Part #258: A Land Fit for Heroes
“...Nin Nin Four. New transmission. Barking Barking Six, at Gold Dolphin, requests Pimlico Abbey Rainham One. Repeat, Pimlico Abbey Rainham One. To be delivered to Gold Dolphin. Orpington One Two confirms...yes, of course it’s authorised! ”
–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel
*
From: Motext Pages EX124L-P [retrieved 22/11/19].
Remarks: These pages are listed under “SAAX History Revision: Syllabus B”.
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
History isn’t like subjects like Maths, where usually an equation has only one solution. Maths deals with an idealised, human-created, simplified version of reality, not reality itself. It’s a useful tool, but anything that only yields one possible answer can never reflect the complexity of the world we live in. If you study Science subjects, you’ll know that there isn’t one ‘correct’ way of looking at a problem, but multiple different models that were constructed using maths tools. None of them give unambiguously the ‘right’ answer, but some will be a more appropriate way of looking at the situation than others, depending on what the problem is.
You’ll find that history questions are often structured in a deceptively brief and simple way, to test whether you understand this principle. If you see a 45-minute essay question that looks like it can be answered in one line, then beware—you’ve not understood it!
For example, let’s take a look at the example question below, from North American Political History:
“Was the Faulker Presidency a success?”
What a devilishly vague question! A success according to whom? By what metrics?
You may have already realised that this question has deliberately chosen a subject where a ‘simple, unambiguous’ answer circulates through the public consciousness, especially in the ENA itself but also elsewhere. The Faulkner Presidency is widely regarded as a disaster. Indeed, even those who will defend President Faulkner today often seem to be doing so more out of a sense of obligation, to promote a healthy diversity of opinions, than because they truly believe Faulkner met with success. But just what is ‘success’?
The widespread view is formed on the basis that priority number one of any government in the 1900s, especially that of the ENA, should have been to oppose Societism and the Combine. But we must be careful not to be anachronistic. Very few people in the 1900s predicted that the Combine would become the level of threat to the civilised world that it eventually became. The American voters who elected the government certainly did not regard it as a priority; nor did they five years later when called upon to vote again. We might as well criticise George II for exiling Frederick the First when he should have been planning how to respond if France suffered a revolution decades later. The only reason this does not seem as absurd as that example is because the Combine already existed during Faulkner’s time in office; but the Combine of the 1900s was not the Combine of the 1920s.
Another reason to regard Faulkner’s presidency as a failure (highlighted by American nationalists) is the retreat from overseas empire at that time. But, again, was Faulkner a man to regard the amount of land coloured in on a map as the top priority for a leader? For that matter, did American voters think so?
Instead, let’s look at the priorities that Faulkner himself espoused, and judge his presidency by how successful he was in accomplishing those. To do this, we need to consider his own biography.
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Lewis Faulkner was born in St Lewis, then in western Virginia, in 1854, months after the Armistice which ended the Great American War.[1] His father Robert, a successful carpenter and joiner, was a staunch Supremacist. He had been a strong opponent of Henry Frederick Owens-Allen’s rule as Governor. He was also outraged by the election of the Patriot ‘Peace Government’, which he (like other opponents) referred to as the Capitulation Government. He named his son after Lewis Studebaker, impressed by the fiery speech which the then-obscure Pennsylvanian businessman had given at the Supremacist Convention. Ironically, Lewis Faulkner’s future political opponent, Lewis Burwell, would also be named for Studebaker, illustrating how much impact the speech had had.
Robert Faulkner and his wife Mildred decided to move on to pastures new in 1856. As part of Francis Bassett’s desperate, futile push for ‘normalcy’ in the dying days of the Peace Government, economic incentives were provided to encourage northerners to move to the ‘redeemed’ portions of pre-war Carolina under American rule. The eastern provinces remained unstable and seething with hostility (exemplified by the Infernal Device Rage of 1857, in which bombs were mailed to numerous MCPs by a terror group based in Martinople[2]). However, the western provinces, largely inhabited by Carolinians without much connection to the institution of slavery (some of whom had even been Imperial loyalists) looked more attractive.
Robert was very receptive to the ‘self-evident birthright’ pro-western settlement rhetoric of the Supremacists (and some Liberal) and saw the former Carolinian western provinces as a land of opportunity. He and his family moved to Coppertown, Gualpa,[3] and he was able to set up his own business. Robert had wisely seized the moment; a year later, the Supremacists would be elected, and soon afterwards (with Liberal help) would redraw the map of North America. Gualpa would no longer be part of a rump loyal Carolina, but a province of the new Confederation of Westernesse. It was this which Lewis identified with as he grew up.
The young Lewis grew up in this land of opportunity, and saw both its promise and its flaws. It was a land where a man like his father could rise from humble beginnings to achieve wealth and security; but it was also a land where the less fortunate immigrants, gambling desperately on a second chance, could find themselves stuck down a mine, working for a pittance on a job that was slowly poisoning them.
Lewis initially worked for his father’s business and then, after some part-time education at one of the new Provincial Colleges set up under Michael Chamberlain, made his name as a country accountant and lawyer. Biographers generally consider this to be the reason why Lewis chose to enter politics as a Liberal rather than a Supremacist like his father. He remained a lifelong admirer of Chamberlain and, in interviews, would always cite him as the greatest President of the ENA, over legendary figures like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. “Our children can learn of the exploits of those great men on the pages of their schoolbooks,” Faulkner explained in 1891, “but the reason why they can read them—why they have schoolbooks—why they have a schoolroom to read them in—is Mr Chamberlain!”
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Lewis was forming his own political ideology as he worked throughout the 1870s and early 1880s. He felt that the Supremacists had moved too far away from their original ‘American Supremacy’ views, and that they had been infiltrated by many aristocratic former Patriots due to the decline and reinvention of the old Patriot Party. Indeed, his future opponent Lewis Burwell definitely fell into this category. Lewis regarded the Supremacists of the 1880s, men like Henry Foxbury, as being purely generic doradists, and too close to the east coast Arc of Power establishment.
By contrast, he felt there was room inside the Liberal Party to speak up for the interests of western Americans, a constituency that dated back to the tradition of the old Neutral and Democratic Parties. Unlike some of his ideological predecessors, who had practised anti-Godwinist,[4] devil-take-the-hindmost attitudes, Lewis considered it his duty to speak for the poor and less fortunate as well as the stereotypical hardy frontiersmen. As a lawyer, he was known for taking cases “pro bono” when the plaintiff was poor and disadvantaged, as in the case of miners mistreated by the powerful Gualpa mining corporations. His political enemies accused of him doing so purely as a publicity stunt, but this won him great popularity with the people of Gualpa. The corporations often appointed expensive (and more capable) Harvard lawyers from the East, and Lewis became notorious for his habit of emotively appealing to the (local) juries and attacking his opposite numbers as stuffy outsiders. In this he formed part of a longstanding American tradition, which may be described as anti-elitism or anti-intellectualism depending on where one stands.
Lewis moved to the capital of Pinckney[5] in 1881 and continued to rise in prominence. Active in his local chapter of the Liberal Party, he put his name forward for the Westernesse confederal elections of 1883 and, to his own surprise, was elected. He found himself in St Lewis, the city in which he had been born, now the capital of Westernesse. The confederal Liberals had won the election, and despite his freshman status, Lewis found himself appointed to the Confederal Cabinet as Councillor for the Treasury.[6] He won the notice of Arc of Power newspapers when his investigations exposed a bipartisan case of embezzling and corruption which had taken place under the former confederal government. This did not win him many friends among the confederal Liberals, who hastily suggested he run for Imperial office in the 1885 general election to carefully remove him from the scene.
Lewis indeed ran and won election as one of Gualpa’s provincial MCPs. Ironically, he entered Parliament just as his hero Chamberlain retired from it, and the Liberals lost power to Foxbury’s Supremacists on the Imperial level. Lewis was not considered senior enough to appoint as an opposition Critic by new Liberal leader Dennis Cooper, but he nonetheless made a splash on the Fredericksburg scene. With charisma and rhetoric, he spoke on many topics in the Continental Parliament, critical of the Supremacist Government on most issues, but defending them on the seizure of the “Lionheart” from Great Britain in 1886. A year later, the shaky Supremacist minority would collapse, and Lewis found himself speaking for President Cooper’s Government instead.
It was during these debates where Lewis codified his views and principles to the public. These are the same views and principles you’ll need to know to answer the question we started with. What would Lewis Faulkner “himself” consider to be a success or failure for an American Imperial Government?
In 1888, during a (brief) period of mutual sabre-rattling with the Orantes government in the UPSA, Lewis called for peace and a continuation of prosperity, rather than spending money on doubling the number of lionhearts ordered from the shipyards over what might just be a rumour of a Meridian buildup. (Indeed, it turned out to be one, strengthening his case). His stance was criticised by Thomas Gedney, Supremacist Critic for War, who accused Lewis of espousing Bassettite Patriot-like ‘peace at any cost’ views.
Lewis angrily retorted that Bassett had stood for ‘peace born of weakness and insecurity; but war born of weakness and insecurity is little better. Let this country, the greatest country in the world, speak from a position of strength and security, a security born of the prosperity of the American people. ... If we must induce one of the Seven Deadly Sins among the lesser nations of the terraqueous globe, let it not be wrath, but envy! Why should we fear the Meridian people, or any people, calling on their government to build engines of war to attack us—when they should be demanding their government spend that money on raising their own standard of living to that which is the birthright of all Americans? Their pensions, their schools, their colleges, their free hospitals.[7] So long as America remains the envy of the world, why should she fear attack?’
Lewis’ speech was criticised as naïve even at the time, but struck a chord with many ordinary Americans. Prior to that time, the issue had often been characterised as a simple binary choice—raise taxes to build lineships, or view taxes as an outrageous imposition that should always be kept low. The idea that taxes should be raised to fund more Chamberlain-style social programmes had not been codified in the context of the present debate. In the short term, this probably hurt the Liberals, as Cooper did not strictly endorse Lewis’ position, and the Mentian Party capitalised on the public feeling raised instead. The Liberals would go on to lose the 1892 general election to Stuart Jamison’s Supremacists.
At no point before the Pandoric War was Lewis Faulkner appointed as either a Minister or Critic, in government or in opposition. At first seen as too junior, he was now regarded as a dangerous loose cannon, but one too popular to quash. There was a powerful ‘Faulknerite’ faction growing within the Liberal Party that must be appeased if Cooper (and then his successor Michael Briars) wanted to form the next government. Lewis won back some more support from the stuffy mainstream of his party in 1894, when he was serving on the Parliamentary Fisheries Committee. Amid a dispute between New England fishermen based out of the Kingdom of Iceland and their Scandinavian counterparts, Lewis found a legal loophole that allowed a settlement that both sides could agree to. What might have been a minor war scare was smoothed over. President Jamison also felt that Lewis was a man he could work with, as a result of this. When the Pandoric War broke out in 1896, Lewis played a role in the formation of the War Coalition government between the Supremacists and Liberals.
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Scarcely had the war began when Lewis put a foot wrong. His rhetoric at this time led observers, those previously unfamiliar with his career, to see him as a Patriot-like irredentist who wanted to reclaim Carolina for the Empire at any cost. They noted that he was from a formerly Carolinian province (Gualpa) and sometimes regarded him as a crypto-Carolinian viper in the bosom of the Empire. He was also often regarded as arrogant and egotistical, not least by establishment Arc of Power politicians who looked down on his humble background. Satirical magazine “The Wiener”[8] once captioned a caricature of him as “MR FAULKNER, who, on days when he is feeling especially well-disposed towards the World, may occasionally concede that he is only the “SECOND” Greatest Man whose Mother was Married to a Carpenter.”
However, in the words of Lewis’ acquaintance (and professional diamondball player) Joseph ‘Joe’ Holliday, he ‘did not care two figs for the fate of everyone in Carolina, be they black, white or green. He only cared about America, protecting America so Americans could prosper’. Lewis was privately against the war, seeing it as at best a distraction, but if it must take place, he saw it as an opportunity to eliminate threats to his idealised America. This meant ejecting other powers from the continent of North America, or subduing them as vassals. Beyond that, and perhaps protecting the Confederation of Cygnia, he cared not for the outcome of the war. Lewis was always fairly open that he felt no sense of loyalty to the mother country of Great Britain; he wrote that the seizure of the “Lionheart” had been ‘no different from seizing a valuable coal seam from Natives too Foolish and Weak to defend and exploit it’. Equally, he saw the overseas empire as a drain and a distraction. ‘Its alleged wealth has never trickled down to ordinary Americans, who instead are called upon to pay taxes to defend it’. He regarded trade with Bengal, Guinea and Natal as being a rich Arc of Power man’s game, and Venezuela as being nothing more than a card to be dealt or discarded as part of a geopolitical power play.
Lewis therefore saw the first priority of the war as being to finally reconquer Carolina and deny it to the Meridians as a forward base that could threaten America via a land border. He felt that any strategy that would accelerate this process was worth trying, especially as he thought (optimistically) that the war might peter out and be stopped only a few months in. If that did take place, he wanted to ensure that the tentacles of the Meridian octopus wrapped around the rattlesnake’s throat (in his words) had at least been hacked off.[9] Knowing that white Carolinians had been unhappy with the Meridian yoke for decades, he pushed a propaganda offensive (together with John Wyatt and Albert Babington of the ‘One Carolina Movement’) suggesting that the ENA would ‘restore the historic privileges’ of those whites. Which in practice would be interpreted as allowing slavery to return.
Lewis had no intention of actually following through on this promise, of course, fully intending to ruthlessly go back on his word when Carolina was surrendered by its eager white populace. He did, at this point, hope that Carolina would be readmitted as a Confederation, but only comprised of its current land area. The OCM, on the other hand, were Patriots who wanted to restore Carolina to its traditional borders (including Gualpa) and perhaps even reverse the 1850s Reforms altogether, returning to the ENA to its ‘Original Five Perfect Confederations’.
The propaganda offensive badly backfired, with white Carolinians thoroughly untrusting of any pronouncement by those they had been raised to regard as demons in human flesh, and black Carolinians thoroughly alienated by this. It is thought that some early ENA offensives may even have been sabotaged by black American groups from Africa Nova[10] out of fear sparked by the propaganda. Jamison, who had reluctantly signed off on the proposals, turned on Faulkner and exiled him to the poisoned chalice job of ‘Minister for Carolina’. John Wyatt was appointed to head up the ‘Wyatt Plan’ for how to administer the ‘liberated’ parts of Carolina, which was seen as taking him away from his role in the OCM.
However, both Lewis and Wyatt proved to be too good at their jobs, helped by the fact that Carolina was conquered faster than expected, and that Cyrus Wragg was captured in November 1897 and appointed as a plausible puppet Governor. A band of rebels in Tallahassee claimed to be protecting the son of King William V Daniel (who had been assassinated in Ultima earlier that year), Prince John William. Whether the boy in question was really the Prince of Jamaica[11] or not remains a matter for debate, as chaos had reigned in the immediate aftermath of his father’s assassination. The rebels were defeated by forces sent by Wyatt and the boy captured, thereafter to become a pawn in other people’s games.
Following the disaster of the Scientific Attack and the Third Glorious Revolution, Americans went to the polls and punished the Supremacists who had led the war government. The Liberals’ position was more complex, making small net gains at the expense of the Supremacists, but also losing seats to a rising Mentian Party, independents, and even a resurgent Patriot party. Though Michael Briars had been the party’s
de jure leader, Lewis had impressed his party’s caucus, and it was he who gained the chance to form a Government from the depressed, soon-to-abdicate Emperor George IV.
The Liberals had too few seats to realistically form a minority government, and both Lewis and the Supremacists had no desire to resume the wartime coalition. Instead, Lewis approached both the Patriots and Mentians, two parties whose aims might seem contradictory, and managed to create a shaky but workable government based on support from both simultaneously. This was possible for two, very personal, reasons. Firstly, the Mentian leader Ernest Newman—newly appointed, as they had only just gained major party status—was an admirer of Lewis’ fighting for pensions and workers’ rights within the Liberals. Secondly, the Patriots had appointed John Wyatt as leader due to him gaining popularity for his work in Carolina. With good personal relationships on both sides, Lewis managed to govern.
The Supremacists, after the resignation of Lewis Burwell VII and the election of Thomas Gedney in his place, criticised the ramshackle and ideologically incoherent nature of Lewis’ government. Lewis, however, had an answer for them. In his maiden speech as President, he described his government as a ‘Social American Coalition’, and outlined an ideology which history has called Social Americanism. This largely consisted of simply codifying his own existing views: that the purpose of government was to ensure its people enjoyed both economic opportunity and protection, and that foreign policy was relevant only in that foreign powers might pose an external threat to those things. ‘If we shall name ourselves patriots’, Lewis gestured to Wyatt on his right, ‘then let it not simply be because we happen to be born on the soil of a nation, but because we can point to the
evidence that that nation is truly the greatest in the world, that its people,’ he gestured to Newman on his left, ‘are the happiest and most secure’.
Social Americanism has been a controversial ideology within the American political landscape for the past fifty years and more. There are many who would not disagree with most of its tenets, who nonetheless feel the need to say they reject it. Partly this is because Lewis’ appeal to objective evidence of greatness (such as well-funded pensions and schools) feels outdated in the modern world of knowingly subjective supremacy in nationalism; partly it is simply because ‘Social’ looks similar to ‘Societist’. Mostly, however, it is because of its very association with Lewis himself and his presidency.
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The new Government had a number of conflicting priorities, and it is a measure of Lewis’ political skill that he was able to keep it together, like a juggler keeping several plates in the air at once. Lewis initially benefited from lack of opposition outside his party, with the Supremacists still reeling and the new Emperor Augustus finding his feet. Many decisions that would set the stage for the twentieth century, and have repercussions even into this one, were taken by Lewis almost by default at this point. Trying to get his complex coalition to do anything was difficult and required political capital, meaning that Lewis had a tendency to default to doing nothing when it was on an issue he cared little about.
Hence Venezuela was abandoned (with the Societists’ blood money accepted almost in passing—Lewis would likely have abandoned it even without this) and Lewis always referred to Princess Daniela, a popular society figure in exile in Fredericksburg, only as ‘Danielle Stonor’. Hence Bengal fell into native Bengali hands by means of a stock transaction, with only military ties retained, and much the same (albeit with more of a continuing role for white directors) occurred in Guinea. Hence Natal, which had even been nationalised by the American Imperial Government in the 1880s (a move criticised by the young Lewis at the time) was now allowed to fall into exclusive British, later English, hands. And, for that matter, hence how the ties between Great Britain and America, long under strain, were now allowed to break not with a shout but with a sigh. America also made little moves at holding a position in Ireland, whose monarchy eventually separated in 1918. If anything, Lewis may have seen this as an advantage. ‘Europe is the past—we now have no vestigial appendix left there, no excuse to waste the time and attention of America, which is the future, on that realm,’ he once commented, unguardedly, at a dinner party. He was accused of “ferdinandismo” as a result.[12] It is telling that there was relatively little backlash, however, with even the rump Patriots having largely abandoned more than lip service to the old ties.
This is not to say that Lewis’ government was a lazy or ineffective one. He simply prioritised what he saw as the more important matters. Lewis’ big concern coming out of the war was that America had retreated from the Northwest, losing strategically important parts of her West Coast to Russia/the RLPC and being attacked through the Superior Republic. Russian forces had even operated east of Lake Winipick at their height, and come relatively close to the bounds of the Confederation of Ohio. Though the Russians had been pushed back and the Republic effectively partitioned, Lewis saw all his as a major threat for the future. ‘We have removed the knife to America’s throat that was Meridian-controlled Carolina,’ he explained in a speech, ‘but now we must remove the knife to America’s back that is the Russians’. He regarded America’s top priority in any future war to be the ejection from the continent of all Russian settlements and the vassalisation of California, currently leaning towards the Russian orbit. Notably, some of Lewis’ few defenders nowadays point to the fact that he ordered the Imperial Navy’s ironsharks to sink clandestine Russian convoys sending help to the Societists in Lima and Valparaiso. The reason for this was, of course, purely to frustrate Russian policy (the Russians were helping the Societists to hurt and embarrass the French-led International Expeditionary Force fighting them). Yet, in a manner which is tellingly indicative of how the debate is usually framed today, those defenders draw attention to this incident as though Lewis’ goal was to hurt the Societists.
In collaboration with the Mentians, probably the grandest project of Lewis’ time in office was to commission an expanded Imperial Census in 1904. There had been censuses taken in the ENA before, of course, but this one saw considerable additional funding, data gathering and analysis facilities designed by the talented statisticians of the Cooke Institute in Stratford, New England.[13] It came with the aim not merely to create a more detailed and accurate description of the ENA and its people, but to highlight those areas which required improvement. This met with considerable opposition by those who felt the Imperial government was exceeding its remit, but Lewis benefited from the fact that Imperial supremacy (like some of his other views) was more of a traditional Supremacist position. The opposition under Gedney therefore found it difficult to criticise, although some Liberals and Patriots in the government grew jittery.
Of course, it didn’t escape the notice of wags that someone commissioning a census under Emperor Augustus had a certain historical resonance. The Supremacist-supporting paper the “Pittsburgh Advertiser” promptly dubbed Lewis ‘Cyrenius’, a name which caught on in some of the other newspapers.[14] There appears to have been one or two millenarian cults who genuinely saw it all as an imminent sign of the Second Coming, helped by the fact that it was a new century. Of course, it seems very strange to us now that anyone could miss the genuine apocalyptic threat growing at that time, but is important to recognise that this was far from obvious to people there and then.
The census was a triumph of contemporary organisation and technology, with solution engines used to speed data processing and new data visualisation techniques used to track poverty, disease and deprivation across the ENA. The government passed a number of new social measures to respond to these, though many of these did not have noticeable impact until long after Lewis ceased to be President (hence why he rarely gets credit for them). Modern analysts consider that the actions of Lewis and his government probably increased the average American lifespan by at least two years. However, there is also controversy in how those reforms were designed and implemented, with some contemporary views on what constituted ‘progress’ which now smack of Superhumanism [eugenics]. The prohibition of alcohol was also generally seen as a desirable goal in and of itself at this point.
If you’ve done exam questions on earlier parts of American history, you might be thinking that it sounds strange that the Patriots would go along with all this—aren’t they supposed to be the stick-in-the-mud old-fashioned ones? Well, you’d be right that there was muttering among the Patriots, but they remained loyal, not just because of Wyatt, but another factor. Cythereanism in the ENA had been a stop-start process, with decisions over women’s suffrage largely in the hands of Confederal governments. When the Social American Government was elected in 1900, only Westernesse allowed women to vote in all elections and stand for their corresponding offices. New England and Drakesland allowed women voters and candidates in Confederal but not Imperial elections. Ohio and Cygnia allowed women voters in both Confederal and Imperial elections, but only to stand as candidates in Confederal elections. Michigan (strangely) allowed women to stand as candidates in Confederal elections, but only to vote in Imperial elections. Pennsylvania allowed women to vote in Confederal elections but not to stand as candidates in any office, and New York and Old Virginia did not allow women to vote on any level of government.
As a political movement, Cythereanism had mostly manifested itself as a force within the Liberals, but with a significant minority of more upper-class Cythereans (‘Blue-Gold’ to use English terminology) within the Patriots. The Supremacists and Mentians were, broadly speaking, both considered too macho and roughhouse in their organisational style, tending to repel women from participation within their structures (with, of course, some exceptions). After John Wyatt, undoubtedly the most powerful and influential person within the Patriot caucus was Liberty Grey Manders, prophetically named by her parents after the influential early American Cytherean and Patriot, Libby ‘Liberty’ Grey. Commonly known as LG Manders after her deliberately ambiguous “nom de plume”, she was instrumental in pushing for women’s suffrage to become an Imperial, constitutional mandate. At the same time, Newman pushed for the enforcement of universal male suffrage, which in several Confederations had proved vulnerable to legal tricks such as excluding convicted felons from voting, and then inventing trivial crimes to indict poor workingmen and other ‘undesirables’ of.
Women’s suffrage remained a contentious issue in some quarters, but a somewhat watered-down version of LG Manders’ desires was pushed through Parliament and Imperial Assent granted by Emperor Augustus. The 1905 general election would be fought on a larger electorate than ever before, including all married women and all women above the age of 30 regardless of their marital status. The stricture was supposedly implemented out of fear that otherwise the male electorate, depleted by the military losses of the Pandoric War, would be outnumbered!
Though some grumpy Supremacists claimed this was tantamount to rigging the election, it is likely that the Social American Coalition would have been re-elected regardless. The Supremacists did make gains, somewhat at the expense of the three coalition parties but also through sweeping up the seats won by the short-lived independents elected in 1900. Gedney stayed on as leader.
If you read about Lewis’ second term in your average school history book, especially in America itself, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was dominated by the question of what to do now the Combine had ejected the IEF and dominated South America. Of course, again, this isn’t how it was seen at the time. Lewis’ government had unquestionably improved the lives of millions of Americans, as well as gaining the country crucial new ports by annexing North Arizpe and Nouvelle-Orleans. In 1906 the fate of Nueva Irlanda was belatedly settled by plebiscite, and the country became an independent kingdom in personal union with the ENA. (In 1927, another plebiscite would change this to personal union with old Ireland’s now separate monarchy). America dominated Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba and the rest of the West Indies. In Lewis’ own estimation, surely things were going more or less exactly as he wanted, Russia in the north-west aside.
But if Carolina was no longer a knife to America’s neck, it became a sword of Damocles over Lewis’ head (as depicted by a cartoon in the “New York Register” ). What to do with Carolina was the question that persistently split the Social American Coalition, not merely between parties but within them. The One Carolina Movement in the Patriots wanted a return to the Confederation of Carolina on its pre-1849 borders; Lewis himself wanted a Confederation of Carolina with its current borders, many Liberals wanted a separate Kingdom in personal union with the ENA; some others wanted to restore a puppet Kingdom under the alleged Prince John William. The Mentian Party, largely free from Neo-Jacobin influence , argued that lands should be given over to Carolina’s Negroes; some also advocated the Cherokee Empire’s independence be restored, but this was a less popular position given the public association of natives with the late rebels in Superia.[15]
The only thing nobody wanted was to do nothing—and yet that is what was done. Not even Lewis was able to resolve this political deadlock, though he worked into the night trying to reach a consensus. In the meantime, Carolina remained treated as a set of occupied provinces. It was surprisingly quiescent for the most part—after all, its people had gotten used to being ignored, and it was small difference to go from rigged and irrelevant elections to no elections at all. The black population, very suspicious of Lewis after his activities in the first part of the war, often went to Africa Nova rather than risk being attacked by local whites when the occupation forces were looking the other way. However, a substantial population of Negroes did remain, and even established a
de facto black state in Talugisi[16] where a successful slave rebellion had overthrown the Cherokee slavemasters. (The Cherokee themselves remained holed up in Nevadoheyadav and tried carefully not to attract ENA attention).
It was while Lewis was working into the night that he suffered a heart attack in June 1908. He was advised by his doctors to stand down, and began planning for a successor, but kept working at a high pace while he did so. At this time, with suffrage passed, the electoral debate had moved on to whether to implement the Modified American Percentage Representation (MAPR) voting system nationwide, which had been used by New England for confederal elections since 1890.[17] In the end, this would be a bridge too far for the present, but would be implemented some years later. Regardless, even as the Liberal caucus was ready to vote, Lewis suffered a second heart attack and died on July 17th, 1908 at the age of 54.
A state funeral was held for this vigorous American politician, who had burned like a bright candle and burned himself out (in the words of the eulogy given by Joe Holliday). Perhaps moved by the loss of their leader, the caucus battle of ‘The Two Mikes’ unexpectedly went against the veteran Michael Briars in favour of Michael Chamberlain Dawlish, a younger MCP who had been named by his parents in honour of Lewis’ hero.
Dawlish could not hold the Social American Coalition together for long; it is doubtful that there are many who could have. The government finally collapsed in early 1909 and the American people voted Gedney’s Supremacists back in. Gedney himself would suffer health problems after two years and hastily retired, doubtless thinking of Lewis. Ironically, these would turn out to be exaggerated, and Gedney would live another 25 years after retiring, before passing away in 1936 at the age of 85. By this point, of course, it had become very clear what the consequences of Lewis’ inaction on the Combine and other foreign policy during his presidency had been. It is not an exaggeration to say that the modern popular view of Lewis is driven in large part that in the 1930s, his old enemy Gedney was still around to criticise him, but he wasn’t there to defend himself...
[1] Though it was only described as an Armistice in hindsight, initially being called a temporary ceasefire (see Part #194 in Volume IV).
[2] OTL Asheville, NC.
[3] OTL Muskogee, OK. The name stems from the green Verdigris River.
[4] I.e. Malthusian or Darwinian.
[5] OTL Oklahoma City.
[6] Ministerial roles on the confederal level in the ENA are referred to as Councillors. Mostly, that is; there is a fair amount of variation between the Confederations.
[7] The late 19th century Liberal governments in the ENA also set up some free hospitals as well as schools and colleges, albeit on a rather less ambitious scale than in the People’s Kingdom, and often backed by private charity as much as taxes.
[8]
The Wiener is descended from the 1840s satirical magazine
Weinig Petrus, or, The American Ringleader, mentioned in Volume IV.
[9] The rattlesnake is the traditional animal emblem of the ENA (going back to Franklin’s ‘Join, or Die’ cartoon); the octopus is not an emblem of the UPSA, but rather a typical choice to describe a grasping, manipulative power with its finger in many pies (used in OTL political cartoons to describe Tsarist Russia, the British Empire, the European Union and many others).
[10] Formerly Raleigh Province (i.e. the eastern half of OTL North Carolina) – see Part #205 in Volume V.
[11] A made-up title created for the heir to the throne of Carolina in the 1860s, which was obsoleted when Jamaica stopped being a Carolinian territory and instead became a neutralised but slightly pro-Meridian republic like Cuba, but stuck around out of inertia regardless.
[12] I.e. Novamundine supremacy and a contempt for Europe or the Old World in general—named after Ferdinand VII of New Spain.
[13] Stratford, CT in OTL.
[14] “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)” (Luke 2:1-2, NIV). Note that in the Biblical translations used at the time, the name was usually rendered as Cyrenius rather than Quirinius.
[15] Note an inadvertent anachronism here.
[16] OTL Birmingham, AL.
[17] See Part #223 in Volume V.
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