Proposals and War Aims That Didn't Happen Map Thread

Codae

DaniCBP said:
I would say that Austria would relinquish Bukovina to Romania, rather than having this strange arrangement. It wasn't really important for the Empire, as far as I'm concerned.
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I'd believe that those Austrian exclaves were never actually planned, just a consequence of a future mapmaker taking an imprecise proposal literally.
 

athgtq16129

MasterSanders said:
William Yandell Elliott's Proposed "Commonwealths" (1935)

William Yandell Elliott was a prominent historian and intellectual during the mid-20th century. He was originally part of the "Fugitives," the forerunner to the Southern Agrarians, before going on to teach at what would become the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He advised several presidents, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and would later teach other leaders like Pierre Trudeau, McGeorge Bundy, and most notably Henry Kissinger. He wrote extensively on geopolitical topics, with perhaps his most notorious being The Need for Constitutional Reform: A Plan for National Security (1935). In it, he outlined his plan for an extensive overhaul of the Constitution that would, among other things:

  • Extend the term of the House of Representatives from 2 to 4 years.
  • Reduce the power of the Senate to largely being an advisory body with little in the way of actual legislative initiative.
  • Allow for the President to dissolve Congress at least once for an election should there be a gridlock.
  • Have the President be succeeded immediately by an "Executive Vice President" except if the former resigns in order to maintain a continuity of policy.
  • Have permanent heads of civil service departments along the British model in order to abolish patronage.
  • Reduce the Supreme Court of its ability to strike down legislation without 2/3rds of the judges doing so.
But the part that everyone took note of was Elliott's proposal to create "commonwealths" out of existing states that would supposedly reflect cultural and economic realities. (No, Fallout did not invent the term "commonwealth" in reference to "super states"). While he said that the Federal Reserve districts might serve as a model for the borders of these commonwealths, he does offer a few ideas as to what they might look like:

  • A New England commonwealth
  • New York as its own Commonwealth
  • New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and possibly West Virginia
  • Two unspecified Midwest commonwealths
  • South Atlantic Seaboard commonwealth
  • Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, and Georgia (I added Florida here to maintain continuity)
  • Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas
  • Western Prairie commonwealth
  • Rocky Mountains commonwealth
  • Pacific Coast commonwealth
A lot of these seem arbitrary (WV and New Jersey in the same commonwealth?), but it is interesting nonetheless. The states themselves would be reduced to something akin to English counties that are more traditional rather than actual government entities.

Below is a map that follows his outline. If someone could do a WorldA patch, I would appreciate it:
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Fallout Moment.
 
Hrvatskiwi

Hrvatskiwi

Rattenfänger von Memphis said:
The first thing that comes to my mind, looking at both Snowstalker's and James the AH Fan's maps, minus northern New Jersey, is the Alien Queen Xenomorph on her side with Long Island being her elongated head.
m_645be03632c1dc2b965557b6.jpeg
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"Get outta Jersey, you bitch!"
 

Tiro

vgh... said:
They should have done it
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Reading about the 'Annexation Bill' of AD 1866 aways makes me wish that, at this point in history, Mark Twain was already in place to write something skewering the impulse to add yet another icebox to the list of United States territories and yet more Americans who had historically expressed a strong desire to NOT be US citizens to the list of troublesome residents (There's a whole North & South America outside the United States, kiddos, it's very easy to be American without coming anywhere near the United States) in the name of Manifest Destiny.

I'm not saying it would have to be a gleefully anti-Imperialist satire depicting the newly-acquired Canadian States experiencing Troubles conspicuously similar to those being endured in the Reconstruction-era South, mixed in with complaints about how durn COLD it gets in Canada, but wouldn't that be perfectly appropriate content for A LETTER FROM THE STATE OF NEW BRUNSWICK? (Bonus points if we can also smuggle in the strong suggestion that the whole scheme was cooked up purely as a way to get one Nathaniel Banks more votes from the Irish-American community in Massachusetts).
 

Wendell

I don't get this notion that there was much of a hard Canadian nationalism outside of pockets around Toronto and Halifax before Confederation.
 

Aichi72

Wendell said:
I don't get this notion that there was much of a hard Canadian nationalism outside of pockets around Toronto and Halifax before Confederation.
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Perhaps not necessarily nationalism as such but definitley the prescence of an emergent national concsiousness, though one tied to Britain and heavily based on not being USAmericans. Plus, nothing like a foreign invasion to rile up national sentiment and a "rally 'round the flag" effect.
 

Wendell

Aichi72 said:
Perhaps not necessarily nationalism as such but definitley the prescence of an emergent national concsiousness, though one tied to Britain and heavily based on not being USAmericans. Plus, nothing like a foreign invasion to rile up national sentiment and a "rally 'round the flag" effect.
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To an extent, and, again, in the places already mentioned. Also, it's not clear that this is an invasion more than it is a sale, and the difference in culture and population is less than in other areas the U.S. gained historically, and to the extent that this is not so, the population in question likely has no particular fondness for British rule either.
 

Tiro

Wendell said:
To an extent, and, again, in the places already mentioned. Also, it's not clear that this is an invasion more than it is a sale, and the difference in culture and population is less than in other areas the U.S. gained historically, and to the extent that this is not so, the population in question likely has no particular fondness for British rule either.
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Small differences can loom very large: just ask the Northern and Southern sections of the United States! (Heck, remember that the US south originally fought to be a part of the United States, unlike the ancestors of the Canadians - and, at least in the 1860s, not the distant ancestors of those Canadians).
 

Wendell

Tiro said:
Small differences can loom very large: just ask the Northern and Southern sections of the United States! (Heck, remember that the US south originally fought to be a part of the United States, unlike the ancestors of the Canadians - and, at least in the 1860s, not the distant ancestors of those Canadians).
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That was different. In the south's propaganda, they were the patriots preserving the society of Washington and Jefferson against "King Abraham", even if the reality was rather different. That they felt the need to propagandize in such a way demonstrates just how attached the American essence had engrained itself in Dixie before the war.
 
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