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AH Cooperative Lists Thread

Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding/Calvin Coolidge[1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo/Charles W. Bryan[2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris[3]

1935-6: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris/Herbert Hoover [5]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.
 
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Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon/Hubert Humphrey [7]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon/Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon/Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953-1957: Archie Roosevelt/Harold Stassen [9]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon/Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953-1957: Archie Roosevelt/Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace/Walter Reuther[10]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon/Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953-1957: Archie Roosevelt/Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace/Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon/Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953-1957: Archie Roosevelt/Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace/Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964-1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon/Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953-1957: Archie Roosevelt/Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace/Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964-1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

1965-1972: Robert Kennedy/Caeser Chavez [13]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here


[13] "Big Bob" was a handsome man, a smooth operator, a legal mastermind, and a wealthy, connected man: he won handily. Chavez was his running mate partly to placate a wing of the PLP that were unsure about a rich lawyer, partly as a "fuck you" gesture in public to Reuther's killers by having a hispanic man without scaring the south with a black one. He promised to continue Voorhis "war for the streets" - having him resign in Congress to become a player in Congress - with the crushing of mobsters and klansman, he promised to continue civil rights and democratic socialism with the Fair Society packages, and he also announced "the New World needs to take its place", as Red Europe declined and Red Asia looked set to dominate the next half of the century.

There were economic downturns and the slow grind against bigotry and, to America's disquiet, wars for the first time in a while: brief interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Phillipines, several years of 'training' in Zimbabwe. "Big Bob" helped ensure Red Asia split between communists and socialists again, and American naval and air forces trained with the latter. People were uneasier about this end of isolationism, and about the state's power as it crushed crime and racism, but for the most part Kennedy is seen as one of the best presidents. Like his brother, the Attorney General, he was involved in quite a few cut corners, shifty deals, and a lot of sleaze - but the public didn't see so they didn't care.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon/Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953-1957: Archie Roosevelt/Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace/Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964 - 1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

1965 - 1972: Robert Kennedy / Cesar Chavez [13]

1972 - 1974: Cesar Chavez [14]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here


[13] "Big Bob" was a handsome man, a smooth operator, a legal mastermind, and a wealthy, connected man: he won handily. Chavez was his running mate partly to placate a wing of the PLP that were unsure about a rich lawyer, partly as a "fuck you" gesture in public to Reuther's killers by having a hispanic man without scaring the south with a black one. He promised to continue Voorhis "war for the streets" - having him resign in Congress to become a player in Congress - with the crushing of mobsters and klansman, he promised to continue civil rights and democratic socialism with the Fair Society packages, and he also announced "the New World needs to take its place", as Red Europe declined and Red Asia looked set to dominate the next half of the century.

There were economic downturns and the slow grind against bigotry and, to America's disquiet, wars for the first time in a while: brief interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Phillipines, several years of 'training' in Zimbabwe. "Big Bob" helped ensure Red Asia split between communists and socialists again, and American naval and air forces trained with the latter. People were uneasier about this end of isolationism, and about the state's power as it crushed crime and racism, but for the most part Kennedy is seen as one of the best presidents. Like his brother, the Attorney General, he was involved in quite a few cut corners, shifty deals, and a lot of sleaze - but the public didn't see so they didn't care.

[14] Bob passed away peacefully, in what doctor's believe was a random brain aneurysm. And so, America's first non-white President was ushered into the Oval Office. A decade earlier perhaps, Chavez could have been the breath of fresh air America needed. But by 1972, Chavez had transformed into the kind of authoritarian leader that a lot of America had grown all too familiar with. While he had technically surrendered his positions in the UFW on gaining the Vice Presidency, he had used the force of his personality to impose his will on the union. The kind of sleaze America had grown used to but chose not to see would be dragged out into the open by Chavez.

Chavez easily trounced his opposition in the PLP - through the use of strongarm tactics and a militant wing of the party that had grown strong through years of confrontation with Klansmen and the mob. Up against him at the general however was the most significant challenge to the PLP for over a decade. His name was Joe Kennedy Jr. Amidst the collapse of the Democratic Party, the younger sibling had gone one way, the elder another. With the Kennedy name under his belt, and a growing litany of sloppy graft emerging, and a mostly unified opposition movement behind him, Joe Jr posed a significant threat to Chavez winning a presidential term in his own right.

The result was terribly close, the PLP suffering its worst result since 1956. But the electoral college was hung, thanks to the Southern rump of the Democrats holding up in the South. Chavez flexed his muscles, using an executive order to declare the Democrats an illegal front for the Klan and having their electoral college votes thrown out - giving him a majority in what remained. Protests immediately broke out, and the labour union movement turned on itself divided over support or opposition to Chavez. Kennedy retreated to the safety of his homestate of Massachusetts but declared himself the legitimate President.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon / Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953-1957: Archie Roosevelt / Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace / Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964 - 1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

1965 - 1972: Robert Kennedy / Cesar Chavez [13]

1972 - 1974: Cesar Chavez [14]

1974 - 1981: Elmo Zumwalt / Frank Lausche [15]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here

[13] "Big Bob" was a handsome man, a smooth operator, a legal mastermind, and a wealthy, connected man: he won handily. Chavez was his running mate partly to placate a wing of the PLP that were unsure about a rich lawyer, partly as a "fuck you" gesture in public to Reuther's killers by having a hispanic man without scaring the south with a black one. He promised to continue Voorhis "war for the streets" - having him resign in Congress to become a player in Congress - with the crushing of mobsters and klansman, he promised to continue civil rights and democratic socialism with the Fair Society packages, and he also announced "the New World needs to take its place", as Red Europe declined and Red Asia looked set to dominate the next half of the century.

There were economic downturns and the slow grind against bigotry and, to America's disquiet, wars for the first time in a while: brief interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Phillipines, several years of 'training' in Zimbabwe. "Big Bob" helped ensure Red Asia split between communists and socialists again, and American naval and air forces trained with the latter. People were uneasier about this end of isolationism, and about the state's power as it crushed crime and racism, but for the most part Kennedy is seen as one of the best presidents. Like his brother, the Attorney General, he was involved in quite a few cut corners, shifty deals, and a lot of sleaze - but the public didn't see so they didn't care.

[14] Bob passed away peacefully, in what doctor's believe was a random brain aneurysm. And so, America's first non-white President was ushered into the Oval Office. A decade earlier perhaps, Chavez could have been the breath of fresh air America needed. But by 1972, Chavez had transformed into the kind of authoritarian leader that a lot of America had grown all too familiar with. While he had technically surrendered his positions in the UFW on gaining the Vice Presidency, he had used the force of his personality to impose his will on the union. The kind of sleaze America had grown used to but chose not to see would be dragged out into the open by Chavez.

Chavez easily trounced his opposition in the PLP - through the use of strongarm tactics and a militant wing of the party that had grown strong through years of confrontation with Klansmen and the mob. Up against him at the general however was the most significant challenge to the PLP for over a decade. His name was Joe Kennedy Jr. Amidst the collapse of the Democratic Party, the younger sibling had gone one way, the elder another. With the Kennedy name under his belt, and a growing litany of sloppy graft emerging, and a mostly unified opposition movement behind him, Joe Jr posed a significant threat to Chavez winning a presidential term in his own right.

The result was terribly close, the PLP suffering its worst result since 1956. But the electoral college was hung, thanks to the Southern rump of the Democrats holding up in the South. Chavez flexed his muscles, using an executive order to declare the Democrats an illegal front for the Klan and having their electoral college votes thrown out - giving him a majority in what remained. Protests immediately broke out, and the labour union movement turned on itself divided over support or opposition to Chavez. Kennedy retreated to the safety of his homestate of Massachusetts but declared himself the legitimate President.

[15] Leading the generals and chiefs of staff, Admiral and former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt stormed the Oval Office and deposed Cesar Chavez. Reputed for his leadership and vocal opposition to Chavez's takeover, Zumwalt was quickly appointed to lead the Emergency Government alongside long-time Governor Frank Lausche of Ohio. While this would not stop Joe Kennedy Jr. from declaring his participation in the 1976 presidential election, it certainly helped establish Zumwalt's administration as a strictly non-partisan one, appealing to all Americans around the country.

With the American labor movement divided in the midst of Chavez's order and subsequent downfall, the majority in Congress that the PLP worked so hard to build quickly tumbled over, particularly as many of their best operatives were arrested for years-old acts of graft as the FBI and the police responded to Zumwalt's promise of "clean government". While Zumwalt was far from racist, spending much of his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations reforming outdated and discriminatory policies, the number of hate crimes against Black and Hispanic Americans doubled during his term as the FBI struggled to track down and crack down on white supremacist "vigilante" organizations formed to combat "Chavez's anti-constitutional coup"; this struggle would continue into Zumwalt's second term. Along with diplomatic successes in building a closer relationship with Socialist China and strengthening the Association of American States, Zumwalt's tenure would ultimately see an American economy on the (very slight) uptick and a decrease in crime by 1980, marking the end of what historians would call "the Decade of Blood".
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949-1952: Brien McMahon / Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953-1957: Archie Roosevelt / Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace / Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964 - 1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

1965 - 1972: Robert Kennedy / Cesar Chavez [13]

1972 - 1974: Cesar Chavez [14]

1974 - 1981: Elmo Zumwalt / Frank Lausche [15]

1981 - 1989: Tonie Nathan / Frank Church [16]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here

[13] "Big Bob" was a handsome man, a smooth operator, a legal mastermind, and a wealthy, connected man: he won handily. Chavez was his running mate partly to placate a wing of the PLP that were unsure about a rich lawyer, partly as a "fuck you" gesture in public to Reuther's killers by having a hispanic man without scaring the south with a black one. He promised to continue Voorhis "war for the streets" - having him resign in Congress to become a player in Congress - with the crushing of mobsters and klansman, he promised to continue civil rights and democratic socialism with the Fair Society packages, and he also announced "the New World needs to take its place", as Red Europe declined and Red Asia looked set to dominate the next half of the century.

There were economic downturns and the slow grind against bigotry and, to America's disquiet, wars for the first time in a while: brief interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Phillipines, several years of 'training' in Zimbabwe. "Big Bob" helped ensure Red Asia split between communists and socialists again, and American naval and air forces trained with the latter. People were uneasier about this end of isolationism, and about the state's power as it crushed crime and racism, but for the most part Kennedy is seen as one of the best presidents. Like his brother, the Attorney General, he was involved in quite a few cut corners, shifty deals, and a lot of sleaze - but the public didn't see so they didn't care.

[14] Bob passed away peacefully, in what doctor's believe was a random brain aneurysm. And so, America's first non-white President was ushered into the Oval Office. A decade earlier perhaps, Chavez could have been the breath of fresh air America needed. But by 1972, Chavez had transformed into the kind of authoritarian leader that a lot of America had grown all too familiar with. While he had technically surrendered his positions in the UFW on gaining the Vice Presidency, he had used the force of his personality to impose his will on the union. The kind of sleaze America had grown used to but chose not to see would be dragged out into the open by Chavez.

Chavez easily trounced his opposition in the PLP - through the use of strongarm tactics and a militant wing of the party that had grown strong through years of confrontation with Klansmen and the mob. Up against him at the general however was the most significant challenge to the PLP for over a decade. His name was Joe Kennedy Jr. Amidst the collapse of the Democratic Party, the younger sibling had gone one way, the elder another. With the Kennedy name under his belt, and a growing litany of sloppy graft emerging, and a mostly unified opposition movement behind him, Joe Jr posed a significant threat to Chavez winning a presidential term in his own right.

The result was terribly close, the PLP suffering its worst result since 1956. But the electoral college was hung, thanks to the Southern rump of the Democrats holding up in the South. Chavez flexed his muscles, using an executive order to declare the Democrats an illegal front for the Klan and having their electoral college votes thrown out - giving him a majority in what remained. Protests immediately broke out, and the labour union movement turned on itself divided over support or opposition to Chavez. Kennedy retreated to the safety of his homestate of Massachusetts but declared himself the legitimate President.

[15] Leading the generals and chiefs of staff, Admiral and former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt stormed the Oval Office and deposed Cesar Chavez. Reputed for his leadership and vocal opposition to Chavez's takeover, Zumwalt was quickly appointed to lead the Emergency Government alongside long-time Governor Frank Lausche of Ohio. While this would not stop Joe Kennedy Jr. from declaring his participation in the 1976 presidential election, it certainly helped establish Zumwalt's administration as a strictly non-partisan one, appealing to all Americans around the country.

With the American labor movement divided in the midst of Chavez's order and subsequent downfall, the majority in Congress that the PLP worked so hard to build quickly tumbled over, particularly as many of their best operatives were arrested for years-old acts of graft as the FBI and the police responded to Zumwalt's promise of "clean government". While Zumwalt was far from racist, spending much of his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations reforming outdated and discriminatory policies, the number of hate crimes against Black and Hispanic Americans doubled during his term as the FBI struggled to track down and crack down on white supremacist "vigilante" organizations formed to combat "Chavez's anti-constitutional coup"; this struggle would continue into Zumwalt's second term. Along with diplomatic successes in building a closer relationship with Socialist China and strengthening the Association of American States, Zumwalt's tenure would ultimately see an American economy on the (very slight) uptick and a decrease in crime by 1980, marking the end of what historians would call "the Decade of Blood".

[16] Thanks to Chavez, the Democrat Party had been rehabilitated - no longer suspicious and overly conservative, it was now a party of libertarian resistance - and after many generations of socialism and social democracy, libertarian ideas were sexy and new. Tonie Nathan furthered this by promising to be the first Jewish and female president, and she'd been a Democrat before her conversion to libertarian ideas and so had been best able to secure the primary.

Nathan promised a great deal but the state that existed proved extremely difficult to shrink. Her government focused instead on relaxing business regulations, trade tariffs, and bank restrictions, and Democrat state and city governments promoted the wonderful world of enterprise. The economy boomed, allowing her to win reelection and try to batter the state once more, cutting away at the many 'state corporations' that still existed and privatising. Unfortunately for Nathan, there was a recession in 1986 due to a stock market cockup and while it had finished by the time of the next election, America was not used to the old boom-and-bust cycle and she found herself accused of risking a second Great Depression. The Democrats were out.

One of her big legacies was an end to the remaining drug prohibitions and lingering laws against sodomy and 'deviance' - this last backed by the PLP - and a sweeping change to the school system and the Federal Curriculum, pushing for heavier STEM education and economics classes. The Democrats hoped this would lead to more libertarian-minded set of voters in the decades to come.
 
i just saw something comparing glenn beck to charles coughlin you know what that means

Social Justice Warrior

2001-2005: George W. Bush (Republican)
2000 (with Dick Cheney) def. Al Gore (Democratic)
2005-2009: Donald Trump (Democratic)
2004 (with John Kerry) def. George W. Bush (Republican), Ralph Nader (Independent)
2009-2013: John McCain (Republican)
2008 (with Meg Whitman) def. Donald Trump (Democratic), Buddy Roemer (Reform)
2013-2017: Donald Trump (Democratic)
2012 (with Meg Whitman) def. John McCain (Republican), Mike Huckabee (Reform)
2017-2021: Ted Cruz (Republican/Reform*)
2016 (with Mike Lee) def. John Kerry (Democratic), Meg Whitman (Americans Elect), Jesse Ventura (Reform*)
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949 - 1952: Brien McMahon / Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953 - 1957: Archie Roosevelt / Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace / Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964 - 1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

1965 - 1972: Robert Kennedy / Cesar Chavez [13]

1972 - 1974: Cesar Chavez [14]

1974 - 1981: Elmo Zumwalt / Frank Lausche [15]

1981 - 1989: Tonie Nathan / Frank Church [16]

1989 - 1997: Jerry Brown / Jesse Jackson [17]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here

[13] "Big Bob" was a handsome man, a smooth operator, a legal mastermind, and a wealthy, connected man: he won handily. Chavez was his running mate partly to placate a wing of the PLP that were unsure about a rich lawyer, partly as a "fuck you" gesture in public to Reuther's killers by having a hispanic man without scaring the south with a black one. He promised to continue Voorhis "war for the streets" - having him resign in Congress to become a player in Congress - with the crushing of mobsters and klansman, he promised to continue civil rights and democratic socialism with the Fair Society packages, and he also announced "the New World needs to take its place", as Red Europe declined and Red Asia looked set to dominate the next half of the century.

There were economic downturns and the slow grind against bigotry and, to America's disquiet, wars for the first time in a while: brief interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Phillipines, several years of 'training' in Zimbabwe. "Big Bob" helped ensure Red Asia split between communists and socialists again, and American naval and air forces trained with the latter. People were uneasier about this end of isolationism, and about the state's power as it crushed crime and racism, but for the most part Kennedy is seen as one of the best presidents. Like his brother, the Attorney General, he was involved in quite a few cut corners, shifty deals, and a lot of sleaze - but the public didn't see so they didn't care.

[14] Bob passed away peacefully, in what doctor's believe was a random brain aneurysm. And so, America's first non-white President was ushered into the Oval Office. A decade earlier perhaps, Chavez could have been the breath of fresh air America needed. But by 1972, Chavez had transformed into the kind of authoritarian leader that a lot of America had grown all too familiar with. While he had technically surrendered his positions in the UFW on gaining the Vice Presidency, he had used the force of his personality to impose his will on the union. The kind of sleaze America had grown used to but chose not to see would be dragged out into the open by Chavez.

Chavez easily trounced his opposition in the PLP - through the use of strongarm tactics and a militant wing of the party that had grown strong through years of confrontation with Klansmen and the mob. Up against him at the general however was the most significant challenge to the PLP for over a decade. His name was Joe Kennedy Jr. Amidst the collapse of the Democratic Party, the younger sibling had gone one way, the elder another. With the Kennedy name under his belt, and a growing litany of sloppy graft emerging, and a mostly unified opposition movement behind him, Joe Jr posed a significant threat to Chavez winning a presidential term in his own right.

The result was terribly close, the PLP suffering its worst result since 1956. But the electoral college was hung, thanks to the Southern rump of the Democrats holding up in the South. Chavez flexed his muscles, using an executive order to declare the Democrats an illegal front for the Klan and having their electoral college votes thrown out - giving him a majority in what remained. Protests immediately broke out, and the labour union movement turned on itself divided over support or opposition to Chavez. Kennedy retreated to the safety of his homestate of Massachusetts but declared himself the legitimate President.

[15] Leading the generals and chiefs of staff, Admiral and former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt stormed the Oval Office and deposed Cesar Chavez. Reputed for his leadership and vocal opposition to Chavez's takeover, Zumwalt was quickly appointed to lead the Emergency Government alongside long-time Governor Frank Lausche of Ohio. While this would not stop Joe Kennedy Jr. from declaring his participation in the 1976 presidential election, it certainly helped establish Zumwalt's administration as a strictly non-partisan one, appealing to all Americans around the country.

With the American labor movement divided in the midst of Chavez's order and subsequent downfall, the majority in Congress that the PLP worked so hard to build quickly tumbled over, particularly as many of their best operatives were arrested for years-old acts of graft as the FBI and the police responded to Zumwalt's promise of "clean government". While Zumwalt was far from racist, spending much of his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations reforming outdated and discriminatory policies, the number of hate crimes against Black and Hispanic Americans doubled during his term as the FBI struggled to track down and crack down on white supremacist "vigilante" organizations formed to combat "Chavez's anti-constitutional coup"; this struggle would continue into Zumwalt's second term. Along with diplomatic successes in building a closer relationship with Socialist China and strengthening the Association of American States, Zumwalt's tenure would ultimately see an American economy on the (very slight) uptick and a decrease in crime by 1980, marking the end of what historians would call "the Decade of Blood".

[16] Thanks to Chavez, the Democrat Party had been rehabilitated - no longer suspicious and overly conservative, it was now a party of libertarian resistance - and after many generations of socialism and social democracy, libertarian ideas were sexy and new. Tonie Nathan furthered this by promising to be the first Jewish and female president, and she'd been a Democrat before her conversion to libertarian ideas and so had been best able to secure the primary.

Nathan promised a great deal but the state that existed proved extremely difficult to shrink. Her government focused instead on relaxing business regulations, trade tariffs, and bank restrictions, and Democrat state and city governments promoted the wonderful world of enterprise. The economy boomed, allowing her to win reelection and try to batter the state once more, cutting away at the many 'state corporations' that still existed and privatising. Unfortunately for Nathan, there was a recession in 1986 due to a stock market cockup and while it had finished by the time of the next election, America was not used to the old boom-and-bust cycle and she found herself accused of risking a second Great Depression. The Democrats were out.

One of her big legacies was an end to the remaining drug prohibitions and lingering laws against sodomy and 'deviance' - this last backed by the PLP - and a sweeping change to the school system and the Federal Curriculum, pushing for heavier STEM education and economics classes. The Democrats hoped this would lead to more libertarian-minded set of voters in the decades to come.

[17] Brown’s campaign sealed the victory of the ‘New Progressives’ who had been fighting to rehabilitate the PLP’s image since the “unpleasantness” of the 70s. His nomination was opposed tooth-and-nail by the hard-left Chavez Did Nothing Wrong wing of the party, but they were gradually expelled at successive conventions. Instead, Brown would give the Democrats’ economic reforms credit where credit was due but call for ‘common sense’ regulation in light of the ‘86 Crash. He ended up giving the VP slot to primary runner-up Jesse Jackson to both placate his enthusiastic supporters and reaffirm the PLP as the party of African Americans. This also symbolically fulfilled the promise of Bayard Rustin (although the campaign emphasized Jackson’s strong faith and family to avoid provoking any repeats of historic assassinations.)

Easily winning the White House over Senator Gravel, Brown’s first term was stable and uncontroversial. He agreed with his predecessor’s social liberalism and budgetary restraint, and chiefly expanded social programmes which were already popular. Cruising to re-election, Brown’s second term would be more ambitious as he began sweeping environmental and labor initiatives. He also tried to shake America out of its isolationism by promoting liberal interventionism in coordination with the European Commonwealth (headline writers had an easy day of it whenever US President Brown met with UK Prime Minister Brown). Finally, he pushed for his grand designs to overhaul America’s constitution, especially moving to a more proportional and parliamentary system in the wake of the more authoritarian presidents of the past few decades. But his rather naïve attempts to simply convince everyone of his reforms’ rightness got nowhere and came off as arrogant.

Overall Brown is remembered as a good, but not great, president. His time in office being noted for its dull stability and continued prosperity despite his sometimes-eccentric personal style. He would keep promoting various causes up until his death, often with fellow former president and personal friend Tonie Nathan.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949 - 1952: Brien McMahon / Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953 - 1957: Archie Roosevelt / Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace / Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964 - 1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

1965 - 1972: Robert Kennedy / Cesar Chavez [13]

1972 - 1974: Cesar Chavez [14]

1974 - 1981: Elmo Zumwalt / Frank Lausche [15]

1981 - 1989: Tonie Nathan / Frank Church [16]

1989 - 1997: Jerry Brown / Jesse Jackson [17]

1997 - 2001: Jesse Jackson/ Bernie Sanders [18]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here

[13] "Big Bob" was a handsome man, a smooth operator, a legal mastermind, and a wealthy, connected man: he won handily. Chavez was his running mate partly to placate a wing of the PLP that were unsure about a rich lawyer, partly as a "fuck you" gesture in public to Reuther's killers by having a hispanic man without scaring the south with a black one. He promised to continue Voorhis "war for the streets" - having him resign in Congress to become a player in Congress - with the crushing of mobsters and klansman, he promised to continue civil rights and democratic socialism with the Fair Society packages, and he also announced "the New World needs to take its place", as Red Europe declined and Red Asia looked set to dominate the next half of the century.

There were economic downturns and the slow grind against bigotry and, to America's disquiet, wars for the first time in a while: brief interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Phillipines, several years of 'training' in Zimbabwe. "Big Bob" helped ensure Red Asia split between communists and socialists again, and American naval and air forces trained with the latter. People were uneasier about this end of isolationism, and about the state's power as it crushed crime and racism, but for the most part Kennedy is seen as one of the best presidents. Like his brother, the Attorney General, he was involved in quite a few cut corners, shifty deals, and a lot of sleaze - but the public didn't see so they didn't care.

[14] Bob passed away peacefully, in what doctor's believe was a random brain aneurysm. And so, America's first non-white President was ushered into the Oval Office. A decade earlier perhaps, Chavez could have been the breath of fresh air America needed. But by 1972, Chavez had transformed into the kind of authoritarian leader that a lot of America had grown all too familiar with. While he had technically surrendered his positions in the UFW on gaining the Vice Presidency, he had used the force of his personality to impose his will on the union. The kind of sleaze America had grown used to but chose not to see would be dragged out into the open by Chavez.

Chavez easily trounced his opposition in the PLP - through the use of strongarm tactics and a militant wing of the party that had grown strong through years of confrontation with Klansmen and the mob. Up against him at the general however was the most significant challenge to the PLP for over a decade. His name was Joe Kennedy Jr. Amidst the collapse of the Democratic Party, the younger sibling had gone one way, the elder another. With the Kennedy name under his belt, and a growing litany of sloppy graft emerging, and a mostly unified opposition movement behind him, Joe Jr posed a significant threat to Chavez winning a presidential term in his own right.

The result was terribly close, the PLP suffering its worst result since 1956. But the electoral college was hung, thanks to the Southern rump of the Democrats holding up in the South. Chavez flexed his muscles, using an executive order to declare the Democrats an illegal front for the Klan and having their electoral college votes thrown out - giving him a majority in what remained. Protests immediately broke out, and the labour union movement turned on itself divided over support or opposition to Chavez. Kennedy retreated to the safety of his homestate of Massachusetts but declared himself the legitimate President.

[15] Leading the generals and chiefs of staff, Admiral and former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt stormed the Oval Office and deposed Cesar Chavez. Reputed for his leadership and vocal opposition to Chavez's takeover, Zumwalt was quickly appointed to lead the Emergency Government alongside long-time Governor Frank Lausche of Ohio. While this would not stop Joe Kennedy Jr. from declaring his participation in the 1976 presidential election, it certainly helped establish Zumwalt's administration as a strictly non-partisan one, appealing to all Americans around the country.

With the American labor movement divided in the midst of Chavez's order and subsequent downfall, the majority in Congress that the PLP worked so hard to build quickly tumbled over, particularly as many of their best operatives were arrested for years-old acts of graft as the FBI and the police responded to Zumwalt's promise of "clean government". While Zumwalt was far from racist, spending much of his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations reforming outdated and discriminatory policies, the number of hate crimes against Black and Hispanic Americans doubled during his term as the FBI struggled to track down and crack down on white supremacist "vigilante" organizations formed to combat "Chavez's anti-constitutional coup"; this struggle would continue into Zumwalt's second term. Along with diplomatic successes in building a closer relationship with Socialist China and strengthening the Association of American States, Zumwalt's tenure would ultimately see an American economy on the (very slight) uptick and a decrease in crime by 1980, marking the end of what historians would call "the Decade of Blood".

[16] Thanks to Chavez, the Democrat Party had been rehabilitated - no longer suspicious and overly conservative, it was now a party of libertarian resistance - and after many generations of socialism and social democracy, libertarian ideas were sexy and new. Tonie Nathan furthered this by promising to be the first Jewish and female president, and she'd been a Democrat before her conversion to libertarian ideas and so had been best able to secure the primary.

Nathan promised a great deal but the state that existed proved extremely difficult to shrink. Her government focused instead on relaxing business regulations, trade tariffs, and bank restrictions, and Democrat state and city governments promoted the wonderful world of enterprise. The economy boomed, allowing her to win reelection and try to batter the state once more, cutting away at the many 'state corporations' that still existed and privatising. Unfortunately for Nathan, there was a recession in 1986 due to a stock market cockup and while it had finished by the time of the next election, America was not used to the old boom-and-bust cycle and she found herself accused of risking a second Great Depression. The Democrats were out.

One of her big legacies was an end to the remaining drug prohibitions and lingering laws against sodomy and 'deviance' - this last backed by the PLP - and a sweeping change to the school system and the Federal Curriculum, pushing for heavier STEM education and economics classes. The Democrats hoped this would lead to more libertarian-minded set of voters in the decades to come.

[17] Brown’s campaign sealed the victory of the ‘New Progressives’ who had been fighting to rehabilitate the PLP’s image since the “unpleasantness” of the 70s. His nomination was opposed tooth-and-nail by the hard-left Chavez Did Nothing Wrong wing of the party, but they were gradually expelled at successive conventions. Instead, Brown would give the Democrats’ economic reforms credit where credit was due but call for ‘common sense’ regulation in light of the ‘86 Crash. He ended up giving the VP slot to primary runner-up Jesse Jackson to both placate his enthusiastic supporters and reaffirm the PLP as the party of African Americans. This also symbolically fulfilled the promise of Bayard Rustin (although the campaign emphasized Jackson’s strong faith and family to avoid provoking any repeats of historic assassinations.)

Easily winning the White House over Senator Gravel, Brown’s first term was stable and uncontroversial. He agreed with his predecessor’s social liberalism and budgetary restraint, and chiefly expanded social programmes which were already popular. Cruising to re-election, Brown’s second term would be more ambitious as he began sweeping environmental and labor initiatives. He also tried to shake America out of its isolationism by promoting liberal interventionism in coordination with the European Commonwealth (headline writers had an easy day of it whenever US President Brown met with UK Prime Minister Brown). Finally, he pushed for his grand designs to overhaul America’s constitution, especially moving to a more proportional and parliamentary system in the wake of the more authoritarian presidents of the past few decades. But his rather naïve attempts to simply convince everyone of his reforms’ rightness got nowhere and came off as arrogant.

Overall Brown is remembered as a good, but not great, president. His time in office being noted for its dull stability and continued prosperity despite his sometimes-eccentric personal style. He would keep promoting various causes up until his death, often with fellow former president and personal friend Tonie Nathan.


[18] Despite an election where passive racism became not so passive, Jackson became the first black President on the back of the last eight years of stability. His two big policies were to reduce military spending on force projection and invest in free higher education for all who wanted it, a policy even previous socialists had backed off from. It was costly but popular, and won votes in college towns & among the 18-24 demographic that served the PLP well in the midterms. After so many decades of violence and political instability, America could boast almost twenty years of doing fine and Jackson promised even brighter uplands in the next century. For socialists too, it was the fortieth anniversary of the first PLP President and it was being seen in by their current one.

But early 2000 would see attempted genocide in the People's Republic of North Sudan, and the Southwest African Economic Community would ask for foreign troop support for an intervention. Jackson decided to send a few Navy ships and marines to provide surveillance aid. Americans could see a vast international effort and that their country, for all its wealth and influence, was one of the 'second rate' nations. Jackson's defence cuts had mostly affected new equipment, not ended old ones; but the perception America was no longer able to pull its weight and had become weak on defence even when it was reducing isolationism went against him in the 2000 election.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949 - 1952: Brien McMahon / Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953 - 1957: Archie Roosevelt / Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace / Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964 - 1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

1965 - 1972: Robert Kennedy / Cesar Chavez [13]

1972 - 1974: Cesar Chavez [14]

1974 - 1981: Elmo Zumwalt / Frank Lausche [15]

1981 - 1989: Tonie Nathan / Frank Church [16]

1989 - 1997: Jerry Brown / Jesse Jackson [17]

1997 - 2001: Jesse Jackson / Bernie Sanders [18]

2001 - 2009: George Bush / Albert Gore Jr. [19]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here

[13] "Big Bob" was a handsome man, a smooth operator, a legal mastermind, and a wealthy, connected man: he won handily. Chavez was his running mate partly to placate a wing of the PLP that were unsure about a rich lawyer, partly as a "fuck you" gesture in public to Reuther's killers by having a hispanic man without scaring the south with a black one. He promised to continue Voorhis "war for the streets" - having him resign in Congress to become a player in Congress - with the crushing of mobsters and klansman, he promised to continue civil rights and democratic socialism with the Fair Society packages, and he also announced "the New World needs to take its place", as Red Europe declined and Red Asia looked set to dominate the next half of the century.

There were economic downturns and the slow grind against bigotry and, to America's disquiet, wars for the first time in a while: brief interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Phillipines, several years of 'training' in Zimbabwe. "Big Bob" helped ensure Red Asia split between communists and socialists again, and American naval and air forces trained with the latter. People were uneasier about this end of isolationism, and about the state's power as it crushed crime and racism, but for the most part Kennedy is seen as one of the best presidents. Like his brother, the Attorney General, he was involved in quite a few cut corners, shifty deals, and a lot of sleaze - but the public didn't see so they didn't care.

[14] Bob passed away peacefully, in what doctor's believe was a random brain aneurysm. And so, America's first non-white President was ushered into the Oval Office. A decade earlier perhaps, Chavez could have been the breath of fresh air America needed. But by 1972, Chavez had transformed into the kind of authoritarian leader that a lot of America had grown all too familiar with. While he had technically surrendered his positions in the UFW on gaining the Vice Presidency, he had used the force of his personality to impose his will on the union. The kind of sleaze America had grown used to but chose not to see would be dragged out into the open by Chavez.

Chavez easily trounced his opposition in the PLP - through the use of strongarm tactics and a militant wing of the party that had grown strong through years of confrontation with Klansmen and the mob. Up against him at the general however was the most significant challenge to the PLP for over a decade. His name was Joe Kennedy Jr. Amidst the collapse of the Democratic Party, the younger sibling had gone one way, the elder another. With the Kennedy name under his belt, and a growing litany of sloppy graft emerging, and a mostly unified opposition movement behind him, Joe Jr posed a significant threat to Chavez winning a presidential term in his own right.

The result was terribly close, the PLP suffering its worst result since 1956. But the electoral college was hung, thanks to the Southern rump of the Democrats holding up in the South. Chavez flexed his muscles, using an executive order to declare the Democrats an illegal front for the Klan and having their electoral college votes thrown out - giving him a majority in what remained. Protests immediately broke out, and the labour union movement turned on itself divided over support or opposition to Chavez. Kennedy retreated to the safety of his homestate of Massachusetts but declared himself the legitimate President.

[15] Leading the generals and chiefs of staff, Admiral and former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt stormed the Oval Office and deposed Cesar Chavez. Reputed for his leadership and vocal opposition to Chavez's takeover, Zumwalt was quickly appointed to lead the Emergency Government alongside long-time Governor Frank Lausche of Ohio. While this would not stop Joe Kennedy Jr. from declaring his participation in the 1976 presidential election, it certainly helped establish Zumwalt's administration as a strictly non-partisan one, appealing to all Americans around the country.

With the American labor movement divided in the midst of Chavez's order and subsequent downfall, the majority in Congress that the PLP worked so hard to build quickly tumbled over, particularly as many of their best operatives were arrested for years-old acts of graft as the FBI and the police responded to Zumwalt's promise of "clean government". While Zumwalt was far from racist, spending much of his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations reforming outdated and discriminatory policies, the number of hate crimes against Black and Hispanic Americans doubled during his term as the FBI struggled to track down and crack down on white supremacist "vigilante" organizations formed to combat "Chavez's anti-constitutional coup"; this struggle would continue into Zumwalt's second term. Along with diplomatic successes in building a closer relationship with Socialist China and strengthening the Association of American States, Zumwalt's tenure would ultimately see an American economy on the (very slight) uptick and a decrease in crime by 1980, marking the end of what historians would call "the Decade of Blood".

[16] Thanks to Chavez, the Democrat Party had been rehabilitated - no longer suspicious and overly conservative, it was now a party of libertarian resistance - and after many generations of socialism and social democracy, libertarian ideas were sexy and new. Tonie Nathan furthered this by promising to be the first Jewish and female president, and she'd been a Democrat before her conversion to libertarian ideas and so had been best able to secure the primary.

Nathan promised a great deal but the state that existed proved extremely difficult to shrink. Her government focused instead on relaxing business regulations, trade tariffs, and bank restrictions, and Democrat state and city governments promoted the wonderful world of enterprise. The economy boomed, allowing her to win reelection and try to batter the state once more, cutting away at the many 'state corporations' that still existed and privatising. Unfortunately for Nathan, there was a recession in 1986 due to a stock market cockup and while it had finished by the time of the next election, America was not used to the old boom-and-bust cycle and she found herself accused of risking a second Great Depression. The Democrats were out.

One of her big legacies was an end to the remaining drug prohibitions and lingering laws against sodomy and 'deviance' - this last backed by the PLP - and a sweeping change to the school system and the Federal Curriculum, pushing for heavier STEM education and economics classes. The Democrats hoped this would lead to more libertarian-minded set of voters in the decades to come.

[17] Brown’s campaign sealed the victory of the ‘New Progressives’ who had been fighting to rehabilitate the PLP’s image since the “unpleasantness” of the 70s. His nomination was opposed tooth-and-nail by the hard-left Chavez Did Nothing Wrong wing of the party, but they were gradually expelled at successive conventions. Instead, Brown would give the Democrats’ economic reforms credit where credit was due but call for ‘common sense’ regulation in light of the ‘86 Crash. He ended up giving the VP slot to primary runner-up Jesse Jackson to both placate his enthusiastic supporters and reaffirm the PLP as the party of African Americans. This also symbolically fulfilled the promise of Bayard Rustin (although the campaign emphasized Jackson’s strong faith and family to avoid provoking any repeats of historic assassinations.)

Easily winning the White House over Senator Gravel, Brown’s first term was stable and uncontroversial. He agreed with his predecessor’s social liberalism and budgetary restraint, and chiefly expanded social programmes which were already popular. Cruising to re-election, Brown’s second term would be more ambitious as he began sweeping environmental and labor initiatives. He also tried to shake America out of its isolationism by promoting liberal interventionism in coordination with the European Commonwealth (headline writers had an easy day of it whenever US President Brown met with UK Prime Minister Brown). Finally, he pushed for his grand designs to overhaul America’s constitution, especially moving to a more proportional and parliamentary system in the wake of the more authoritarian presidents of the past few decades. But his rather naïve attempts to simply convince everyone of his reforms’ rightness got nowhere and came off as arrogant.

Overall Brown is remembered as a good, but not great, president. His time in office being noted for its dull stability and continued prosperity despite his sometimes-eccentric personal style. He would keep promoting various causes up until his death, often with fellow former president and personal friend Tonie Nathan.


[18] Despite an election where passive racism became not so passive, Jackson became the first black President on the back of the last eight years of stability. His two big policies were to reduce military spending on force projection and invest in free higher education for all who wanted it, a policy even previous socialists had backed off from. It was costly but popular, and won votes in college towns & among the 18-24 demographic that served the PLP well in the midterms. After so many decades of violence and political instability, America could boast almost twenty years of doing fine and Jackson promised even brighter uplands in the next century. For socialists too, it was the fortieth anniversary of the first PLP President and it was being seen in by their current one.

But early 2000 would see attempted genocide in the People's Republic of North Sudan, and the Southwest African Economic Community would ask for foreign troop support for an intervention. Jackson decided to send a few Navy ships and marines to provide surveillance aid. Americans could see a vast international effort and that their country, for all its wealth and influence, was one of the 'second rate' nations. Jackson's defence cuts had mostly affected new equipment, not ended old ones; but the perception America was no longer able to pull its weight and had become weak on defence even when it was reducing isolationism went against him in the 2000 election.


[19] 2000 was a watershed moment - Bush's victory confirmed what had been known for some time. The GOP was essentially dead, only retaining a notable presence on a local level and a handful of representation in the 'Mormon Corridor'. Bush was the scion of a Republican political family but had become a Democrat at an early point in his career, inspired by the example of Joe Kennedy Jr. Sharing his ticket was the representative of another political dynasty - the Gores being traditional Southern Democrats who had kept the flame alive during the dark years of socialist ascendancy.

Bush had been elected on the back of specific discontent with the incumbent administration and he answered their prayers. Perhaps more dramatically than they had intended. Fueling increased military expenditure by making cuts to social services and forming 'Partnership Initiatives' to get private companies to provide public services, was more than a little controversial. But during Bush's first term, the controversy was wiped out by successes. The enlarged and enriched US military tested its mettle in a series of humanitarian interventions in Africa and East Asia. The successes saw patriotic feeling burst forth in 2004, ensuring Bush's re-election. But in 2005, civil war broke out in Greater Indonesia. The quasi-Communist by-blow of Japanese Imperialism, Greater Indonesia had maintained a firm grip over the seas of Southeast Asia. This began to fray as the Great Power politics of US vs Red Entente changed and particularly after the Anglo-Soviet Split. Revelations of ethnic cleansing emerged from Timor and Papua. This was Bush had been preparing for.

The intervention in Greater Indonesia became a quagmire, as the civil proved more complex than anyone had realised. Cooperation with the Commonwealth of Australia, ostensibly a long-term US ally in the region, was acutely controversial as Australia had fought and lost a war with Greater Indonesia in the 1960s over Papua. Many of those who may have welcomed the Americans saw them as facilitating Austrialian empire-building. There were no clean lines on the map and the grandiose military Bush had constructed to satiate patriotic fervour was almost uniquely ill-prepared for an assymetric war.
 
Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949 - 1952: Brien McMahon / Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953 - 1957: Archie Roosevelt / Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace / Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964 - 1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

1965 - 1972: Robert Kennedy / Cesar Chavez [13]

1972 - 1974: Cesar Chavez [14]

1974 - 1981: Elmo Zumwalt / Frank Lausche [15]

1981 - 1989: Tonie Nathan / Frank Church [16]

1989 - 1997: Jerry Brown / Jesse Jackson [17]

1997 - 2001: Jesse Jackson / Bernie Sanders [18]

2001 - 2009: George Bush / Albert Gore Jr. [19]

2009 - 2013: Howard Dean / Elizabeth Warren [18]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here

[13] "Big Bob" was a handsome man, a smooth operator, a legal mastermind, and a wealthy, connected man: he won handily. Chavez was his running mate partly to placate a wing of the PLP that were unsure about a rich lawyer, partly as a "fuck you" gesture in public to Reuther's killers by having a hispanic man without scaring the south with a black one. He promised to continue Voorhis "war for the streets" - having him resign in Congress to become a player in Congress - with the crushing of mobsters and klansman, he promised to continue civil rights and democratic socialism with the Fair Society packages, and he also announced "the New World needs to take its place", as Red Europe declined and Red Asia looked set to dominate the next half of the century.

There were economic downturns and the slow grind against bigotry and, to America's disquiet, wars for the first time in a while: brief interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Phillipines, several years of 'training' in Zimbabwe. "Big Bob" helped ensure Red Asia split between communists and socialists again, and American naval and air forces trained with the latter. People were uneasier about this end of isolationism, and about the state's power as it crushed crime and racism, but for the most part Kennedy is seen as one of the best presidents. Like his brother, the Attorney General, he was involved in quite a few cut corners, shifty deals, and a lot of sleaze - but the public didn't see so they didn't care.

[14] Bob passed away peacefully, in what doctor's believe was a random brain aneurysm. And so, America's first non-white President was ushered into the Oval Office. A decade earlier perhaps, Chavez could have been the breath of fresh air America needed. But by 1972, Chavez had transformed into the kind of authoritarian leader that a lot of America had grown all too familiar with. While he had technically surrendered his positions in the UFW on gaining the Vice Presidency, he had used the force of his personality to impose his will on the union. The kind of sleaze America had grown used to but chose not to see would be dragged out into the open by Chavez.

Chavez easily trounced his opposition in the PLP - through the use of strongarm tactics and a militant wing of the party that had grown strong through years of confrontation with Klansmen and the mob. Up against him at the general however was the most significant challenge to the PLP for over a decade. His name was Joe Kennedy Jr. Amidst the collapse of the Democratic Party, the younger sibling had gone one way, the elder another. With the Kennedy name under his belt, and a growing litany of sloppy graft emerging, and a mostly unified opposition movement behind him, Joe Jr posed a significant threat to Chavez winning a presidential term in his own right.

The result was terribly close, the PLP suffering its worst result since 1956. But the electoral college was hung, thanks to the Southern rump of the Democrats holding up in the South. Chavez flexed his muscles, using an executive order to declare the Democrats an illegal front for the Klan and having their electoral college votes thrown out - giving him a majority in what remained. Protests immediately broke out, and the labour union movement turned on itself divided over support or opposition to Chavez. Kennedy retreated to the safety of his homestate of Massachusetts but declared himself the legitimate President.

[15] Leading the generals and chiefs of staff, Admiral and former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt stormed the Oval Office and deposed Cesar Chavez. Reputed for his leadership and vocal opposition to Chavez's takeover, Zumwalt was quickly appointed to lead the Emergency Government alongside long-time Governor Frank Lausche of Ohio. While this would not stop Joe Kennedy Jr. from declaring his participation in the 1976 presidential election, it certainly helped establish Zumwalt's administration as a strictly non-partisan one, appealing to all Americans around the country.

With the American labor movement divided in the midst of Chavez's order and subsequent downfall, the majority in Congress that the PLP worked so hard to build quickly tumbled over, particularly as many of their best operatives were arrested for years-old acts of graft as the FBI and the police responded to Zumwalt's promise of "clean government". While Zumwalt was far from racist, spending much of his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations reforming outdated and discriminatory policies, the number of hate crimes against Black and Hispanic Americans doubled during his term as the FBI struggled to track down and crack down on white supremacist "vigilante" organizations formed to combat "Chavez's anti-constitutional coup"; this struggle would continue into Zumwalt's second term. Along with diplomatic successes in building a closer relationship with Socialist China and strengthening the Association of American States, Zumwalt's tenure would ultimately see an American economy on the (very slight) uptick and a decrease in crime by 1980, marking the end of what historians would call "the Decade of Blood".

[16] Thanks to Chavez, the Democrat Party had been rehabilitated - no longer suspicious and overly conservative, it was now a party of libertarian resistance - and after many generations of socialism and social democracy, libertarian ideas were sexy and new. Tonie Nathan furthered this by promising to be the first Jewish and female president, and she'd been a Democrat before her conversion to libertarian ideas and so had been best able to secure the primary.

Nathan promised a great deal but the state that existed proved extremely difficult to shrink. Her government focused instead on relaxing business regulations, trade tariffs, and bank restrictions, and Democrat state and city governments promoted the wonderful world of enterprise. The economy boomed, allowing her to win reelection and try to batter the state once more, cutting away at the many 'state corporations' that still existed and privatising. Unfortunately for Nathan, there was a recession in 1986 due to a stock market cockup and while it had finished by the time of the next election, America was not used to the old boom-and-bust cycle and she found herself accused of risking a second Great Depression. The Democrats were out.

One of her big legacies was an end to the remaining drug prohibitions and lingering laws against sodomy and 'deviance' - this last backed by the PLP - and a sweeping change to the school system and the Federal Curriculum, pushing for heavier STEM education and economics classes. The Democrats hoped this would lead to more libertarian-minded set of voters in the decades to come.

[17] Brown’s campaign sealed the victory of the ‘New Progressives’ who had been fighting to rehabilitate the PLP’s image since the “unpleasantness” of the 70s. His nomination was opposed tooth-and-nail by the hard-left Chavez Did Nothing Wrong wing of the party, but they were gradually expelled at successive conventions. Instead, Brown would give the Democrats’ economic reforms credit where credit was due but call for ‘common sense’ regulation in light of the ‘86 Crash. He ended up giving the VP slot to primary runner-up Jesse Jackson to both placate his enthusiastic supporters and reaffirm the PLP as the party of African Americans. This also symbolically fulfilled the promise of Bayard Rustin (although the campaign emphasized Jackson’s strong faith and family to avoid provoking any repeats of historic assassinations.)

Easily winning the White House over Senator Gravel, Brown’s first term was stable and uncontroversial. He agreed with his predecessor’s social liberalism and budgetary restraint, and chiefly expanded social programmes which were already popular. Cruising to re-election, Brown’s second term would be more ambitious as he began sweeping environmental and labor initiatives. He also tried to shake America out of its isolationism by promoting liberal interventionism in coordination with the European Commonwealth (headline writers had an easy day of it whenever US President Brown met with UK Prime Minister Brown). Finally, he pushed for his grand designs to overhaul America’s constitution, especially moving to a more proportional and parliamentary system in the wake of the more authoritarian presidents of the past few decades. But his rather naïve attempts to simply convince everyone of his reforms’ rightness got nowhere and came off as arrogant.

Overall Brown is remembered as a good, but not great, president. His time in office being noted for its dull stability and continued prosperity despite his sometimes-eccentric personal style. He would keep promoting various causes up until his death, often with fellow former president and personal friend Tonie Nathan.


[18] Despite an election where passive racism became not so passive, Jackson became the first black President on the back of the last eight years of stability. His two big policies were to reduce military spending on force projection and invest in free higher education for all who wanted it, a policy even previous socialists had backed off from. It was costly but popular, and won votes in college towns & among the 18-24 demographic that served the PLP well in the midterms. After so many decades of violence and political instability, America could boast almost twenty years of doing fine and Jackson promised even brighter uplands in the next century. For socialists too, it was the fortieth anniversary of the first PLP President and it was being seen in by their current one.

But early 2000 would see attempted genocide in the People's Republic of North Sudan, and the Southwest African Economic Community would ask for foreign troop support for an intervention. Jackson decided to send a few Navy ships and marines to provide surveillance aid. Americans could see a vast international effort and that their country, for all its wealth and influence, was one of the 'second rate' nations. Jackson's defence cuts had mostly affected new equipment, not ended old ones; but the perception America was no longer able to pull its weight and had become weak on defence even when it was reducing isolationism went against him in the 2000 election.


[19] 2000 was a watershed moment - Bush's victory confirmed what had been known for some time. The GOP was essentially dead, only retaining a notable presence on a local level and a handful of representation in the 'Mormon Corridor'. Bush was the scion of a Republican political family but had become a Democrat at an early point in his career, inspired by the example of Joe Kennedy Jr. Sharing his ticket was the representative of another political dynasty - the Gores being traditional Southern Democrats who had kept the flame alive during the dark years of socialist ascendancy.

Bush had been elected on the back of specific discontent with the incumbent administration and he answered their prayers. Perhaps more dramatically than they had intended. Fueling increased military expenditure by making cuts to social services and forming 'Partnership Initiatives' to get private companies to provide public services, was more than a little controversial. But during Bush's first term, the controversy was wiped out by successes. The enlarged and enriched US military tested its mettle in a series of humanitarian interventions in Africa and East Asia. The successes saw patriotic feeling burst forth in 2004, ensuring Bush's re-election. But in 2005, civil war broke out in Greater Indonesia. The quasi-Communist by-blow of Japanese Imperialism, Greater Indonesia had maintained a firm grip over the seas of Southeast Asia. This began to fray as the Great Power politics of US vs Red Entente changed and particularly after the Anglo-Soviet Split. Revelations of ethnic cleansing emerged from Timor and Papua. This was Bush had been preparing for.

The intervention in Greater Indonesia became a quagmire, as the civil proved more complex than anyone had realised. Cooperation with the Commonwealth of Australia, ostensibly a long-term US ally in the region, was acutely controversial as Australia had fought and lost a war with Greater Indonesia in the 1960s over Papua. Many of those who may have welcomed the Americans saw them as facilitating Austrialian empire-building. There were no clean lines on the map and the grandiose military Bush had constructed to satiate patriotic fervour was almost uniquely ill-prepared for an assymetric war.


[20] The war killed Gore's chances of election and the PLP came to power on promise of achieving a dignified withdrawal - and this is one of the key factors why Dean won, as this establishment 'big beast' of the PLP, having been congressman, Surgeon General, and governor in his time, was the sort of figure you wanted.

Unfortunately for Dean, it would be three grinding, miserable years of failed talks and ceasefires and special forces strikes and arguments with Pacific nations before the Saigon Agreement was finally signed. Experts argue on how much of this was blunders on his part, how much was down to the other parties involved (notably the Agreement was signed not long after Australia's own changing of government, ending the National Party's long reign), and how much was due to the nature of the conflict. Either way, it overshadowed Dean's stable domestic achievements, and his legacy as a whole, and led to "the Class of '10" - a wave of midterms primaries by angrier, more radical, young PLP candidates against older 'establishment' figures.
 
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Presidents of the United States of America

1921 - 1925: Warren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge [1]

1925 - 1933: William Gibbs McAdoo / Charles W. Bryan [2]

1933 - 1935: Fiorello H. La Guardia / George W. Norris [3]

1935 - 1937: George W. Norris [4]

1937 - 1943: George W. Norris / Herbert Hoover [5]

1943 - 1949: Herbert Hoover / Henry A. Wallace [6]

1949 - 1952: Brien McMahon / Hubert Humphrey [7]

1952 - 1953: Hubert Humphrey [8]

1953 - 1957: Archie Roosevelt / Harold Stassen [9]

1957 - 1964: Henry A. Wallace / Walter Reuther [10]

1964 - 1964: Walter Reuther [11]

1964 - 1965: Jerry Voorhis [12]

1965 - 1972: Robert Kennedy / Cesar Chavez [13]

1972 - 1974: Cesar Chavez [14]

1974 - 1981: Elmo Zumwalt / Frank Lausche [15]

1981 - 1989: Tonie Nathan / Frank Church [16]

1989 - 1997: Jerry Brown / Jesse Jackson [17]

1997 - 2001: Jesse Jackson / Bernie Sanders [18]

2001 - 2009: George Bush / Albert Gore Jr. [19]

2009 - 2013: Howard Dean / Elizabeth Warren [20]

2013-2021: Ted Danson/ Jane Fonda [21]

[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.

[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)

[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...

[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!

Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.

'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.

George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.

[5] It was one of the most viciously contested elections in a while but Norris won - Hoover as running mate kept more conservative Republicans on side - while (to everyone's disquiet) the Socialist Party started to poke through in several congressional seats. Great sweeping changes and a variety of alphabet agencies got Americans building infrastructure, while the newly founded FBI equally came down hard on any communist anywhere and any Klansman anywhere, and new labour and civil rights laws came in. Norris was going to change the nation whatever it took. (Except for prohibition, so the mobs stayed strong)

Two other big transformative man were Hitler and Tojo, and they shook Norris' anti-war, anti-intervention views. America would not be bound to a war, but in various meetings and at the Munich Conference, he made it clear America would do its best to aid others and the new Embargo Law would cripple any 'belligerent nation'. Hitler abandoned plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Japan downgraded its plans in China, and Italy abandoned any plans of its own - until they'd formed a pact and stocked up. In 1940, Poland was attacked "to stop Stalin", as well as Greece and unoccupied China. Norris triggered the Embargo Act, foreign aid, and raids on the Bund, but America's military stayed out of this world war. The stress of everything made his health worse and he passed away a few weeks before the war ended.

[6] Hoover was ushered into the White House just in time to see the Red Entente triumph over Fascism in Europe. He earned a great deal of good will ahead of 1944, when many anticipated that voter fatigue would see the Democrats drive the GOP out of power. His reputation as the Man Who Rebuilt Europe Twice, with the roll out of the Ickes Plan to combine American aid with the economies of the victorious powers of Europe, ensured a handy victory. However, things started to turn not long after. While the Ickes Plan trundled along, the GOP began to unravel. The coalition constructed by La Guardia over a decade prior was an extremely fragile thing. Conservatives within the party, including Hoover himself, were increasingly hostile to the vast federal structures which had been constructed over the years. African-Americans, a long-time constituency of the GOP, were more politically empowered than they had been decades and by contrast regarded the New Deal as a half-measure. There was increasing paranoia in the more traditional quarters of the party over the consequences of the victory in Europe and the ascendancy of the likes of Stafford Cripps on the world stage - and the increasing presence of Socialists at a Congressional level. And then there were those like the Vice President who saw the Socialists as a natural ally. In 1948, Hoover was easily renominated to the Presidency, but he informed the Convention that on no account would he run alongside Wallace again, a clear signal of the President's turn to the right. Wallace took umbrage and launched his own campaign, modelled after Roosevelt's in 1912, allied with the Socialists and the African-American wing of the Republicans. Conversely, the hard-right of the Republicans launched their own quixotic campaign against the Ickes Plan amongst other supposed signs of Hoover's socialism. It seemed that the Democrats had a shoe in the White House Door.

[7] With a Republican Party split between the Conservatism of Hoover and the Radicals of Wallace (who now lead the Progressive Labor Party into the election) the Democrats could finally produce someone who weren't relics of it's more insidious side. After spending several years experimenting with Liberals, Southern Populists and Hardcore Conservatives it decided upon a mix of Law and Order and Rural Midwestern charm as the Presidential ticket for 1949. Brien McMahon was a good choice for President, an advocate of Law and Order and Democracy the former Lawyer was popular for his Pro-Labor stance and for his tough on crime record. Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Liberal Labor stalwart, the man who had helped bring Minnesota to the Democrats from the clutches of the Republicans and Socialists and his Pro-Civil Rights potentials washed away the fears of another McAdoo. This pairing would do well as America turned away from the splintering Republicans towards the bright light of the Democrats as the Democrats finally had a team who could win America for the Democrats. Of course things weren't easy for McMahon, whilst his advocacy for Labor causes would win him support from the Socialists and Liberals in Congress it would sour his relationships with the Conservatives who weren't impressed with the Pro-Labor and Trade Union stances of the President and Vice President (despite the fact that most working Americans by this point were members of a Union in some way). McMahon would also repeal Prohibition seeing it as a way to increase the flow of cash for the Government and to knock away the power of organised crime who had managed to gaining a stunning amount of power in the preceding years. Also to undercut the Civil Rights elements who had gravitated Socialist and Labor in the preceding years, McMahon would help push through a number of anti-segregation amendments (though things like voting rights and schools segregation was still left on the drawing board despite Humphrey's insistence) McMahon would also focus to another emerging science as he readily embraced the possibility of Atomic energy for both power (replacing the precarious oil and coal) and for nuclear weapons as the Red Entente secured it's power in Europe, McMahon wanted an ace up his sleeve against them. He would also help create the 'Peace-Corps' an idea for a Government funded body to help spread the idea of Liberal Democracy and Peace across the globe (which was also a good counter to the Red Europe's CommonWealth Group who were operating similarly to the Peace Corps but spreading Socialism instead). But the great new light of American Liberalism would be snuffed out in his prime, as he prepared for his reelection campaign in 1952, McMahon would be diagnosed with cancer and within a couple of months be dead. And so the Democrats turned to Hubert Humphrey...and the knives came out.

[8] Humphrey had to fight a vicious battle for the candidacy, as the Democrat factions saw McMahon's death as their chance - but he won. It was an unseemly battle that the public winced at, but he'd won, it should have been fine. But that summer, the 'Red World' (versus the capitalist 'Yellow World', as in the colour of gold in cheap print) was sundering: after a decade of any divides being about whether you were socialist or communist, and what kind of socialism/communism, it had inexorably broken down on geographical lines between Red Europe and Red Asia, over the Vietnam Settlement. Both the Republicans and the Progressive Labour Party argued, with justification, the Democrats had been distracted from a major foreign issue by their own infighting, and this cost Humphrey the 1952 election.

[9] Archie Roosevelt seemed like a good idea at the time. He was charismatic, Conservative and a war veteran, a good choice to keep that solid Republican vote. The choice of Harold Stassen was to have a Liberal to make sure the ticket wouldn’t scare away potential voters who had been drawn towards Brien McMahon. The 1952 election was less, the Republicans vs. The Democrats and instead the Republicans vs. Progressive Labor, as the Democrats had bleed on the convention floor. Archie Roosevelt would win a tight victory against the eccentric Left Wing Cowboy Glen H.Taylor who ran a Left Wing Populist campaign. And so with his mandate secured people waited to see what the heir of Roosevelt would do.

If it was to take America back 20 years to McAdoo then you would be right. Roosevelt’s streak of Conservatism it turned out, wasn’t just cutting government spending and limiting state influence. It was combined with a deep hatred towards Communism, Socialism, Trade Unions and also Black People. Roosevelt would spend much of his Presidency horrifying even the most passionate Conservative as he tried to repeal as much Civil Rights Laws as possible in an attempt to ‘weed out Communism’, he would try and organise show trials for supposed Communists and generally try and destroy Socialism in America. This didn’t work.

By now Americans were used to the existence of Socialism and when Roosevelt tried to have Taylor and Wallace brought to stand in a show trial, Roosevelt was seen as a Right Wing Quack and be mocked as an out of touch fool. This would become worse when, in 1956 America would detonate there first atom bomb. Also immediately afterwards, Roosevelt would start making airs about using this fearsome weapon to rid Communism once and for all and even the Republican Party baulked at this. He would quickly lose his reelection bid for Presidential Candidate for the Republicans and spend his remaining days as Presidents rambling about Communists out to destroy America as eyes shifted elsewhere to the election of 56.

[10] Roosevelt's crusade ironically had brought in the very thing he wanted to prevent, a win for the Socialists. Although in this case it was actually an electoral alliance between the Progressive Labour faction of Henry Wallace and the Socialist party under the dynamic Trade Union leader Walter Reuther. The nation held its breath at the victory of Wallace, sure that the traditional elite of the country would not let this result stand.

Indeed an apocryphal story had Wallace, at his first Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting say "well gentlemen, I'm here if you want to arrest me?" However it soon became clear that even if there were reservations about what a Wallace administration meant he would be given the time to prove himself. This was time he would not waste, as making common cause with the Humphrey wing if the Democrats he would push through a comprehensive Voting Act to combat African-American disenfrancement. This was followed by enhanced labour protections and even a n embryonic Equal Rights Bill.

Tied with a more settled domestic situation was an improving economic outlook, the lack of civil strife and increased prosperity led to the Wallace years being known as "the second era of good feelings". However while Wallace was lauded for his domestic policy he turned a blind eye to foreign affairs and was seemingly content to let Red Europe and Asia get an increasing strangehold in Africa.

Wallace easily won a second term, and with an increased showing for the Progressive Socialists it was clear that Left Wing politics had broken through to be the Third Force in the country. With Labour content, African Americans exercising their natural rights as citizens and prosperity engulfing America it seemed that nothing could spoilt the party.

Then President Wallace was found dead in his bed

[11] Wallace's death has often been compared to McMahon's due to subsequent events - but this isn't entirely accurate. Unlike the Democrats, the Progressive Labor Party was not nearly so riven by factionalism, and Reuther was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination unlike Humphrey. What created the drama however was Reuther's pick for his running mate - the African-American political organiser Bayard Rustin.

While the United States had been tiptoeing towards racial justice since La Guardia, the idea that black people could vote was still relatively novel across certain parts of America. The Wallace Presidency had been polarising from the beginning, though this had faded into the background before his first mid-terms. Reuther himself had seemed uncontroversial, especially as he presided over the beginning of the Anglo-Soviet Split that ruptured the Red Entente. The pick of Rustin brought all that dark sentiment back to the forefront - and joining the obvious prejudice against Rustin's race was the would-be Vice President's sexuality. In most of America, homosexuality was considered deeply taboo. This was a clear signal for the direction of Reuther's presidency should he be elected in November. Such a course of events was unthinkable.

A shot rang out in Chicago, the sound of a double-barrelled shotgun. And in the space of a year, America had lost two Presidents.

[12] America was in chaos, two Presidents had died in one year and suddenly the speaker of the house, Jerry Voorhis was made President. A politician who had worn many hats in his lifetime, Socialist, Republican, Progressive Labor, Socialist and once again Progressive Labor this Liberal CoOperator of Kansas Stock was considering to retire when Reuther was shot and so he pushed into Presidency. Voorhis’s main aim was simple, crackdown on those who had lead to Reuther’s death. This turned out to be not as simple as first perceived, as arrests and confessions lead to a seeming web of connections leading to the offices of various politicians and members of the law enforcement as it turned out the gunman was a member of Right Wing movement born from the discard remains of the KKK. America was outraged and Voorhis and the American would crack down on the Right who had felt emboldened by the Roosevelt administration. But Voorhis still couldn’t change much, he would only be President for few months as he refused to run for a second term. Instead he spent his last remaining months in office, comforting the American people over the horrors they had witnessed and signing some pro Cooperative Legislation which was met with mute indifference by Conservatives. When he left, many Americans were sad to see the nations comforter go and many questioned what a true Voorhis Presidency would have been like. Instead they were left with the dawning question of where to go from here

[13] "Big Bob" was a handsome man, a smooth operator, a legal mastermind, and a wealthy, connected man: he won handily. Chavez was his running mate partly to placate a wing of the PLP that were unsure about a rich lawyer, partly as a "fuck you" gesture in public to Reuther's killers by having a hispanic man without scaring the south with a black one. He promised to continue Voorhis "war for the streets" - having him resign in Congress to become a player in Congress - with the crushing of mobsters and klansman, he promised to continue civil rights and democratic socialism with the Fair Society packages, and he also announced "the New World needs to take its place", as Red Europe declined and Red Asia looked set to dominate the next half of the century.

There were economic downturns and the slow grind against bigotry and, to America's disquiet, wars for the first time in a while: brief interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Phillipines, several years of 'training' in Zimbabwe. "Big Bob" helped ensure Red Asia split between communists and socialists again, and American naval and air forces trained with the latter. People were uneasier about this end of isolationism, and about the state's power as it crushed crime and racism, but for the most part Kennedy is seen as one of the best presidents. Like his brother, the Attorney General, he was involved in quite a few cut corners, shifty deals, and a lot of sleaze - but the public didn't see so they didn't care.

[14] Bob passed away peacefully, in what doctor's believe was a random brain aneurysm. And so, America's first non-white President was ushered into the Oval Office. A decade earlier perhaps, Chavez could have been the breath of fresh air America needed. But by 1972, Chavez had transformed into the kind of authoritarian leader that a lot of America had grown all too familiar with. While he had technically surrendered his positions in the UFW on gaining the Vice Presidency, he had used the force of his personality to impose his will on the union. The kind of sleaze America had grown used to but chose not to see would be dragged out into the open by Chavez.

Chavez easily trounced his opposition in the PLP - through the use of strongarm tactics and a militant wing of the party that had grown strong through years of confrontation with Klansmen and the mob. Up against him at the general however was the most significant challenge to the PLP for over a decade. His name was Joe Kennedy Jr. Amidst the collapse of the Democratic Party, the younger sibling had gone one way, the elder another. With the Kennedy name under his belt, and a growing litany of sloppy graft emerging, and a mostly unified opposition movement behind him, Joe Jr posed a significant threat to Chavez winning a presidential term in his own right.

The result was terribly close, the PLP suffering its worst result since 1956. But the electoral college was hung, thanks to the Southern rump of the Democrats holding up in the South. Chavez flexed his muscles, using an executive order to declare the Democrats an illegal front for the Klan and having their electoral college votes thrown out - giving him a majority in what remained. Protests immediately broke out, and the labour union movement turned on itself divided over support or opposition to Chavez. Kennedy retreated to the safety of his homestate of Massachusetts but declared himself the legitimate President.

[15] Leading the generals and chiefs of staff, Admiral and former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt stormed the Oval Office and deposed Cesar Chavez. Reputed for his leadership and vocal opposition to Chavez's takeover, Zumwalt was quickly appointed to lead the Emergency Government alongside long-time Governor Frank Lausche of Ohio. While this would not stop Joe Kennedy Jr. from declaring his participation in the 1976 presidential election, it certainly helped establish Zumwalt's administration as a strictly non-partisan one, appealing to all Americans around the country.

With the American labor movement divided in the midst of Chavez's order and subsequent downfall, the majority in Congress that the PLP worked so hard to build quickly tumbled over, particularly as many of their best operatives were arrested for years-old acts of graft as the FBI and the police responded to Zumwalt's promise of "clean government". While Zumwalt was far from racist, spending much of his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations reforming outdated and discriminatory policies, the number of hate crimes against Black and Hispanic Americans doubled during his term as the FBI struggled to track down and crack down on white supremacist "vigilante" organizations formed to combat "Chavez's anti-constitutional coup"; this struggle would continue into Zumwalt's second term. Along with diplomatic successes in building a closer relationship with Socialist China and strengthening the Association of American States, Zumwalt's tenure would ultimately see an American economy on the (very slight) uptick and a decrease in crime by 1980, marking the end of what historians would call "the Decade of Blood".

[16] Thanks to Chavez, the Democrat Party had been rehabilitated - no longer suspicious and overly conservative, it was now a party of libertarian resistance - and after many generations of socialism and social democracy, libertarian ideas were sexy and new. Tonie Nathan furthered this by promising to be the first Jewish and female president, and she'd been a Democrat before her conversion to libertarian ideas and so had been best able to secure the primary.

Nathan promised a great deal but the state that existed proved extremely difficult to shrink. Her government focused instead on relaxing business regulations, trade tariffs, and bank restrictions, and Democrat state and city governments promoted the wonderful world of enterprise. The economy boomed, allowing her to win reelection and try to batter the state once more, cutting away at the many 'state corporations' that still existed and privatising. Unfortunately for Nathan, there was a recession in 1986 due to a stock market cockup and while it had finished by the time of the next election, America was not used to the old boom-and-bust cycle and she found herself accused of risking a second Great Depression. The Democrats were out.

One of her big legacies was an end to the remaining drug prohibitions and lingering laws against sodomy and 'deviance' - this last backed by the PLP - and a sweeping change to the school system and the Federal Curriculum, pushing for heavier STEM education and economics classes. The Democrats hoped this would lead to more libertarian-minded set of voters in the decades to come.

[17] Brown’s campaign sealed the victory of the ‘New Progressives’ who had been fighting to rehabilitate the PLP’s image since the “unpleasantness” of the 70s. His nomination was opposed tooth-and-nail by the hard-left Chavez Did Nothing Wrong wing of the party, but they were gradually expelled at successive conventions. Instead, Brown would give the Democrats’ economic reforms credit where credit was due but call for ‘common sense’ regulation in light of the ‘86 Crash. He ended up giving the VP slot to primary runner-up Jesse Jackson to both placate his enthusiastic supporters and reaffirm the PLP as the party of African Americans. This also symbolically fulfilled the promise of Bayard Rustin (although the campaign emphasized Jackson’s strong faith and family to avoid provoking any repeats of historic assassinations.)

Easily winning the White House over Senator Gravel, Brown’s first term was stable and uncontroversial. He agreed with his predecessor’s social liberalism and budgetary restraint, and chiefly expanded social programmes which were already popular. Cruising to re-election, Brown’s second term would be more ambitious as he began sweeping environmental and labor initiatives. He also tried to shake America out of its isolationism by promoting liberal interventionism in coordination with the European Commonwealth (headline writers had an easy day of it whenever US President Brown met with UK Prime Minister Brown). Finally, he pushed for his grand designs to overhaul America’s constitution, especially moving to a more proportional and parliamentary system in the wake of the more authoritarian presidents of the past few decades. But his rather naïve attempts to simply convince everyone of his reforms’ rightness got nowhere and came off as arrogant.

Overall Brown is remembered as a good, but not great, president. His time in office being noted for its dull stability and continued prosperity despite his sometimes-eccentric personal style. He would keep promoting various causes up until his death, often with fellow former president and personal friend Tonie Nathan.


[18] Despite an election where passive racism became not so passive, Jackson became the first black President on the back of the last eight years of stability. His two big policies were to reduce military spending on force projection and invest in free higher education for all who wanted it, a policy even previous socialists had backed off from. It was costly but popular, and won votes in college towns & among the 18-24 demographic that served the PLP well in the midterms. After so many decades of violence and political instability, America could boast almost twenty years of doing fine and Jackson promised even brighter uplands in the next century. For socialists too, it was the fortieth anniversary of the first PLP President and it was being seen in by their current one.

But early 2000 would see attempted genocide in the People's Republic of North Sudan, and the Southwest African Economic Community would ask for foreign troop support for an intervention. Jackson decided to send a few Navy ships and marines to provide surveillance aid. Americans could see a vast international effort and that their country, for all its wealth and influence, was one of the 'second rate' nations. Jackson's defence cuts had mostly affected new equipment, not ended old ones; but the perception America was no longer able to pull its weight and had become weak on defence even when it was reducing isolationism went against him in the 2000 election.


[19] 2000 was a watershed moment - Bush's victory confirmed what had been known for some time. The GOP was essentially dead, only retaining a notable presence on a local level and a handful of representation in the 'Mormon Corridor'. Bush was the scion of a Republican political family but had become a Democrat at an early point in his career, inspired by the example of Joe Kennedy Jr. Sharing his ticket was the representative of another political dynasty - the Gores being traditional Southern Democrats who had kept the flame alive during the dark years of socialist ascendancy.

Bush had been elected on the back of specific discontent with the incumbent administration and he answered their prayers. Perhaps more dramatically than they had intended. Fueling increased military expenditure by making cuts to social services and forming 'Partnership Initiatives' to get private companies to provide public services, was more than a little controversial. But during Bush's first term, the controversy was wiped out by successes. The enlarged and enriched US military tested its mettle in a series of humanitarian interventions in Africa and East Asia. The successes saw patriotic feeling burst forth in 2004, ensuring Bush's re-election. But in 2005, civil war broke out in Greater Indonesia. The quasi-Communist by-blow of Japanese Imperialism, Greater Indonesia had maintained a firm grip over the seas of Southeast Asia. This began to fray as the Great Power politics of US vs Red Entente changed and particularly after the Anglo-Soviet Split. Revelations of ethnic cleansing emerged from Timor and Papua. This was Bush had been preparing for.

The intervention in Greater Indonesia became a quagmire, as the civil proved more complex than anyone had realised. Cooperation with the Commonwealth of Australia, ostensibly a long-term US ally in the region, was acutely controversial as Australia had fought and lost a war with Greater Indonesia in the 1960s over Papua. Many of those who may have welcomed the Americans saw them as facilitating Austrialian empire-building. There were no clean lines on the map and the grandiose military Bush had constructed to satiate patriotic fervour was almost uniquely ill-prepared for an assymetric war.


[20] The war killed Gore's chances of election and the PLP came to power on promise of achieving a dignified withdrawal - and this is one of the key factors why Dean won, as this establishment 'big beast' of the PLP, having been congressman, Surgeon General, and governor in his time, was the sort of figure you wanted.

Unfortunately for Dean, it would be three grinding, miserable years of failed talks and ceasefires and special forces strikes and arguments with Pacific nations before the Saigon Agreement was finally signed. Experts argue on how much of this was blunders on his part, how much was down to the other parties involved (notably the Agreement was signed not long after Australia's own changing of government, ending the National Party's long reign), and how much was due to the nature of the conflict. Either way, it overshadowed Dean's stable domestic achievements, and his legacy as a whole, and led to "the Class of '10" - a wave of midterms primaries by angrier, more radical, young PLP candidates against older 'establishment' figures.

[21] America wanted someone more radical in 2013, Dean was seen as being overshadowed by foreign engagements, the Democratic choice of Jeb Bush was seen as incredibly dull and a smattering of Right Wingers like Rand Paul were seen as being too odd for the Presidency. So America went with a Third Choice. The Reform party had been a gaggle of Nader supporters in the 80s and 90s who campaigned for increased democracy, a Green Deal, political reform and a decentralised government. Whilst it had done well on state levels it had never managed to win in an Presidential election. But in 2012, actor and political activist Ted Danson would throw is hat in the ring. Compared to the dull Jeb and the tarnished Dean, Danson was seen as a good natured light. Promising a Green Deal, Political Reform and generally a grab bag of goodies that could appease everyone from Liberterians to Liberals to Socialists, Danson was taken into office on a wave of good support. In office Dansson's time would probably be some of the least chaotic in years, working to establish further and better ties with Khasbulatov's Soviet Union and Miliband's Britain which also allowed for the creation of the Global Environmental Congress which was to further expand environmental industries and anti-global warming aims.

The economy would hum along at a gentle pace before kicking up slightly when Danson's Green Deal went into effect which helped reform American industry and allowed for the America to avoid industrial stagnation. It was no suprise when Danson won the 2016 election as well. This was when problems started to emerge. The Reform Party, never the most stable of organisation's anyway suffered a slight split into the Green Party and PLP as arguments about constitutional reform arose. Alongside this the deficit would begin to rise and whilst not enough to sink Danson he was constantly attacked by Democrats for letting this happen. Finally there was the China incident. In 2018, several Nuclear reactors went critical in China causing a radioactive cloud to poison vast swathes of crops and cattle. In the aftermath of this event investigations into new nuclear power plants across America occurred and several new ones built as part of Danson's Green Deal were found to have faults. America freaked out and Danson's popularity plummeted. By the time 2020 rolled around the president of good vibes and cheer would be seen as the man who could have lead America to disaster...
 
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