacArthur loyally and capably. He also criticized his superior when he believed his actions were unsound— and sometimes, MacArthur listened. “He did have a hell of an intellect," admitted Eisenhower. "My God, but he was smart. He had a brain.”

This, perhaps, was one of the reasons why MacArthur feared being deposed early on. He’d always been intended as nothing more than a puppet for the March on Washington’s instigators. He surely knew that during the coup’s early stages, other figureheads like Calvin Coolidge and Smedley Butler were proposed. For the entirety of the war’s first phase, MacArthur kept his talented deputy Hugh Drum in reserve with a small army in D.C., to ensure that there was no counter-March on Washington. But it would not be long before the tables turned and his handlers lost control of him. Some of this was due to his own machinations, such as having Hoover squeeze out enemies. The Director spent the regime’s first days sniffing out homosexuals, consulting nobody but MacArthur and targeting those outside of his orbit. But an even bigger factor was the regime’s own propaganda. “Mac is a brilliant leader,” wrote Dothan, “who, like an alchemist, made gold from a tombstone. He is without the drawbacks of a politician— he is without the noise of debate, the uncertainty of elections, the delay of trials. We march into oblivion under his sturdy hand.”

Eisenhower in formal attire, reporting to the White House​

In reality, the Natcorp regime was anything but sturdy. Its ruling clique was constantly divided by a myriad of factions, often at the expense of the war effort. John W. Davis, other than MacArthur and Hoover, was America’s most powerful man by the end of 1934. The former Ambassador, Senator and Presidential candidate was seen as something of an elder statesman by the other regime members. He had held the prized office of Ambassador to Britain under Wilson, and was the regime’s ace of spades for relations with that country. The British never did anything more than tolerate Davis’s overtures, and neither he nor the Natcorps were afforded any kind of legitimacy. “Davis and his entourage are akin to a band of pirates,” said Edward Wood, “that expediency in Canada rather than honour compels us to not put to death.” Davis’ real power in the Natcorp regime didn’t come from Britain, but from the fascist governments in Germany and Italy. Hitler’s Germany, both to fuel its own ambitions in France and Austria and to aid the Natcorp war effort, had rearmed at a pace that very few people previously believed was possible. Davis helped shepherd German engineers and recruits across the Atlantic. Whether or not this was something his efforts actually made a difference in, MacArthur rewarded him all the same. The German and Italian “legionnaires” boosted Davis’s profile but also earned him the jealousy of many of his allies.

The regime’s conservative” “Old Guard” was the faction that coalesced under Morgan. It was composed mostly of business interests and was fiercely suspicious of anything that compromised their profits. This, as we’ll address shortly, compromised the regime’s interests. The Republican armies had survived across the Northeast and Great Lakes, meaning that the only way the Natcorps could triumph was through war. This required mass mobilization, and huge financial commitments— commitments the Old Guard had sponsored the March on Washington to avoid. MacArthur was far more committed to winning the war than he was to lining his puppeteers’ pockets. Prominent members of the Old Guard included Virginia’s powerful Senator Carter Glass, rivaled in southern politics only by Huey Long himself. Glass’s influence was perhaps the deciding factor in many of the members of Congress representing Natcorp territory allying with MacArthur, and he became one of the wealthiest men in the world during the war. Nicholas Murray Butler, the regime’s Vice President, also aligned with the Old Guard and generally functioned as the group’s liaison to MacArthur. It is quite possible that this cold relationship didn’t go hot because of MacArthur’s ego. “He was far too consumed by the way his voice sounded on the radio to give Morgan the time ‘o day,” recalled one soldier stationed near the White House.

J. P. Morgan Jr. with his son​

This was the environment that allowed Natcorp bigotry to take hold. It is perhaps the single most disturbing and destructive component of the period. It began paired with the regime’s other initiatives— the Natcorp regime ramped up racial segregation wherever it went. It crushed opportunities for women, whose entry into the political world fifteen years prior was thought to have led to the progressive Democrats’ ascendancy. Earlier historians tended to identify Natcorp fearmongering about homosexuals, Jews, and other minorities as a “distraction” from the regime’s policies. More recent interpretations tend to see Natcorp bigotry as authentic hatred from MacArthur’s subordinates, and his willingness to use it for his own purposes. “MacArthur has never given a rat’s ass about negroes,” said Eisenhower to an aide. Director Hoover, however, saw communist plots in every black organization and the extensive crackdowns in cities like Baltimore only strengthened his own power. And there is no doubt that Hoover’s mad hunt for homosexuals was more than a pretense, driven by a deeply-held neurosis that is still studied to this day.

The racialization of the Natcorp government was encouraged by their overseas backers, which led to the rise of another German favorite: legendary automobile titan Henry Ford, whose role in the propagation of antisemitism in the 1930’s has made him “synonymous with evil,” as one biographer wrote. Hitler considered Ford as the greatest American. While many Natcorp leaders used their newfound power to persecute minority groups, Ford was by far the most notable. He was the architect of the expansive racialist agenda the regime would adopt further into the war. Blaming the war on “international Jewry”, as time passed Ford’s antisemitism became exponentially more vicious. By summer of 1934, his correspondence with Rudolf Hess already employed words like “annihilation”. He laid the groundwork for his plans in public, too, devoting his own war chest to advancing his beliefs in the press and bankrolling racialist organizations. His own radio broadcasts always circled back to the “Jewish problem”. “We see in this war that the international Jew, as distinguished from the common Jew, can shape the minds of nations,” intoned Ford in November of 1934, “and make or break millions of families with the pull of secret levers from the heart of finance. We must confront this problem with courage and honesty— for it has confronted us. Let us be thankful that under General Mac’s wise guidance, we have stood up before our extinction!”

Henry Ford is given the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest Nazi award to a non-German, by German consuls Karl Kapp and Fritz Heiler circa January of 1935.​

The backbone of Natcorp support was the white middle class, and continuing to keep their loyalty meant America needed to be stable and prosperous. Reports of communist Yankee hordes only went so far. The issue was that MacArthur could only win through total war, which required sacrifice from business and his subjects alike. By the time 1935 arrived, MacArthur had bills to pay. He needed to pay them without inconveniencing the middle class or business, which proved impossible. Ironically enough, the sheer amount of businesses that opposed the regime for whatever reason gave the Natcorps a limited but prodigious source of income they could dip into. The assets of traitors were blatantly nationalized, giving MacArthur a much needed break during the war’s early stretches. That money got the Natcorp war machine off its feet. But looting could only go so far too. As a despot state widely distrusted outside of Germany and Italy, the Natcorps were unable to secure enough foreign loans to stop the bleeding forever. Taxes were not just something the regime was unwilling to do, but with the federal bureaucracy in shambles (made worse by constant DOJ purges) they were probably unable as well.

Forced labor helped the regime’s position both politically and economically. It got rid of potential troublemakers. It removed the poor from view. And it provided manpower. MacArthur told Hoover to “take however many we need— chiefly from the dumb fools in Ohio and Wisconsin.” Meanwhile, MacArthur satisfied his backers through strictly anti-consumer price controls. “This,” writes Alan Brinkley, “lead to even more massive profits for the wealthiest Natcorps, which in turn propped up the war effort. And it meant collapse for insufficiently huge businesses, and would have destroyed the common America.” MacArthur staved off death with a novel plan that was perhaps the formative moment in the regime’s history. The Bush Plan, named after banker and MacArthur confidante Prescott Bush, proposed a simple solution to the Natcorp price floors and war-related economic fallout: payouts of $10,000 for every family in America. Ford, Davis, and the military also approved. There were, of course, many caveats. Only white families with two married parents, one a working man, and children received benefits. The Natcorp bureaucracy was often so disorganized and corrupt that much of that money was lost along the way. Even so, it was able to relieve the sting for some time, and at least create the illusion of prosperity for some. Morgan was bitterly opposed to the plan, and only assented when he was told by Butler that it could stop socialist uprisings, and even then agreed on the premise that it was a one time measure. Morgan’s fears of MacArthur picking his pocket were short-sighted, however, and what he and the Old Guard footed would eventually be returned to them through the market— the most important consequence of the Bush Plan and Natcorp propaganda around it is that it expanded MacArthur’s base of support and gave him new power independent of business.

Clerks working to distribute Natcorp payouts​

 

[The Angry Observer]

“The Grand Organizations”​

“Now I am frank to say that I am not a liberal. I enjoy working on a common basis with liberals for their platforms, but I am not a liberal. I am what I want to be—I am a radical. I am a radical in the sense that I want a definite change in the system. I am not satisfied with tinkering, I am not satisfied with patching, I am not satisfied with hanging a laurel wreath upon the burglars and thieves and pirates that now occupy Washington D.C. We will be satisfied by nothing less than their destruction, and the destruction of what created them.” - Floyd B. Olson, March 27th 1934

Portrait of Governor Floyd B. Olson
​

One of the great ironies of the Second American Civil War was that the Natcorp regime’s numerous crimes against humanity emboldened the radical left that they were designed to destroy. The history of America’s radical tradition is far-reaching, from the Populist Party at the turn of the century to the Socialist Party under Eugene Debs, to Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party. The Communist Party, thanks to the dismal state of the American economy, boasted of tens of thousands of members by the outbreak of the War. However, the left was always viewed with intense suspicion by America’s public and government, made worse by the emergence of the Soviet Union in Russia. It was only during the War that it became a serious force large enough to openly beat its enemies in the world of politics— which likely wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the March on Washington. We can only speculate as to how successful radical leftist movements would be in America if not for MacArthur himself. The American far-left as we understand it today can generally trace its lineage back to the constituencies MacArthur was determined to destroy: unions, farmers, and communists. And they returned the favor, becoming the heart of anti-fascist resistance in the American Republic.

While many on the left tentatively supported Huey Long for the 1936 DNC, during the war he was regarded with contempt for enabling MacArthur. Long attempted to make overtures from his perch in Louisiana, perhaps in preparation for working against whichever capitalist won the war, but he was almost universally rejected. Support for the Republic soon became a litmus test among socialist and other radical organizations. In part thanks to MacArthur’s vicious persecution of them, American leftists were broadly in agreement that the Natcorps had to be defeated militarily, while the moderate Smith Administration had to be cooperated with in the field. And almost as important, beaten politically. When the Natcorps marched across the American Midwest and Northeast, the Republic was forced into alliance with the Communist Party. The Communist Party under Earl Browder already had an army of devoted, disciplined recruits that quickly turned into Republican operatives throughout the borderlands. Its connections with Moscow were also far more valuable than anyone in the government wanted to admit, securing a semi-steady trickle of Russian engineers, equipment, and leftist recruits from abroad. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, was greatly excited by developments in America. He viewed the war as the beginning of the endgame, chaos that would shatter his geopolitical enemies in the west. Stalin and the CPUSA’s goal was to lay the groundwork for the Revolution, not just against the National-Corporate state, but also against the Republic. The Communists took particular glee in forcing the Republic into partnership with them. Browder, quoting Lenin, said “the last oligarch we hang will be the one who sold us the rope.” The CPUSA’s, and therefore the USSR’s, partnership with the Secret Service brought all parties concerned lots of grief, whether from left-wing purists or the supermajority of Americans that loathed communism. It was a favorite propaganda piece of MacArthur’s, and the role that the Secret Service’s partnership with the CPUSA played in helping the regime keep power is still debated. But there is one thing that nobody disputes— the CPUSA’s manpower and material made the difference more than once. As all affiliates were targeted by the DOJ, its membership rolls were strictly secret. Even so, Browder’s boasts of close to a million recruits at the apex of the war are generally accepted. The CPUSA was not alone. Leftists from across the world streamed into America to fight for the Republic, including Trotskyists and anarchists. They brought with them their political ideas, which they widely disseminated.

International Brigades in rural Michigan​

Communists were disciplined and well-equipped, brawling with Natcorp partisans and waging elaborate sabotage campaigns behind enemy lines. Communists operated outside the bounds of the law, which made them particularly useful patsies when the Republic had dirty work that needed to be done. Many of Secretary Stimson’s directives regarding the CPUSA were destroyed, but one famous line has survived. “Delay the Jackboot, defy the Jackboot, destroy the Jackboot. Whatever toll there is to be paid in these operations, pay it and pin it on the Enemy. Kill him while he is sleeping and walking. Trade two lives for a life.” The CPUSA helped wage a terror campaign against fascism, organizing labor revolts, and continued to build an apparatus for taking control of the U.S., before or after MacArthur’s defeat. The CPUSA and a coalition of other left-wing parties and organizations had ambitions that went far further than Stalin’s. Stalin’s “Socialism in One Country” meant he had a limited amount of resources he was willing to commit to the Republican cause, and saw a Natcorp victory that incapacitated the United States and shattered the British Empire’s alliance as desirable. The CPUSA, however, adopted the doctrine of “Parallel Institutions”. This governed their long-term strategy for the war and its aftermath: defeat the Natcorps, and use the war effort as a pretext to build hard and electoral power. In the same way that the War forced the CPUSA to align with the Republic militarily, it encouraged its leadership to, if only for pragmatic purposes, embrace some form of serious electoralism. With the federal government almost exclusively split between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, the CPUSA’s plan was to build leftist power from the ground up, and then elect a radical as President in 1936.

The left saw the Republican Party as dominated by Natcorp oligarchs and the Democratic Party under the control of the Smith machine. This led to the Farmer-Labor Party going national in the middle of 1935. Its presumptive nominee was Floyd Olson of Minnesota, whose total prosecution of the war paired with his staunch leftism and open contempt for the Smith Administration made him a popular figure with the American radical. The Smith Administration’s grand strategy to win the war, developed by Stimson and Hull, involved keeping the Natcorps bogged down in the Midwest. This was to keep the Natcorps fighting a war on two fronts, stopping them from focusing all of their firepower on the Northeast. And within time, a counter-offensive from the Northeast would shatter the regime’s heart. But Hugh Johnson and his troops rampaging through the Midwest meant that the region was facing complete destruction. It needed support from Albany and London and Moscow, and while there was always supplies coming in it was never enough. With fascist troops streaming through the gates and turning whole swathes of Illinois and Wisconsin into open-air prison camps, Midwesterners developed a peculiar sense of solidarity that has separated them from the rest of America to this day. “It all comes back to the war,” one political scientist at Floyd Olson University said. “Staunch anti-capitalism, deep suspicion of business, the eastern yankees, and the establishments of the Democratic and Republican Party. Farmer-Labor politics seek to protect the American yeoman from their machinations. Fascism is seen as the brutal endgame of capitalism.” Hubert Humphrey, who was a pharmacist before joining the Army to fight Johnson, put it this way: “Government serves Americans. And when it’s not, that only means nobody’s stopping the bourgeoisie’s flaming arrows. You know, us in Minnesota, especially those that lived through that time, understand this better than most. A lot of our bodies can bear witness to that.”

Carnage on the Midwestern Front​

If the war allowed MacArthur to tighten his grip on the border states, it also allowed Olson and his leftist allies to consolidate power on a level previously thought impossible. Indeed, by 1935, Olson had nationalized all of his state’s major resources. Where Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa’s civilian governments still had control, they had done the same thing. These actions were broadly popular, and the legislatures made this the law of the land over the spring of 1935. It was this that provoked conservative Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg to introduce and pass the War Production Act, which put the “niggling question” of nationalization to bed. Vandenberg’s bill gave the President a variety of emergency powers. It gave the War Department broad authority to purchase items necessary for military victory, such as steel, with nothing but promissory notes. It established a framework for distribution of said resources that was at least intended to benefit the Midwestern Front. And it also put a moratorium on further nationalizations. To the Act’s proponents, nationalization not only fed into accusations of communism, but also undermined the market and therefore the war effort. “This is what we need to do to win the war,” Smith warned a progressive opponent in the House. “The American government needs to work with American ingenuity, and not in its place. Let me tell you what, if we did what they’re saying, and made all the metal the property of the U.S. Army, we’d have less of it, too.” The Black Court, handpicked by Smith, approved of his actions 9-0. The bill had easily passed over the objections of progressive Democrats on May 18th. This was, for the left, the last straw. “The astounding hypocrisy of this Act,” fumed La Follette, “is that it overrides nationalization by our state by outrageously claiming all resources exist under the supervision of Alfred Emmanuel Smith.” The progressives bolted to the Farmer-Labor Party, causing a disaster that almost overshadowed the previous month’s impeachment trial. “He couldn’t do anything to stop them from taking D.C.,” seethed Olson while visiting some privates, “he couldn’t stop them from raising a million men and burning Wisconsin. He couldn’t even help us fight back. But wouldn’t you know it, the second our fairly elected democracy fighting on his orders tried to do what he couldn’t, Al Smith and the Republican elites in Congress scrambled to take action.” Smith was fully aware of the political and military danger posed by the Farmer-Labor Party, but viewed them as far less dangerous than his conservative opposition— which will be covered in the next chapter.

Olson continued with his nationalization programs anyway, and when the Court ruled his actions illegal he ignored it. Thus began the schism between American liberalism and American leftism. We are still grappling with the political, economic, and cultural consequences today. It must be pointed out, however, that the Midwestern left under Olson and Northeastern liberals under Smith saw each other as more than just strange bedfellows. Stimson and Smedly Butler were in near constant contact to maintain the Olson Line. Whenever the subject of aid for the Midwestern front came up, whether it was from the War Department or Congress, Smith always demanded more. “These people are dyin’ for us,” he told Kennedy when the latter said Canada’s patience with the smuggling lines was waning. “Get Bennett on the wire.” Olson, meanwhile, utterly refused to tolerate secession talk and made it known to the CPUSA that his revolution would be a democratic one. He also appeared to implicitly accept the War Department’s plans, noting that every single Natcorp bogged down near the Midwest meant less to resist George Patton’s thunderous attack on Washington. Olson even cooperated with the Department of Agriculture to transport food from the agrarian Dakotas to the northeast, bypassing his own people when it was necessary. But as the Midwest approached summer, Hugh Johnson’s troops caught Butler in a bind by crossing the Mississippi near the state’s south with alarming speed. Combined with a massive bombing campaign, and a dual offensive in western Wisconsin, the Republican armies were pinned and their numerical superiority diluted. Meanwhile, nearly every type of supply was in critical need. Johnson’s looting had crippled Wisconsin for a generation, and it also put the Natcorps in an excellent (short-term) position logistically. “These fucking bastards are sleep ing [sic] in wool blankets with fresh hash on the kettle,” wrote one corporal. “The men are pissed. We don’t know when the last time we ate a proper meal was.” Meanwhile, Johnson continued to march on Minneapolis, while Butler and the War Department scrambled for a showdown that could take the wind out of his sails.

An early Farmer-Labor Convention in 1935​

But nowhere in the Midwest was the Republic’s situation more dire than in Chicago.

The Natcorps completely encircled the city, the one portion of Illinois they did not control. By taking Michigan and Wisconsin they made reinforcement by sea very difficult. If Albany’s grand strategy was to use the Midwest to keep the Natcorps from getting comfortable enough to attack New York in full force, Chicago was this for the Midwest. So long as the Republican force there kept fighting, Johnson always needed to hold one hand behind his back. The Natcorps committed around 67,000 men to Chicago in Illinois alone, troops that otherwise might’ve been in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, the city’s defenders were left to grapple with constant Natcorp harassment and the fact that one of America’s largest cities no longer had any reliable contact with the outside— meaning, food ran out very quickly. The city’s capitulation was stopped only by the heroism of its defenders, bolstered by the extensive preparations its government took to fortify it. Here, historians almost unanimously give credit to Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. Cermak quickly seized control of the city, taking charge of its Republican defenders and mobilizing the entire population to dig trenches and erecting other barriers. The measures Cermak took were initially decried as cruel and tyrannical, such as turning refugees away (leaving them to the Natcorps’ mercy) and harsh, early rationing. Chicago’s government also seized excess food stores wherever they could be found, and distributed them equally among the city’s rich and poor denizens. Martial law was declared and all the powers therein were given to Cermak, with any potential agitators shot on the spot. Whatever the cost of Cermak’s actions, it is widely accepted that he saved Chicago from collapse. This, of course, meant that its inhabitants would starve and weather bombardment until one side or the other gave up. And then Cermak was killed by a shell on April 2nd, only three days before the next Chicago election in which Cermak was running unopposed. The city may have imploded, if it weren’t for the man Cermak defeated in the 1931 election. The boisterous William “Big Bill” Thompson unanimously won and assumed immediate control, vowing never to open the gates to the Jackboots.

Many Chicagoans had no choice but to eat their pets, their walls, and even each other. Thompson needed to keep the troops fed to stop riots from consuming the city, but the prioritization of the Army only made things worse. When Natcorp bombers and artillery pulverized Chicago, they dropped leaflets promising meals for any defectors. Thompson ordered anyone caught crossing no-man’s land killed. In between the grueling attacks at the city’s fringes, the Natcorp commanders taunted Chicago by crafting ornate picnics within view of the enemy— and then leaving them out to rot. Thompson, to raise morale, ate only standard civilian rations. This likely contributed to his eventual death, as was the case with many thousands of Chicagoans. Given the heavy casualties, the value in capturing Chicago largely intact, and the intensity of the front in Wisconsin, Johnson ordered the bombings and infantry attacks paired back. Nearly every week, there was some major disturbance that was bloodily crushed by starving Republican troops. Given time, hunger would capture Chicago far less expensively than Natcorp tanks could. Johnson wasn’t wrong. The city was on the verge of capitulation, not because the defenders weren’t willing to die for their cause, but because there simply was not enough food or bullets to keep it up forever. Thompson’s message to the War Department was simple: “There are only so many lives in Chicago.” The Republican authorities were not deaf to Thompson’s pleas, nor to his suggestions. Thus began perhaps the most unusual alliance of the entire war. Under Thompson’s advice, the U.S. government secretly deputized the Chicago Outfit. This was only one of countless partnerships between the Republicans and organized crime. Where MacArthur could, he had wiped them out swiftly and brutally, shoring up Natcorp support. For instance, the Natcorps wiped out the Kansas City crime family early in 1934. But this gave the Republic an underground network that reached into awkward, otherwise inaccessible places. What remained of the Kansas City mob was quickly put to work by the Secret Service and Kansas Republicans loyal to Alf Landon.

The boisterous and controversial Chicago Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson​

President Smith oversaw a variety of behind the scenes deals with the mafia. The government drafted pardons for all mafia members in exchange for their services. Since public pardons could out mafia operatives, Smith simply kept them in his desk and illegally released criminals from custody. The most infamous of the Administration’s deals with organized crime was through none other than Huey Long. In exchange for weapons and Secret Service intelligence on Tennessee, Al Capone and other criminals were set loose from southern penitentiaries. Capone himself would be pardoned by Smith and put to work in Chicago with his old affiliate Bill Thompson. In 1931, America’s five Italian mafia families gathered under the leadership of Charles “Lucky” Luciano’s “Commission”, meant to coordinate mafia activity nationally. During the Second American Civil War, the Commission practically became an arm of the Secret Service. The mafia’s main specialty was smuggling, but it dabbled in sabotage too. Trains were derailed. Natcorp partisans were murdered. Fires were started. And the mafia assisted in inciting revolts in Natcorp slave camps and breaking out captured operatives. The war, at least partially, was personal for the mafia. “It’s true,” said Luciano, whose organization had been attacked by both Mussolini and MacArthur, “that there’s no such thing as good or bad money, just money. But there’s a real joy in how we’re making this particular batch of it.” Mafia guns, food, and operatives criss-crossed America. But perhaps most importantly, the mafia joined arms with local Republicans and the Secret Service to mastermind a complex and very risky smuggling operation through Lake Michigan to relieve Chicago. During the darkest hours of the Siege, smugglers were the only lifeline the city had. And this is why, to this day, Al Capone is widely celebrated in Illinois.

These plans were fiercely opposed by many in the government. If William Borah had his way, Smith would’ve been impeached a second time, but the Shyetzkin Affair had drained whatever will Albany had for impeachment. What little papers survived indicate that the mob partnership was militarily effective, in Chicago and elsewhere, and that the operations paid for themselves. However, as with CPUSA, the alliance fed into MacArthur’s narrative. Natcorp radio and newspapers chattered endlessly about the newest mafia outrage, connecting it to the Republican cause more broadly. Smith had long been a symbol of city machine politics to his many detractors. “He is more comfortable in a dark room of Soviet diplomats and his mob friends than with actual Americans,” sneered one of Hearst’s editorials. “They have been planning insurrection and coup since the 18th Amendment passed.” “Make no mistake,” thundered MacArthur after a mafia hit in Kansas City killed the family of a DOJ Agent, “this is what the Albany mafia have planned for you— for all of you.”

Mugshot of Al Capone​