I had actually decided that I should try to hold off on questions at least until the TL was over. Mostly so I don't accidentally ask questions that are answered later on in the TL.
The Three Amigos (Collaborative TL Between Joe Bonkers, TheMann, and isayyo2)
- Thread starter Joe Bonkers
- Start date
Thank You for that, and I hope you enjoy what was written. 🙂
The 1970s were times of dramatic changes in many corporate and economic policies, driven more than anything by new industries, the reformations of many existing ones and the ever-growing numbers of the Baby Boomers making their presences known in the workplace. Even as politics in the Amigos favored men of great charisma (the Kennedys, Ronald Reagan, Pierre Trudeau, Tommy Douglas) the work of much of the policies of the time fell to a generation that, while not always being as flashy as the charismatic men inhabiting the White House or holding court in the San Lazaro Building, took the policies of the men of the time and made them happen, guiding what we're by that point three of the world's most dynamic nations - incredibly prosperous, but also recognizing that the society would be judged based on how it treated its less fortunate, and so the making of life better for those less fortunate, something that had been a social responsibility in the 1950s and 1960s grew into a government one in many regards, but one would expect from a government and population making loud statements about helping others, the plans were carefully vetted and developed before being implemented, and the implementation was just as impressive.
World War II had seen many industries move out to suburban regions, aiming to get more land and less traffic. Far from being an urban flight this became to be seen as an opportunity in countless cases, many of these former factories became offices, condominiums, markets or even publix housing, and many other locales saw the factories knocked down, the land remediated and then houses for those less fortunate built on it. After early post-war 'slum clearance' plans (such as the infamous Pruitt-Igoe Projects in St. Louis) turned out to be absolute horror stories many similar plans were scrapped and others rethought. Shoddy workmanship in some buildings caused other issues, but by the late 1950s and early 1960s the day of the major project was gone, replaced by the "Build up the Neighborhood" style of planning, whereupon better housing developments were inserted into existing neighborhoods, and anywhere poverty was, social services followed, and by the late 1960s and early 1970s many of these places had seen better jobs and services come to these places, while the steady rise in wages in many cities led to better lives for these people. While plans for entirely new neighborhoods built from formerly-industrial areas continued to favor the grand - a witness of Harbour City in Toronto, Mission Bay in San Francisco or Bankhead in Atlanta would be hard-pressed to think of them as anything other than that - few major neighborhoods saw a wrecking ball after 1960, and what happened instead was tens of thousands of mid-rise buildings integrated into neighborhoods, renovated houses, mixed-use buildings and a handful of major buildings that virtually always had extensive amenities.
In suburbs that hadn't been hammered by the Energy Crisis things were a little different. Here, massive mixed-use complexes, with residential units built above retail establishments, schools, offices and other uses. Fully understanding that making one want to live in a large building as opposed to a home of their own with a backyard and land of their own, builders private, non-profit and government alike went to considerable lengths to make their new developments attractive for their residents. Playgrounds were built on the roofs of mid-rise structures or as part of the developments, indoor pools were a common amenity (gyms and fitness clubs would be a common part of this by the late 1960s, and basketball courts a few years after), the units almost always came with air conditioning and proper climate control systems, large bathrooms, spacious kitchens with breakfast bars and a great many had balconies, as well as a late-20th-Century development that by the 1970s was virtually de rigeur in all new homes, condos or apartments in the Amigos countries - the hobby room.
These rooms began to be seen in the 1950s, as people's income and time made it possible for more and more people to find hobbies or interests to do with their time outside of work, and the improvements in making chores easier often added to this, even as ever-greater numbers of women left their homes for the workplace in the 1960s and 1970s. As the steadily-improving lives of citizens of the Amigos grew, so with it came such hobbies and businesses and groups that catered to them. This expansion of interests and minds saw a vast growth in interests in both participation sports and the arts in the 1970s, and with that further came people's hobbies enriching their lives.
Perhaps not surprisingly considering the Second Great Awakening and the Born For This generation, those benefits extended to even the poorest of people in the Amigos. Minimum wage rose steadily during the 1950s, 60s and 70s in many places, while the rates of unionization in the workplace rose in many places which had generally not been unionized before, such as many customer service industries. Older business leaders often disapproved of this, but many younger ones didn't - having explicit contracts made planning easier for them, too, and by the early 1970s many unions had established their own funds and banks for the explicit purpose of supporting the businesses of their dues-paying members.
Perhaps also not surprisingly, the new generations had a dramatic effect on many fraternal organizations - the Elks, Moose, Lions, Eagles and the like - and spurred on the creations of more than a few more. Far from collapsing (as many predicted with the exodus of many people to the suburbs before the Energy Crisis), many of the traditional gentlemen's clubs of major cities gained new members and even new clubs came about, both in existing places and new ones. Over time these private clubs began banding together to purchase or build their own clubhouses and meeting places that were appropriate for the interests of the people involved, and began to organize many of their own plans and ideas for their interests, and for the richest of the new clubs, guilds, lodges and societies, what they could and did accomplish was impressive, from the clubhouses themselves (one particularly famous one is the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Grand Club of Nevada clubhouse on Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas, completed in 1957 and owned by the club since 1976, which is considered one of America's favorite pieces of architecture) to the things they did and sought to do, particularly for their members. A great many of the societies built around occupations soon were soon joined at the hip with the unions they worked with and were quick to pass along knowledge between members, acting as a center for learning and advancement which in many cases rubbed off on the corporations (and the products they made) represented by members. Membership in many of the famous fraternal orders soon became something many members were keen to show off, and senior members taking younger ones under their wing in both the orders themselves as well as in business and society. This camaraderie created a sense of community that became a common selling point among many groups and societies, with more experiences or affluent members of said groups being expected to help provide for the club and its less fortunate members, with additional respect and privileges given out as a consequence. While it was all but unavoidable that some would take advantage of this privilege in bad ways, the overall effect was to grow the minds, connections and in many cases assets of those involved, becoming a great benefit for those willing to be part of the club.
Indeed the 1970s pushed the idea of camaraderie to new heights, even in the United States, whose mythology of rugged individualism went back to its very foundations. But far from being a counter to this, much of the idea of communities people would be a part of was based on ones achievements, and there was a considerable quantity of pride in being part of many of these groups, as well as the friendships and connections made. Among the younger generations this was the most pronounced, and one of the trends of the second half of the 1970s was adventures with ones friends and the experiences one had with those people, this sense of adventure and self--grworh became a defining trend of the decade, and one that was eagerly and enthusiastically passed on to the next generation as the Boomers started becoming parents in large numbers in the 1970s. As they did too, concerns about education and health care quality began growing in the United States, arguments that would consume a lot of time and effort in the 1980s.
Before then, though, the "Born For This" generation had plenty more cards to play, in the form of completing many of the projects the generation before them had started, with one of the largest being the Interstate Highway System. First authorized by President Kirk in May 1955, the Interstate Highway System had begun through the integration of many of the limited-access highways built during the depression and after the war and then expanding the system further into a complete network of highways. Thinking ahead to the future (and aware of the cycle of profits from many built pieces of infrastructure) the interstate system was tolled from the start, this done out of a desire to have a steady flow of income not to pay off the bonds needed to build the projects in the first place, but also to provide the funds for upkeep and expansion improvements of the system. In addition, while the initial programs had been done in all three Amigos, the Acts that made the Interstates possible had been negotiated in all three nations, giving common standards, signage, numbering and many other standards for the new interstates. All three countries used the Interstate shield, though with differing colors (red and blue with white lettering in the US, green and while with black lettering in Mexico and red and while with black lettering in Canada) and pathways through country borders were designed to a large scale, allowing for traffic to move as quickly as possible in all directions. The system was for the most part completed by the late 1970s (though some remote sections, such as Interstate 16 across Alberta and British Columbia and I-70 across Colorado and Utah, wouldn't be completed until the mid-1980s) and allowed easier car travel across all three countries, with special care being paid to make interstate driving not only efficient but enjoyable. Many of the highways themselves were built in the grand style, with huge, spectacular bridges, tree-lined roads (and in many cases center dividers as well) and many other beautification designs and plans. In many urban areas the Interstates would ultimately be buried or covered over and the space created used for a variety of purposes, more often than not parks and recreation facilities and neighborhood centers, with many cities facing bitter opposition to highway developments and most often counteracting them by either alternate routes or plans. While some ill-advised plans were still built, many of the worst examples would either be rebuilt or removed later on and few doubted the benefits of the system.
World War II had seen many industries move out to suburban regions, aiming to get more land and less traffic. Far from being an urban flight this became to be seen as an opportunity in countless cases, many of these former factories became offices, condominiums, markets or even publix housing, and many other locales saw the factories knocked down, the land remediated and then houses for those less fortunate built on it. After early post-war 'slum clearance' plans (such as the infamous Pruitt-Igoe Projects in St. Louis) turned out to be absolute horror stories many similar plans were scrapped and others rethought. Shoddy workmanship in some buildings caused other issues, but by the late 1950s and early 1960s the day of the major project was gone, replaced by the "Build up the Neighborhood" style of planning, whereupon better housing developments were inserted into existing neighborhoods, and anywhere poverty was, social services followed, and by the late 1960s and early 1970s many of these places had seen better jobs and services come to these places, while the steady rise in wages in many cities led to better lives for these people. While plans for entirely new neighborhoods built from formerly-industrial areas continued to favor the grand - a witness of Harbour City in Toronto, Mission Bay in San Francisco or Bankhead in Atlanta would be hard-pressed to think of them as anything other than that - few major neighborhoods saw a wrecking ball after 1960, and what happened instead was tens of thousands of mid-rise buildings integrated into neighborhoods, renovated houses, mixed-use buildings and a handful of major buildings that virtually always had extensive amenities.
In suburbs that hadn't been hammered by the Energy Crisis things were a little different. Here, massive mixed-use complexes, with residential units built above retail establishments, schools, offices and other uses. Fully understanding that making one want to live in a large building as opposed to a home of their own with a backyard and land of their own, builders private, non-profit and government alike went to considerable lengths to make their new developments attractive for their residents. Playgrounds were built on the roofs of mid-rise structures or as part of the developments, indoor pools were a common amenity (gyms and fitness clubs would be a common part of this by the late 1960s, and basketball courts a few years after), the units almost always came with air conditioning and proper climate control systems, large bathrooms, spacious kitchens with breakfast bars and a great many had balconies, as well as a late-20th-Century development that by the 1970s was virtually de rigeur in all new homes, condos or apartments in the Amigos countries - the hobby room.
These rooms began to be seen in the 1950s, as people's income and time made it possible for more and more people to find hobbies or interests to do with their time outside of work, and the improvements in making chores easier often added to this, even as ever-greater numbers of women left their homes for the workplace in the 1960s and 1970s. As the steadily-improving lives of citizens of the Amigos grew, so with it came such hobbies and businesses and groups that catered to them. This expansion of interests and minds saw a vast growth in interests in both participation sports and the arts in the 1970s, and with that further came people's hobbies enriching their lives.
Perhaps not surprisingly considering the Second Great Awakening and the Born For This generation, those benefits extended to even the poorest of people in the Amigos. Minimum wage rose steadily during the 1950s, 60s and 70s in many places, while the rates of unionization in the workplace rose in many places which had generally not been unionized before, such as many customer service industries. Older business leaders often disapproved of this, but many younger ones didn't - having explicit contracts made planning easier for them, too, and by the early 1970s many unions had established their own funds and banks for the explicit purpose of supporting the businesses of their dues-paying members.
Perhaps also not surprisingly, the new generations had a dramatic effect on many fraternal organizations - the Elks, Moose, Lions, Eagles and the like - and spurred on the creations of more than a few more. Far from collapsing (as many predicted with the exodus of many people to the suburbs before the Energy Crisis), many of the traditional gentlemen's clubs of major cities gained new members and even new clubs came about, both in existing places and new ones. Over time these private clubs began banding together to purchase or build their own clubhouses and meeting places that were appropriate for the interests of the people involved, and began to organize many of their own plans and ideas for their interests, and for the richest of the new clubs, guilds, lodges and societies, what they could and did accomplish was impressive, from the clubhouses themselves (one particularly famous one is the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Grand Club of Nevada clubhouse on Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas, completed in 1957 and owned by the club since 1976, which is considered one of America's favorite pieces of architecture) to the things they did and sought to do, particularly for their members. A great many of the societies built around occupations soon were soon joined at the hip with the unions they worked with and were quick to pass along knowledge between members, acting as a center for learning and advancement which in many cases rubbed off on the corporations (and the products they made) represented by members. Membership in many of the famous fraternal orders soon became something many members were keen to show off, and senior members taking younger ones under their wing in both the orders themselves as well as in business and society. This camaraderie created a sense of community that became a common selling point among many groups and societies, with more experiences or affluent members of said groups being expected to help provide for the club and its less fortunate members, with additional respect and privileges given out as a consequence. While it was all but unavoidable that some would take advantage of this privilege in bad ways, the overall effect was to grow the minds, connections and in many cases assets of those involved, becoming a great benefit for those willing to be part of the club.
Indeed the 1970s pushed the idea of camaraderie to new heights, even in the United States, whose mythology of rugged individualism went back to its very foundations. But far from being a counter to this, much of the idea of communities people would be a part of was based on ones achievements, and there was a considerable quantity of pride in being part of many of these groups, as well as the friendships and connections made. Among the younger generations this was the most pronounced, and one of the trends of the second half of the 1970s was adventures with ones friends and the experiences one had with those people, this sense of adventure and self--grworh became a defining trend of the decade, and one that was eagerly and enthusiastically passed on to the next generation as the Boomers started becoming parents in large numbers in the 1970s. As they did too, concerns about education and health care quality began growing in the United States, arguments that would consume a lot of time and effort in the 1980s.
Before then, though, the "Born For This" generation had plenty more cards to play, in the form of completing many of the projects the generation before them had started, with one of the largest being the Interstate Highway System. First authorized by President Kirk in May 1955, the Interstate Highway System had begun through the integration of many of the limited-access highways built during the depression and after the war and then expanding the system further into a complete network of highways. Thinking ahead to the future (and aware of the cycle of profits from many built pieces of infrastructure) the interstate system was tolled from the start, this done out of a desire to have a steady flow of income not to pay off the bonds needed to build the projects in the first place, but also to provide the funds for upkeep and expansion improvements of the system. In addition, while the initial programs had been done in all three Amigos, the Acts that made the Interstates possible had been negotiated in all three nations, giving common standards, signage, numbering and many other standards for the new interstates. All three countries used the Interstate shield, though with differing colors (red and blue with white lettering in the US, green and while with black lettering in Mexico and red and while with black lettering in Canada) and pathways through country borders were designed to a large scale, allowing for traffic to move as quickly as possible in all directions. The system was for the most part completed by the late 1970s (though some remote sections, such as Interstate 16 across Alberta and British Columbia and I-70 across Colorado and Utah, wouldn't be completed until the mid-1980s) and allowed easier car travel across all three countries, with special care being paid to make interstate driving not only efficient but enjoyable. Many of the highways themselves were built in the grand style, with huge, spectacular bridges, tree-lined roads (and in many cases center dividers as well) and many other beautification designs and plans. In many urban areas the Interstates would ultimately be buried or covered over and the space created used for a variety of purposes, more often than not parks and recreation facilities and neighborhood centers, with many cities facing bitter opposition to highway developments and most often counteracting them by either alternate routes or plans. While some ill-advised plans were still built, many of the worst examples would either be rebuilt or removed later on and few doubted the benefits of the system.
In the fall of 1979, about a year after being elected to the papal chair, Pope John Paul II made his first official visit to the Western Hemisphere, traveling to all of the Three Amigos.
The Pope pointedly traveled first to Mexico, where he was greeted by an ecstatic crowd of over 1 million. Highlights of the trip included Masses said at both the Cathedral of the Assumption in Mexico City and at the pilgrimage site of Guadalupe.
A triumphal trip through Canada began in Montreal, in the heart of the strongly Catholic French-Canadian community, before proceeding to ten cities including Halifax, Toronto, London, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver. Some of the largest crowds yet seen in Canadian history turned out for the visit, wherein John Paul II thanked the Canadians, Mexicans and Americans for their efforts to shelter Pope Pius XII during the persecution of the Nazis during the Second World War.
Finally, the Pope made a six-city visit to the United States, arriving first in Philadelphia, where he was greeted by John Cardinal Krol, along with the mayor of the city and the Governor of Pennsylvania, Richard Thornburgh. A crowd estimated at almost 2 million swarmed into the area of Logan Circle, where the Pope said an outdoor Mass. A visit to Des Moines, Iowa, followed, and then the tour moved on to Chicago, New York, and Boston, before wrapping up in Washington, D.C., where John Paul II became the first pope to visit the White House, there meeting President Reagan along with former President John Kennedy and his younger brother Robert, newly elected to the Senate.
The United States had the lowest proportion of Catholics among the Three Amigos (though the largest population, since the nation’s population was the largest), but this papal visit, while not the first a pope had made to the United States, was greeted with respect and honor throughout the country, even among non-Catholics. Even the iconoclastic late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live limited itself to some gentle ribbing carried out by Don Novello as the character of Father Guido Sarducci, who offered to the audience a contest to “find the popes in the pizza” – a photograph of a pizza which he insisted depicted all 435 pontiffs, with the winner being the person who found the most popes. (“Here’s a clue,” he said: “Most of the popes have red faces.”)
The reactions that ranged from respectful to ecstatic, but swung to hostile only among an isolated few, underlined as clearly as any event could have one of the most important and influential phenomena of the times: the Third Great Awakening was in full swing. Society in the Three Amigos had defied conventional wisdom, which held that as material comforts increased, the interest of individuals in spiritual matters decreased. The generation that had come out of the Sixties, the “Born for This” generation, in particular, had stood that wisdom on its head; steeped in a tradition of service that had come in part out of the Second World War, influenced by figures like the Rev. Martin Luther King, they appreciated their material comforts but also sensed a certain lack of meaning in pure possessions. Searching for answers, many sought deeper meaning in life, and turned to the concept of serving a Higher Power with an enthusiasm no one could have predicted.
This search for answers had led individuals down many paths. Sadly, some were exploited by charlatans. But others, like the popular New Light Church, had arisen alongside the traditional faiths, nearly all of which blossomed as they were flooded with new converts. Mass attendance, after slowly declining in the 1950s and 1960s, was up throughout the Americas; and traditional Protestant denominations, along with synagogues of the various strains of Judaism, also had the happy experience of many new faces.
These new faces had a salutary effect on the old churches, in many cases that being the effect of blowing old cobwebs out the door, sweeping up dusty corners, and letting new light shine in. This generation frowned on the sort of “faith” that reduced itself to judgmentalism and self-righteousness. This was not the way, they insisted. They were steeped in a sensibility, as the Beatles’ John Lennon once put it, of avoiding reverencing “the [holy] book for the name that’s on the cover and not for what it says.” Instead, their approach was to tear into their chosen scriptures looking for love, mercy and forgiveness, and to emphasize what those scriptures taught – the Golden Rule being put into practice, not just as a nice ideal one might aspire to but not actually achieve, but rather as a cornerstone of daily life.
This paradigm – really, a refreshment of what it was supposed to be about in the first place, as many declared – began slowly but surely to manifest itself in all sorts of ways. And as it did, even those who did not choose to belong to a church were inspired by their friends and colleagues, who had entered a world that seemed foreign but clearly seemed to make them better people. This, in turn, led even those outside the churches to make their lives more meaningful, by seeking opportunities to serve others – and they in turn further inspired the converts, who more and more turned their local churches into centers of service toward their communities and the world at large, working with organizations both spiritual and secular and across ecumenical lines that in an earlier era would have divided them utterly, and spreading their love across the world.
The growth in material wealth that continued to flourish throughout the lands of the Three Amigos and ultimately in the countries that felt their influence turned out to be no impediment to this. Indeed, it turned out instead that the more wealth individuals had, and the more leisure time they had away from work, the more resources they had available for service.
In time, these values even came to define their work, as said values entered the workplace. Businesses came to place a higher premium than ever before on the simple act of doing the morally right thing, as opposed to simply doing the profitable thing. Over time, in fact, profitability came to be associated with doing the right thing, as those companies who acted with morality (real morality, not simply window-dressing – hypocrisy fooled no one) found that they were rewarded financially for their behavior. This came to include everything from discharging employees only as an absolute last resort – CEOs who insisted that “we’re all a family here at XYZ Company” came to be expected to put their money where their mouth was – to honesty in advertising to avoiding damage to the environment to the greatest extent possible – and to taking responsibility when things did go wrong.
The churches did the same. The Catholic Church in the 1970s, not long before the Pope’s visit, was rocked by a scandal – but it weathered the scandal through honest behavior. It had come to be the case, unfortunately, that the Church’s requirement that priests be celibate, coupled with the many youth organizations around the churches including but not limited to parochial schools, had made the priesthood seem a safe haven for pedophiles. At first, as instances of priests abusing were reported in various dioceses, the Church was uncertain how to react. Some experts at the time held that pedophiles could be treated. But ultimately the advances in understanding of mental health that had come out of the Second World War in the Three Amigos made clear that pedophiles were essentially untreatable and should be kept away from children. Now the Church had a dilemma, as cases of abuse were reported that had gone back as much as two decades. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, spurred by the Archdiocese of Boston, made the bold decision to take action. The USCCB as a whole issued a statement on behalf of churches in the United States openly admitting to the instances of abuse and further stating that many had likely gone unreported. The bishops took full responsibility: “we can have no excuse before the Lord and before those whom the Lord has instructed us to bring to Him for our failure to protect them.” The Church set up a Victims Assistance Office under the Archdiocese of New York – soon extended worldwide by the Vatican – to assist through counseling all who had suffered abuse, and those who had not yet reported such abuse were urged to come forward. The Vatican also adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward priests accused of abuse; any such accusations were thoroughly investigated, and if found to have merit, the priest in question was laicized (dismissed from the clerical state, or “defrocked,” although the Catholic Church doesn’t normally use that particular term) and turned over to the secular authorities if there was evidence of an outright crime. The Vatican also went all-out to train all staff, whether clerical or lay employees, on how to spot a potential abuser and how to go about reporting him. The Church’s open handling of the scandal was admired throughout the wider society for its example of honesty in admitted one’s own failings.
But it wasn’t just the churches, of course, who were inspired by the new generation to move in new ways. The rediscovery of the values of the Golden Rule, of love and mercy, and of service to others, filtered throughout the society, even acting as an inspiration to the older generations, who of course had been taught these words but hadn’t always seen them acted upon. An early instance of just how far this thinking had penetrated was seen in the summer of 1972, in Pennsylvania’s fourth-largest city, Wilkes-Barre.
The fourth-largest city in the state had (since the consolidation of 1937, which had vastly expanded the city by absorbing neighboring communities) shared a border with the third largest, Scranton, and together they were the leading cities of the anthracite coal region. The use of anthracite coal for home-heating fuel had driven their growth in the late 19th and early 20th Century, with both cities exploding in population; but as anthracite had begun to give way to oil and natural gas for home heating, the market for anthracite had fallen, and population growth had leveled off (part of the reason why the consolidation was seen as a good idea). It wasn’t until the Oil Crisis of the late 1950s that the situation began to improve once again for anthracite, which would emerge as a more stable but smaller industry. In the meantime, though, Wilkes-Barre had successfully stabilized its population, luring a variety of other industries, including Studebaker, Miller Brewing, IBM, RCA, Eberhard Faber, Certain Teed, Campbell Soup, Foster-Wheeler, and many others, giving the industrial base of the region a diversity it had not enjoyed while it was strictly tied to coal. In particular, the region came to have a new image: as the leading national center for the design and manufacture of children’s toys and games, spurred initially by the growth of Roth American, a company which had taken off when a former postal worker named Herb Schaper, who had been transferred by the Post Office to Wilkes-Barre in 1946, had come up with a series of toys and been hired by Roth. Their designs had snowballed, and led to other leading toy manufacturers, including Mattel, Parker Brothers, and Kenner, to locate design facilities and plants in the Wilkes-Barre-Scranton region.
Wilkes-Barre’s greatest vulnerability had always been flooding, with the city’s downtown and its most heavily populated neighborhoods in perennial danger of the overflows of the Susquehanna River, a large but shallow river that nevertheless flooded on a fairly regular basis. The city had experienced a major flood in 1936 (another spur to the consolidation vote the following year), which had caused severe damage and led to a federal project to construct a levee system.
A hydrologist at Wilkes University, however, after studying the initial plans for the levees, became concerned, because the levees only protected the city against a flood like that of 1936, which was a spring-thaw flood. A hurricane moving up the East Coast could potentially produce a much larger flood, one well beyond the 33-foot crest of the 1936 flood, he argued. Enough local officials were convinced by this argument to lobby federal officials for a more extensive levee system, and it was ultimately decided that the levees, originally intended to be built to a height of 37 feet, should instead be built to a 43-foot height.
For nearly 36 years, no major flood threatened the Wyoming Valley, the valley in which the city of Wilkes-Barre sat. But in the second week of June 1972, Hurricane Agnes formed off the coast of Yucatan. The hurricane battered its way through Cuba and the Florida panhandle before rapidly losing strength over Georgia. It appeared to be dying – but then it unexpectedly strengthened over the Carolinas. It was not an especially windy storm, but its energy was dissipated in the form of heavy, intense rain, which caused flash flooding throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. The storm appeared to be making its way out to sea on June 21, but the following day it turned inland again, prevented by a high-pressure system over the Atlantic from moving eastward. Instead, it looped over the southern tier of New York and the state of Pennsylvania – a movement that took until June 25 for the storm to finally resume its northward path, meaning that it was effectively stationary over the watersheds of the streams and rivers of Pennsylvania and New York for three days, dumping its torrential rains. As if this wasn’t bad enough, two other factors aggravated the situation: the grounds were already saturated from high rainfall earlier in the month, meaning that the rainwater ran directly into the streams; and another storm system, moving from the west, combined with Agnes and added its rain to the hurricane.
Small towns and cities throughout the state were hit hard by the flooding, especially in the watershed of the Susquehanna, whose tributaries – the Chenango, the Genesee, the Chemung, the Lackawanna, as well as countless creeks and small streams – were filled to bursting and poured their floodwaters into the main stream. The little town of Shickshinny, a suburb of Wilkes-Barre, suffered heavy damage when a dam on Shickshinny Creek collapsed under the unprecedented heavy weight of the water and the stream’s flash flood cascaded through the downtown area, even before the river rose to inundate the town the next day. Bloomsburg suffered severe damage as the river flooded the Magee Carpet plant and the nearby fairgrounds. Towanda, to the north near the New York line, saw the river sweep away bridges and flood the downtown area. Perhaps worst of all was the state capital, Harrisburg, where the water was eight feet deep on the floor of the brand-new governor’s mansion and rose deep into adjoining neighborhoods.
In Wilkes-Barre, the crisis made itself felt by the afternoon of June 22, when Civil Defense (the predecessor of FEMA) learned that the river would crest at 40-43 feet, which made it an open question whether the levees would hold. It also created an immediate situation of danger for the Plymouth section of the city. Plymouth, like much of the valley, had been a separate town before the 1937 consolidation. Over the years, it had found a niche as the antique district. Plymouth was vulnerable to flooding, but because of a quirk of geography its dike system was separate from the rest of the city’s. That separate Plymouth dike was now in trouble. In March, a 50-foot section near the pumping station at Vine Street had been excavated to fix a broken sewage drain. That gap had not yet been repaired, and with the river rising, that meant that Plymouth was in grave danger.
In the evening hours of June 22, with the river rising rapidly – it had gone from only four feet or so the day before to nearly 17 feet by late afternoon – Civil Defense director Frank Townend took the great risk of making a series of important decisions. First, he ordered the immediate evacuation of Plymouth, and the evacuation of the rest of the city’s vulnerable neighborhoods, including the central city district, by no later than 5 am. “We don’t know how far this is going to go,” he said on an announcement carried on local radio and TV, “and we can’t afford to take a chance with the lives of our citizens by understating the danger.”
Second, Townend asked for two sets of volunteers. One group was needed to immediately try to fill the hole in the Plymouth dike as rapidly as possible, with fill and sandbags. But beyond that, Townend warned that the predicted crest would strain the levee system throughout the rest of the valley to its very limits. There was no assurance, given the possibility of shifts in the surface beneath the dikes over the years, that the river’s great height would not be enough to overflow the dikes. So he asked for volunteers to reinforce the valley’s dike system – up and down both sides of the river for nearly 15 miles – with sandbags. “If we do this,” he said, “this is not a job for 100 men or 500 men or a thousand men. If we do this, if we make it work, it’s going to take at least 10,000 people.” He had already contacted Wilkes-Barre’s powerful local congressman, Dan Flood (“this will be one Flood against another,” the latter would tell the media), who had close connections with the Pentagon and who was able to promise – and deliver – a sufficient number of sandbags from military stockpiles, rushed to the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Airport by Army and Navy helicopters and airplanes and hauled to the dikes by Pennsylvania National Guard vehicles. But all would depend on whether enough volunteers would show up at the levees. While the local hospitals in the flood plain raced their evacuees by ambulance to safer hospitals, and while the police and fire departments focused on evacuating the elderly and others who were most vulnerable, the question remained: would the local residents focus on securing the safety of their personal belongings first – thereby neglecting the dikes, and possibly bringing about the very flood they hoped to avoid – or would they respond to Townend’s call?
The answer astonished even the most optimistic of the Civil Defense staff. Thousands of local residents showed up at the dikes, fanning out from the Market Street Bridge both north and south, on both sides, all the way to the Solomon’s Creek pumping station and the courthouse on the east side, and to the area around the Swetland Homestead and the Page Street pumping station on the west side – in other words, covering the entire levee system. It was a mix of young people – many of them hippies, with long hair and “groovy” clothing – side by side with middle-aged, cigar-smoking factory workers who were accustomed to wearing hard hats at their jobs and professional types who had in many cases come home and changed from suits into work clothes before heading to the dikes. Everyone was impressed by the gusto with which the young people attacked the hard work – a comment by one man to a local paper was typical: “I sure as hell don’t understand the young people today, but I’ll never say a bad word about them again.” But everyone worked together, performing the back-breaking work of shoveling sand into bags, tying them, and passing them up to the top of the dike in a spirit of camaraderie. It seemed later that out of the city’s population, only those truly unable to work had heeded the evacuation order: everyone else was at the dike, with even the residents of the Heights and other sections that were out of danger coming down to help. Meanwhile, the local churches and schools organized evacuation centers out of the flood zone.
For three tense days, the volunteers remained at the dikes, relieving each other in shifts once the initial work was done, strengthening the sandbag walls atop the dikes, keeping careful watch on any potential danger spots. No official count was taken of the numbers, but they were believed to well exceed Townend’s original call for 10,000 volunteers. Local restaurants brought food and drink free of charge, and Hotel Sterling and the dormitories at King’s and Wilkes colleges, at Wyoming Seminary, and even in some private homes were opened to the exhausted volunteers who stayed to the limits of their ability and finally needed rest.
The tensest moment of all came around 6 am on Saturday, June 24, as the North Street Bridge, low to the water, rickety, and swamped by the river, tore loose from its piers, finally unable to bear the pressure of the relentless water in the river and the debris that crashed repeatedly into the side of the bridge. Shrieks rose from the volunteers along the dikes, and Civil Defense held their breath; the fear was great that the loose bridge would float into the dikes, puncturing them, with a horrendous loss of life and devastation resulting. Fortunately, the bridge was too heavy to float, and sank into the river some 50 feet from the piers. Around 7 pm that night, the river finally crested at just below 41 feet – lapping at the very top of the dikes, splashing against the sandbags, but ultimately held in place.
Not until June 26, when it was clear the river had receded below flood stage, did the volunteers begin to leave. The valley had been saved from major flooding, virtually alone in the Susquehanna watershed.
But the Wyoming Valley was not known as “The Valley with a Heart” for nothing. And the new values of volunteerism, of serving others, that had sunk their roots deep into the local community, showed up a second time, as the undamaged cities of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton now turned to the task of helping those around them. Hundreds of residents of both cities took vacation time from their jobs to go to Bloomsburg, Shickshinny, Harrisburg, and all the other devastated communities in the region to help the residents of those regions clean up their damaged homes. A huge outpouring of donated food and supplies came from the Wilkes-Barre and Scranton area to the communities in the surrounding region and states, where so many needed immediate help. An editorial in the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader thanked the people of the region for their efforts, saying, “It’s not until a crisis like Hurricane Agnes comes along that we realize just what we are capable of and how much we can do.”
Conventional wisdom said that this shouldn’t have happened at all, that people living in an increasingly affluent world would become more selfish and insular. But the societies of the Three Amigos had, as they had so many times before, proven the so-called experts wrong.
And by the 1980s, that paradigm of love, mercy and service, and just what it could accomplish, would spread worldwide in dramatic fashion, highlighted on a weekend in July 1985, and an event called "Live Aid."
The Pope pointedly traveled first to Mexico, where he was greeted by an ecstatic crowd of over 1 million. Highlights of the trip included Masses said at both the Cathedral of the Assumption in Mexico City and at the pilgrimage site of Guadalupe.
A triumphal trip through Canada began in Montreal, in the heart of the strongly Catholic French-Canadian community, before proceeding to ten cities including Halifax, Toronto, London, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver. Some of the largest crowds yet seen in Canadian history turned out for the visit, wherein John Paul II thanked the Canadians, Mexicans and Americans for their efforts to shelter Pope Pius XII during the persecution of the Nazis during the Second World War.
Finally, the Pope made a six-city visit to the United States, arriving first in Philadelphia, where he was greeted by John Cardinal Krol, along with the mayor of the city and the Governor of Pennsylvania, Richard Thornburgh. A crowd estimated at almost 2 million swarmed into the area of Logan Circle, where the Pope said an outdoor Mass. A visit to Des Moines, Iowa, followed, and then the tour moved on to Chicago, New York, and Boston, before wrapping up in Washington, D.C., where John Paul II became the first pope to visit the White House, there meeting President Reagan along with former President John Kennedy and his younger brother Robert, newly elected to the Senate.
The United States had the lowest proportion of Catholics among the Three Amigos (though the largest population, since the nation’s population was the largest), but this papal visit, while not the first a pope had made to the United States, was greeted with respect and honor throughout the country, even among non-Catholics. Even the iconoclastic late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live limited itself to some gentle ribbing carried out by Don Novello as the character of Father Guido Sarducci, who offered to the audience a contest to “find the popes in the pizza” – a photograph of a pizza which he insisted depicted all 435 pontiffs, with the winner being the person who found the most popes. (“Here’s a clue,” he said: “Most of the popes have red faces.”)
The reactions that ranged from respectful to ecstatic, but swung to hostile only among an isolated few, underlined as clearly as any event could have one of the most important and influential phenomena of the times: the Third Great Awakening was in full swing. Society in the Three Amigos had defied conventional wisdom, which held that as material comforts increased, the interest of individuals in spiritual matters decreased. The generation that had come out of the Sixties, the “Born for This” generation, in particular, had stood that wisdom on its head; steeped in a tradition of service that had come in part out of the Second World War, influenced by figures like the Rev. Martin Luther King, they appreciated their material comforts but also sensed a certain lack of meaning in pure possessions. Searching for answers, many sought deeper meaning in life, and turned to the concept of serving a Higher Power with an enthusiasm no one could have predicted.
This search for answers had led individuals down many paths. Sadly, some were exploited by charlatans. But others, like the popular New Light Church, had arisen alongside the traditional faiths, nearly all of which blossomed as they were flooded with new converts. Mass attendance, after slowly declining in the 1950s and 1960s, was up throughout the Americas; and traditional Protestant denominations, along with synagogues of the various strains of Judaism, also had the happy experience of many new faces.
These new faces had a salutary effect on the old churches, in many cases that being the effect of blowing old cobwebs out the door, sweeping up dusty corners, and letting new light shine in. This generation frowned on the sort of “faith” that reduced itself to judgmentalism and self-righteousness. This was not the way, they insisted. They were steeped in a sensibility, as the Beatles’ John Lennon once put it, of avoiding reverencing “the [holy] book for the name that’s on the cover and not for what it says.” Instead, their approach was to tear into their chosen scriptures looking for love, mercy and forgiveness, and to emphasize what those scriptures taught – the Golden Rule being put into practice, not just as a nice ideal one might aspire to but not actually achieve, but rather as a cornerstone of daily life.
This paradigm – really, a refreshment of what it was supposed to be about in the first place, as many declared – began slowly but surely to manifest itself in all sorts of ways. And as it did, even those who did not choose to belong to a church were inspired by their friends and colleagues, who had entered a world that seemed foreign but clearly seemed to make them better people. This, in turn, led even those outside the churches to make their lives more meaningful, by seeking opportunities to serve others – and they in turn further inspired the converts, who more and more turned their local churches into centers of service toward their communities and the world at large, working with organizations both spiritual and secular and across ecumenical lines that in an earlier era would have divided them utterly, and spreading their love across the world.
The growth in material wealth that continued to flourish throughout the lands of the Three Amigos and ultimately in the countries that felt their influence turned out to be no impediment to this. Indeed, it turned out instead that the more wealth individuals had, and the more leisure time they had away from work, the more resources they had available for service.
In time, these values even came to define their work, as said values entered the workplace. Businesses came to place a higher premium than ever before on the simple act of doing the morally right thing, as opposed to simply doing the profitable thing. Over time, in fact, profitability came to be associated with doing the right thing, as those companies who acted with morality (real morality, not simply window-dressing – hypocrisy fooled no one) found that they were rewarded financially for their behavior. This came to include everything from discharging employees only as an absolute last resort – CEOs who insisted that “we’re all a family here at XYZ Company” came to be expected to put their money where their mouth was – to honesty in advertising to avoiding damage to the environment to the greatest extent possible – and to taking responsibility when things did go wrong.
The churches did the same. The Catholic Church in the 1970s, not long before the Pope’s visit, was rocked by a scandal – but it weathered the scandal through honest behavior. It had come to be the case, unfortunately, that the Church’s requirement that priests be celibate, coupled with the many youth organizations around the churches including but not limited to parochial schools, had made the priesthood seem a safe haven for pedophiles. At first, as instances of priests abusing were reported in various dioceses, the Church was uncertain how to react. Some experts at the time held that pedophiles could be treated. But ultimately the advances in understanding of mental health that had come out of the Second World War in the Three Amigos made clear that pedophiles were essentially untreatable and should be kept away from children. Now the Church had a dilemma, as cases of abuse were reported that had gone back as much as two decades. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, spurred by the Archdiocese of Boston, made the bold decision to take action. The USCCB as a whole issued a statement on behalf of churches in the United States openly admitting to the instances of abuse and further stating that many had likely gone unreported. The bishops took full responsibility: “we can have no excuse before the Lord and before those whom the Lord has instructed us to bring to Him for our failure to protect them.” The Church set up a Victims Assistance Office under the Archdiocese of New York – soon extended worldwide by the Vatican – to assist through counseling all who had suffered abuse, and those who had not yet reported such abuse were urged to come forward. The Vatican also adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward priests accused of abuse; any such accusations were thoroughly investigated, and if found to have merit, the priest in question was laicized (dismissed from the clerical state, or “defrocked,” although the Catholic Church doesn’t normally use that particular term) and turned over to the secular authorities if there was evidence of an outright crime. The Vatican also went all-out to train all staff, whether clerical or lay employees, on how to spot a potential abuser and how to go about reporting him. The Church’s open handling of the scandal was admired throughout the wider society for its example of honesty in admitted one’s own failings.
But it wasn’t just the churches, of course, who were inspired by the new generation to move in new ways. The rediscovery of the values of the Golden Rule, of love and mercy, and of service to others, filtered throughout the society, even acting as an inspiration to the older generations, who of course had been taught these words but hadn’t always seen them acted upon. An early instance of just how far this thinking had penetrated was seen in the summer of 1972, in Pennsylvania’s fourth-largest city, Wilkes-Barre.
The fourth-largest city in the state had (since the consolidation of 1937, which had vastly expanded the city by absorbing neighboring communities) shared a border with the third largest, Scranton, and together they were the leading cities of the anthracite coal region. The use of anthracite coal for home-heating fuel had driven their growth in the late 19th and early 20th Century, with both cities exploding in population; but as anthracite had begun to give way to oil and natural gas for home heating, the market for anthracite had fallen, and population growth had leveled off (part of the reason why the consolidation was seen as a good idea). It wasn’t until the Oil Crisis of the late 1950s that the situation began to improve once again for anthracite, which would emerge as a more stable but smaller industry. In the meantime, though, Wilkes-Barre had successfully stabilized its population, luring a variety of other industries, including Studebaker, Miller Brewing, IBM, RCA, Eberhard Faber, Certain Teed, Campbell Soup, Foster-Wheeler, and many others, giving the industrial base of the region a diversity it had not enjoyed while it was strictly tied to coal. In particular, the region came to have a new image: as the leading national center for the design and manufacture of children’s toys and games, spurred initially by the growth of Roth American, a company which had taken off when a former postal worker named Herb Schaper, who had been transferred by the Post Office to Wilkes-Barre in 1946, had come up with a series of toys and been hired by Roth. Their designs had snowballed, and led to other leading toy manufacturers, including Mattel, Parker Brothers, and Kenner, to locate design facilities and plants in the Wilkes-Barre-Scranton region.
Wilkes-Barre’s greatest vulnerability had always been flooding, with the city’s downtown and its most heavily populated neighborhoods in perennial danger of the overflows of the Susquehanna River, a large but shallow river that nevertheless flooded on a fairly regular basis. The city had experienced a major flood in 1936 (another spur to the consolidation vote the following year), which had caused severe damage and led to a federal project to construct a levee system.
A hydrologist at Wilkes University, however, after studying the initial plans for the levees, became concerned, because the levees only protected the city against a flood like that of 1936, which was a spring-thaw flood. A hurricane moving up the East Coast could potentially produce a much larger flood, one well beyond the 33-foot crest of the 1936 flood, he argued. Enough local officials were convinced by this argument to lobby federal officials for a more extensive levee system, and it was ultimately decided that the levees, originally intended to be built to a height of 37 feet, should instead be built to a 43-foot height.
For nearly 36 years, no major flood threatened the Wyoming Valley, the valley in which the city of Wilkes-Barre sat. But in the second week of June 1972, Hurricane Agnes formed off the coast of Yucatan. The hurricane battered its way through Cuba and the Florida panhandle before rapidly losing strength over Georgia. It appeared to be dying – but then it unexpectedly strengthened over the Carolinas. It was not an especially windy storm, but its energy was dissipated in the form of heavy, intense rain, which caused flash flooding throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. The storm appeared to be making its way out to sea on June 21, but the following day it turned inland again, prevented by a high-pressure system over the Atlantic from moving eastward. Instead, it looped over the southern tier of New York and the state of Pennsylvania – a movement that took until June 25 for the storm to finally resume its northward path, meaning that it was effectively stationary over the watersheds of the streams and rivers of Pennsylvania and New York for three days, dumping its torrential rains. As if this wasn’t bad enough, two other factors aggravated the situation: the grounds were already saturated from high rainfall earlier in the month, meaning that the rainwater ran directly into the streams; and another storm system, moving from the west, combined with Agnes and added its rain to the hurricane.
Small towns and cities throughout the state were hit hard by the flooding, especially in the watershed of the Susquehanna, whose tributaries – the Chenango, the Genesee, the Chemung, the Lackawanna, as well as countless creeks and small streams – were filled to bursting and poured their floodwaters into the main stream. The little town of Shickshinny, a suburb of Wilkes-Barre, suffered heavy damage when a dam on Shickshinny Creek collapsed under the unprecedented heavy weight of the water and the stream’s flash flood cascaded through the downtown area, even before the river rose to inundate the town the next day. Bloomsburg suffered severe damage as the river flooded the Magee Carpet plant and the nearby fairgrounds. Towanda, to the north near the New York line, saw the river sweep away bridges and flood the downtown area. Perhaps worst of all was the state capital, Harrisburg, where the water was eight feet deep on the floor of the brand-new governor’s mansion and rose deep into adjoining neighborhoods.
In Wilkes-Barre, the crisis made itself felt by the afternoon of June 22, when Civil Defense (the predecessor of FEMA) learned that the river would crest at 40-43 feet, which made it an open question whether the levees would hold. It also created an immediate situation of danger for the Plymouth section of the city. Plymouth, like much of the valley, had been a separate town before the 1937 consolidation. Over the years, it had found a niche as the antique district. Plymouth was vulnerable to flooding, but because of a quirk of geography its dike system was separate from the rest of the city’s. That separate Plymouth dike was now in trouble. In March, a 50-foot section near the pumping station at Vine Street had been excavated to fix a broken sewage drain. That gap had not yet been repaired, and with the river rising, that meant that Plymouth was in grave danger.
In the evening hours of June 22, with the river rising rapidly – it had gone from only four feet or so the day before to nearly 17 feet by late afternoon – Civil Defense director Frank Townend took the great risk of making a series of important decisions. First, he ordered the immediate evacuation of Plymouth, and the evacuation of the rest of the city’s vulnerable neighborhoods, including the central city district, by no later than 5 am. “We don’t know how far this is going to go,” he said on an announcement carried on local radio and TV, “and we can’t afford to take a chance with the lives of our citizens by understating the danger.”
Second, Townend asked for two sets of volunteers. One group was needed to immediately try to fill the hole in the Plymouth dike as rapidly as possible, with fill and sandbags. But beyond that, Townend warned that the predicted crest would strain the levee system throughout the rest of the valley to its very limits. There was no assurance, given the possibility of shifts in the surface beneath the dikes over the years, that the river’s great height would not be enough to overflow the dikes. So he asked for volunteers to reinforce the valley’s dike system – up and down both sides of the river for nearly 15 miles – with sandbags. “If we do this,” he said, “this is not a job for 100 men or 500 men or a thousand men. If we do this, if we make it work, it’s going to take at least 10,000 people.” He had already contacted Wilkes-Barre’s powerful local congressman, Dan Flood (“this will be one Flood against another,” the latter would tell the media), who had close connections with the Pentagon and who was able to promise – and deliver – a sufficient number of sandbags from military stockpiles, rushed to the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Airport by Army and Navy helicopters and airplanes and hauled to the dikes by Pennsylvania National Guard vehicles. But all would depend on whether enough volunteers would show up at the levees. While the local hospitals in the flood plain raced their evacuees by ambulance to safer hospitals, and while the police and fire departments focused on evacuating the elderly and others who were most vulnerable, the question remained: would the local residents focus on securing the safety of their personal belongings first – thereby neglecting the dikes, and possibly bringing about the very flood they hoped to avoid – or would they respond to Townend’s call?
The answer astonished even the most optimistic of the Civil Defense staff. Thousands of local residents showed up at the dikes, fanning out from the Market Street Bridge both north and south, on both sides, all the way to the Solomon’s Creek pumping station and the courthouse on the east side, and to the area around the Swetland Homestead and the Page Street pumping station on the west side – in other words, covering the entire levee system. It was a mix of young people – many of them hippies, with long hair and “groovy” clothing – side by side with middle-aged, cigar-smoking factory workers who were accustomed to wearing hard hats at their jobs and professional types who had in many cases come home and changed from suits into work clothes before heading to the dikes. Everyone was impressed by the gusto with which the young people attacked the hard work – a comment by one man to a local paper was typical: “I sure as hell don’t understand the young people today, but I’ll never say a bad word about them again.” But everyone worked together, performing the back-breaking work of shoveling sand into bags, tying them, and passing them up to the top of the dike in a spirit of camaraderie. It seemed later that out of the city’s population, only those truly unable to work had heeded the evacuation order: everyone else was at the dike, with even the residents of the Heights and other sections that were out of danger coming down to help. Meanwhile, the local churches and schools organized evacuation centers out of the flood zone.
For three tense days, the volunteers remained at the dikes, relieving each other in shifts once the initial work was done, strengthening the sandbag walls atop the dikes, keeping careful watch on any potential danger spots. No official count was taken of the numbers, but they were believed to well exceed Townend’s original call for 10,000 volunteers. Local restaurants brought food and drink free of charge, and Hotel Sterling and the dormitories at King’s and Wilkes colleges, at Wyoming Seminary, and even in some private homes were opened to the exhausted volunteers who stayed to the limits of their ability and finally needed rest.
The tensest moment of all came around 6 am on Saturday, June 24, as the North Street Bridge, low to the water, rickety, and swamped by the river, tore loose from its piers, finally unable to bear the pressure of the relentless water in the river and the debris that crashed repeatedly into the side of the bridge. Shrieks rose from the volunteers along the dikes, and Civil Defense held their breath; the fear was great that the loose bridge would float into the dikes, puncturing them, with a horrendous loss of life and devastation resulting. Fortunately, the bridge was too heavy to float, and sank into the river some 50 feet from the piers. Around 7 pm that night, the river finally crested at just below 41 feet – lapping at the very top of the dikes, splashing against the sandbags, but ultimately held in place.
Not until June 26, when it was clear the river had receded below flood stage, did the volunteers begin to leave. The valley had been saved from major flooding, virtually alone in the Susquehanna watershed.
But the Wyoming Valley was not known as “The Valley with a Heart” for nothing. And the new values of volunteerism, of serving others, that had sunk their roots deep into the local community, showed up a second time, as the undamaged cities of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton now turned to the task of helping those around them. Hundreds of residents of both cities took vacation time from their jobs to go to Bloomsburg, Shickshinny, Harrisburg, and all the other devastated communities in the region to help the residents of those regions clean up their damaged homes. A huge outpouring of donated food and supplies came from the Wilkes-Barre and Scranton area to the communities in the surrounding region and states, where so many needed immediate help. An editorial in the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader thanked the people of the region for their efforts, saying, “It’s not until a crisis like Hurricane Agnes comes along that we realize just what we are capable of and how much we can do.”
Conventional wisdom said that this shouldn’t have happened at all, that people living in an increasingly affluent world would become more selfish and insular. But the societies of the Three Amigos had, as they had so many times before, proven the so-called experts wrong.
And by the 1980s, that paradigm of love, mercy and service, and just what it could accomplish, would spread worldwide in dramatic fashion, highlighted on a weekend in July 1985, and an event called "Live Aid."
The World Outside the Amigos
There is a lot to talk about here, but I'll try to make it as quick and easy as possible, starting with the world's major geopolitics.
The primary dynamic that shows in the world's geopolitics is the classic Communism vs. Capitalism debate, and it's protagonists. The USSR obviously is the leader of the Eastern Bloc side along with the Warsaw Pact, and courtesy of the massive injection of hard currency into their coffers thanks to the Energy Crisis, they avoided a lot of the stagnation of the late Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, though at this point they are at something of a technological disadvantage that is, however, somewhat counteracted by their natural resource wealth. Nobody does monster heavy industry projects bigger than the Soviets, but even with this they are noticeably falling behind the Western Blocs, and while many of their heavy industries are impressive, others struggle to be competitive and the USSR is belatedly doing all they can to develop or acquire nuclear technology and environmental remediation expertise.
The USSR's desire to advance communism through much of the world has by and large been slowed - more than anything, the failure of communist forces in Vietnam was a massive blow to their goals - but the USSR has in modern times begun to shift their geopolitical goals more towards the development of the third world along their lines, and they have had considerable success assisting many elements in the third world with this, a situation that has pushed both Washington, Latin America, Europe and the Commonwealth to respond in kind. Detente hasn't stopped the development of armed forces technologies on both sides, and the Soviets' developing of a true blue-water global navy and fleets of aerial refueling tankers for their air forces have dramatically extended the reach of their armed forces, which has in itself led to noticeable Western responses in kind. Oil's ability to be used as a weapon by the Soviets and their allies in the Middle East has been dramatically reduced by the nuclear industry, synthetic crude and the development of newer sources of petroleum in these nations, and in the 1970s many infrastructure pieces for the supplying of oil in oil-producing Western Countries, such as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Mexico Pipeline System and the Western Canada Energy Supply System, were completed and became operational, adding the available petroleum supplies.
Outside the USSR, the most powerful Bloc on the planet is the Commonwealth of Nations, the once British-led project that has steadily become a collection of equals, more than anything owing to the growth in the power and influence of the former colonies that make up the Central Commonwealth - Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa - as well as the influence of other nations that are involved in the Commonwealth, India most of all. While in a tight spot its hard to find a situation where the Commonwealth and United States wouldn't support one another, there are differences between them, primarily in the fields of economics and international trade. Britain openly supports its balance of payments through the use of major export drives in many fields - aerospace, electronics, shipbuilding, automobiles - and this at times rankles Washington when the two end up as rivals for orders. Canada and Australia's immense natural resource wealth has given both countries truly-huge natural resource funds, funds that after World War II were heavily used to buy up large amounts of Britain's economy. This support allowed the British Pound to regain a status of reserve currency for many nations in the 1960s - which was a huge help to Britain's government finances if not it's export attempts - and the growing development of North Sea oil and the massive development of synthetic fuels by the UK - Britain spends more than any other nation on Earth on it, behind only the United States and Japan - has also helped with these finances. Since the 1960s Britain's industries have also made much more of an attempt at working with continental Europe, and while the relationship between the UK and it's colonies does occupy the greatest portion of its attention, since the beginnings of the integration of the Europeans into a supranational bloc in the 1950s Britain has sought to be a major player there. Britain, like France, has long left colonialism behind but retains a number of places that are considered "integral territories" of the United Kingdom, of which Malta, Socotra and Hong Kong are the most important - all three are major RN bases and the latter two were or are considered important bulwarks in an uncertain world. (Today Malta and Hong Kong function with a great deal of autonomy, Socotra is headed that way and all three have little difficulty as self-sustaining communities.) These places are considered highly important to the UK for a number of reasons and there is no sign of them being independent of the UK, but their politics are highly advanced and few on the islands have much in the way of objections to their current status.
Canada and Australia, being the originators of half of the world's uranium exports, have used this leverage to their benefit to a considerable extent, and Canada has take this further through the use of their CANDU nuclear technology, which has been in use in Canada since 1960 and has since been sold to several other countries - CANDUs are used in France, India and the United States as nuclear garbage disposal units, a unique system Canada also openly exploits. Through the 1960s many nations joined the club of nuclear energy users (Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, India, France, Italy, Sweden, South Africa, New Zealand, Japan, Korea) and a whole new group began using it in the 1970s (China, Thailand, Vietnam, Iran, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, Singapore, Chile, Nigeria), dramatically growing the world's demand for uranium - and making the selling of it profitable in places that hadn't generally done so before, creating the "Uranium Boom" of the late 1960s and early 1970s as prices rose rapidly with demand, plateauing with the beginning of production in Namibia, Spain, Niger and Vietnam, Germany lifting its export ban and production improvements in the United States, Canada, Australia and the Soviet Union. By the late 1970s spent fuel had begun to be processed by multiple different countries and nuclear research had gone into overdrive across much of the world - India was massively researching the thorium fuel cycle, a Franco-American consortium had developed the first operable fast-breeder reactor design, Britain was developing the first high-temperature reactors and American firm Westinghouse was operating the first molten-salt cooled reactor designs. Despite a number of notable incidents, nuclear energy had by the 1970s gained an enviable reputation in much of the world, and the industry, keen on continuing this good reputation, continued to look for ways of improving the safety of their facilities.
After being left all but in ruins by World War II, the recovery of the economies of Europe was remarkable, and by the 1960s the continent was beginning the long process of developing common ground and policies, aiming to make their economic and social positions better. Germany and France found themselves at the hub of this (along with Italy) and began to advocate for a greater Europe in addition for stronger individual nations, finding themselves able to (to an extent) swallow their own pride to develop stronger societies. The Europeans also took advantage of the fact that they didn't have nearly the fervent anti-communist policies and societal expectations of Britain and the Amigos to develop better social and economic relations with the Eastern Bloc and Middle East.
China in particular sees themselves as being a power bloc unto themselves, even as their involvement in the APTA technically makes them a nation the explicitly opposes communism. Despite that alliance China seeks to use its own considerable power, a desire that puts them at odds with their neighbours at times but is a key geopolitical trait in the world. China's relations with the USSR have been incredibly frosty since the Vietnam War - the USSR believes that Beijing helped to bring about the defeat of the Vietnamese Communists, and there is some truth to that - but over time they have developed a rapport with many nations, most notably the Philippines, Korea and Indonesia, though Japan and China aren't as close and Beijing has been long annoyed by the Ketuanan Malayu policies in Indonesia that is regards as discriminatory towards Chinese people in Malaysia.
The pathway to the Treaty of Asheville and Palestinian independence drew a clear line in the sand that both sides of the Middle East are keen to influence in their favor. Supported from Europe and the Amigos, the North African, Jordanian, Lebanese and Palestinian Arabs have steadily become much more accommodating towards others in their midst, especially in Lebanon (which has a Christian majority, the only Middle Eastern Arab nation to do so) and Palestine (which is joined at the hip with the Israel). As these places have shifted so with it has their economies and societies, often in favor of the more Western social norms. The Modern Islam movement has a vast following in much of North Africa, and the Christian Arabs among these populations also tend to have much different views of the world around them. By contrast, the nations of the Arabian Peninsula and their supporters and clients (including Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan) continue to hold to traditions that have, somewhat conversely, come to rely on a social construct that encourages the rigidly hierarchal social orders of the past while at the same time seeking economic development that traditionally is focused on the production of natural resources. This duality has resulted in a considerable and continuing brain drain towards more-socially-liberal sections of the Middle East that has proven to be a major problem for the Saudis and Iraqis in particular.
The 1970s saw a wave of terrorism aimed at derailing the Treaties that dealt with Israel and Palestine, but this ended up being more or less a strategic failure that ended up causing more than a little backlash in the more liberal nations, this most famously seen in the attacks on the Hezbollah militias in the summer of 1975 after repeated attacks aimed at destabilizing Lebanon ultimately went nowhere but causing a groundswell among both Christian and Muslim Lebanese Arabs that culminated in the Bednayel Incident on August 25 and 26, 1975, when after a bombing on a Maronite Christian church that killed 11 people was claimed responsibility by the Syrian Islamic Jihad, an enraged community some 14,000 strong stormed a compound near the Bekaa Valley town of Bednayel known to be used by Hezbollah and several allies and burned it to the ground, with the series of intermittent gun battles between Lebanese police and Army, rioters and the terrorists themselves killed over 70 people and the riot itself leading to an ugly scene where seven captured gunmen were beaten to death by the massive mob and three others were crucified on makeshift crosses, with the corpses left for all to see. The Bednayel Incident all but eradicated terrorism support in Lebanon and made headlines across the Middle East, and after similar (though less bloody) incidents in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia and a failed bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub that was heroically halted by a Palestinian refugee on March 22, 1977, the many nations on the side of progress began to have reactions of their own. In the years after the Treaty of Asheville, several of the Arab nations began co-operating with the Israelis on intelligence matters, both adding to the Israeli Mossad's already-formidable reputation and helping to assure the stability of the other nations.
Similar to this is Iran. Shah Reza Pahlavi's nation was by the mid-1970s the second-largest exporter of oil to Europe and the largest to Japan and Korea, creating a truly monumental income that Pahlavi shoveled heavily into the restructuring of Iranian society and it's economy as well as a massive buildup of the Iranian armed forces, the latter actions taken primarily owing to fear of the Soviet Union to the North and the armed-to-the-teeth Arabs to the West and Southwest. Iran would suffer a number of social upheavals in the late 1970s, bringing about Pahlavi's son giving up his absolute power position, but Iran is an ultimate beneficiary of those moves, with a stable elected government and continued good relations with the West. With this, Iran's population in its elite classes, long enamored by more modern and open interpretations of Islam, saw a lot of their views on the subject filter down to the lower classes, whose lot in life had been dramatically changed by the White Revolution. For the vast majority of Iran by the late 1970s, whatever their views on the Shah and some of his actions and those of his lieutenants, modern interpretations of Islam went hand-in-hand with prosperity, and when compared to the Arabs (which many Iranians saw themselves as better than) the modern, economically-prosperous, increasingly-free Iran was something to be cherished - and Shah Reza Pahlavi II, recognizing this, went to considerable lengths to grow democracy and civil rights in Iran.
India was widely considered by much of the world to be "the next big nation" by the late 1970s and it wasn't hard to figure out why. Indira Gandhi ended up dismantling much of the license Raj her father had built, but that ended up being a benefit in a wide variety of ways. India's truly immense educational systems built by Nehru served the nation well by creating legions of skilled professionals, who combined with the end of the license Raj and heaps of Commonwealth, American and Japanese money to bring about a spectacular economic boom in the 1970s. India's economy grew by staggering proportions during the decade - it averaged 9.1% per year growth during the decade - and by the end of the decade the Indians were plowing all they could into poverty reduction strategies as well as environmental remediation, the latter an increasingly-big need by the late 1970s as air and water pollution began to have serious effects on India.
As befitting their position as the Commonwealth's greatest project (both sides knew that well), India sought in the 1970s to expand their position in the world, perhaps most notably (and initially alarmingly to some) through the purchase of three aircraft carriers from the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s along with a fleet of fighters. The Americans allowed India to purchase Spey Phantoms for the carriers (in return for this, India bought the American E-2 Hawkeye and E-3 Sentry for AWACS platforms), providing them with a legitimate blue-water naval capability. This led to Pakistan, disgusted by this, withdrawing from the Commonwealth in 1977 (they were re-admitted in 1992) and drawing closer to the USSR during Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's time leading Pakistan (that ended in a plane crash in 1988) and increased animosity with India. Despite this animosity, by the mid-1980s the vast majority of the world's military planners saw any conflict between India and Pakistan as extremely likely to go the way of the former and see Pakistan's belligerence as being increasingly problematic for themselves as well as nations around them.
Japan went through one of the most dramatic economic shifts of all of those who lost during WWII, but from a nation built on Yamato supremacy in 1945 Japan rapidly evolved, seeking the position of Asia's great power again though in a much more peaceful sense. While the country was overtaken economically by China in the early 1980s - having six times the population and vastly more natural resources does help, after all - but Japan's asset price bubble soared the value of its property to stratospheric heights by 1986 before efforts by the Japanese government sought to tamp it down. Owing to being entirely dependent on the sea for shipping and economic survival, Japan operates a vast but defensively-minded Navy and Air Force - three small aircraft carriers joined by a vast fleet of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, a handful of nuclear submarines and a massive collection of some of the world's best diesel-electric ones, aiming to make sure sea lanes to and from Japan stay open no matter what. Similarly, during the asset price bubble, Japanese investors bought truly monumental quantities of assets abroad, and their banks have made a reputation for themselves through the rescue of troubled firms.
Societally, Japan (and Korea, who often follow close behind) is among the more advanced nations in terms of social norms and are joined at the hip with the West, even if they don't always see eye to eye on issues.
There is a lot to talk about here, but I'll try to make it as quick and easy as possible, starting with the world's major geopolitics.
The primary dynamic that shows in the world's geopolitics is the classic Communism vs. Capitalism debate, and it's protagonists. The USSR obviously is the leader of the Eastern Bloc side along with the Warsaw Pact, and courtesy of the massive injection of hard currency into their coffers thanks to the Energy Crisis, they avoided a lot of the stagnation of the late Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, though at this point they are at something of a technological disadvantage that is, however, somewhat counteracted by their natural resource wealth. Nobody does monster heavy industry projects bigger than the Soviets, but even with this they are noticeably falling behind the Western Blocs, and while many of their heavy industries are impressive, others struggle to be competitive and the USSR is belatedly doing all they can to develop or acquire nuclear technology and environmental remediation expertise.
The USSR's desire to advance communism through much of the world has by and large been slowed - more than anything, the failure of communist forces in Vietnam was a massive blow to their goals - but the USSR has in modern times begun to shift their geopolitical goals more towards the development of the third world along their lines, and they have had considerable success assisting many elements in the third world with this, a situation that has pushed both Washington, Latin America, Europe and the Commonwealth to respond in kind. Detente hasn't stopped the development of armed forces technologies on both sides, and the Soviets' developing of a true blue-water global navy and fleets of aerial refueling tankers for their air forces have dramatically extended the reach of their armed forces, which has in itself led to noticeable Western responses in kind. Oil's ability to be used as a weapon by the Soviets and their allies in the Middle East has been dramatically reduced by the nuclear industry, synthetic crude and the development of newer sources of petroleum in these nations, and in the 1970s many infrastructure pieces for the supplying of oil in oil-producing Western Countries, such as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Mexico Pipeline System and the Western Canada Energy Supply System, were completed and became operational, adding the available petroleum supplies.
Outside the USSR, the most powerful Bloc on the planet is the Commonwealth of Nations, the once British-led project that has steadily become a collection of equals, more than anything owing to the growth in the power and influence of the former colonies that make up the Central Commonwealth - Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa - as well as the influence of other nations that are involved in the Commonwealth, India most of all. While in a tight spot its hard to find a situation where the Commonwealth and United States wouldn't support one another, there are differences between them, primarily in the fields of economics and international trade. Britain openly supports its balance of payments through the use of major export drives in many fields - aerospace, electronics, shipbuilding, automobiles - and this at times rankles Washington when the two end up as rivals for orders. Canada and Australia's immense natural resource wealth has given both countries truly-huge natural resource funds, funds that after World War II were heavily used to buy up large amounts of Britain's economy. This support allowed the British Pound to regain a status of reserve currency for many nations in the 1960s - which was a huge help to Britain's government finances if not it's export attempts - and the growing development of North Sea oil and the massive development of synthetic fuels by the UK - Britain spends more than any other nation on Earth on it, behind only the United States and Japan - has also helped with these finances. Since the 1960s Britain's industries have also made much more of an attempt at working with continental Europe, and while the relationship between the UK and it's colonies does occupy the greatest portion of its attention, since the beginnings of the integration of the Europeans into a supranational bloc in the 1950s Britain has sought to be a major player there. Britain, like France, has long left colonialism behind but retains a number of places that are considered "integral territories" of the United Kingdom, of which Malta, Socotra and Hong Kong are the most important - all three are major RN bases and the latter two were or are considered important bulwarks in an uncertain world. (Today Malta and Hong Kong function with a great deal of autonomy, Socotra is headed that way and all three have little difficulty as self-sustaining communities.) These places are considered highly important to the UK for a number of reasons and there is no sign of them being independent of the UK, but their politics are highly advanced and few on the islands have much in the way of objections to their current status.
Canada and Australia, being the originators of half of the world's uranium exports, have used this leverage to their benefit to a considerable extent, and Canada has take this further through the use of their CANDU nuclear technology, which has been in use in Canada since 1960 and has since been sold to several other countries - CANDUs are used in France, India and the United States as nuclear garbage disposal units, a unique system Canada also openly exploits. Through the 1960s many nations joined the club of nuclear energy users (Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, India, France, Italy, Sweden, South Africa, New Zealand, Japan, Korea) and a whole new group began using it in the 1970s (China, Thailand, Vietnam, Iran, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, Singapore, Chile, Nigeria), dramatically growing the world's demand for uranium - and making the selling of it profitable in places that hadn't generally done so before, creating the "Uranium Boom" of the late 1960s and early 1970s as prices rose rapidly with demand, plateauing with the beginning of production in Namibia, Spain, Niger and Vietnam, Germany lifting its export ban and production improvements in the United States, Canada, Australia and the Soviet Union. By the late 1970s spent fuel had begun to be processed by multiple different countries and nuclear research had gone into overdrive across much of the world - India was massively researching the thorium fuel cycle, a Franco-American consortium had developed the first operable fast-breeder reactor design, Britain was developing the first high-temperature reactors and American firm Westinghouse was operating the first molten-salt cooled reactor designs. Despite a number of notable incidents, nuclear energy had by the 1970s gained an enviable reputation in much of the world, and the industry, keen on continuing this good reputation, continued to look for ways of improving the safety of their facilities.
After being left all but in ruins by World War II, the recovery of the economies of Europe was remarkable, and by the 1960s the continent was beginning the long process of developing common ground and policies, aiming to make their economic and social positions better. Germany and France found themselves at the hub of this (along with Italy) and began to advocate for a greater Europe in addition for stronger individual nations, finding themselves able to (to an extent) swallow their own pride to develop stronger societies. The Europeans also took advantage of the fact that they didn't have nearly the fervent anti-communist policies and societal expectations of Britain and the Amigos to develop better social and economic relations with the Eastern Bloc and Middle East.
China in particular sees themselves as being a power bloc unto themselves, even as their involvement in the APTA technically makes them a nation the explicitly opposes communism. Despite that alliance China seeks to use its own considerable power, a desire that puts them at odds with their neighbours at times but is a key geopolitical trait in the world. China's relations with the USSR have been incredibly frosty since the Vietnam War - the USSR believes that Beijing helped to bring about the defeat of the Vietnamese Communists, and there is some truth to that - but over time they have developed a rapport with many nations, most notably the Philippines, Korea and Indonesia, though Japan and China aren't as close and Beijing has been long annoyed by the Ketuanan Malayu policies in Indonesia that is regards as discriminatory towards Chinese people in Malaysia.
The pathway to the Treaty of Asheville and Palestinian independence drew a clear line in the sand that both sides of the Middle East are keen to influence in their favor. Supported from Europe and the Amigos, the North African, Jordanian, Lebanese and Palestinian Arabs have steadily become much more accommodating towards others in their midst, especially in Lebanon (which has a Christian majority, the only Middle Eastern Arab nation to do so) and Palestine (which is joined at the hip with the Israel). As these places have shifted so with it has their economies and societies, often in favor of the more Western social norms. The Modern Islam movement has a vast following in much of North Africa, and the Christian Arabs among these populations also tend to have much different views of the world around them. By contrast, the nations of the Arabian Peninsula and their supporters and clients (including Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan) continue to hold to traditions that have, somewhat conversely, come to rely on a social construct that encourages the rigidly hierarchal social orders of the past while at the same time seeking economic development that traditionally is focused on the production of natural resources. This duality has resulted in a considerable and continuing brain drain towards more-socially-liberal sections of the Middle East that has proven to be a major problem for the Saudis and Iraqis in particular.
The 1970s saw a wave of terrorism aimed at derailing the Treaties that dealt with Israel and Palestine, but this ended up being more or less a strategic failure that ended up causing more than a little backlash in the more liberal nations, this most famously seen in the attacks on the Hezbollah militias in the summer of 1975 after repeated attacks aimed at destabilizing Lebanon ultimately went nowhere but causing a groundswell among both Christian and Muslim Lebanese Arabs that culminated in the Bednayel Incident on August 25 and 26, 1975, when after a bombing on a Maronite Christian church that killed 11 people was claimed responsibility by the Syrian Islamic Jihad, an enraged community some 14,000 strong stormed a compound near the Bekaa Valley town of Bednayel known to be used by Hezbollah and several allies and burned it to the ground, with the series of intermittent gun battles between Lebanese police and Army, rioters and the terrorists themselves killed over 70 people and the riot itself leading to an ugly scene where seven captured gunmen were beaten to death by the massive mob and three others were crucified on makeshift crosses, with the corpses left for all to see. The Bednayel Incident all but eradicated terrorism support in Lebanon and made headlines across the Middle East, and after similar (though less bloody) incidents in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia and a failed bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub that was heroically halted by a Palestinian refugee on March 22, 1977, the many nations on the side of progress began to have reactions of their own. In the years after the Treaty of Asheville, several of the Arab nations began co-operating with the Israelis on intelligence matters, both adding to the Israeli Mossad's already-formidable reputation and helping to assure the stability of the other nations.
Similar to this is Iran. Shah Reza Pahlavi's nation was by the mid-1970s the second-largest exporter of oil to Europe and the largest to Japan and Korea, creating a truly monumental income that Pahlavi shoveled heavily into the restructuring of Iranian society and it's economy as well as a massive buildup of the Iranian armed forces, the latter actions taken primarily owing to fear of the Soviet Union to the North and the armed-to-the-teeth Arabs to the West and Southwest. Iran would suffer a number of social upheavals in the late 1970s, bringing about Pahlavi's son giving up his absolute power position, but Iran is an ultimate beneficiary of those moves, with a stable elected government and continued good relations with the West. With this, Iran's population in its elite classes, long enamored by more modern and open interpretations of Islam, saw a lot of their views on the subject filter down to the lower classes, whose lot in life had been dramatically changed by the White Revolution. For the vast majority of Iran by the late 1970s, whatever their views on the Shah and some of his actions and those of his lieutenants, modern interpretations of Islam went hand-in-hand with prosperity, and when compared to the Arabs (which many Iranians saw themselves as better than) the modern, economically-prosperous, increasingly-free Iran was something to be cherished - and Shah Reza Pahlavi II, recognizing this, went to considerable lengths to grow democracy and civil rights in Iran.
India was widely considered by much of the world to be "the next big nation" by the late 1970s and it wasn't hard to figure out why. Indira Gandhi ended up dismantling much of the license Raj her father had built, but that ended up being a benefit in a wide variety of ways. India's truly immense educational systems built by Nehru served the nation well by creating legions of skilled professionals, who combined with the end of the license Raj and heaps of Commonwealth, American and Japanese money to bring about a spectacular economic boom in the 1970s. India's economy grew by staggering proportions during the decade - it averaged 9.1% per year growth during the decade - and by the end of the decade the Indians were plowing all they could into poverty reduction strategies as well as environmental remediation, the latter an increasingly-big need by the late 1970s as air and water pollution began to have serious effects on India.
As befitting their position as the Commonwealth's greatest project (both sides knew that well), India sought in the 1970s to expand their position in the world, perhaps most notably (and initially alarmingly to some) through the purchase of three aircraft carriers from the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s along with a fleet of fighters. The Americans allowed India to purchase Spey Phantoms for the carriers (in return for this, India bought the American E-2 Hawkeye and E-3 Sentry for AWACS platforms), providing them with a legitimate blue-water naval capability. This led to Pakistan, disgusted by this, withdrawing from the Commonwealth in 1977 (they were re-admitted in 1992) and drawing closer to the USSR during Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's time leading Pakistan (that ended in a plane crash in 1988) and increased animosity with India. Despite this animosity, by the mid-1980s the vast majority of the world's military planners saw any conflict between India and Pakistan as extremely likely to go the way of the former and see Pakistan's belligerence as being increasingly problematic for themselves as well as nations around them.
Japan went through one of the most dramatic economic shifts of all of those who lost during WWII, but from a nation built on Yamato supremacy in 1945 Japan rapidly evolved, seeking the position of Asia's great power again though in a much more peaceful sense. While the country was overtaken economically by China in the early 1980s - having six times the population and vastly more natural resources does help, after all - but Japan's asset price bubble soared the value of its property to stratospheric heights by 1986 before efforts by the Japanese government sought to tamp it down. Owing to being entirely dependent on the sea for shipping and economic survival, Japan operates a vast but defensively-minded Navy and Air Force - three small aircraft carriers joined by a vast fleet of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, a handful of nuclear submarines and a massive collection of some of the world's best diesel-electric ones, aiming to make sure sea lanes to and from Japan stay open no matter what. Similarly, during the asset price bubble, Japanese investors bought truly monumental quantities of assets abroad, and their banks have made a reputation for themselves through the rescue of troubled firms.
Societally, Japan (and Korea, who often follow close behind) is among the more advanced nations in terms of social norms and are joined at the hip with the West, even if they don't always see eye to eye on issues.
Dragon of the South
The Republic of Vietnam in Three Amigos
Prologue
An hour prior
“Thank you very much for hosting me,” Madeleine Bastien said to her friend’s parents and relatives as they left her friend Mai’s home.
“I am very happy that our dear Mai was able to make good friends when she went to Canada,” her friend’s father replied, “Please enjoy your evening.”
The two friends bid their good evenings before they headed into Hue’s bustling Tet celebration.
“I hope you enjoyed the food,” Mai said as they walked in the crowd filled street, “It wasn’t too unusual for you?”
The two young adults were dressed in traditionnal ao dai, Mai wearing a blue one and Madeleine wearing a red one. The Canadian reporter had her camera hanging around her neck.
“Different, yes… but I’ve never had such good food! Pho would be perfect during the winters in Montreal.”
“Agreed, I missed it so much when I was there,” Mai replied with a laugh, “I was almost about to make some with spaghetti noodles at some point.”
The two women laughed at the predicament.
“I heard people started importing goods from Vietnam,” Madeleine replied, “So when you’ll get back maybe you’ll be able to get some for the apartment.”
“Of course! Otherwise, have you been able to get enough information for those articles you wanted to write about Vietnamese culture?”
Madeleine nodded.
“I’m very happy that your parents were kind enough to let me take some pictures as well. I really love how the Vietnamese commemorate their loved ones.”
“Yes,” Mai replied, a look of sadness on her face, “Sadly, there have been too many in the past few years.”
Madeleine nodded in understanding. She remembered the smiling portrait of her friend’s eldest brother, Tung, on their family’s ancestors’ shrine. The young man had been killed during a battle against the Viet-Cong.
“But I have faith that this war’ll end so-.”
An air raid siren went off, cutting her off. The National Police and QC were fast on the scene, guiding people and doing their best to maintain order. The two young women were heading back to Mai’s home, navigating the crowds of people trying to get to cover.
Suddenly, three explosions echoed through Vietnam’s ancient capital, knocking the two women off their feet.
“Are you alright?” Mai shouted over the sounds of the panicking crowd and the whistles of the policemen.
“Yes!” Madeleine as she picked herself off the ground, wiping the dust off her glasses, “A few scratches here and there but I can still walk! You?!”
“Yes,” Mai replied, looking around her to get her bearings, “OH MY GOD!”
She pointed to a nearby raging inferno, a few blocks from there.
“I’m going to help them!” the young woman shouted as she broke into a sprint. Before she could get very far, she was stopped by a police officer.
“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to please evacuate the area,” he ordered her, “This is too dangerous for civilians.”
Mai shook her head, determination edged on her face.
“I’m a medical student. I can help them!”
The policeman’s expression changed instantly.
“Very well then! Go!” he ordered before pointing at a nearby building, “There’s a medical clinic over there!”
“Thank you sir!”
Madeleine followed her friend towards the clinic. As they got closer, the sight was sorrowful. People were carrying their injured loved ones, their finest clothes dirtied by blood and soot, the voice crying out for help while anyone who could assist, did. South Vietnamese soldiers and their allies were doing their best to treat anyone they could.
The Canadian woman rushed over to help an elderly man who had collapsed. As she picked him up, she realized with horror that he was bleeding profusely.
“HELP!” she shouted, almost dropping the injured man out of shock. A nearby boy ran over, tears on his face, screaming in Vietnamese. The boy tried to help the old man as well, tears streaking down his youthful face.
“Madeleine! Are you sure you can help here!?” Mai yelled. The Vietnamese woman was bandaging an injured woman’s arm, “Can you do first aid?”
“No-no,” she stammered as she clutched her camera.
Realization hit her.
“I’ll come back later!” Madeleine shouted as she ran out the clinic, her camera in hand. Her body went into autopilot as she began capturing the scene of the tragedy that had befallen Vietnam’s ancient capital. With each photo she took, an image of sorrow was forever captured. Scenes of injured, dying and dead being engraved in film. The sorry state of burning and ruined buildings contrasted with the heroic efforts of firefighters, policemen and soldiers fighting to save their people. The young reporter wandered the chaotic streets, forgetting how long it had been since she left the clinic.
“Ma’am!” a heavily accented voice shook the reporter’s attention back to reality, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave this area!”
It was an ARVN soldier with QC marked on his helmet. His uniform’s nametape had Hung written on it.
“It is not safe for civilians to be in this area right now,” he continued, “I’m going to have to ask you to get to shelter immediately!”
“I am a reporter,” she replied in French but the QC shook his head, “I have to take pictures for my newspaper.”
The soldier shook his head.
“I understand that you are doing your job but it's too dangerous for you to be roaming around. We don’t know if the communists are going to attack the city again so please take shelter.”
“You don’t understand! This is the only way I can help!” she yelled back at the soldier, “The world must see what happened here.”
“And my job is to make sure that civilians aren’t in harm’s way.” the QC barked back, “I’m going to have to ask you to return to where you are staying!”
As they argued, they didn’t notice the jeep stopping behind them.
“Excuse me ma’am,” another voice cut in, “May I have a word with you?”
Madeleine and Sgt. Hung looked at the source. The Sgt. straightened himself as he saw the newcomer’s uniform. He was a tall and lanky man riding in a jeep with a pair of soldiers. A half-smoked cigarette hung from his lips.
“Major Trung! I was ordering this civilian to return home!”
“Yes,” he replied before turning his attention to the reporter, his stern eyes narrowing, “Mademoiselle, you have taken many pictures of tonight’s tragedies?”
“Y-yes Major,” she stammered under his intense glare.
“Splendid. Please come with me,” he demanded, “I believe your pictures would be of use to me.”
“He’s from Political Warfare,” Sgt. Hung cut in, “He’ll make sure everyone in Vietnam’ll see your pictures.”
“Thank you Sergeant,” Major Trung replied, lighting another cigarette before looking at the reporter, “Will you accompany me to my office? I will personally make sure that your pictures will be developed and published as soon as possible. Tonight’s tragedy must be seen by all.”
“Yes,” the reporter replied, “Can I ask a favor first?”
“Of course,”
“Can you tell my friend that I am coming with you?”
The major nodded.
“I will dispatch one of my men. Where is she?”
The reporter quickly gave the address to the Major.
“Send a runner to that clinic when we get to the office,” he ordered while another soldier helped Madeleine onto the back of the jeep. In the distance, the sounds of battle echoed outside the ancient capital. The Communists were attacking Hue.
Madeleine Bastien’s pictures of what would be known as the “Tragedy in Hue'' were the first to be publicized, courtesy of the ARVN Political Warfare Branch. The sorrowful images of South Vietnamese citizens injured by the indiscriminate SCUD attacks on the city were shown across the world and would bolster support for the Republic of Vietnam.
The ARVN Political Warfare Department ruthlessly used the images of the Tragedy in Hue as propaganda weapons against the North but it was only a prelude of what they would see once the march north would begin.
Author’s notes:
Hello everyone,
I’m a Vietnam War historian who worked on the RVN as well as the Boat People crisis and Canada’s response to it. My Masters’ thesis was on the American and Canadian response to the Boat People crisis, the legal changes in immigration and refugee policy in the decades prior and can be found online. In addition, I’m from South Vietnam and my father made it here in the early 80’s as a Boat Person.
The ARVN MP sergeant’s comment on snipers is grounded in reality. During the Tet offensive in our timeline, when South Vietnamese firefighters responded to fires in Saigon, there were incidents of them getting shot by snipers. I remember seeing either a video or a picture of a firefighter walking away after being shot. There’s also a video of ARVN troops helping them fight fires led by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of RVN National Police. The general actually mans fire hoses with his men to aid in containing the damage. General Loan, in our timeline, is well-known for the picture where he executes a VC operative that had been captured after murdering ARVN officers and their families. He was known as a hotheaded, cocky officer who was known to be quite reckless and brutish around the edges so it was unsurprising that he helped out with the fire fighting efforts personally.
A video where General Loan fights fires with his men during the Tet Offensive.
Biệt Động Quân QLVNCH tại trận Mậu Thân Sài Gòn năm 1968
The comment about spaghetti noodles in pho is a reference to the early years of the Vietnamese refugees in Montreal. My dad at the time couldn’t find proper pho noodles and had to make do with spaghetti noodles.
The ARVN Political Warfare did really exist as a branch of the ARVN and spent the war doing psyops and propaganda against the Communists as well as trying to ensure loyalty in the ARVN. For more reading on them:
http://www.psywarrior.com/VietnamGPWD.html
Unlike the Tet offensive in our timeline, the ARVN was very well prepared so Hue didn't fall to the VC/PAVN forces. The ARVN 1st Division and other units are fully mobilized to keep the city safe unlike our timeline where only the 1st Division’s quick response forces, HQ clerks and staff officers and whatever they cobbled together were able to defend the city.
As for the format of the story, it'll bounce between characters on the ground and a more encyclopedia format.
The Republic of Vietnam in Three Amigos
Prologue
In 1967, the ARVN was faced with the largest attack on its home territory ever since its founding in 1956. With the situation growing ever more critical in the North due the Allied blockade and the NLF guerillas in the South floundering as President Ngo Dinh Diem steadily led his nation to prosperity, the Hanoi Politburo under the leadership of Le Duan pressured the PAVN’s high command under General Vo Nguyen Giap and the NLF leadership to launch an all-assault against the South and their Allies. The PAVN’s plan was to assault the Allied forces’ lines in the North during Tet 1967 and break through to the South.
Meanwhile, in the South, the NLF (more popularly known as the Viet-Cong) were to launch an all-out assault against the South Vietnamese cities and seize as many cities as possible while inflicting as many casualties as they could against the ARVN forces.
In Tet 1967, the night came to life as the North Vietnamese forces opened up along the allied lines stretching from Vinh to the Laotian border. Ever since the war had started, the Lunar New Year or Tet was a period of truce that had been staunchly respected by both sides but the Communist North broke it out of desperation. SCUD missiles landed across South Vietnam’s northernmost cities such Hue and Quang Tri. Meanwhile, the VC guerrillas launched an all-out assault on South Vietnamese cities and bases.
Chapter 1: Tragedy in Hue
A group of MP’s were walking through the northern streets of Vietnam’s ancient Imperial capital of Hue. Their armbands and helmets were marked with QC, identifying them as the ARVN’s military police. Despite the Tet celebrations and festive mood in the city, the Quân cảnh were still out patrolling, ensuring the safety of South Vietnam’s cities alongside their civilian counterparts in the Cảnh sát Quốc gia (National Police). It was also a good time for the QC to look good in the eyes of their people so their uniforms were impeccable. The city’s streets were full of people celebrating the New Year, parading and dancing around. There were also quite a few foreigners amongst the crowds.
“Man, I really hope Intelligence’s wrong and that the communists aren’t going to attack,” Corporal Binh said as his four man team walked down one of Hue’s many streets.
“I highly doubt it,” Sergeant. Hung replied, “Intelligence is rarely wrong on this.”
“I hope they are,” Private Le added as he waved to a passing group of ladies in Ao Dai, “Got any plans for Tet that aren’t ruined so far.”
“I’m supposed to see my family tomorrow morning if all goes well,” Binh replied, “My sister’s sent some presents from Canada.”
“How’s she doing over there?” his sergeant asked, “I heard from a friend that went there that the weather is dreadfully cold.”
“Well apparently, you can get used to it,” Binh answered, “Her friends took her shopping for a winter coat but she still misses the warm weather here.”
“I don’t think anyone can get used to Canadian weather,” chuckled Private Minh, “How can you live in a country where the weather is colder than a freezer?”
The squad laughed at the private’s comment.
“I remember meeting a Canadian officer on leave a few month ago complaining about how he would never get used to our heat,” the sergeant replied with a smile, “but he told that his Mexican buddies feel right at ho-”
Suddenly, air raid sirens resonated throughout Vietnam’s ancient capital followed by panicked shouting.
“Shit!”
The four man team rushed towards the main intersection in their sector, blowing their whistles to clear the way. Once there, they took positions and were met by National Policemen.
“Please remain calm and return to your homes!” they ordered, guiding the crowds of people and ensuring that panic wouldn’t set in.
Suddenly an explosion rocked the city, followed by two others.
“Oh my god…” Private Binh mouthed as the blasts rose over the city, a few blocks from them.
“Th-those BASTARDS! THAT’S JUST A NEIGHBORHOOD!”
“Those were SCUD missiles!” Sgt. Hung realized in horror as he saw the flames rage where the missiles strucks, “Make sure everyone’s gotten home safe first! We’ll go help out afterwards!”
“Yes sir!”
The sound of firefighter sirens began to fill the air as they rushed to the stricken area as the QC and National Policemen cleared the street of civilians.
“We’ll take it from here!” a police officer shouted at the QC, “You guys go help over there!”
Sgt. Hung nodded and it was that was needed for the team to break into a run. Adrenaline and worry for their people carried them. As they came closer, they were by sorrowful sights. Families who dressed in their finest clothes for Tet were now covered in soot, dust and blood. Young women’s ao dai were stained with the blood of the injured as they struggled to carry them out. The neighborhood was bathed in the cruel orange light of uncaring flames. What was a moment of joy and togetherness had turned into a tragedy. Cries of help echoed over the sounds of flames and firefighter’s water hoses. Training kicked in and the four man team moved as one, helping anyone that needed it.
“Help is on the way,” Private Binh said as he carried an injured man to a nearby bench, “You’ll be ok soon.”
Meanwhile, Private Minh was doing his best to calm down a crying child before handing the child a small candy bar. The child suddenly ran towards another person. The private looked and saw an elderly man dressed elegantly.
“Grandfather! Grandfather!”
“Little one!”
“Sir! You need help!” Minh realized as he saw the blood stains on the man’s sleeve. He quickly produced a bandage and quickly wrapped it around the old man’s arm before sending off to a nearby hospital.
The QC helped keep order as best as they could while helping injured civilians get to safety. They were also on the lookout for any other dangers.
“Keep an eye for snipers!” Sgt. Hung suddenly shouted as he remembered a Viet-Cong bombing where a Viet-Cong sniper team had hidden in a tall building nearby and shot the first responders before it was neutralized.
“Yes sir!”
The sound of thumping boots caught their attention. Private Binh recognized their insignia. It was a squad of Mexican Marineros. Beads of sweat could be seen on their faces as they caught their breath.
“Who’s in charge?” their sergeant asked hurriedly, “We saw what happened and came to help! We have a medic with us too!”
Sgt Hung nodded as he glanced quickly at the Mexican’s uniform.
“I’m happy to see you, Sgt Juarez! We could use some help getting the wounded out!”
“You heard the man! Get to it! Keep an eye for trouble!” He ordered his men and they soon complied.
At that moment, Sgt. Hung noticed the flash of a camera nearby. A foreign woman with glasses dressed in a beautiful red ao dai was wandering around with her camera, snapping pictures of what she saw. She moved as if she was in a trance, her expression vacant.
Meanwhile, in the South, the NLF (more popularly known as the Viet-Cong) were to launch an all-out assault against the South Vietnamese cities and seize as many cities as possible while inflicting as many casualties as they could against the ARVN forces.
In Tet 1967, the night came to life as the North Vietnamese forces opened up along the allied lines stretching from Vinh to the Laotian border. Ever since the war had started, the Lunar New Year or Tet was a period of truce that had been staunchly respected by both sides but the Communist North broke it out of desperation. SCUD missiles landed across South Vietnam’s northernmost cities such Hue and Quang Tri. Meanwhile, the VC guerrillas launched an all-out assault on South Vietnamese cities and bases.
Chapter 1: Tragedy in Hue
A group of MP’s were walking through the northern streets of Vietnam’s ancient Imperial capital of Hue. Their armbands and helmets were marked with QC, identifying them as the ARVN’s military police. Despite the Tet celebrations and festive mood in the city, the Quân cảnh were still out patrolling, ensuring the safety of South Vietnam’s cities alongside their civilian counterparts in the Cảnh sát Quốc gia (National Police). It was also a good time for the QC to look good in the eyes of their people so their uniforms were impeccable. The city’s streets were full of people celebrating the New Year, parading and dancing around. There were also quite a few foreigners amongst the crowds.
“Man, I really hope Intelligence’s wrong and that the communists aren’t going to attack,” Corporal Binh said as his four man team walked down one of Hue’s many streets.
“I highly doubt it,” Sergeant. Hung replied, “Intelligence is rarely wrong on this.”
“I hope they are,” Private Le added as he waved to a passing group of ladies in Ao Dai, “Got any plans for Tet that aren’t ruined so far.”
“I’m supposed to see my family tomorrow morning if all goes well,” Binh replied, “My sister’s sent some presents from Canada.”
“How’s she doing over there?” his sergeant asked, “I heard from a friend that went there that the weather is dreadfully cold.”
“Well apparently, you can get used to it,” Binh answered, “Her friends took her shopping for a winter coat but she still misses the warm weather here.”
“I don’t think anyone can get used to Canadian weather,” chuckled Private Minh, “How can you live in a country where the weather is colder than a freezer?”
The squad laughed at the private’s comment.
“I remember meeting a Canadian officer on leave a few month ago complaining about how he would never get used to our heat,” the sergeant replied with a smile, “but he told that his Mexican buddies feel right at ho-”
Suddenly, air raid sirens resonated throughout Vietnam’s ancient capital followed by panicked shouting.
“Shit!”
The four man team rushed towards the main intersection in their sector, blowing their whistles to clear the way. Once there, they took positions and were met by National Policemen.
“Please remain calm and return to your homes!” they ordered, guiding the crowds of people and ensuring that panic wouldn’t set in.
Suddenly an explosion rocked the city, followed by two others.
“Oh my god…” Private Binh mouthed as the blasts rose over the city, a few blocks from them.
“Th-those BASTARDS! THAT’S JUST A NEIGHBORHOOD!”
“Those were SCUD missiles!” Sgt. Hung realized in horror as he saw the flames rage where the missiles strucks, “Make sure everyone’s gotten home safe first! We’ll go help out afterwards!”
“Yes sir!”
The sound of firefighter sirens began to fill the air as they rushed to the stricken area as the QC and National Policemen cleared the street of civilians.
“We’ll take it from here!” a police officer shouted at the QC, “You guys go help over there!”
Sgt. Hung nodded and it was that was needed for the team to break into a run. Adrenaline and worry for their people carried them. As they came closer, they were by sorrowful sights. Families who dressed in their finest clothes for Tet were now covered in soot, dust and blood. Young women’s ao dai were stained with the blood of the injured as they struggled to carry them out. The neighborhood was bathed in the cruel orange light of uncaring flames. What was a moment of joy and togetherness had turned into a tragedy. Cries of help echoed over the sounds of flames and firefighter’s water hoses. Training kicked in and the four man team moved as one, helping anyone that needed it.
“Help is on the way,” Private Binh said as he carried an injured man to a nearby bench, “You’ll be ok soon.”
Meanwhile, Private Minh was doing his best to calm down a crying child before handing the child a small candy bar. The child suddenly ran towards another person. The private looked and saw an elderly man dressed elegantly.
“Grandfather! Grandfather!”
“Little one!”
“Sir! You need help!” Minh realized as he saw the blood stains on the man’s sleeve. He quickly produced a bandage and quickly wrapped it around the old man’s arm before sending off to a nearby hospital.
The QC helped keep order as best as they could while helping injured civilians get to safety. They were also on the lookout for any other dangers.
“Keep an eye for snipers!” Sgt. Hung suddenly shouted as he remembered a Viet-Cong bombing where a Viet-Cong sniper team had hidden in a tall building nearby and shot the first responders before it was neutralized.
“Yes sir!”
The sound of thumping boots caught their attention. Private Binh recognized their insignia. It was a squad of Mexican Marineros. Beads of sweat could be seen on their faces as they caught their breath.
“Who’s in charge?” their sergeant asked hurriedly, “We saw what happened and came to help! We have a medic with us too!”
Sgt Hung nodded as he glanced quickly at the Mexican’s uniform.
“I’m happy to see you, Sgt Juarez! We could use some help getting the wounded out!”
“You heard the man! Get to it! Keep an eye for trouble!” He ordered his men and they soon complied.
At that moment, Sgt. Hung noticed the flash of a camera nearby. A foreign woman with glasses dressed in a beautiful red ao dai was wandering around with her camera, snapping pictures of what she saw. She moved as if she was in a trance, her expression vacant.
An hour prior
“Thank you very much for hosting me,” Madeleine Bastien said to her friend’s parents and relatives as they left her friend Mai’s home.
“I am very happy that our dear Mai was able to make good friends when she went to Canada,” her friend’s father replied, “Please enjoy your evening.”
The two friends bid their good evenings before they headed into Hue’s bustling Tet celebration.
“I hope you enjoyed the food,” Mai said as they walked in the crowd filled street, “It wasn’t too unusual for you?”
The two young adults were dressed in traditionnal ao dai, Mai wearing a blue one and Madeleine wearing a red one. The Canadian reporter had her camera hanging around her neck.
“Different, yes… but I’ve never had such good food! Pho would be perfect during the winters in Montreal.”
“Agreed, I missed it so much when I was there,” Mai replied with a laugh, “I was almost about to make some with spaghetti noodles at some point.”
The two women laughed at the predicament.
“I heard people started importing goods from Vietnam,” Madeleine replied, “So when you’ll get back maybe you’ll be able to get some for the apartment.”
“Of course! Otherwise, have you been able to get enough information for those articles you wanted to write about Vietnamese culture?”
Madeleine nodded.
“I’m very happy that your parents were kind enough to let me take some pictures as well. I really love how the Vietnamese commemorate their loved ones.”
“Yes,” Mai replied, a look of sadness on her face, “Sadly, there have been too many in the past few years.”
Madeleine nodded in understanding. She remembered the smiling portrait of her friend’s eldest brother, Tung, on their family’s ancestors’ shrine. The young man had been killed during a battle against the Viet-Cong.
“But I have faith that this war’ll end so-.”
An air raid siren went off, cutting her off. The National Police and QC were fast on the scene, guiding people and doing their best to maintain order. The two young women were heading back to Mai’s home, navigating the crowds of people trying to get to cover.
Suddenly, three explosions echoed through Vietnam’s ancient capital, knocking the two women off their feet.
“Are you alright?” Mai shouted over the sounds of the panicking crowd and the whistles of the policemen.
“Yes!” Madeleine as she picked herself off the ground, wiping the dust off her glasses, “A few scratches here and there but I can still walk! You?!”
“Yes,” Mai replied, looking around her to get her bearings, “OH MY GOD!”
She pointed to a nearby raging inferno, a few blocks from there.
“I’m going to help them!” the young woman shouted as she broke into a sprint. Before she could get very far, she was stopped by a police officer.
“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to please evacuate the area,” he ordered her, “This is too dangerous for civilians.”
Mai shook her head, determination edged on her face.
“I’m a medical student. I can help them!”
The policeman’s expression changed instantly.
“Very well then! Go!” he ordered before pointing at a nearby building, “There’s a medical clinic over there!”
“Thank you sir!”
Madeleine followed her friend towards the clinic. As they got closer, the sight was sorrowful. People were carrying their injured loved ones, their finest clothes dirtied by blood and soot, the voice crying out for help while anyone who could assist, did. South Vietnamese soldiers and their allies were doing their best to treat anyone they could.
The Canadian woman rushed over to help an elderly man who had collapsed. As she picked him up, she realized with horror that he was bleeding profusely.
“HELP!” she shouted, almost dropping the injured man out of shock. A nearby boy ran over, tears on his face, screaming in Vietnamese. The boy tried to help the old man as well, tears streaking down his youthful face.
“Madeleine! Are you sure you can help here!?” Mai yelled. The Vietnamese woman was bandaging an injured woman’s arm, “Can you do first aid?”
“No-no,” she stammered as she clutched her camera.
Realization hit her.
“I’ll come back later!” Madeleine shouted as she ran out the clinic, her camera in hand. Her body went into autopilot as she began capturing the scene of the tragedy that had befallen Vietnam’s ancient capital. With each photo she took, an image of sorrow was forever captured. Scenes of injured, dying and dead being engraved in film. The sorry state of burning and ruined buildings contrasted with the heroic efforts of firefighters, policemen and soldiers fighting to save their people. The young reporter wandered the chaotic streets, forgetting how long it had been since she left the clinic.
“Ma’am!” a heavily accented voice shook the reporter’s attention back to reality, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave this area!”
It was an ARVN soldier with QC marked on his helmet. His uniform’s nametape had Hung written on it.
“It is not safe for civilians to be in this area right now,” he continued, “I’m going to have to ask you to get to shelter immediately!”
“I am a reporter,” she replied in French but the QC shook his head, “I have to take pictures for my newspaper.”
The soldier shook his head.
“I understand that you are doing your job but it's too dangerous for you to be roaming around. We don’t know if the communists are going to attack the city again so please take shelter.”
“You don’t understand! This is the only way I can help!” she yelled back at the soldier, “The world must see what happened here.”
“And my job is to make sure that civilians aren’t in harm’s way.” the QC barked back, “I’m going to have to ask you to return to where you are staying!”
As they argued, they didn’t notice the jeep stopping behind them.
“Excuse me ma’am,” another voice cut in, “May I have a word with you?”
Madeleine and Sgt. Hung looked at the source. The Sgt. straightened himself as he saw the newcomer’s uniform. He was a tall and lanky man riding in a jeep with a pair of soldiers. A half-smoked cigarette hung from his lips.
“Major Trung! I was ordering this civilian to return home!”
“Yes,” he replied before turning his attention to the reporter, his stern eyes narrowing, “Mademoiselle, you have taken many pictures of tonight’s tragedies?”
“Y-yes Major,” she stammered under his intense glare.
“Splendid. Please come with me,” he demanded, “I believe your pictures would be of use to me.”
“He’s from Political Warfare,” Sgt. Hung cut in, “He’ll make sure everyone in Vietnam’ll see your pictures.”
“Thank you Sergeant,” Major Trung replied, lighting another cigarette before looking at the reporter, “Will you accompany me to my office? I will personally make sure that your pictures will be developed and published as soon as possible. Tonight’s tragedy must be seen by all.”
“Yes,” the reporter replied, “Can I ask a favor first?”
“Of course,”
“Can you tell my friend that I am coming with you?”
The major nodded.
“I will dispatch one of my men. Where is she?”
The reporter quickly gave the address to the Major.
“Send a runner to that clinic when we get to the office,” he ordered while another soldier helped Madeleine onto the back of the jeep. In the distance, the sounds of battle echoed outside the ancient capital. The Communists were attacking Hue.
Madeleine Bastien’s pictures of what would be known as the “Tragedy in Hue'' were the first to be publicized, courtesy of the ARVN Political Warfare Branch. The sorrowful images of South Vietnamese citizens injured by the indiscriminate SCUD attacks on the city were shown across the world and would bolster support for the Republic of Vietnam.
The ARVN Political Warfare Department ruthlessly used the images of the Tragedy in Hue as propaganda weapons against the North but it was only a prelude of what they would see once the march north would begin.
Author’s notes:
Hello everyone,
I’m a Vietnam War historian who worked on the RVN as well as the Boat People crisis and Canada’s response to it. My Masters’ thesis was on the American and Canadian response to the Boat People crisis, the legal changes in immigration and refugee policy in the decades prior and can be found online. In addition, I’m from South Vietnam and my father made it here in the early 80’s as a Boat Person.
The ARVN MP sergeant’s comment on snipers is grounded in reality. During the Tet offensive in our timeline, when South Vietnamese firefighters responded to fires in Saigon, there were incidents of them getting shot by snipers. I remember seeing either a video or a picture of a firefighter walking away after being shot. There’s also a video of ARVN troops helping them fight fires led by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of RVN National Police. The general actually mans fire hoses with his men to aid in containing the damage. General Loan, in our timeline, is well-known for the picture where he executes a VC operative that had been captured after murdering ARVN officers and their families. He was known as a hotheaded, cocky officer who was known to be quite reckless and brutish around the edges so it was unsurprising that he helped out with the fire fighting efforts personally.
A video where General Loan fights fires with his men during the Tet Offensive.
Biệt Động Quân QLVNCH tại trận Mậu Thân Sài Gòn năm 1968
The comment about spaghetti noodles in pho is a reference to the early years of the Vietnamese refugees in Montreal. My dad at the time couldn’t find proper pho noodles and had to make do with spaghetti noodles.
The ARVN Political Warfare did really exist as a branch of the ARVN and spent the war doing psyops and propaganda against the Communists as well as trying to ensure loyalty in the ARVN. For more reading on them:
http://www.psywarrior.com/VietnamGPWD.html
Unlike the Tet offensive in our timeline, the ARVN was very well prepared so Hue didn't fall to the VC/PAVN forces. The ARVN 1st Division and other units are fully mobilized to keep the city safe unlike our timeline where only the 1st Division’s quick response forces, HQ clerks and staff officers and whatever they cobbled together were able to defend the city.
As for the format of the story, it'll bounce between characters on the ground and a more encyclopedia format.
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Great addition, man! Good job!
It's a sobering reminder to all of us: We often write about warfare on this site from a 10,000-foot perspective - "the Allies attack XYZ" or whatever - without remembering that, even in a victorious war, there is a price in human life. Thank you for reminding us of this.
It's a sobering reminder to all of us: We often write about warfare on this site from a 10,000-foot perspective - "the Allies attack XYZ" or whatever - without remembering that, even in a victorious war, there is a price in human life. Thank you for reminding us of this.
@daspaceasians
You did a fabulous job, Man! That looks great and fits in beautifully with how Vietnam went in the universe of the Three Amigos. Great Work! 🙂
You did a fabulous job, Man! That looks great and fits in beautifully with how Vietnam went in the universe of the Three Amigos. Great Work! 🙂
Thank you very much for your thoughts on this. Personally, I'm not satisfied with it and think I could have done better. Otherwise, the next part will be about the air war from the VNAF's perspective. I got lucky recently and one of my contacts got his hands on some very juicy declassified CIA documents about events that happened during the Tet Offensive.
Oooooooh I'm curious to see this. 🙂 Let us know what you've got here, perhaps we can work it into the main TL.
Canada Of The Amigos
The most northerly of the Three Amigos (for the most part, though five of Canada's 15 provinces are located in the Caribbean) and the both the largest of the three by land area and the smallest of them in population, Canada is in many ways similar to the United States in having a society born from the influence of the colonial powers and the Native Americans that they shared their land with, but different in that it is descended from two colonial powers and has considerable influence from both, in the process sowing the seeds for the many, many different cultures and communities of the nation.
Modern Canada as of the 1981 Census showed a population of 68,626,271, a sign of a continued growth going back to the beginning of Canada's existence. While population growth had slowed in the 70s compared to the frenzied boom of the 50s and the integration of the islands in the 60s, many of the trends continued at their pace. The integration of the majority-black islands into Canada proper had made African-Canadians the largest minority group in the country (if one didn't count Native Canadians as an ethnic minority, which many did) and brought upon sizable demographic shifts as islanders headed north (most of all to Ontario and Alberta) looking for opportunities and Canadians from the rest of the country headed south to the islands seeking their place in the sun. Despite this sudden growth, the 1970s had been the decade of arrivals from Asia, both South Asians (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh) and East Asians (China, Vietnam, Japan and Thailand leading the way in arrivals). The former mostly ended up congregating more in Trinidad (were there was already a large Indian-descent population), the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver and Metro Toronto, while the latter ended in communities all over the place - Vietnamese tended to congregate in French-speaking Montreal, Chinese arrivals most often landed in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto (where there were already large Chinese-descent populations), the Japanese arrivals most often came to Vancouver.
Since WWII Toronto has overtaken Montreal as Canada's largest and most prosperous city, though during that same time period the steady drift of English-speaking businessmen to Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver has seen the void filled by a massive generation of French-speaking businessmen, both from France themselves and from other places overseas where French is the most common language, particularly Vietnam and West Africa, while the Mohawk presence in Quebec that dates to colonial times has made Montreal (which they often refer to by the Mohawks' name for the island, Hochelaga) their center for commerce as well. French-speaking Quebec's historical differences with the rest of Canada for the most part disappeared in the post-war era, as Quebec's once very conservative society shifted greater than anywhere else in Canada and Canada's massive push for the use of French in society led to bilingualism becoming very common in much of Canada (and virtually all of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces) by the 1970s. Since the completion of vast hydroelectric projects in the 1960s and 1970s Quebec has gained a number of industrial jobs and facilities that had added to employment, and the development of mineral resources saw more population heading North, extending the Mineral Belt of north-central Ontario across Quebec as well.
As the density and land prices of the great cities of Southern Ontario grew - massively influencing Metro Toronto and Hamilton but also effecting Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, London-St.Thomas-Port Stanley, St. Catherines, Windsor, Peterborough and Sarnia - the population and economic boom shifted northwards, settling more people in the communities of Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching as well as Georgian Bay on the way to the Mineral Belt. With cheaper land, cheap hydropower and excellent transport links (particularly after the completion of Interstate 101, the Trans-Canada Interstate Highway, in the late 1960s) a bunch of heavy industry moved North, particularly to occupy the many areas around Sudbury already ravaged by over a century of nickel mining in the region. As the computer labs of Queens University, the University of Waterloo and Carleton University spawned many of Canada's modern electronics industries, Metro Toronto and Windsor because a key hub of the North American auto industry and the aerospace industry gathered around Montreal, many materials industries went North, bringing jobs and wealth with them. As this was the time of environmental concerns being important, the factories themselves went to considerable lengths to help the environment and so did the communities themselves, resulting in huge areas of the Mineral Belt being communities tucked neatly into the woods, lakes and rocky outcroppings that defined the terrain of the mineral-rich Canadian Shield. The communities of these regions adapted quickly in this regard, wanting as much as was possible to combine the spectacular natural beauty of the region with the drivers of its prosperity.
Atlantic Canada, widely considered to be Canada's birthplace and where its history began, was by the 1980s something of a study ìn contradictions. At its heart was the great port city of Halifax - it's population being over one and a half million strong by that point - with its massive port and naval base and a throughly modern city, while large sections of Atlantic Canada still in many ways functioned as it had for a century with fishing, farming and forestry being dominant industries. Despite this modernity had reached even those places - three nuclear power plants in Nova Scotia and one in New Brunswick made for an ample electricity supply, the mighty Sydney Steel Works began a comprehensive overhaul in May 1981, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick both felt the effects of a rapid growth in the automotive and shipbuilding industries, the Trans-Canada Expressway and the Bluenose Parkway from Yarmouth to Sydney had made car travel easier and the long-active forestry industries had shifted to making more specialized products, while among the first orders for the new ship builders had been multiple ocean-going fishing vessels, extending the reach of the fishermen well into the Atlantic and diversifying their catches, as Ottawa has been steadily lowering the catches for the traditional cod fishery since the late 1970s amid signs of collapsing fish stocks. Newfoundland has also adapted to these realities, and the development of oil and gas reserves on the Grand Banks in the 1970s has led to a number of new jobs and economic life on the island and in other parts of the Maritimes. The long problem of brain drain out of the region slowed considerably with the advancement in the economy, though whether this is just contributing to growth in Halifax, Moncton, St. John's and Fredericton is something still widely debated in the provinces. This advancement and the problems of industry consolidating in central Canada, a common complaint in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, has since World War II largely been eliminated, with the nuclear power plants being a key driver and steady growth in trade with Europe after World War II also playing a key role.
Also notable about the Atlantic provinces are the newcomer communities, many in forms one wouldn't always expect to see - the Lebanese communities in Prince Edward Island, dark-skinned Africans in Halifax and areas around it (this community dates back to colonial times) and the Latin Americans and Vietnamese in New Brunswick. With these and the steady integration of the First Nations of the region (and a later-20th-Century resurgence in the interest of the culture of the Acadians) and a strong surge in tourism in the 20th Century, life has become as good in the Maritimes as in the rest of Canada - this wasn't always the case - and this prosperity and advancement has, perhaps not surprisingly, only added to the famous hospitality of the Atlantic Provinces.
Further West, the Prairie Provinces also grew with the times. With the vast oil-industry-driven cities of Calgary and Edmonton on the West side of them and the transport hub of Winnipeg to the east edge of them, the Prairies remained the breadbasket of Canada (and indeed much of the world) but rapidly moved beyond that, particularly as the industry of Alberta was supposed by other parts of the provinces. The development of wind turbines as power sources on the Prairies was eagerly supported by the Western Power System and SaskPower, and the coal and potash deposits of the Prairies were joined by the immense uranium deposits of northern Saskatchewan in the 1950s, leading to the developments of countless mines and communities in the North. Only too aware that a total reliance on an individual industry could be disastrous in the long term, many of the communities of the northern Prairies went to considerable lengths to make new reasons for existence, taking the funds earned from the mines and lumber and paper mills and building superb retreats and hunting and fishing lodges, winter sports communities, native art centers, technical colleges and developing some of the world's finest furniture makers.
Alberta was the same but only the scale and the finances were bigger. Having begun producing oil from the vast oil sands of northeastern Alberta in the mid-1960s and having built the gargantuan Fort McMurray Nuclear Generating Station there in the 1970s, northern Alberta was a land of opportunity for many, and after over 60 years of monster-scale oil production, Alberta's natural resource fund was by the early 1980s the largest single owner of stocks and bonds in all of the Amigos, managing nearly two trillion dollars in assets. Such a windfall made Alberta have the lowest taxes in the country, and easily made it so that they could develop the capital of Edmonton into a health care and education hub and Calgary as a major business center, while also making it so that many of the things needed by Alberta's industries - from farm machinery to fertilizers to woodworking tools - was made in Alberta. Even as the cities of Calgary and Edmonton were home to nearly four million people apiece by the 1980s and Lethbridge was home to nearly a million on its own and Alberta's new arrivals brought with them a vast collection of new cultures, interests and ways of living, quite a lot would never change - the Calgary Stampede was the city's biggest event, the two cities' hockey and football teams would always be each other's greatest rival, and the backyard barbeques, outdoor sports, cowboy boots and rodeos that defined life for a lot of the residents, many traditions that more than a few of the newcomers would partake in themselves.
British Columbia, home to one of the largest and most diverse collections of Native Canadians in the country, has similarly followed the Alberta lean towards a diversified economy. While the ports of Roberts Bank and Vancouver are the two busiest in the nation (and Prince Rupert is fourth) and the province has monumental natural resources the province has long prided itself on being a place where all kinds of things happen, and in modern times Vancouver and Calgary battle it out for the third-biggest commerce center in the country behind Toronto and Montreal, while the provinces many smaller cities - Victoria, Prince George, Prince Rupert, Kelowna, Kamloops, Revelstoke - all have made names for themselves. The rugged, beautiful British Columbia Rockies have not only been sources of resources but have also given some of the best recreation areas and ski resorts on Earth, and British Columbia in modern times finds themselves joined at the hip with Alaska and the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
The Native Canadians of British Columbia have long taken an attitude of using opportunities to get their tribal authorities ahead (this is common across North America, but BC First Nations are particularly good even compared to others), using the needs of industrial development to make themselves important to the province and the industries that work it of it, with them demanding shares in businesses, job guarantees, financial contributions or any of the above, and this has made more than a few BC native tribes very wealthy indeed.
Being enormously over-represented (compared to the size of their population) in the trades fields and with the conditions of where they live being a common sign of ones success among their tribe, since the 1946 Amendment to the Treaty of Orillia that allowed for land on reserves to be purchased by members of that reserve's population, the homes and businesses on many reserves have dramatically improved in size, condition and style, this being most seen on reserves in wealthier regions and most of all in the Inuit capital of Iqaluit, whose harsh weather conditions and being well north of the tree line meant the small city's dwellings were distinguished by their styles and rock landscaping, the city's residential districts being large numbers of stunning steel-glass-stone-concrete homes on winding paved roads. While the traditional longhouses remain an important cultural heritage, in modern times very few reserve residents have anything less than good homes, and even before the Treaty of Orillia the entrepreneurial spirit of many First Nations members showed through, creating the genesis of dozens of corporate bodies created and operated for the benefit of members of their tribes and their friends, the likes of The Northern Company, Haudenosaunee Advancement Corporation and Spirit Financial Corporation being among the most notable.
By the 1970s the interest in the culture of Canada's First Nations had led to the beginnings of what would be a dramatic revival of many aspects of their cultural life, and the 1980s saw much of that metamorphosis into the "True Spirits" movements, which had at their core that as the ancestors of modern First Nations had built the beginnings of their culture and that the generations of today and tomorrow best served themselves and their people by building up the people around them, both themselves and the Canadians they shared the land with. This manifested itself in the entrepreneurship and activism of much of the community in the 80s, as well as a lot of their cultural revival. For much of the rest of Canada, as the decade went on the revival manifested itself in ever greater exhibition of much of the cultural improvements and their appreciation by much of the rest of Canada. The greatest moment of this came at the end of the decade, with the opening of the spectacular National Monument To The First Nations, built on Dowker Island at the meeting point of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, which was opened by Queen Elizabeth II at a black-tie gala at the Monument on July 21, 1989.
For the islands, the years after their entry into Canada was a story of promises made and promises kept. Having settled much of the debate over the entry into the Federation by the islands by calling for Canada having a new Constitution, the debate over the new constitution began in earnest in 1967, with Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau being a loud supporter of the effort, and his rise to become Prime Minister in April 1968 took matters much further. Being a long supporter of the islands joining Confederation, Trudeau only added to Pearson's making it clear that, as Canadians, the people of the islands had as much say as anyone else. Owing to this, several Caribbean leaders, most notably Jamaican Deputy Premier (and future Prime Minister of Canada) Edward Seaga and Bahamian Premier Lynden Pindling, were deeply involved in the negotiations, which while becoming acrimonious at times (and costing Trudeau much parliamentary support in elections in May 1972), produced a masterwork of a document, which after the British Government had its say on the matter (necessary owing to Canada's governing document before this being the British North America Act of 1860) and agreed upon by all 15 provinces, was signed into law in Ottawa by Queen Elizabeth II on September 16, 1972.
A number of parts of the document were exemplary. The embedded Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution set out a very real framework both for existing rights and the interpretation of others (most famously being seen in the decision enshrining LGBTQ rights in 1986) and Ottawa developed funds specifically for the research into and development of legal criteria and justifications for rights in the courts. Canada's bicameral parliament saw its Senate reformed, adding in a number of new responsibilities heavily influenced by the United States (including Senate confirmation of Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices and a number of other officials) and mandating its members be elected by the provinces according to size and influence - Ontario would elect 24 Senators, Quebec 20 and British Columbia and Alberta 12 with all other provinces getting eight aside from the tiny Barbados and Prince Edward Island which elected four each, as well as twelve elected from First Nations reserves. (In 1995, the three territories were allowed two Senators apiece as well.) Canada's constitution mandated a ground-breaking mixed-member representation voting system that resulted in a number of parties joining Canada's three existing major political parties (of these, the Reform and Green Parties would ultimately have the most effect on politics) and rewrote the rules on Canada's federal politics in a way that rapidly shifted down to the provinces.
Beyond the Charter and the elected and empowered Senate, the "Societies Clause" added further to Canada's societal changes. The Clause, which stated that Canada was not so much born from the British Empire as it had been from the many differing communities that had been a part of modern Canada, had rankled some feathers at first but would ultimately become seen as one of the wisest additions to the governing document of Canada. The Clause combined with Canada's post-World War II bilingualism push to basically end any lingering desires for separation among Quebecers and basically make it absolutely clear that those of French and Native Canadian ancestry were just as much a part of Canada as those of British background. While the Treaty superseded the Treaty of Orillia, calls for this to change were minimal among Native Canadians, who in any case were more than a little happy that twelve Senators and a number of House of Commons members would be elected by them. The Societies Clause also explicitly mentioned the arrivals from Africa and India, a clear and obvious nod to the African-descent Canadians who were a clear majority in four of the five Caribbean provinces and were a plurality in the fifth. Despite this, the document did continue to recognize the Crown as Canada's Head of State, to which they were few objections among Canadians.
The resulting shifts in politics in Canada initially benefited the Conservatives, who came to power in September 1974, but the party needed the support of the Progressive Party to keep its power, while the MMP system worked exactly as had been hoped, allowing all of the provinces to have their say in Canada's decision making at the federal level, something that would over time contribute to parties making up ground in areas where they had traditionally been weak on both sides, with the Liberals benefiting from support in the Prairie Provinces and the Conservatives from the major cities that they had been largely shut out of since before World War II. By the late 1980s, the percentage of the voting base which supported the Reform, Green and National parties had more or less made a complete majority in either the House of Commons or the Senate of Canada impossible, with the smaller parties regularly able to make concessions on government policy as a direct result. When combined with a vibrant media sector with both the publicly-run (and huge) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and countless private sector television and radio broadcast networks, three major national daily newspapers (The centrist The Globe And Mail, right-leaning National Post and left-leaning The Canadian) and countless ones in cities large and small contribute to a vibrant media environment and a constant political discourse, as well as regular activism.
Canada and Mexico's pioneering uses of natural resource funds and government-owned entities (followed to an extent in the United States) have helped shape many aspects of their economies. Canada's high-value currency and higher wages do make the country a more expensive place to do business on an industrial front, though this is massively counteracted by one of the world's best educational systems, cheap energy, a sizable domestic market (and access to the huge American and Mexican markets) and easy access to investment capital. The publicly-owned companies - "crown corporations", as they are called in Canada - include all of the provinces' power generation authorities, Petro-Canada (which is large but not by any means Canada's only oil company), the Nuclear Energy Corporation of Canada, Canadian National Railways and Air Canada, and all (aside from the power authorities, which are all provincially-owned rather than by Ottawa) do compete with private-sector firms even in the most massive of fields, the crown corporations forcing their private sector rivals into better service to the public and the privately-held companies forcing better management of the government-owned entities. This has shown itself in the private-sector firms being well in tune with the needs of the communities they serve and the publicly-owned companies almost always being profitable enterprises - in the case of Petro-Canada, the NECC and Canadian National Railways, they each return billions of dollars in profits to the government while maintaining high standards of technical advancement, while Air Canada is regularly used as a diplomatic and political showcase and flies to countless destinations Ottawa wants easy connections to and the CBC, which operates five television networks, three radio networks, Radio-Canada International and a large number of international news bureaus, is considered an indispensable asset to the world, not just Canada.
EDIT: Thanks to @garfield2 for reminding me about the Maritimes chapter I forgot to put in. 🙂
The most northerly of the Three Amigos (for the most part, though five of Canada's 15 provinces are located in the Caribbean) and the both the largest of the three by land area and the smallest of them in population, Canada is in many ways similar to the United States in having a society born from the influence of the colonial powers and the Native Americans that they shared their land with, but different in that it is descended from two colonial powers and has considerable influence from both, in the process sowing the seeds for the many, many different cultures and communities of the nation.
Modern Canada as of the 1981 Census showed a population of 68,626,271, a sign of a continued growth going back to the beginning of Canada's existence. While population growth had slowed in the 70s compared to the frenzied boom of the 50s and the integration of the islands in the 60s, many of the trends continued at their pace. The integration of the majority-black islands into Canada proper had made African-Canadians the largest minority group in the country (if one didn't count Native Canadians as an ethnic minority, which many did) and brought upon sizable demographic shifts as islanders headed north (most of all to Ontario and Alberta) looking for opportunities and Canadians from the rest of the country headed south to the islands seeking their place in the sun. Despite this sudden growth, the 1970s had been the decade of arrivals from Asia, both South Asians (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh) and East Asians (China, Vietnam, Japan and Thailand leading the way in arrivals). The former mostly ended up congregating more in Trinidad (were there was already a large Indian-descent population), the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver and Metro Toronto, while the latter ended in communities all over the place - Vietnamese tended to congregate in French-speaking Montreal, Chinese arrivals most often landed in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto (where there were already large Chinese-descent populations), the Japanese arrivals most often came to Vancouver.
Since WWII Toronto has overtaken Montreal as Canada's largest and most prosperous city, though during that same time period the steady drift of English-speaking businessmen to Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver has seen the void filled by a massive generation of French-speaking businessmen, both from France themselves and from other places overseas where French is the most common language, particularly Vietnam and West Africa, while the Mohawk presence in Quebec that dates to colonial times has made Montreal (which they often refer to by the Mohawks' name for the island, Hochelaga) their center for commerce as well. French-speaking Quebec's historical differences with the rest of Canada for the most part disappeared in the post-war era, as Quebec's once very conservative society shifted greater than anywhere else in Canada and Canada's massive push for the use of French in society led to bilingualism becoming very common in much of Canada (and virtually all of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces) by the 1970s. Since the completion of vast hydroelectric projects in the 1960s and 1970s Quebec has gained a number of industrial jobs and facilities that had added to employment, and the development of mineral resources saw more population heading North, extending the Mineral Belt of north-central Ontario across Quebec as well.
As the density and land prices of the great cities of Southern Ontario grew - massively influencing Metro Toronto and Hamilton but also effecting Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, London-St.Thomas-Port Stanley, St. Catherines, Windsor, Peterborough and Sarnia - the population and economic boom shifted northwards, settling more people in the communities of Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching as well as Georgian Bay on the way to the Mineral Belt. With cheaper land, cheap hydropower and excellent transport links (particularly after the completion of Interstate 101, the Trans-Canada Interstate Highway, in the late 1960s) a bunch of heavy industry moved North, particularly to occupy the many areas around Sudbury already ravaged by over a century of nickel mining in the region. As the computer labs of Queens University, the University of Waterloo and Carleton University spawned many of Canada's modern electronics industries, Metro Toronto and Windsor because a key hub of the North American auto industry and the aerospace industry gathered around Montreal, many materials industries went North, bringing jobs and wealth with them. As this was the time of environmental concerns being important, the factories themselves went to considerable lengths to help the environment and so did the communities themselves, resulting in huge areas of the Mineral Belt being communities tucked neatly into the woods, lakes and rocky outcroppings that defined the terrain of the mineral-rich Canadian Shield. The communities of these regions adapted quickly in this regard, wanting as much as was possible to combine the spectacular natural beauty of the region with the drivers of its prosperity.
Atlantic Canada, widely considered to be Canada's birthplace and where its history began, was by the 1980s something of a study ìn contradictions. At its heart was the great port city of Halifax - it's population being over one and a half million strong by that point - with its massive port and naval base and a throughly modern city, while large sections of Atlantic Canada still in many ways functioned as it had for a century with fishing, farming and forestry being dominant industries. Despite this modernity had reached even those places - three nuclear power plants in Nova Scotia and one in New Brunswick made for an ample electricity supply, the mighty Sydney Steel Works began a comprehensive overhaul in May 1981, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick both felt the effects of a rapid growth in the automotive and shipbuilding industries, the Trans-Canada Expressway and the Bluenose Parkway from Yarmouth to Sydney had made car travel easier and the long-active forestry industries had shifted to making more specialized products, while among the first orders for the new ship builders had been multiple ocean-going fishing vessels, extending the reach of the fishermen well into the Atlantic and diversifying their catches, as Ottawa has been steadily lowering the catches for the traditional cod fishery since the late 1970s amid signs of collapsing fish stocks. Newfoundland has also adapted to these realities, and the development of oil and gas reserves on the Grand Banks in the 1970s has led to a number of new jobs and economic life on the island and in other parts of the Maritimes. The long problem of brain drain out of the region slowed considerably with the advancement in the economy, though whether this is just contributing to growth in Halifax, Moncton, St. John's and Fredericton is something still widely debated in the provinces. This advancement and the problems of industry consolidating in central Canada, a common complaint in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, has since World War II largely been eliminated, with the nuclear power plants being a key driver and steady growth in trade with Europe after World War II also playing a key role.
Also notable about the Atlantic provinces are the newcomer communities, many in forms one wouldn't always expect to see - the Lebanese communities in Prince Edward Island, dark-skinned Africans in Halifax and areas around it (this community dates back to colonial times) and the Latin Americans and Vietnamese in New Brunswick. With these and the steady integration of the First Nations of the region (and a later-20th-Century resurgence in the interest of the culture of the Acadians) and a strong surge in tourism in the 20th Century, life has become as good in the Maritimes as in the rest of Canada - this wasn't always the case - and this prosperity and advancement has, perhaps not surprisingly, only added to the famous hospitality of the Atlantic Provinces.
Further West, the Prairie Provinces also grew with the times. With the vast oil-industry-driven cities of Calgary and Edmonton on the West side of them and the transport hub of Winnipeg to the east edge of them, the Prairies remained the breadbasket of Canada (and indeed much of the world) but rapidly moved beyond that, particularly as the industry of Alberta was supposed by other parts of the provinces. The development of wind turbines as power sources on the Prairies was eagerly supported by the Western Power System and SaskPower, and the coal and potash deposits of the Prairies were joined by the immense uranium deposits of northern Saskatchewan in the 1950s, leading to the developments of countless mines and communities in the North. Only too aware that a total reliance on an individual industry could be disastrous in the long term, many of the communities of the northern Prairies went to considerable lengths to make new reasons for existence, taking the funds earned from the mines and lumber and paper mills and building superb retreats and hunting and fishing lodges, winter sports communities, native art centers, technical colleges and developing some of the world's finest furniture makers.
Alberta was the same but only the scale and the finances were bigger. Having begun producing oil from the vast oil sands of northeastern Alberta in the mid-1960s and having built the gargantuan Fort McMurray Nuclear Generating Station there in the 1970s, northern Alberta was a land of opportunity for many, and after over 60 years of monster-scale oil production, Alberta's natural resource fund was by the early 1980s the largest single owner of stocks and bonds in all of the Amigos, managing nearly two trillion dollars in assets. Such a windfall made Alberta have the lowest taxes in the country, and easily made it so that they could develop the capital of Edmonton into a health care and education hub and Calgary as a major business center, while also making it so that many of the things needed by Alberta's industries - from farm machinery to fertilizers to woodworking tools - was made in Alberta. Even as the cities of Calgary and Edmonton were home to nearly four million people apiece by the 1980s and Lethbridge was home to nearly a million on its own and Alberta's new arrivals brought with them a vast collection of new cultures, interests and ways of living, quite a lot would never change - the Calgary Stampede was the city's biggest event, the two cities' hockey and football teams would always be each other's greatest rival, and the backyard barbeques, outdoor sports, cowboy boots and rodeos that defined life for a lot of the residents, many traditions that more than a few of the newcomers would partake in themselves.
British Columbia, home to one of the largest and most diverse collections of Native Canadians in the country, has similarly followed the Alberta lean towards a diversified economy. While the ports of Roberts Bank and Vancouver are the two busiest in the nation (and Prince Rupert is fourth) and the province has monumental natural resources the province has long prided itself on being a place where all kinds of things happen, and in modern times Vancouver and Calgary battle it out for the third-biggest commerce center in the country behind Toronto and Montreal, while the provinces many smaller cities - Victoria, Prince George, Prince Rupert, Kelowna, Kamloops, Revelstoke - all have made names for themselves. The rugged, beautiful British Columbia Rockies have not only been sources of resources but have also given some of the best recreation areas and ski resorts on Earth, and British Columbia in modern times finds themselves joined at the hip with Alaska and the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
The Native Canadians of British Columbia have long taken an attitude of using opportunities to get their tribal authorities ahead (this is common across North America, but BC First Nations are particularly good even compared to others), using the needs of industrial development to make themselves important to the province and the industries that work it of it, with them demanding shares in businesses, job guarantees, financial contributions or any of the above, and this has made more than a few BC native tribes very wealthy indeed.
Being enormously over-represented (compared to the size of their population) in the trades fields and with the conditions of where they live being a common sign of ones success among their tribe, since the 1946 Amendment to the Treaty of Orillia that allowed for land on reserves to be purchased by members of that reserve's population, the homes and businesses on many reserves have dramatically improved in size, condition and style, this being most seen on reserves in wealthier regions and most of all in the Inuit capital of Iqaluit, whose harsh weather conditions and being well north of the tree line meant the small city's dwellings were distinguished by their styles and rock landscaping, the city's residential districts being large numbers of stunning steel-glass-stone-concrete homes on winding paved roads. While the traditional longhouses remain an important cultural heritage, in modern times very few reserve residents have anything less than good homes, and even before the Treaty of Orillia the entrepreneurial spirit of many First Nations members showed through, creating the genesis of dozens of corporate bodies created and operated for the benefit of members of their tribes and their friends, the likes of The Northern Company, Haudenosaunee Advancement Corporation and Spirit Financial Corporation being among the most notable.
By the 1970s the interest in the culture of Canada's First Nations had led to the beginnings of what would be a dramatic revival of many aspects of their cultural life, and the 1980s saw much of that metamorphosis into the "True Spirits" movements, which had at their core that as the ancestors of modern First Nations had built the beginnings of their culture and that the generations of today and tomorrow best served themselves and their people by building up the people around them, both themselves and the Canadians they shared the land with. This manifested itself in the entrepreneurship and activism of much of the community in the 80s, as well as a lot of their cultural revival. For much of the rest of Canada, as the decade went on the revival manifested itself in ever greater exhibition of much of the cultural improvements and their appreciation by much of the rest of Canada. The greatest moment of this came at the end of the decade, with the opening of the spectacular National Monument To The First Nations, built on Dowker Island at the meeting point of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, which was opened by Queen Elizabeth II at a black-tie gala at the Monument on July 21, 1989.
For the islands, the years after their entry into Canada was a story of promises made and promises kept. Having settled much of the debate over the entry into the Federation by the islands by calling for Canada having a new Constitution, the debate over the new constitution began in earnest in 1967, with Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau being a loud supporter of the effort, and his rise to become Prime Minister in April 1968 took matters much further. Being a long supporter of the islands joining Confederation, Trudeau only added to Pearson's making it clear that, as Canadians, the people of the islands had as much say as anyone else. Owing to this, several Caribbean leaders, most notably Jamaican Deputy Premier (and future Prime Minister of Canada) Edward Seaga and Bahamian Premier Lynden Pindling, were deeply involved in the negotiations, which while becoming acrimonious at times (and costing Trudeau much parliamentary support in elections in May 1972), produced a masterwork of a document, which after the British Government had its say on the matter (necessary owing to Canada's governing document before this being the British North America Act of 1860) and agreed upon by all 15 provinces, was signed into law in Ottawa by Queen Elizabeth II on September 16, 1972.
A number of parts of the document were exemplary. The embedded Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution set out a very real framework both for existing rights and the interpretation of others (most famously being seen in the decision enshrining LGBTQ rights in 1986) and Ottawa developed funds specifically for the research into and development of legal criteria and justifications for rights in the courts. Canada's bicameral parliament saw its Senate reformed, adding in a number of new responsibilities heavily influenced by the United States (including Senate confirmation of Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices and a number of other officials) and mandating its members be elected by the provinces according to size and influence - Ontario would elect 24 Senators, Quebec 20 and British Columbia and Alberta 12 with all other provinces getting eight aside from the tiny Barbados and Prince Edward Island which elected four each, as well as twelve elected from First Nations reserves. (In 1995, the three territories were allowed two Senators apiece as well.) Canada's constitution mandated a ground-breaking mixed-member representation voting system that resulted in a number of parties joining Canada's three existing major political parties (of these, the Reform and Green Parties would ultimately have the most effect on politics) and rewrote the rules on Canada's federal politics in a way that rapidly shifted down to the provinces.
Beyond the Charter and the elected and empowered Senate, the "Societies Clause" added further to Canada's societal changes. The Clause, which stated that Canada was not so much born from the British Empire as it had been from the many differing communities that had been a part of modern Canada, had rankled some feathers at first but would ultimately become seen as one of the wisest additions to the governing document of Canada. The Clause combined with Canada's post-World War II bilingualism push to basically end any lingering desires for separation among Quebecers and basically make it absolutely clear that those of French and Native Canadian ancestry were just as much a part of Canada as those of British background. While the Treaty superseded the Treaty of Orillia, calls for this to change were minimal among Native Canadians, who in any case were more than a little happy that twelve Senators and a number of House of Commons members would be elected by them. The Societies Clause also explicitly mentioned the arrivals from Africa and India, a clear and obvious nod to the African-descent Canadians who were a clear majority in four of the five Caribbean provinces and were a plurality in the fifth. Despite this, the document did continue to recognize the Crown as Canada's Head of State, to which they were few objections among Canadians.
The resulting shifts in politics in Canada initially benefited the Conservatives, who came to power in September 1974, but the party needed the support of the Progressive Party to keep its power, while the MMP system worked exactly as had been hoped, allowing all of the provinces to have their say in Canada's decision making at the federal level, something that would over time contribute to parties making up ground in areas where they had traditionally been weak on both sides, with the Liberals benefiting from support in the Prairie Provinces and the Conservatives from the major cities that they had been largely shut out of since before World War II. By the late 1980s, the percentage of the voting base which supported the Reform, Green and National parties had more or less made a complete majority in either the House of Commons or the Senate of Canada impossible, with the smaller parties regularly able to make concessions on government policy as a direct result. When combined with a vibrant media sector with both the publicly-run (and huge) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and countless private sector television and radio broadcast networks, three major national daily newspapers (The centrist The Globe And Mail, right-leaning National Post and left-leaning The Canadian) and countless ones in cities large and small contribute to a vibrant media environment and a constant political discourse, as well as regular activism.
Canada and Mexico's pioneering uses of natural resource funds and government-owned entities (followed to an extent in the United States) have helped shape many aspects of their economies. Canada's high-value currency and higher wages do make the country a more expensive place to do business on an industrial front, though this is massively counteracted by one of the world's best educational systems, cheap energy, a sizable domestic market (and access to the huge American and Mexican markets) and easy access to investment capital. The publicly-owned companies - "crown corporations", as they are called in Canada - include all of the provinces' power generation authorities, Petro-Canada (which is large but not by any means Canada's only oil company), the Nuclear Energy Corporation of Canada, Canadian National Railways and Air Canada, and all (aside from the power authorities, which are all provincially-owned rather than by Ottawa) do compete with private-sector firms even in the most massive of fields, the crown corporations forcing their private sector rivals into better service to the public and the privately-held companies forcing better management of the government-owned entities. This has shown itself in the private-sector firms being well in tune with the needs of the communities they serve and the publicly-owned companies almost always being profitable enterprises - in the case of Petro-Canada, the NECC and Canadian National Railways, they each return billions of dollars in profits to the government while maintaining high standards of technical advancement, while Air Canada is regularly used as a diplomatic and political showcase and flies to countless destinations Ottawa wants easy connections to and the CBC, which operates five television networks, three radio networks, Radio-Canada International and a large number of international news bureaus, is considered an indispensable asset to the world, not just Canada.
EDIT: Thanks to @garfield2 for reminding me about the Maritimes chapter I forgot to put in. 🙂
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Fun fact: in OTL, after University of Washington QB Warren Moon went undrafted by the NFL in 1978 (in large part, IIRC, because many didn't think a black QB could be successful), he went to the CFL and led the then-Edmonton Eskimos (now the Elks (1)) to five straight Grey Cups (the CFL equivalent of the Lombardi Trophy) before joining the NFL in 1984 as a member of the Houston Oilers. He is probably on the Mount Rushmore of Edmonton athletes (but not the top one--a certain hockey player nicknamed The Great One has something to say about that, IMO)...
Seriously, though, good TL...
(1) It was changed because, like the Redskins (which actually is insulting to Native American culture), the name Eskimos is thought to be insulting to Native American culture. Hey, at least there are actually elks in Alberta...
Seriously, though, good TL...
(1) It was changed because, like the Redskins (which actually is insulting to Native American culture), the name Eskimos is thought to be insulting to Native American culture. Hey, at least there are actually elks in Alberta...
Ah dang it, I knew I was forgetting a section of that! I'll get that fixed when I get back to my home computer and can fix it.And the Maritimes get virtually ignored as usual.
(Little side vignette
In the summer of 1980, Penn State Nittany Lions head coach Joe Paterno began hearing rumors about one of his assistant coaches, Jerry Sandusky. The rumors alleged that Sandusky had made use of a children's charity he had founded, Second Mile, in 1977, to gain access to young boys for nefarious purposes. Paterno was stunned by the accusations, and confronted Sandusky, who denied them heatedly. But the rumors continued to persist, and Paterno began quietly talking to some of the Nittany Lions players, who said that Sandusky's behavior sometimes seemed a little "off." What's more, their testimony, it turned out, was credible.
The coach was deeply troubled. What if the rumors were true? he wondered. If it became public, the damage to the university and the football program could be tremendous. But at the same time, could he act on these rumors? Should he? In his mind he went over all the possible damage that could occur: possible criminal charges; certainly the possibility of lawsuits; the football program that he had worked so hard to build up being reduced to a shambles; loss of enrollment at the university; public humiliation and ridicule of everyone concerned; maybe even loss of sponsorship dollars and of research dollars to university programs, and of funding from the state. To go public with this could be devastating.
While still pondering what to do, one Sunday that summer he attended Mass like the good Italian Catholic he'd been brought up to be. The priest's homily that day had to do with making sacrifices. And Paterno began thinking long and hard about what the Church had had to deal with. Confronted with much the same problem in the early 1970s, the Church had made the brave decision to come clean and face the music, whatever the consequences. Truth, they had in essence declared, mattered more than trying to protect their "brand." There had been lawsuits, and ridicule and scorn, but these had been mitigated by the Church's honesty, its willingness to work to protect and aid those who had been hurt, and its unwillingness to protect the perpetrators who had used a priest's collar to do evil. Paterno, after much thought, decided that he must do the same. The truth would come out one way or another; better to do the right thing up front, no matter the immediate results.
The university's board of trustees was less sanguine, and when Paterno met with them to tell them of his intentions, it turned into a shouting match as they insisted that he keep his mouth shut. Finally, faced with no other choice, he did what sports announcer Bob Costas would call "either the bravest or stupidest act of Paterno's career": he put his foot down and wrote a letter of resignation. He would withdraw the resignation, he said, only if the board of trustees agreed to come clean. If they did not, he said, he would resign and go public with what he knew about Sandusky - even though that would surely mean the end of his career as a college football coach.
Their hand thus forced, the trustees assented, though they insisted that Paterno include a statement in the press release that "neither the Nittany Lions organization nor the university administration were aware of these acts" (which was, after all, true). Sandusky was fired, and Paterno issued a statement saying exactly why.
As expected, the fallout was rather intense for a year or so. Enrollment did indeed dip for a while, and some money was withdrawn from the university. The Nittany Lions suffered losing seasons in 1980, 1981, and 1982, having been thrown into disarray despite Paterno's best efforts. And there was a certain amount of public ridicule - "Hello everyone, Joe Piscopo live, Saturday Night Sports. The big story! Penn State! Sandusky! BAD MAN! Paterno! Did he know? WHO CARES!"
But as even Joe Piscopo's joke on Saturday Night Live illustrated, despite a handful of lawsuits, most of the public scorn was deflected away from the university and the team due to their honesty, and instead fell on Sandusky - just as the Church had weathered the worst of its scandal a few years earlier, with most of the scorn falling on the ex-priests who had abused the office of the priesthood. Sandusky considered suing over his dismissal, until his lawyers explained that doing so would open his private life up to legal discovery - something he decidedly did not want to do. There was not enough evidence to charge him with crimes, but he nevertheless fled the state. A pariah as far as any coaching jobs were concerned, he moved as far away as he could - to Anchorage, Alaska, where he ended up running a small sporting-goods store. Even there, though, parents reportedly would not leave their kids unattended if the owner was around.
Meanwhile, Joe Paterno worked hard to restore the Nittany Lions' luster. The student body at Penn State embraced their team. No longer did they seem as a privileged few who stood over and above their classmates at the university; instead they were seen as scrappy underdogs fighting to restore their good name, Penn State's good name, and their winning record. Paterno rebuilt his 1980s team around quarterback John Shaffer and running back D.J. Dozier, and was rewarded with a spectacular season in 1986, when the Lions - still unranked as the season began - climbed all the way to a national championship.
In the summer of 1980, Penn State Nittany Lions head coach Joe Paterno began hearing rumors about one of his assistant coaches, Jerry Sandusky. The rumors alleged that Sandusky had made use of a children's charity he had founded, Second Mile, in 1977, to gain access to young boys for nefarious purposes. Paterno was stunned by the accusations, and confronted Sandusky, who denied them heatedly. But the rumors continued to persist, and Paterno began quietly talking to some of the Nittany Lions players, who said that Sandusky's behavior sometimes seemed a little "off." What's more, their testimony, it turned out, was credible.
The coach was deeply troubled. What if the rumors were true? he wondered. If it became public, the damage to the university and the football program could be tremendous. But at the same time, could he act on these rumors? Should he? In his mind he went over all the possible damage that could occur: possible criminal charges; certainly the possibility of lawsuits; the football program that he had worked so hard to build up being reduced to a shambles; loss of enrollment at the university; public humiliation and ridicule of everyone concerned; maybe even loss of sponsorship dollars and of research dollars to university programs, and of funding from the state. To go public with this could be devastating.
While still pondering what to do, one Sunday that summer he attended Mass like the good Italian Catholic he'd been brought up to be. The priest's homily that day had to do with making sacrifices. And Paterno began thinking long and hard about what the Church had had to deal with. Confronted with much the same problem in the early 1970s, the Church had made the brave decision to come clean and face the music, whatever the consequences. Truth, they had in essence declared, mattered more than trying to protect their "brand." There had been lawsuits, and ridicule and scorn, but these had been mitigated by the Church's honesty, its willingness to work to protect and aid those who had been hurt, and its unwillingness to protect the perpetrators who had used a priest's collar to do evil. Paterno, after much thought, decided that he must do the same. The truth would come out one way or another; better to do the right thing up front, no matter the immediate results.
The university's board of trustees was less sanguine, and when Paterno met with them to tell them of his intentions, it turned into a shouting match as they insisted that he keep his mouth shut. Finally, faced with no other choice, he did what sports announcer Bob Costas would call "either the bravest or stupidest act of Paterno's career": he put his foot down and wrote a letter of resignation. He would withdraw the resignation, he said, only if the board of trustees agreed to come clean. If they did not, he said, he would resign and go public with what he knew about Sandusky - even though that would surely mean the end of his career as a college football coach.
Their hand thus forced, the trustees assented, though they insisted that Paterno include a statement in the press release that "neither the Nittany Lions organization nor the university administration were aware of these acts" (which was, after all, true). Sandusky was fired, and Paterno issued a statement saying exactly why.
As expected, the fallout was rather intense for a year or so. Enrollment did indeed dip for a while, and some money was withdrawn from the university. The Nittany Lions suffered losing seasons in 1980, 1981, and 1982, having been thrown into disarray despite Paterno's best efforts. And there was a certain amount of public ridicule - "Hello everyone, Joe Piscopo live, Saturday Night Sports. The big story! Penn State! Sandusky! BAD MAN! Paterno! Did he know? WHO CARES!"
But as even Joe Piscopo's joke on Saturday Night Live illustrated, despite a handful of lawsuits, most of the public scorn was deflected away from the university and the team due to their honesty, and instead fell on Sandusky - just as the Church had weathered the worst of its scandal a few years earlier, with most of the scorn falling on the ex-priests who had abused the office of the priesthood. Sandusky considered suing over his dismissal, until his lawyers explained that doing so would open his private life up to legal discovery - something he decidedly did not want to do. There was not enough evidence to charge him with crimes, but he nevertheless fled the state. A pariah as far as any coaching jobs were concerned, he moved as far away as he could - to Anchorage, Alaska, where he ended up running a small sporting-goods store. Even there, though, parents reportedly would not leave their kids unattended if the owner was around.
Meanwhile, Joe Paterno worked hard to restore the Nittany Lions' luster. The student body at Penn State embraced their team. No longer did they seem as a privileged few who stood over and above their classmates at the university; instead they were seen as scrappy underdogs fighting to restore their good name, Penn State's good name, and their winning record. Paterno rebuilt his 1980s team around quarterback John Shaffer and running back D.J. Dozier, and was rewarded with a spectacular season in 1986, when the Lions - still unranked as the season began - climbed all the way to a national championship.
On the way 🙂 This is the list of the Canadian Prime Ministers we decided on for the TL:
1) John A. MacDonald
July 1, 1860 - May 22, 1871 [1]
2) Georges-Etienne Cartier
May 24, 1871 - September 6, 1873 [2]
3) Alexander MacKenzie
September 8, 1873 - May 16, 1881
4) John Thompson
May 18, 1881 - August 14, 1890 [3]
5) Wilfrid Laurier
August 16, 1890 - October 6, 1911
6) Robert Borden
October 9, 1911 - July 10, 1920
7) Arthur Meighen
First term: July 10, 1920 - December 29, 1921
Second term: June 18, 1926 - September 19, 1926 [4]
8) William Lyon MacKenzie King
First term: January 1, 1922 - June 16, 1926
Second term: September 22, 1926 - August 7, 1930
Third term: March 12, 1937 - June 18, 1947
9) Richard Bedford Bennett
August 7, 1930 - May 19, 1933
10) Thomas Crerar
May 19, 1933 - March 12, 1937 [5]
11) Louis St. Laurent
June 18, 1947 - September 25, 1958
12) John Diefenbaker
September 25, 1958 - April 22, 1963 [6]
13) Lester Pearson
April 22, 1963 - April 20, 1968
14) Pierre Elliott Trudeau
April 20, 1968 - September 15, 1974 [7]
15) Robert Stanfield
September 15, 1974 - June 14, 1984 [8]
16) Edward Seaga
June 14, 1984 - October 11, 1988 [9]
17) Jean Chretien
October 11, 1988 - May 15, 1996 [10]
18) Avril Phaedra "Kim" Campbell
May 15, 1996 - June 27, 2000 [11]
19) John Gilbert "Jack" Layton
June 27, 2000 - August 19, 2009 [12]
20) Peter MacKay
August 19, 2009 - June 26, 2017
21) Justin Trudeau
June 26, 2017 - present [13]
[1] John A. MacDonald retired from office owing to the Pacific Scandal, but unlike OTL he did not attempt a political comeback
[2] Georges-Etienne Cartier doesn't here suffer from Bright's Disease until much later in life, and here remains in politics long enough to be Thompson's Foreign Minister during the Philippines War
[3] MacDonald's not making a political comeback and Cartier's age allows numerous younger members of the Conservative Party to rise in the ranks, and John Thompson rises all the way to become prime minister
[4] Arthur Meighen's short second term is a direct result of the King-Byng Affair, which also directly leads to the Statute of Westminster
[5] Thomas Crerar and his Progressive Party pull off a truly stunning victory in the 1933 elections at the nadir of the Great Depression, and usher in an era of minority governments. Crerar loses his Prime Ministership back to King in 1937 but remains (along with a number of his cabinet ministers) in the government until 1947
[6] John Diefenbaker has a reasonably-successful time as Prime Minister but his crushing 1957 electoral victory is the very last Canadian parliamentary majority government
[7] Pierre Trudeau rises to power with great fanfare but the economic difficulties of Canada in the early 1970s and the growing divisions in his party mean his second government is short-lived before he falls to the widely-respected Stanfield
[8] The government that resulted from the first elections under Canada's new electoral system elected Nova Scotian Robert Stanfield to the Prime Minister's office. Stanfield's first cabinet is also notable in that it saw a former Prime Minister (Diefenbaker, in this case) become a cabinet minister, which while not unheard of was unusual
[9] Seaga was the first Prime Minister from the Canadian Caribbean, and his time as PM was the end of his long list of achievements in Canada, including being instrumental in Canada's Constitution in 1972
[10] Chretien was Pierre Trudeau's right-hand man and one of the best negotiators of Canadian politics in the 1970s and 1980s. He defeated Seaga and Ed Broadbent in the 1988 elections and was victorious again in 1992 before falling narrowly to Campbell in 1996
[11] The first female Prime Minister
[12] Having resuscitated the Progressive Party from its 1990s nadir, Jack Layton proved to be just as charismatic as so many Prime Ministers before him and re-established the Progressive Party as a capable governing party, turning Canada's evolving two-coalition system into a three-coalition system and establishing the first multi-party governments since World War II
[13] Pierre Trudeau's son proves to have all of the charisma of his father half a century before, and an ability to align multiple parties into a working government
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