Look to the West Volume IX: The Electric Circus
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
In fairness, we have absolutely no idea how those words are pronounced, or even if they are correct
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
The laryngeals are dependent on Hittite which is in the Eternal State so how Societists pronounce it will be contingent
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How come that for all of their Diversitarian pursuits of BS, they have naught come up with it? Surely, there must be a niche piece of literature there dealing with it, even if it's as obscure* as OTL's Island in the Sea of Time is.
*obscure relative to the more mainstream ones like The Man in the High Castle
Though they seem to be finally coming up with Many Worlds by the narrative present
I'm quite incredulous of modern physics developing significantly — or I even dare say — ridiculously slower since it and its mathematics was conceptualised in quite an explosive manner IOTL. It had taken a mere seven decades for the Standard Model to develop from the set of disparate theories and formulations that the entire thing used to be in the early 20th century, with the many worlds being presented thirty seven years after Copenhagen.
It can be that the former interpretation was laughed out of the park when it was first presented. Or — as I suspect in Separated at Birth as well — it just had been marginalised and deprived of funding so as to belate its experimental confirmation, especially through particle accelerators/Gordian rings.
Or — worse comes to worst — quantum physics only became a serious and respected field of study within the 1970s ITTL, depriving it not just of cash, but even of the academic and professional manpower needed to conceptualise those to begin with.
I suspect the latter, the first nukes aren't developed until the fifties and the doctrine is different. Combined with different perceptions of the underlying science it's enough to retard development of the necessary theory, though likely not to the degree presented 🤔 As for Separated at Birth, that one's comparatively easier, since a more militarized world system threw all its money at engineering solutions rather than theoretical ones, hence guns big enough to hit a target an ocean away. It's telling that it's only under the spirit of free inquiry incentivized by Situationism that the bomb is developed at all, and that the immediate world reaction is "Oh, our seismic detectors went off, they've built a Tsar Bomba".
I would really just like to appreciate all the work the author puts into this timeline.
It's hinted they're not part of the Iverson Protocols. Even if they eventually join (unlikely) they're probably the only Diversitarian superpower that's constantly editing their history books to tell whatever the current political line is.
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
Related: Ethnic groups constantly migrating over the centuries and with ancient or even midieval PODs the cultural map of Europe/ME would look very different
317
Thande
Donor
Part #317: Summer Days, Drifting Away…
“GOD GAVE ZIG-AND-ZAG TO YOU!
2020 RAPPAHANNOCK RAMPAGE MUSIC FESTIVAL
Doc Wengler und his Funkmen * Debutante * Jayjay Darke
Albion’s Tears * Herbert Dawkins and the Joe Ordinaries
ft. AGO and Liveprog Yeahman
(Smaller text for supporting acts below is now not legible)
August 12th-15th Spotsylvania Park
BIGGEST EVER NOT TO BE MISSED!
- Decayed advertising poster seen on Cornubia Avenue, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Sgt Bob Mumby, December 2020
*
(Sgt Ellis’ note)
We now interrupt all that dreary politics stuff with some good old-fashioned rock and roll!
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
Technically it’s not the same as rock and roll, Dom, and also there is a lot of politics involved anyway.
(Sgt Ellis’ note)
Look, just be quiet, OK? Let me hav—
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
You mean ‘be quiet, aydub’...
*
Extract from recorded lecture “The Naughty Forties: The First Zaggers” by “Debutante” (stage name of Melanie Acker) and David Sanderling, recorded October 22nd, 2020—
…y’know, it’s hard to think that it was eighty years ago now that the 1940s began. Long before I was born. Even my grandmother was only a child, and only for the last years of that decade – before she thinks I’m callin’ her old. (Audience chuckles) But it feels a lot more, what’s the word, Davey? Visceral? Ar, that’s it. A lot more real, a lot more here’n’now. I bet those folks in the Forties didn’t think times eighty years before them felt as, uhh, current as they do to us. But we do.
Recordings. Recordings are a big part of it. Good recordings. Oh, they had groovetapes and discs even in Flippant days, but they were garbage recordings by our standards. Fine for orchestral stuff, but they could barely pick out a voice. Most of the music back then was instrumental. It took till the Thirties before we started to get augies.[1] Then, suddenly, voices were everything. We got the Smoothies for a while. Fine enough, but their style was meant to go with those early augies. They were only popular because nothing else would work with the tech, in my view, others may disagree. (Audience chuckles)
Look, I know Smoothies are still popular with some folks and in some countries. Fair play to them. But to me, that style always sounds, mm, archaic. Almost as much as the instrumental classical stuff, the maroon trance or the New York Rattlebang from the Flippants. Whereas, look at the zig-a’-zaggers of the Forties. So groundbreaking, so revolutionary, that we still use that word today to say we’re voguey. Shockingly blending music from different traditions, Carolinian refugees, German immigrants, Tortolians. Black and white and red. Zig-a’-zag may have started in Ohio, but it’s popular across the nation and the world for a reason. It took time to be accepted, mind you. In the early days they called it Societism and tried to ban it. (Surprised reactions). Ar, that’s the Second Black Scare for you. I can only assume those folks who tried to ban it never heard what that damnable ‘Human Music’ sounded like. (More laughter, a little nervous)
No, Societist tunes sound dead. Put together by committee. No, the scary part about zig-a’-zag, to those folks, was that it made you feel alive. Makes you want to clap your hands and stamp your feet. And it made a fine soundtrack for that era. Helped underline it as a golden age. Maybe it wasn’t for everyone. But there’s a reason why we still idolise those days today, even when they’ve almost passed out of memory.
A lot of folks call that period the Naughty Forties. It was a time of Carnal Liberation, as they called it – bit old-fashioned now – a time of shockin’ social transgressions. Sure, they said a lot of things now that seem wrong in hindsight, but my daddy always told me you cain’t learn without makin’ mistakes.
But all this kinda led to generational war between the youth and the old establishment. Maybe because war had declined so much in the rest of the world. Not, maybe, to the extent we like to pretend it had. There was still fighting in the Nusantara, Formosa, in Tartary, in Africa and stuff. But still. It is true to say that the 1940s were the most peaceful decade of the twentieth century, and one in which all the nations advanced in terms of development and standard of living at a rate that’ll never be equalled again.
Ar, they call it the Naughty Forties, but only in hindsight. Not many folks called it that at the time. The name that people started using around the middle of the decade was The Gay Forties. (Sharp intake of breath from audience) Yes, well, that word meant something different then. Though it is true quite a few of those youth had started experimenting with certain substances.[2] There’s another term that was often used, which is my personal favourite. The Long Hot Summer.
That’s one that’s fallen outta favour. Maybe because some folks took it too literally. I’ve seen punks claim that they called it that ’cause of climate amelioration and the atmosphere getting’ phlogisticated. Codswallop. There were a few guys with high foreheads back then who saw it comin’, not that anyone paid attention to ’em yet, but it certainly wain’t noticeable like.
No, they called it the Long Hot Summer because…I guess that’s how we remember it. You look at any film made then that was set, what’s the word Davey? Contemporary. Set when it’s made, y’know. Or books written at the time, or the great zig-a’-zag hits, like I was sayin’. Look at all them and tell me if you see more than one scene in a hundred where it’s snowin’ outside. ’Xactly. People, especially young people, just had a summer mindset.
What, Davey? Oh ar. Well, one exception I guess. Two. For the same reason. Firstly there was the Combine. Too busy killin’ each other over Alfarus, and then crackin’ down on any kind of artistic freedom. Just making those dull, dreary – whadda they called again? Moralizdiko films.[3] Life under the Eye might as well have been in winter, or in monochrome. Never mind that most of their realm was on the Equator! But no, in the free world it was forever summer. Except Russia – if you count ’em as the free world in that time. Zig-a’-zag was decadent western foreign filth to the Tsar an’ the Orthodox Church. Not that it stopped discs and tapes bein’ smuggled in, of course. Not a lot of summer in Russia, either.
All of it was born from the Thirties, really, of course. The Archies and the Wreckies had been goin’ for a while, and they kept evolvin’. There was an iconoclasm even to the Archies, though. Whereas the Wreckies wanted to tear down society, the Archies started lookin’ back to the classical world with the same damn goal of Carnal Liberation in mind. Both of them were criticisin’ the traditional family for different reasons, but basically it all came down to ‘you can’t tell me whatta do or who I can court’.
Even zig-a’-zag started in the Thirties.
Ar. Technic’ly…
The first zig-a’-zag record, “Kink’s Delight”, was released in 1938 by the Moonlight Trio of Shippingport. Listen to it now and…
It don’t sound much like what we think of as zig-a’-zag, ye ken.
But it was ahead of its time and the roots were there.
Aydub, Davey. So like I said, it all started in the Thirties. But the Forties were different. We’d finished rebuildin’ from the Black Twenties. China had lost its war in Panchala and now returned to engagin’ with the world. There was a whole generation of youth in China who’d opposed the war because their older brothers were gettin’ conscripted, and now they joined the world scene alongside the Archies and Wreckies in Europe and here in the Empire. Writers and bands were gettin’ fascinated with Bisnagi and Indien culture after the whole French political crisis made both of ’em better known. You know the marcheurs de rêve movement in France, that was inspired by the spiritual beliefs of the Indiens in Pérousie. That’s still left traces in French pop music to this day, just as the Tortolians did in zig-a’-zag here.[4]
Not all the elders yelled at the youth to smarten themselves up and stop banging those drums. Some realised that this influence of other cultures dovetailed nicely with the growth of political Diversitarianism. They say even Madame Mercier in France used to go to Rêve concerts, shock society and embarrass her daughter – even if some did say she had cotton wool stuck in her ears. Instead of viewing the influx of cultural influence as a threat, it could be seen as a kind of strengthening against Societism, as well as ensuring those cultures survived. Javanese gamelan music would live on in Araby and Africa thanks to the One-Way Hajj, for instance. I don’t want to condone that, it was a bad business, but my point is that the Societists could not truly eradicate a culture as they had dreamed. Even Tahuantinsuya and Aymara music survived in California.
Ar, Davey. Speaking of California, there’s another thing you were gonna bring up…
Oh yes. Another musical innovation happened there, though it didn’t truly come to fruition till the Fifties. The Californian company AuraTrax was working on ways to adapt the existing sound recording techniques for better film synchronisation. They, along with other companies that produced groovediscs, were struggling because Societist control of most of the Nusantara meant that it had become difficult to import the vital gum-lac used to make the old discs.[5] Several synthetic alternatives were tried, using different types of pseulac, Quite incidentally, they happened to try a variant of the POM already used in groovetapes, and stumbled on a way to fit more grooves on a groovedisc compared to the old gum-lac types. They called them parvogroove, or PG, records. (Audience reaction)
That’s right, the very same ones we still have today, and never bettered, no matter what they say about all this magnetic c – stuff. Back in the day, they called it ‘album on a disc’. See, with the old groovediscs, what were called standard groove or SG in hindsight, those could only get a few minutes of music on, maybe one song each side. An album of music was literally an album, y’know, like a stamp collector’s album, a booklet of sleeves with SG records in. Whereas you could fit that many songs all on one PG disc. We kept callin’ ’em albums, even though it was only one disc and one sleeve. Still do today.[6]
Yes. Ironically, groovetapes had sown the seeds of their own loss in the ongoing format war – for a time, at least. Part of the appeal of groovetapes had always been that they could store more music than groovediscs, but the latter were more, um, visually appealing, er…
Sexier? (Audience laughter)
…if you must put it that way, yes. With longer-playing PG discs, tapes had to take a back seat for home players. The tape companies countered, though, with the portable music revolution.
If you can call it portable! Luggable, more like. Don’t go picturin’ today’s Marathons. We’re talkin’ somethin’ the size of a small briefcase. The idea was you took it a long with you, opened up the case with the speakers, put in a tape and then you could have a party in the park, or anywhere. The early ones were pretty awful. But as speakers and hand-cranked batteries improved, they got better. The first really good one was the Votex Wanderlust-20, which came out, in, help me, Davey…
1943. So a lot of young people had them, right in time for…
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Making of Modern American Politics” by Lady Philippa G. Bidwell, recorded October 21st, 2020—
As much as I will praise President Washborough, I cannot pretend he was perfect or that he always made the right call.[7] It’s remarkable that the Pioneer minority government elected in 1931, under the old system, managed to change so much in such a short time. The reforms of 1932, the movement to MAPR, was unquestionably a good thing for the Empire, especially in the long term. But there were other problems, intractable problems, and Washborough also had to make promises to other parties in order to buy their support for pushing MAPR through. Washborough himself said, ruefully, that no sooner had the Societists taken the problem of Carolina off their hands that now he had to face the problem of Superia. (Audience murmurs) It was dark humour, true.
The big issue was that he’d set a precedent. To put it bluntly, he’d done a deal with Prince Yengalychev that meant that Baranovia got to be an autonomous state like New Ireland, and was made so in 1933. But that begged the question of what to do with Old Panimaha, far too large and nonfunctional, and in 1936 it ended up being split into three, New Navarre, the smaller Panimaha we know today (a few audience cheers) and Superia. That wasn’t the start of the Superia Brushfires but it certainly intensified them, and I think we all know what happened there before it all finally came to an end in 1970. It’s history to a lot of you, but I lived through it – not all of it! (Audience chuckles)
So, yes, President Washborough was still President in 1936, which surprised a lot of people. Nobody had quite been sure what would come of the 1932 reforms. There was a certain assumption that, while the new voting system favoured smaller parties, the fact that the Supremacists were a united force would give them a certain advantage over their opponents, what with the old Liberals having split. But remember the reforms had also included the Representation of the People Act (1932) which had granted universal suffrage at age 21 to everyone, removing the disenfranchisement of young unmarried women. Many of these female voters naturally had grounds to favour the party that had helped them gain a voice, and so the Pioneers rode to another strong minority in 1934, their widespread voter coalition fitting the new voting system well. The Supremacists remained the opposition, with the Liberals in third and the Patriots in fourth. Marley – whichever one you mean – stepped down and the Supremacists chose a new leader, E. C. Edwards. And that’s where the trouble started for them.
As you might be able to tell from the fact that his parents named him after Eustace Clarke, Edwards was born into a hardcore Supremacist family descended from the party’s founding tradition of radicalism, anti-corruption and, frankly, anti-Catholicism and antisemitism. (Audience murmurs) His election, at the contentious Supremacist Party Convention in Milwark, represented an earthquake in the party and the expression of a popular backlash. Since the decline of the Patriots after their discrediting in the aftermath of the Great American War, the Supremacists had absorbed many more mainstream doradist voters and moneyed interests who just opposed the Liberals and saw the Supremacists as a more viable vehicle than the decaying Patriots. By the time of Foxbury, in many ways the Supremacists had become the thing they had been founded to oppose – the establishment. Grassroots anger had been building since the Pandoric War in particular, temporarily assuaged by the small-p populism of Tayloe, but then flaring up again. Even Tayloe had been descended from Virginian aristocrats, if dispossessed ones. A common insulting name for the doradist, establishmentarian Supremacists was ‘Burwellites’, as the old Clarkean party core saw President Lewis Burwell as being the epitome of their party’s infiltration by old-money aristocrats. They were also sometimes called ‘New York Firemen’, a slightly obscure term that may have referenced past factional struggles in that Confederation or city, but more probably reflecting the fact that those firemen had traditionally worn buff-coloured protective coats over blue uniforms. Like the firemen, the Clarkeans contended, the Burwellites were Supremacist buff on the outside but Patriot blue on the inside.
President Washborough and the Pioneers undoubtedly benefited from the Supremacist infighting that followed the election of Edwards. Even as bombs exploded in Les Grandes Fourches – soon to be joined by those in Fredericksburg – the opposition seemed unable to take advantage of the situation. After several disappointing by-election results in 1936, the Burwellites attempted to launch an internal party coup against Edwards. This failed, with Edwards rallying his supporters to march in the streets in protest and called for the expulsion of the Burwellite ringleaders. This was successfully pushed through, but several more moderate Supremacist MCPs also resigned the whip in protest.
In 1938, with an election looming, Dame Eleanor Cross – who had led the Patriots for sixteen years – now made an appeal to the dispossessed doradist Burwellites. She invited them to a conference and made a radical proposal; an alliance. The Burwellite MCPs faced a challenge in being re-elected as independents; though some of them have strong personal votes, the new voting system tended to favour parties over individuals, and they could not no longer call on the war chest or activist base of the Supremacists. Dame Eleanor proclaimed the New Doradist Alliance, whose colours would be blue, buff and red. (Audience murmurs) Naturally, the old traditionalists in her party were shocked by this and called it a betrayal of Patriot principles. For some of them, after she had already supported the move to MAPR, this was the last straw. Three Virginian MCPs, led by James Omohundro, resigned the Patriot whip and proclaimed themselves the Tory Patriots of Virginia. Or TPV. (Audience reaction) Yes. Exactly. They wouldn’t rename themselves the more general ‘Traditional Patriot Voice’ until the 1960s.
The 1939 general election again left the Pioneers as the largest party, but in a more contentious position. With the divided Parliaments that the new voting system was producing, the role of the Emperor was becoming more important again. The convention became that the leader of the largest party was given first opportunity to form a government, but there was the possibility of another President being selected if he or she was unable to. This would leave the Emperor in a difficult position, as he was meant to be above politics. Accordingly, the position of Lord Deputy, which had become a sinecure in some ways now the Emperor resided in Fredericksburg most of the time, suddenly became very significant. In the future, the role of Lord Deputy would be seen as having the primary role of organising government formation negotiations after an election.[8]
Now, the Liberals had replaced their leader, and the new man, Walter Hickham, began a new programme of outreach to voters in Michigan and western New York who had grown discontented with the Brushfires and were repelled by the Supremacist infighting. The Liberals would provide only limited support to the Pioneer government, seeking to force an early election which they thought they could benefit from. Indeed, Parliament was dissolved in 1941 and Hickham ended up as President, with the Pioneers in the junior position. After ten years as President, Washborough stepped down as Pioneer leader in opposition. However, like Madame Mercier in France, he was persuaded to return when fresh elections were called in 1944 after the Summer of Passion. He served as Prime Minister for a second term until 1948 before stepping down once again, this time in favour of Sally Hardwicke. As you all know, Mrs Hardwicke was the Empire’s first female President, though some make a case for Lilian Marley. But Mrs Hardwicke served only until the 1949 election when the NDA, now a more coherent group and led by David Stuart, became the largest party. That’s the irony – a new party built by a woman ends up replacing our first female premier with a man. But that’s the way life works…
*
Extract from recorded lecture “The Naughty Forties: The First Zaggers” by “Debutante” (stage name of Melanie Acker) and David Sanderling, recorded October 22nd, 2020—
In many ways, our popular memories of the period are generalised from the summer of 1944, known as the Summer of Passion. This was genuinely burning hot across most of the Empire, China, and to a lesser extent Europe. There was widespread drought. China in particular, which five years earlier had had too much water in its devastating floods, now had too little. The streets were full of angry young men and women demanding action. Emperor Shengjian had empowered the One Hundred and Eight Mandators as a ploy to seize power, but in doing so he’d set a dangerous precedent. He now found himself forced to deal with something increasingly resembling a parliament. Not all his randomly-selected peasant representatives were easily bribed or intimidated. For the first time, important Chinese politicians began to emerge from the proletariat, both urban and rural.[9]
Ooh ar, aydub Davey, but enough about that. Look, if the Chinese wanted water, here in the Empire the demand was for Freeborn Rights. Magna Carta Nova. Washborough had gotten young women the vote, fair enough, but there was much more to do. Zig-a’-zag, real authentic zig-a’-zag, brung – brought – folks together. Not like the Societists, not like the moral guardians of the old establishment claimed, but the opposite. Celebratin’ the cultures that had survived, the folks who’d escaped Societist rule as they tried to preserve their way o’ life while dwellin’ in a foreign land, to them, our fair Empire.
‘Authentic’ zig-and-zag. Yes. That’s a contentious one...
Go on, Davey, tell ’em, you know I get all het up when I talk about it.
Er, very well, er, Miss Acker. (Audience titters in background) So, um, zig-and-zag music became popular all over the free world by the mid-1940s. There were bands in England, France, Siam, China, even Bisnaga playing zig-and-zag music...
What they say is zig-a’-zag music...
Um, yes. That’s the contention. Ah – purists claim that it’s only ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ zig-and-zag if it’s from the Empire, where the musical traditions of different races and cultures flowed together and created something new. And that all the others are just copying them, but it’s, ah, it’s hollow and has no heart to it. Sometimes they say it only counts if it’s from Ohio...
Even I say that’s goin’ too far, Davey. Look, in my book, to be real zig-a’-zag it’s got to come from a mixin’ of traditions, like you just said. But it don’t have to be those in Ohio. They have their own zig-a’-zag in Cygnia, f’r’instance, but they call it Rattlewhine. They mixed the Rattlebang style from New York immigrants who went there after the Black Twenties, with the music of the indigenous Indien peoples. You know, the maquo.[10] Pérousie has something similar but mixed with old French folk music. The Arab Federation has Aljawia, which mixes the gamelan music of Javanese refugee settlers with the local styles. Even somewhere like England has Bristol Soul, which is a mix of English, Welsh and Natalese music. Those are all forms of the zig-a’-zag idea under another name. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, flowering faster than the Sanchezistas can uproot. Ensurin’ they can never force a homog – what’s that word – sameness on us. Always somethin’ new.
Now what isn’t real zig-a’-zag is when they just copy old 1940s Ohio zig-a’-zag with no understanding of where it came from, jus’ because they like the sound of it. That’s crowdin’ out their own authentic sounds for copyin’ someone else, and that’s almost as big a crime as what the Societists do. (Sharp intake of breath from audience) That’s jus’ my tuppence.
Right...well, before we start a riot (relieved chuckles from audience) we should move on. Where was I...1944 and the Summer of Passion. It was a time of riot and rebellion in many lands, but of course we first think of what happened here in the Empire. There were plenty of causes. As the economy boomed, businesses began recruiting extensively from refugees and immigrants as a pool of cheap labour that were mostly not unionised and did not ask awkward questions. There had been one big wave of refugees fleeing the Societists after the Black Twenties, but the Silent Revolution down south was prompting more. Mexico, Guatemala and California also struggled to cope with the influx of people, but there was a distinction. Spanish-speaking people from places like Cuba might choose them, but all three – even California – were not considered especially welcoming to black refugees from Jamaica, Cuba or Carolina. Nor was the Empire as a whole, but refugees knew of places like Africa Nova where the rules were different. And, of course, it was easier to get across the land border from Carolina, especially when the Societists stripped the border guard to have more warm bodies to fight in their pointless civil wars...
Sure. When we look upon it with a Diversitarian eye, y’know, we can say all these folks were bringin’ all these wonderful styles of music with ’em. And the stories and lyrics that went with ’em. I’m a zig-a’-zag forever girl as you’ll have gathered, (audience chuckles) but there were others too. We all know the lammens, for one.
Yes, the lammens, derived from ‘Lamentations’ as in the Biblical book. Also sometimes called the blue devils and the life dozens, but lammens is the term most people know. Black people in Carolina, and in other forms in other lands with slavery, had been developing that musical style for years, and a lot of it can be traced all the way back to Guinea, which was relevant, as we’ll get to. It drew on church music and work chants from the plantations and plenty of other influences, but it was always sorrowful in tone, lamenting the state that those people were born into.[11] There are characteristic chord progressions and flattened notes that you’d recognise if you heard them...
Ooh ar Davey, if you carry on talkin’ like a professor you’ll kill the spirit of it, or so they tell me. (Audience chuckles) I’m not a lammens singer but I’ll acknowledge the great influence that lammens had on zig-a’-zag, while also survivin’ in its own right. Like I said, we can look at it as this great cultural bounty. But that’s not how folk saw it at the time.
No. People were concerned about their livelihoods, about losing their jobs to cheap non-union labour. Mentianism had collapsed after the Black Twenties and instead unions mostly turned to the Pioneer Party. But President Washborough had to try to juggle those interests with others. And all the unions weren’t on the same side, either. The Soloprintists of North America, which was the biggest women-dominated union, were often at odds with the United Miners of the Empire, for instance. Dealing with the mass waves of strikes that began to cripple the nation in 1944 was no small or simple matter.
Sure. But enough politics. People were angry. Workers were angry about their jobs allegedly bein’ taken. The immigrants were angry that the police weren’t protectin’ them from mob so-called justice. Black and Tortolian athletes had won laurels for the Empire at the Global Games but then were denied entry to hotels and clubs. Sometimes zig-a’-zag brung – brought folks together, but people are idiots and it didn’t always work like that. You could have a fella dance to zig-a’-zag in the club and then punch the dude who wrote the song in the street on the way home ’cause he was black. Bein’ black, bein’ red, bein’ Catholic, all made you a target.
Of course, the ones who had it worst were the white Carolinians. They did have the advantage that they could pass for white Americans to look at. But as soon as they opened their mouths, unless they made an effort to change their accents, they would be immediately denounced as traitors, collaborators, infiltrators. In smaller towns plenty of them were hanged in the street in full view of the police, who looked the other way.
Not sure everyone would agree they had it worst, Davey. But it was rough for everyone. The politicians couldn’t seem to fix it, so with that summer heat of ’44, all the young folk were on the streets demanding a better way...
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Making of Modern American Politics” by Lady Philippa G. Bidwell, recorded October 21st, 2020—
After the tumultuous election of 1944, President Washborough returned to power. It seemed he was in an impossible situation, tasked with fixing a bitterly divided nation with burning cities, closed factories and Governors who had called in the Confederal Guard to break up protests.
In the end, he probably did better than most would have. He did manage to change the law to help ensure that workers would be unionised and protected no matter where they were from. He benefited from the fact that he could always resort to Black Scare tactics of blaming Societist infiltrators, even though we now know that the Empire was one of the least-penetrated nations on Earth, as Alfarus had sacrificed all his Agendes in the War of 1926. But so long as the worst of the excesses, whether from unions, migrant militias or Guardsmen, could be dismissed as the work of the Societist enemy within, it was possible to address concerns on all sides to a limited extent. Nobody was ever quite happy, and as I said, he stepped down in 1948 so that the government could try to draw a line under the controversies. But nonetheless, Washborough had now been responsible now for not one but two major periods of reform; one constitutional in 1932, the other social in 1944.
Freeborn Rights was the central plank of Washborough’s platform; that all within the ENA, no matter how they had entered it, were fundamentally entitled to the same rights and liberties of freeborn Englishmen that her people had always inherited, no matter their origins. At the same time, those rights could only be recognised if the people reciprocated them with responsibilities and formed a covenant with the Crown. Partly this consisted of being part of the system of Imperial taxation, which had always been a contentious matter in American politics. Washborough’s reforms also defined particular unions as the only legal representatives of workers in their respective industries and required companies to provide space for union liaison representation to their boards of directors.
This radical move, the Covenant System, is often considered emblematic of the ‘American Miracle’, not only of the remainder of the 1940s but also the period of renewed economic growth after the Sunrise War, and was much-copied elsewhere. We often forget that it was also controversial. Washborough had empowered certain existing unions, often merely reflecting a de facto situation that one union had grown through merges to dominate a particular industry (like the UME), but sometimes making a rather strategic selection that deliberately suppressed those unions that were more problematic for the government. His system also made it impossible for new rival breakaway unions to be founded if the existing union leadership was suborned by the corporate establishment, which would frequently prove to be a problem. The Covenant System has also been accused of suppressing technological innovation in the Empire, as existing unions had an incentive to use their power to prevent the growth of new industries – whose workers were not yet protected by a state-defined union – if they represented a potential threat to their own power. That remains a contentious question, though. In my view, and that of my party, the Covenant System has sadly been undermined by NDA- and Supremacist-led governments, but I would say that, wouldn’t I? (Audience chuckles)
In addition to this, and more controversially today, the system permitted groups of people from common cultures to partially self-govern, while still enjoying those same Freeborn Rights. This was an awkward compromise to try to meet the demands of Tortolian groups, though it would be far from a true resolution to the Superia Brushfires. Laws intended to apply to Tortolian nations within the Empire, however, would also be employed by groups of migrants in large cities. Particular areas of Mount-Royal, New York City, Philadelphia, Chichago and many others had frequently been effectively taken over by waves of refugees and the existing inhabitants had moved out. Now, under the new laws, those parts of the cities could be defined as belonging to Catholics, black people, Tortolians or others, who could unofficially elect their own community mayors and have reserved aldermen on city councils. Sometimes this system could be advantageous, but it often led to corruption, Imperial law de facto not applying within the bounds of those ‘quarters’ as they became known, and other abuses. As you probably know, the Supremacists railed against what they called ‘American ghettoes’, evoking the separate status of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and claimed Washborough had demolished American freedoms rather than democratising them.
I should say that this was also the era in which older terms such as Negro, Papist and Indian (Audience murmurs) were first widely recognised as outdated and replaced, at least theoretically, with black and red in a racial sense, or Tortolian in a broader sense of identity. ‘Coloured’ or ‘gentlemen and ladies of colour’ was sometimes used as a collective term for ‘non-white’ but that’s considered outdated in turn today. There were a number of attempts to create a similar term for black people in the Empire, but these struggled with the fact that the Empire’s black people were drawn from a range of origins and identities. Ultimately they were all descended from Africans, but terms involving the word ‘African’ were also contentious. Black Freeborn Rights organisations in the ENA, such as the League of Black Voters, were frequently influenced by visiting speakers from Freedonia and Guinea’s Grand Palaver, who were sometimes portrayed as a link back to African authenticity. Some other black representatives, including many of the existing black MCPs from Africa Nova and Haiti, contended that black Americans enjoyed their own distinct identity and Freedes had no more moral right to tell them what to do than white Americans did.
That one remains controversial. But under the new system, offices that had – informally – been reserved for white Protestants were increasingly accessible to black, red and Catholic subjects. The situation varied from place to place, of course. Cygnia was probably the slowest to shift, due to its distance and the fact that Indien Freeborn Rights organisations fighting for indigenous people were as yet less developed than their Tortolian counterparts; that would have to wait until the 1970s. The Williamite League which facilitated Protestant supremacy, though increasingly challenged in its old heartlands of New England, also tended to exclude Catholics from government in Cygnia and Michigan, among other places. Drakesland was the only part of the Empire where Orthodox subjects were considered the most inherently suspicious, and often ‘encouraged’ to up sticks and move to Baranovia. I could list a thousand more caveats that undermined and delayed Washborough’s achievements. But nonetheless, the law had changed and increasingly the rights of all subjects of the Septentrian Crown began to be recognised – and enforced – on equal footing.
At the turn of the twentieth century, America had undoubtedly and unquestionably been a country that was run by and for white Protestant men. Other groups – white Protestant women, Catholics, Tortolians, black people – were merely resident in someone else’s country. Like the servants in a grand household, beneath notice, to be quickly dismissed by the writer of ratiocinic fiction as suspects lest they displeasingly multiply the list of characters that the reader had to keep track of. Not quite people. Few explicitly put it that way, but that was the mindset. It hardly changed overnight in 1944 thanks to the Covenant System and other reforms. But the Empire had reached a turning point.
The fact that Washborough defined the new system in terms of its relationship to the Crown is significant. The role of the monarchy was evolving, as our flexible constitution permits it to as the world changes. As I said before, the introduction of MAPR and the increasing commonality of multi-party governments made the stability of a nonpartisan head of state to mediate to be all the more vital. Emperor Augustus was still very much from the old tradition. Even though the Emperor had lived primarily in Fredericksburg for many decades by this point, American political culture was still used to thinking of him as a more distant figure. Emperors had never been crowned on American soil, merely enthroned following their formal coronation at Westminster Abbey in England. Due to the controversial and awkward circumstances under which Augustus had succeeded to the throne following George IV’s abdication, he had underwent a hastily-Americanised version of the ceremony behind closed doors. Some early and tentative plans for how to modernise and further Americanise the monarchy had been shelved when the 1925 Silver Jubilee was cancelled due to the plague. Augustus did, unusually, instead hold a Ruby Jubilee in 1940, which some define as the real start of the so-called ‘Naughty Forties’. However, many of the traditions employed were still too associated with England and it was clear that further work was needed if the monarchy was to reconnect with the American people and they were to accept the monarch’s increasingly active political role.
Now, it was clear that the Emperor was in decline after he suffered a stroke in 1946. Augustus had no male children and his heir, according to law, was his daughter Mildred. In recognition of her status as heir apparent, she had been made not merely Princess Imperial but also Princess of Cygnia and Duchess of Cornubia.[13] Mildred was thirty-six years old at the time of her father’s passing in 1949, mere months before his planned Golden Jubilee, and was the first monarch to not even remember a time when the Hanoverian Dominions had been united. This was a clear opportunity to draw a line under the troubles of the past and embrace a new, truly American, Imperial Crown.
There is much debate about precisely when the so-called Naughty Forties ended. Despite wobbles, the economic good times would not truly conclude until the Crash of 1956. Some point to the shocking launch of Dedalo-1 by Romulan Italy in March 1950 as the end of the feeling of a decade of endless summer, for good and ill. Others, however, propose the coronation of Empress Mildred in August 1949, three months after her father’s death. A new Americanised ceremony, based on the English original, was drawn up and carried out in St Piran’s Cathedral in Fredericksburg. The oaths were rewritten to refer to the Empire and all her Confederations. The oil of anointing was derived from olives grown in Cygnia on American soil. A role, somewhat controversially, was put in place for Tortolian representatives and their own traditions. In addition to new and Americanised versions of the traditional crown, orb and sceptre (made of Drakesland gold and prominently including Cygnian opals, Hamilton amethysts and Charlotte sapphires and rubies), Empress Mildred was presented with the new Coronation Wampum Belt, with shells each inscribed with symbols from the Tortolian peoples of the Empire. This innovation was criticised not only by many white traditionalists, but also by plenty of Tortolians, who felt that it represented an implicit recognition of the Crown’s ownership of their old lands, as well as wampum belts being a regional tradition that was not representative of all Tortolian nations. Nonetheless, it has stuck around in coronations to this day, with additions representing Tlingit and Indien totems.
The coronation was, in general, a great success. America had her first Empress Regnant and it was the first time that a woman had reigned over the country since Queen Anne two and a half centuries before. Pageantry dominated Fredericksburg for a week and there were widespread celebrations in cities across the country, with new traditions being invented. Most workers were given three days off, an action that could be coordinated especially well thanks to the Covenant System, I might add. But there were rumours, spread by the more unscrupulous Supremacist and NDA newspapers, that the new ceremony would disestablish the Church in America and remove the requirement for a Protestant succession. Of course, this was always absurd, because that is impossible to change except by Act of Parliament. Even after the Coronation was held and the nation celebrated as it never had before, the lie somehow lived on, and was undoubtedly partly responsible for the election of the NDA-led government of David Stuart in November 1949. I could also point to that as the true end of the good times. But again, I would say that, wouldn’t I...
[1] Augmentophones, i.e. electric microphones.
[2] (Sgt Mumby’s note) It took us a while to figure it out, but apparently in this timeline the word ‘gay’ has taken on a similar meaning to ‘high (on drugs)’ in OTL. Presumably because stoned people act very carefree, joyous, reckless, in the original meaning of the word. Judging by how people react here, it’s a bit more taboo than ‘high’ is to us, though, I can’t imagine anyone in TTL saying they were ‘high on life’ or something without raising eyebrows.
[3] See Part #287 in Volume VIII.
[4] The term ‘pop music’ is an obvious parallel evolution, being the natural abbreviation of ‘popular music’.
[5] Gum-lac is the TTL term for shellac – see Part #256 in Volume VII.
[6] This is similar (though not identical – the details of the formats are different) to the OTL replacement of 78 records by LPs (long-playing records). In OTL these were developed by Columbia in 1948, the term used being the similar ‘microgroove’. ‘Albums’ evolved in much the same way in OTL as described here, a natural parallel evolution given the pre-existing term.
[7] This segment follows on from that quoted in Part #304, but not directly, so as not to repeat material covered in Part #309.
[8] I.e. the Lord Deputy has become the formateur or informateur, to use the terminology popular in the Low Countries in OTL.
[9] This isn’t strictly true, as there had been plenty of storied ways in which people from those backgrounds had entered positions of power in China historically (e.g. as soldiers turned warlords, eunuchs or concubines turned court power brokers, etc.) The speaker here is not an expert.
[10] ‘Maquo’ is the commonly used term in TTL for didgeridoo, derived from the word used by the Binij aboriginal pdeople via French. See Part #255 in Volume VII for the 1900s Rattlebang music of New York, which was one of several styles to emerge from the popularity of groovediscs and groovetapes.
[11] While the details are different, this is the same tradition that became the blues in OTL.
[12] One of the most unlikely OTL linguistic revivals of modern times is the rebirth of ‘people of colour’ as an accepted term, which was in widespread usage during the late eighteenth century during debates over the abolition of the slave trade. In TTL it has not (yet) been revived.
[13] Another example of the hasty and awkward Americanisation of the monarchy in 1900 alluded to earlier in the text, following the breakaway of England and Scotland under Frederick III. The heir to the throne of the ENA now takes the invented titles of Prince of Cygnia and Duke of Cornubia. The latter does not refer to any real place, but is an allusion to the old title of Duke of Cornwall and the fact that the Latinised form ‘Cornubia’ is frequently used in the ENA thanks to the days of Frederick I’s exile. ‘Princess Imperial’ is a simple rebranding of ‘Princess Royal’.
“GOD GAVE ZIG-AND-ZAG TO YOU!
2020 RAPPAHANNOCK RAMPAGE MUSIC FESTIVAL
Doc Wengler und his Funkmen * Debutante * Jayjay Darke
Albion’s Tears * Herbert Dawkins and the Joe Ordinaries
ft. AGO and Liveprog Yeahman
(Smaller text for supporting acts below is now not legible)
August 12th-15th Spotsylvania Park
BIGGEST EVER NOT TO BE MISSED!
- Decayed advertising poster seen on Cornubia Avenue, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Sgt Bob Mumby, December 2020
*
(Sgt Ellis’ note)
We now interrupt all that dreary politics stuff with some good old-fashioned rock and roll!
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
Technically it’s not the same as rock and roll, Dom, and also there is a lot of politics involved anyway.
(Sgt Ellis’ note)
Look, just be quiet, OK? Let me hav—
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
You mean ‘be quiet, aydub’...
*
Extract from recorded lecture “The Naughty Forties: The First Zaggers” by “Debutante” (stage name of Melanie Acker) and David Sanderling, recorded October 22nd, 2020—
…y’know, it’s hard to think that it was eighty years ago now that the 1940s began. Long before I was born. Even my grandmother was only a child, and only for the last years of that decade – before she thinks I’m callin’ her old. (Audience chuckles) But it feels a lot more, what’s the word, Davey? Visceral? Ar, that’s it. A lot more real, a lot more here’n’now. I bet those folks in the Forties didn’t think times eighty years before them felt as, uhh, current as they do to us. But we do.
Recordings. Recordings are a big part of it. Good recordings. Oh, they had groovetapes and discs even in Flippant days, but they were garbage recordings by our standards. Fine for orchestral stuff, but they could barely pick out a voice. Most of the music back then was instrumental. It took till the Thirties before we started to get augies.[1] Then, suddenly, voices were everything. We got the Smoothies for a while. Fine enough, but their style was meant to go with those early augies. They were only popular because nothing else would work with the tech, in my view, others may disagree. (Audience chuckles)
Look, I know Smoothies are still popular with some folks and in some countries. Fair play to them. But to me, that style always sounds, mm, archaic. Almost as much as the instrumental classical stuff, the maroon trance or the New York Rattlebang from the Flippants. Whereas, look at the zig-a’-zaggers of the Forties. So groundbreaking, so revolutionary, that we still use that word today to say we’re voguey. Shockingly blending music from different traditions, Carolinian refugees, German immigrants, Tortolians. Black and white and red. Zig-a’-zag may have started in Ohio, but it’s popular across the nation and the world for a reason. It took time to be accepted, mind you. In the early days they called it Societism and tried to ban it. (Surprised reactions). Ar, that’s the Second Black Scare for you. I can only assume those folks who tried to ban it never heard what that damnable ‘Human Music’ sounded like. (More laughter, a little nervous)
No, Societist tunes sound dead. Put together by committee. No, the scary part about zig-a’-zag, to those folks, was that it made you feel alive. Makes you want to clap your hands and stamp your feet. And it made a fine soundtrack for that era. Helped underline it as a golden age. Maybe it wasn’t for everyone. But there’s a reason why we still idolise those days today, even when they’ve almost passed out of memory.
A lot of folks call that period the Naughty Forties. It was a time of Carnal Liberation, as they called it – bit old-fashioned now – a time of shockin’ social transgressions. Sure, they said a lot of things now that seem wrong in hindsight, but my daddy always told me you cain’t learn without makin’ mistakes.
But all this kinda led to generational war between the youth and the old establishment. Maybe because war had declined so much in the rest of the world. Not, maybe, to the extent we like to pretend it had. There was still fighting in the Nusantara, Formosa, in Tartary, in Africa and stuff. But still. It is true to say that the 1940s were the most peaceful decade of the twentieth century, and one in which all the nations advanced in terms of development and standard of living at a rate that’ll never be equalled again.
Ar, they call it the Naughty Forties, but only in hindsight. Not many folks called it that at the time. The name that people started using around the middle of the decade was The Gay Forties. (Sharp intake of breath from audience) Yes, well, that word meant something different then. Though it is true quite a few of those youth had started experimenting with certain substances.[2] There’s another term that was often used, which is my personal favourite. The Long Hot Summer.
That’s one that’s fallen outta favour. Maybe because some folks took it too literally. I’ve seen punks claim that they called it that ’cause of climate amelioration and the atmosphere getting’ phlogisticated. Codswallop. There were a few guys with high foreheads back then who saw it comin’, not that anyone paid attention to ’em yet, but it certainly wain’t noticeable like.
No, they called it the Long Hot Summer because…I guess that’s how we remember it. You look at any film made then that was set, what’s the word Davey? Contemporary. Set when it’s made, y’know. Or books written at the time, or the great zig-a’-zag hits, like I was sayin’. Look at all them and tell me if you see more than one scene in a hundred where it’s snowin’ outside. ’Xactly. People, especially young people, just had a summer mindset.
What, Davey? Oh ar. Well, one exception I guess. Two. For the same reason. Firstly there was the Combine. Too busy killin’ each other over Alfarus, and then crackin’ down on any kind of artistic freedom. Just making those dull, dreary – whadda they called again? Moralizdiko films.[3] Life under the Eye might as well have been in winter, or in monochrome. Never mind that most of their realm was on the Equator! But no, in the free world it was forever summer. Except Russia – if you count ’em as the free world in that time. Zig-a’-zag was decadent western foreign filth to the Tsar an’ the Orthodox Church. Not that it stopped discs and tapes bein’ smuggled in, of course. Not a lot of summer in Russia, either.
All of it was born from the Thirties, really, of course. The Archies and the Wreckies had been goin’ for a while, and they kept evolvin’. There was an iconoclasm even to the Archies, though. Whereas the Wreckies wanted to tear down society, the Archies started lookin’ back to the classical world with the same damn goal of Carnal Liberation in mind. Both of them were criticisin’ the traditional family for different reasons, but basically it all came down to ‘you can’t tell me whatta do or who I can court’.
Even zig-a’-zag started in the Thirties.
Ar. Technic’ly…
The first zig-a’-zag record, “Kink’s Delight”, was released in 1938 by the Moonlight Trio of Shippingport. Listen to it now and…
It don’t sound much like what we think of as zig-a’-zag, ye ken.
But it was ahead of its time and the roots were there.
Aydub, Davey. So like I said, it all started in the Thirties. But the Forties were different. We’d finished rebuildin’ from the Black Twenties. China had lost its war in Panchala and now returned to engagin’ with the world. There was a whole generation of youth in China who’d opposed the war because their older brothers were gettin’ conscripted, and now they joined the world scene alongside the Archies and Wreckies in Europe and here in the Empire. Writers and bands were gettin’ fascinated with Bisnagi and Indien culture after the whole French political crisis made both of ’em better known. You know the marcheurs de rêve movement in France, that was inspired by the spiritual beliefs of the Indiens in Pérousie. That’s still left traces in French pop music to this day, just as the Tortolians did in zig-a’-zag here.[4]
Not all the elders yelled at the youth to smarten themselves up and stop banging those drums. Some realised that this influence of other cultures dovetailed nicely with the growth of political Diversitarianism. They say even Madame Mercier in France used to go to Rêve concerts, shock society and embarrass her daughter – even if some did say she had cotton wool stuck in her ears. Instead of viewing the influx of cultural influence as a threat, it could be seen as a kind of strengthening against Societism, as well as ensuring those cultures survived. Javanese gamelan music would live on in Araby and Africa thanks to the One-Way Hajj, for instance. I don’t want to condone that, it was a bad business, but my point is that the Societists could not truly eradicate a culture as they had dreamed. Even Tahuantinsuya and Aymara music survived in California.
Ar, Davey. Speaking of California, there’s another thing you were gonna bring up…
Oh yes. Another musical innovation happened there, though it didn’t truly come to fruition till the Fifties. The Californian company AuraTrax was working on ways to adapt the existing sound recording techniques for better film synchronisation. They, along with other companies that produced groovediscs, were struggling because Societist control of most of the Nusantara meant that it had become difficult to import the vital gum-lac used to make the old discs.[5] Several synthetic alternatives were tried, using different types of pseulac, Quite incidentally, they happened to try a variant of the POM already used in groovetapes, and stumbled on a way to fit more grooves on a groovedisc compared to the old gum-lac types. They called them parvogroove, or PG, records. (Audience reaction)
That’s right, the very same ones we still have today, and never bettered, no matter what they say about all this magnetic c – stuff. Back in the day, they called it ‘album on a disc’. See, with the old groovediscs, what were called standard groove or SG in hindsight, those could only get a few minutes of music on, maybe one song each side. An album of music was literally an album, y’know, like a stamp collector’s album, a booklet of sleeves with SG records in. Whereas you could fit that many songs all on one PG disc. We kept callin’ ’em albums, even though it was only one disc and one sleeve. Still do today.[6]
Yes. Ironically, groovetapes had sown the seeds of their own loss in the ongoing format war – for a time, at least. Part of the appeal of groovetapes had always been that they could store more music than groovediscs, but the latter were more, um, visually appealing, er…
Sexier? (Audience laughter)
…if you must put it that way, yes. With longer-playing PG discs, tapes had to take a back seat for home players. The tape companies countered, though, with the portable music revolution.
If you can call it portable! Luggable, more like. Don’t go picturin’ today’s Marathons. We’re talkin’ somethin’ the size of a small briefcase. The idea was you took it a long with you, opened up the case with the speakers, put in a tape and then you could have a party in the park, or anywhere. The early ones were pretty awful. But as speakers and hand-cranked batteries improved, they got better. The first really good one was the Votex Wanderlust-20, which came out, in, help me, Davey…
1943. So a lot of young people had them, right in time for…
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Making of Modern American Politics” by Lady Philippa G. Bidwell, recorded October 21st, 2020—
As much as I will praise President Washborough, I cannot pretend he was perfect or that he always made the right call.[7] It’s remarkable that the Pioneer minority government elected in 1931, under the old system, managed to change so much in such a short time. The reforms of 1932, the movement to MAPR, was unquestionably a good thing for the Empire, especially in the long term. But there were other problems, intractable problems, and Washborough also had to make promises to other parties in order to buy their support for pushing MAPR through. Washborough himself said, ruefully, that no sooner had the Societists taken the problem of Carolina off their hands that now he had to face the problem of Superia. (Audience murmurs) It was dark humour, true.
The big issue was that he’d set a precedent. To put it bluntly, he’d done a deal with Prince Yengalychev that meant that Baranovia got to be an autonomous state like New Ireland, and was made so in 1933. But that begged the question of what to do with Old Panimaha, far too large and nonfunctional, and in 1936 it ended up being split into three, New Navarre, the smaller Panimaha we know today (a few audience cheers) and Superia. That wasn’t the start of the Superia Brushfires but it certainly intensified them, and I think we all know what happened there before it all finally came to an end in 1970. It’s history to a lot of you, but I lived through it – not all of it! (Audience chuckles)
So, yes, President Washborough was still President in 1936, which surprised a lot of people. Nobody had quite been sure what would come of the 1932 reforms. There was a certain assumption that, while the new voting system favoured smaller parties, the fact that the Supremacists were a united force would give them a certain advantage over their opponents, what with the old Liberals having split. But remember the reforms had also included the Representation of the People Act (1932) which had granted universal suffrage at age 21 to everyone, removing the disenfranchisement of young unmarried women. Many of these female voters naturally had grounds to favour the party that had helped them gain a voice, and so the Pioneers rode to another strong minority in 1934, their widespread voter coalition fitting the new voting system well. The Supremacists remained the opposition, with the Liberals in third and the Patriots in fourth. Marley – whichever one you mean – stepped down and the Supremacists chose a new leader, E. C. Edwards. And that’s where the trouble started for them.
As you might be able to tell from the fact that his parents named him after Eustace Clarke, Edwards was born into a hardcore Supremacist family descended from the party’s founding tradition of radicalism, anti-corruption and, frankly, anti-Catholicism and antisemitism. (Audience murmurs) His election, at the contentious Supremacist Party Convention in Milwark, represented an earthquake in the party and the expression of a popular backlash. Since the decline of the Patriots after their discrediting in the aftermath of the Great American War, the Supremacists had absorbed many more mainstream doradist voters and moneyed interests who just opposed the Liberals and saw the Supremacists as a more viable vehicle than the decaying Patriots. By the time of Foxbury, in many ways the Supremacists had become the thing they had been founded to oppose – the establishment. Grassroots anger had been building since the Pandoric War in particular, temporarily assuaged by the small-p populism of Tayloe, but then flaring up again. Even Tayloe had been descended from Virginian aristocrats, if dispossessed ones. A common insulting name for the doradist, establishmentarian Supremacists was ‘Burwellites’, as the old Clarkean party core saw President Lewis Burwell as being the epitome of their party’s infiltration by old-money aristocrats. They were also sometimes called ‘New York Firemen’, a slightly obscure term that may have referenced past factional struggles in that Confederation or city, but more probably reflecting the fact that those firemen had traditionally worn buff-coloured protective coats over blue uniforms. Like the firemen, the Clarkeans contended, the Burwellites were Supremacist buff on the outside but Patriot blue on the inside.
President Washborough and the Pioneers undoubtedly benefited from the Supremacist infighting that followed the election of Edwards. Even as bombs exploded in Les Grandes Fourches – soon to be joined by those in Fredericksburg – the opposition seemed unable to take advantage of the situation. After several disappointing by-election results in 1936, the Burwellites attempted to launch an internal party coup against Edwards. This failed, with Edwards rallying his supporters to march in the streets in protest and called for the expulsion of the Burwellite ringleaders. This was successfully pushed through, but several more moderate Supremacist MCPs also resigned the whip in protest.
In 1938, with an election looming, Dame Eleanor Cross – who had led the Patriots for sixteen years – now made an appeal to the dispossessed doradist Burwellites. She invited them to a conference and made a radical proposal; an alliance. The Burwellite MCPs faced a challenge in being re-elected as independents; though some of them have strong personal votes, the new voting system tended to favour parties over individuals, and they could not no longer call on the war chest or activist base of the Supremacists. Dame Eleanor proclaimed the New Doradist Alliance, whose colours would be blue, buff and red. (Audience murmurs) Naturally, the old traditionalists in her party were shocked by this and called it a betrayal of Patriot principles. For some of them, after she had already supported the move to MAPR, this was the last straw. Three Virginian MCPs, led by James Omohundro, resigned the Patriot whip and proclaimed themselves the Tory Patriots of Virginia. Or TPV. (Audience reaction) Yes. Exactly. They wouldn’t rename themselves the more general ‘Traditional Patriot Voice’ until the 1960s.
The 1939 general election again left the Pioneers as the largest party, but in a more contentious position. With the divided Parliaments that the new voting system was producing, the role of the Emperor was becoming more important again. The convention became that the leader of the largest party was given first opportunity to form a government, but there was the possibility of another President being selected if he or she was unable to. This would leave the Emperor in a difficult position, as he was meant to be above politics. Accordingly, the position of Lord Deputy, which had become a sinecure in some ways now the Emperor resided in Fredericksburg most of the time, suddenly became very significant. In the future, the role of Lord Deputy would be seen as having the primary role of organising government formation negotiations after an election.[8]
Now, the Liberals had replaced their leader, and the new man, Walter Hickham, began a new programme of outreach to voters in Michigan and western New York who had grown discontented with the Brushfires and were repelled by the Supremacist infighting. The Liberals would provide only limited support to the Pioneer government, seeking to force an early election which they thought they could benefit from. Indeed, Parliament was dissolved in 1941 and Hickham ended up as President, with the Pioneers in the junior position. After ten years as President, Washborough stepped down as Pioneer leader in opposition. However, like Madame Mercier in France, he was persuaded to return when fresh elections were called in 1944 after the Summer of Passion. He served as Prime Minister for a second term until 1948 before stepping down once again, this time in favour of Sally Hardwicke. As you all know, Mrs Hardwicke was the Empire’s first female President, though some make a case for Lilian Marley. But Mrs Hardwicke served only until the 1949 election when the NDA, now a more coherent group and led by David Stuart, became the largest party. That’s the irony – a new party built by a woman ends up replacing our first female premier with a man. But that’s the way life works…
*
Extract from recorded lecture “The Naughty Forties: The First Zaggers” by “Debutante” (stage name of Melanie Acker) and David Sanderling, recorded October 22nd, 2020—
In many ways, our popular memories of the period are generalised from the summer of 1944, known as the Summer of Passion. This was genuinely burning hot across most of the Empire, China, and to a lesser extent Europe. There was widespread drought. China in particular, which five years earlier had had too much water in its devastating floods, now had too little. The streets were full of angry young men and women demanding action. Emperor Shengjian had empowered the One Hundred and Eight Mandators as a ploy to seize power, but in doing so he’d set a dangerous precedent. He now found himself forced to deal with something increasingly resembling a parliament. Not all his randomly-selected peasant representatives were easily bribed or intimidated. For the first time, important Chinese politicians began to emerge from the proletariat, both urban and rural.[9]
Ooh ar, aydub Davey, but enough about that. Look, if the Chinese wanted water, here in the Empire the demand was for Freeborn Rights. Magna Carta Nova. Washborough had gotten young women the vote, fair enough, but there was much more to do. Zig-a’-zag, real authentic zig-a’-zag, brung – brought – folks together. Not like the Societists, not like the moral guardians of the old establishment claimed, but the opposite. Celebratin’ the cultures that had survived, the folks who’d escaped Societist rule as they tried to preserve their way o’ life while dwellin’ in a foreign land, to them, our fair Empire.
‘Authentic’ zig-and-zag. Yes. That’s a contentious one...
Go on, Davey, tell ’em, you know I get all het up when I talk about it.
Er, very well, er, Miss Acker. (Audience titters in background) So, um, zig-and-zag music became popular all over the free world by the mid-1940s. There were bands in England, France, Siam, China, even Bisnaga playing zig-and-zag music...
What they say is zig-a’-zag music...
Um, yes. That’s the contention. Ah – purists claim that it’s only ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ zig-and-zag if it’s from the Empire, where the musical traditions of different races and cultures flowed together and created something new. And that all the others are just copying them, but it’s, ah, it’s hollow and has no heart to it. Sometimes they say it only counts if it’s from Ohio...
Even I say that’s goin’ too far, Davey. Look, in my book, to be real zig-a’-zag it’s got to come from a mixin’ of traditions, like you just said. But it don’t have to be those in Ohio. They have their own zig-a’-zag in Cygnia, f’r’instance, but they call it Rattlewhine. They mixed the Rattlebang style from New York immigrants who went there after the Black Twenties, with the music of the indigenous Indien peoples. You know, the maquo.[10] Pérousie has something similar but mixed with old French folk music. The Arab Federation has Aljawia, which mixes the gamelan music of Javanese refugee settlers with the local styles. Even somewhere like England has Bristol Soul, which is a mix of English, Welsh and Natalese music. Those are all forms of the zig-a’-zag idea under another name. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, flowering faster than the Sanchezistas can uproot. Ensurin’ they can never force a homog – what’s that word – sameness on us. Always somethin’ new.
Now what isn’t real zig-a’-zag is when they just copy old 1940s Ohio zig-a’-zag with no understanding of where it came from, jus’ because they like the sound of it. That’s crowdin’ out their own authentic sounds for copyin’ someone else, and that’s almost as big a crime as what the Societists do. (Sharp intake of breath from audience) That’s jus’ my tuppence.
Right...well, before we start a riot (relieved chuckles from audience) we should move on. Where was I...1944 and the Summer of Passion. It was a time of riot and rebellion in many lands, but of course we first think of what happened here in the Empire. There were plenty of causes. As the economy boomed, businesses began recruiting extensively from refugees and immigrants as a pool of cheap labour that were mostly not unionised and did not ask awkward questions. There had been one big wave of refugees fleeing the Societists after the Black Twenties, but the Silent Revolution down south was prompting more. Mexico, Guatemala and California also struggled to cope with the influx of people, but there was a distinction. Spanish-speaking people from places like Cuba might choose them, but all three – even California – were not considered especially welcoming to black refugees from Jamaica, Cuba or Carolina. Nor was the Empire as a whole, but refugees knew of places like Africa Nova where the rules were different. And, of course, it was easier to get across the land border from Carolina, especially when the Societists stripped the border guard to have more warm bodies to fight in their pointless civil wars...
Sure. When we look upon it with a Diversitarian eye, y’know, we can say all these folks were bringin’ all these wonderful styles of music with ’em. And the stories and lyrics that went with ’em. I’m a zig-a’-zag forever girl as you’ll have gathered, (audience chuckles) but there were others too. We all know the lammens, for one.
Yes, the lammens, derived from ‘Lamentations’ as in the Biblical book. Also sometimes called the blue devils and the life dozens, but lammens is the term most people know. Black people in Carolina, and in other forms in other lands with slavery, had been developing that musical style for years, and a lot of it can be traced all the way back to Guinea, which was relevant, as we’ll get to. It drew on church music and work chants from the plantations and plenty of other influences, but it was always sorrowful in tone, lamenting the state that those people were born into.[11] There are characteristic chord progressions and flattened notes that you’d recognise if you heard them...
Ooh ar Davey, if you carry on talkin’ like a professor you’ll kill the spirit of it, or so they tell me. (Audience chuckles) I’m not a lammens singer but I’ll acknowledge the great influence that lammens had on zig-a’-zag, while also survivin’ in its own right. Like I said, we can look at it as this great cultural bounty. But that’s not how folk saw it at the time.
No. People were concerned about their livelihoods, about losing their jobs to cheap non-union labour. Mentianism had collapsed after the Black Twenties and instead unions mostly turned to the Pioneer Party. But President Washborough had to try to juggle those interests with others. And all the unions weren’t on the same side, either. The Soloprintists of North America, which was the biggest women-dominated union, were often at odds with the United Miners of the Empire, for instance. Dealing with the mass waves of strikes that began to cripple the nation in 1944 was no small or simple matter.
Sure. But enough politics. People were angry. Workers were angry about their jobs allegedly bein’ taken. The immigrants were angry that the police weren’t protectin’ them from mob so-called justice. Black and Tortolian athletes had won laurels for the Empire at the Global Games but then were denied entry to hotels and clubs. Sometimes zig-a’-zag brung – brought folks together, but people are idiots and it didn’t always work like that. You could have a fella dance to zig-a’-zag in the club and then punch the dude who wrote the song in the street on the way home ’cause he was black. Bein’ black, bein’ red, bein’ Catholic, all made you a target.
Of course, the ones who had it worst were the white Carolinians. They did have the advantage that they could pass for white Americans to look at. But as soon as they opened their mouths, unless they made an effort to change their accents, they would be immediately denounced as traitors, collaborators, infiltrators. In smaller towns plenty of them were hanged in the street in full view of the police, who looked the other way.
Not sure everyone would agree they had it worst, Davey. But it was rough for everyone. The politicians couldn’t seem to fix it, so with that summer heat of ’44, all the young folk were on the streets demanding a better way...
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Making of Modern American Politics” by Lady Philippa G. Bidwell, recorded October 21st, 2020—
After the tumultuous election of 1944, President Washborough returned to power. It seemed he was in an impossible situation, tasked with fixing a bitterly divided nation with burning cities, closed factories and Governors who had called in the Confederal Guard to break up protests.
In the end, he probably did better than most would have. He did manage to change the law to help ensure that workers would be unionised and protected no matter where they were from. He benefited from the fact that he could always resort to Black Scare tactics of blaming Societist infiltrators, even though we now know that the Empire was one of the least-penetrated nations on Earth, as Alfarus had sacrificed all his Agendes in the War of 1926. But so long as the worst of the excesses, whether from unions, migrant militias or Guardsmen, could be dismissed as the work of the Societist enemy within, it was possible to address concerns on all sides to a limited extent. Nobody was ever quite happy, and as I said, he stepped down in 1948 so that the government could try to draw a line under the controversies. But nonetheless, Washborough had now been responsible now for not one but two major periods of reform; one constitutional in 1932, the other social in 1944.
Freeborn Rights was the central plank of Washborough’s platform; that all within the ENA, no matter how they had entered it, were fundamentally entitled to the same rights and liberties of freeborn Englishmen that her people had always inherited, no matter their origins. At the same time, those rights could only be recognised if the people reciprocated them with responsibilities and formed a covenant with the Crown. Partly this consisted of being part of the system of Imperial taxation, which had always been a contentious matter in American politics. Washborough’s reforms also defined particular unions as the only legal representatives of workers in their respective industries and required companies to provide space for union liaison representation to their boards of directors.
This radical move, the Covenant System, is often considered emblematic of the ‘American Miracle’, not only of the remainder of the 1940s but also the period of renewed economic growth after the Sunrise War, and was much-copied elsewhere. We often forget that it was also controversial. Washborough had empowered certain existing unions, often merely reflecting a de facto situation that one union had grown through merges to dominate a particular industry (like the UME), but sometimes making a rather strategic selection that deliberately suppressed those unions that were more problematic for the government. His system also made it impossible for new rival breakaway unions to be founded if the existing union leadership was suborned by the corporate establishment, which would frequently prove to be a problem. The Covenant System has also been accused of suppressing technological innovation in the Empire, as existing unions had an incentive to use their power to prevent the growth of new industries – whose workers were not yet protected by a state-defined union – if they represented a potential threat to their own power. That remains a contentious question, though. In my view, and that of my party, the Covenant System has sadly been undermined by NDA- and Supremacist-led governments, but I would say that, wouldn’t I? (Audience chuckles)
In addition to this, and more controversially today, the system permitted groups of people from common cultures to partially self-govern, while still enjoying those same Freeborn Rights. This was an awkward compromise to try to meet the demands of Tortolian groups, though it would be far from a true resolution to the Superia Brushfires. Laws intended to apply to Tortolian nations within the Empire, however, would also be employed by groups of migrants in large cities. Particular areas of Mount-Royal, New York City, Philadelphia, Chichago and many others had frequently been effectively taken over by waves of refugees and the existing inhabitants had moved out. Now, under the new laws, those parts of the cities could be defined as belonging to Catholics, black people, Tortolians or others, who could unofficially elect their own community mayors and have reserved aldermen on city councils. Sometimes this system could be advantageous, but it often led to corruption, Imperial law de facto not applying within the bounds of those ‘quarters’ as they became known, and other abuses. As you probably know, the Supremacists railed against what they called ‘American ghettoes’, evoking the separate status of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and claimed Washborough had demolished American freedoms rather than democratising them.
I should say that this was also the era in which older terms such as Negro, Papist and Indian (Audience murmurs) were first widely recognised as outdated and replaced, at least theoretically, with black and red in a racial sense, or Tortolian in a broader sense of identity. ‘Coloured’ or ‘gentlemen and ladies of colour’ was sometimes used as a collective term for ‘non-white’ but that’s considered outdated in turn today. There were a number of attempts to create a similar term for black people in the Empire, but these struggled with the fact that the Empire’s black people were drawn from a range of origins and identities. Ultimately they were all descended from Africans, but terms involving the word ‘African’ were also contentious. Black Freeborn Rights organisations in the ENA, such as the League of Black Voters, were frequently influenced by visiting speakers from Freedonia and Guinea’s Grand Palaver, who were sometimes portrayed as a link back to African authenticity. Some other black representatives, including many of the existing black MCPs from Africa Nova and Haiti, contended that black Americans enjoyed their own distinct identity and Freedes had no more moral right to tell them what to do than white Americans did.
That one remains controversial. But under the new system, offices that had – informally – been reserved for white Protestants were increasingly accessible to black, red and Catholic subjects. The situation varied from place to place, of course. Cygnia was probably the slowest to shift, due to its distance and the fact that Indien Freeborn Rights organisations fighting for indigenous people were as yet less developed than their Tortolian counterparts; that would have to wait until the 1970s. The Williamite League which facilitated Protestant supremacy, though increasingly challenged in its old heartlands of New England, also tended to exclude Catholics from government in Cygnia and Michigan, among other places. Drakesland was the only part of the Empire where Orthodox subjects were considered the most inherently suspicious, and often ‘encouraged’ to up sticks and move to Baranovia. I could list a thousand more caveats that undermined and delayed Washborough’s achievements. But nonetheless, the law had changed and increasingly the rights of all subjects of the Septentrian Crown began to be recognised – and enforced – on equal footing.
At the turn of the twentieth century, America had undoubtedly and unquestionably been a country that was run by and for white Protestant men. Other groups – white Protestant women, Catholics, Tortolians, black people – were merely resident in someone else’s country. Like the servants in a grand household, beneath notice, to be quickly dismissed by the writer of ratiocinic fiction as suspects lest they displeasingly multiply the list of characters that the reader had to keep track of. Not quite people. Few explicitly put it that way, but that was the mindset. It hardly changed overnight in 1944 thanks to the Covenant System and other reforms. But the Empire had reached a turning point.
The fact that Washborough defined the new system in terms of its relationship to the Crown is significant. The role of the monarchy was evolving, as our flexible constitution permits it to as the world changes. As I said before, the introduction of MAPR and the increasing commonality of multi-party governments made the stability of a nonpartisan head of state to mediate to be all the more vital. Emperor Augustus was still very much from the old tradition. Even though the Emperor had lived primarily in Fredericksburg for many decades by this point, American political culture was still used to thinking of him as a more distant figure. Emperors had never been crowned on American soil, merely enthroned following their formal coronation at Westminster Abbey in England. Due to the controversial and awkward circumstances under which Augustus had succeeded to the throne following George IV’s abdication, he had underwent a hastily-Americanised version of the ceremony behind closed doors. Some early and tentative plans for how to modernise and further Americanise the monarchy had been shelved when the 1925 Silver Jubilee was cancelled due to the plague. Augustus did, unusually, instead hold a Ruby Jubilee in 1940, which some define as the real start of the so-called ‘Naughty Forties’. However, many of the traditions employed were still too associated with England and it was clear that further work was needed if the monarchy was to reconnect with the American people and they were to accept the monarch’s increasingly active political role.
Now, it was clear that the Emperor was in decline after he suffered a stroke in 1946. Augustus had no male children and his heir, according to law, was his daughter Mildred. In recognition of her status as heir apparent, she had been made not merely Princess Imperial but also Princess of Cygnia and Duchess of Cornubia.[13] Mildred was thirty-six years old at the time of her father’s passing in 1949, mere months before his planned Golden Jubilee, and was the first monarch to not even remember a time when the Hanoverian Dominions had been united. This was a clear opportunity to draw a line under the troubles of the past and embrace a new, truly American, Imperial Crown.
There is much debate about precisely when the so-called Naughty Forties ended. Despite wobbles, the economic good times would not truly conclude until the Crash of 1956. Some point to the shocking launch of Dedalo-1 by Romulan Italy in March 1950 as the end of the feeling of a decade of endless summer, for good and ill. Others, however, propose the coronation of Empress Mildred in August 1949, three months after her father’s death. A new Americanised ceremony, based on the English original, was drawn up and carried out in St Piran’s Cathedral in Fredericksburg. The oaths were rewritten to refer to the Empire and all her Confederations. The oil of anointing was derived from olives grown in Cygnia on American soil. A role, somewhat controversially, was put in place for Tortolian representatives and their own traditions. In addition to new and Americanised versions of the traditional crown, orb and sceptre (made of Drakesland gold and prominently including Cygnian opals, Hamilton amethysts and Charlotte sapphires and rubies), Empress Mildred was presented with the new Coronation Wampum Belt, with shells each inscribed with symbols from the Tortolian peoples of the Empire. This innovation was criticised not only by many white traditionalists, but also by plenty of Tortolians, who felt that it represented an implicit recognition of the Crown’s ownership of their old lands, as well as wampum belts being a regional tradition that was not representative of all Tortolian nations. Nonetheless, it has stuck around in coronations to this day, with additions representing Tlingit and Indien totems.
The coronation was, in general, a great success. America had her first Empress Regnant and it was the first time that a woman had reigned over the country since Queen Anne two and a half centuries before. Pageantry dominated Fredericksburg for a week and there were widespread celebrations in cities across the country, with new traditions being invented. Most workers were given three days off, an action that could be coordinated especially well thanks to the Covenant System, I might add. But there were rumours, spread by the more unscrupulous Supremacist and NDA newspapers, that the new ceremony would disestablish the Church in America and remove the requirement for a Protestant succession. Of course, this was always absurd, because that is impossible to change except by Act of Parliament. Even after the Coronation was held and the nation celebrated as it never had before, the lie somehow lived on, and was undoubtedly partly responsible for the election of the NDA-led government of David Stuart in November 1949. I could also point to that as the true end of the good times. But again, I would say that, wouldn’t I...
[1] Augmentophones, i.e. electric microphones.
[2] (Sgt Mumby’s note) It took us a while to figure it out, but apparently in this timeline the word ‘gay’ has taken on a similar meaning to ‘high (on drugs)’ in OTL. Presumably because stoned people act very carefree, joyous, reckless, in the original meaning of the word. Judging by how people react here, it’s a bit more taboo than ‘high’ is to us, though, I can’t imagine anyone in TTL saying they were ‘high on life’ or something without raising eyebrows.
[3] See Part #287 in Volume VIII.
[4] The term ‘pop music’ is an obvious parallel evolution, being the natural abbreviation of ‘popular music’.
[5] Gum-lac is the TTL term for shellac – see Part #256 in Volume VII.
[6] This is similar (though not identical – the details of the formats are different) to the OTL replacement of 78 records by LPs (long-playing records). In OTL these were developed by Columbia in 1948, the term used being the similar ‘microgroove’. ‘Albums’ evolved in much the same way in OTL as described here, a natural parallel evolution given the pre-existing term.
[7] This segment follows on from that quoted in Part #304, but not directly, so as not to repeat material covered in Part #309.
[8] I.e. the Lord Deputy has become the formateur or informateur, to use the terminology popular in the Low Countries in OTL.
[9] This isn’t strictly true, as there had been plenty of storied ways in which people from those backgrounds had entered positions of power in China historically (e.g. as soldiers turned warlords, eunuchs or concubines turned court power brokers, etc.) The speaker here is not an expert.
[10] ‘Maquo’ is the commonly used term in TTL for didgeridoo, derived from the word used by the Binij aboriginal pdeople via French. See Part #255 in Volume VII for the 1900s Rattlebang music of New York, which was one of several styles to emerge from the popularity of groovediscs and groovetapes.
[11] While the details are different, this is the same tradition that became the blues in OTL.
[12] One of the most unlikely OTL linguistic revivals of modern times is the rebirth of ‘people of colour’ as an accepted term, which was in widespread usage during the late eighteenth century during debates over the abolition of the slave trade. In TTL it has not (yet) been revived.
[13] Another example of the hasty and awkward Americanisation of the monarchy in 1900 alluded to earlier in the text, following the breakaway of England and Scotland under Frederick III. The heir to the throne of the ENA now takes the invented titles of Prince of Cygnia and Duke of Cornubia. The latter does not refer to any real place, but is an allusion to the old title of Duke of Cornwall and the fact that the Latinised form ‘Cornubia’ is frequently used in the ENA thanks to the days of Frederick I’s exile. ‘Princess Imperial’ is a simple rebranding of ‘Princess Royal’.
One-way Hajj indicates that a significant number of Muslims from Africa and Indonesia fled Societist Zones by traveling to Mecca and not returning.
Question is was this done on their own initiative or did the Combine encourage this migration to remove the more unruly religious element of the locals?
Question is was this done on their own initiative or did the Combine encourage this migration to remove the more unruly religious element of the locals?
This was mentioned in a previous part - many refugiados from the Nusantara fled to South-East Asia, and when the nations there started having political issues regarding refugees, one solution that was used was that the government bought them all tickets to go on the Hajj, but didn't pay for the return journey.