North America
"Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery."
Decline and Fall (1922-1981)
For most of the continent, the 1920's were a relatively prosperous decade. Even though economic growth was substantially less than in South America or France, and growth's benefits were concentrated mainly in the middle and upper classes, nonetheless both North American countries enjoyed a decided improvement in living standards and consumption. Just as in the other leading world economies, the economy of the United States -- and to an extent, that of the Canadian province of Ontario -- was transformed by the mechanization of industry and of agriculture. Perhaps the preeminent global example of industrial mechanization was the complex of automobile manufacturers built around the city of Detroit, in the Union, by Henry Ford. North America was also one of the first regions of the world to adopt the new mass-communications technology of radio broadcasting; by decade's end, hundreds of radio broadcasting stations had been built across the North American continent. Naturally enough, the peripheries of the continent lagged behind the prosperous core -- Canada outside Ontario and middle-income Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland came closest to the Union's prosperity, followed by Mexico and American Cuba, then Yucatán and American-protected Santo Domingo, then the British colonies, and finally the central American republics and Haïti.
The direct effects of this economic boom, the new technologies and techniques introduced as a result, and the social changes wrought by domestic radicalism and the global effects of the First World War, created a decidedly new culture. Centred in the major cities of North America, young men and women liberated by the viable incomes that could be earned by a well-educated person living outside the family unit went on to enjoy a decade of unprecedented liberalism. African-American jazz music became popular across the continent alongside Mexican mariachis and simple British pop tunes, just as the influence of European artistic and literary modernism inspired a literary fluorescence. Increased conservatism towards the end of the decade precipitated an emigration of North American -- particularly United States and Canadian -- writers and artists to Europe, where they became known as the "Lost Generation." Born into the middle-classes of the major cities of the northeastern United States, sometimes of immigrant stock but more often from Anglo-American or African-American backgrounds, these writers achieved prominence in the corpus of English-language literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and many others achieved international renown for their terse yet cutting written perspectives on modern life, in prose and in poetry.
The Great Depression of the 1930's hit the entire continent with unexpected force. The Mexican and Yucatecan economies managed to recover their pre-war levels of economic output in 1938, years ahead of the rest of the continent, thanks to the resurgence of their trade partners in the League of Nations. In the United States, though, political paralysis and poor central bank policies delayed the United States' recovery -- only when the Keynesian-driven policies of the League of Nations states increased demand for American exports in 1936 did the United States economy begin to recover. The final recovery of the United States' economy in 1943-4 was achieved largely by League demands for American industrial products. Canada suffered one of the worst national manifestations of the Great Depression to strike any country, as the country's economic autarky and opposition to Keynesianism left Canada's economic recovery incomplete well into the 1940's.
Mexico declared war on Japan in the Pacific War and the United States might well have intervened had the war ended later, while Yucatán, Mexico, and Canada declared war on Germany along with the rest of the League of Nations in 1943. For the most part, though, North America was untouched by the Second World War. Initially, this sparked an economic boom in the United States and Canada in 1945-1946, as the other industrialized nations of the world were still making the transition to peacetime economies. Once these countries did make the transition, though, both North American industrial countries suffered a sharp recession. This marked the beginning of the stagnation of the United States and Canada throughout the quarante glorieuses.
To be sure, the effects of this stagnation were only readily visible across time. Indeed, until 1972 the United States ranked as the largest First World national economy in the world. Throughout the post-war era, though, the United States consistently experienced far less per capita growth than the other major First World economies -- American GDP per capita was surpassed by Australia and Argentina in the 1950's, by France in the 1960's, and by Brazil and Venezuela in the 1970's. By the early 1970's, living standards in the United States, once the highest in the world, were now on par or even below most other First World countries. Economic historians have placed most of the blame for this relative decline upon the United States' exclusion from the AGEI free-trade accords; as a non-member of the League of Nations, the United States was ineligible for membership in an economic pact criticized by conservative Democrats as a threat to the Union's sovereignty, and so, the Union experienced few of the benefits of the global liberalization of trade. Secondary reasons included the continuing backwardness of the South and financial policies that limiting inflation at the cost of long-term economic growth. Although parts of the United States -- particularly Louisiana, the northeastern states, and California -- remained almost as prosperous as any Southern Hemispheric or European country, by the early 1970's the Union as a whole had become somewhat backward relative to the rest of the First World.
If anything, Canada's relative economic decline was even worse. The post-1947 recession dragged on into the 1950's, and were exacerbated by the misguided financial policies by the Social Credit governments of the 1950's. These governments, in showing no concern for price inflation even as the money supply was expanded at a rapid rate, managed to precipitate annual inflation rates ranging from 50% to 190% in the 1950's. This hyperinflation, along with the poor skills of the Canadian workforce and punitive taxation levels, gutted the Canadian industrial base. By the 1960's, Canada had become a major supplier of skilled and semi-skilled emigrants to the United States, as the Canadian -- particularly English Canadian -- middle class drained away to more attractive destinations in the northeastern United States. Communal problems between English Canadians and French Canadians worsened throughout this period, as rapid population growth among French Canadians encouraged French Canadian immigration into the traditionally Anglophone province of southern Ontario.
Haïti, Santo Domingo, and all of Central American save Nicaragua experienced the same kind of stagnation and relative decline as did the Union and Canada. Unlike even Canada, though, none of these countries had ever enjoyed any prosperity to begin with, and so they sank into a grinding poverty aggravated by incompetent and brutal dictatorships. Illegal immigration from these countries -- to Costa Rica and Venezuela, to Spain via Puerto Rico, and to the United States -- grew rapidly throughout the 1970's. Nicaragua's possession of the Nicaragua Canal allowed it some degree of prosperity, although it, too, was prone to corruption and political violence. The region as a whole developed into something of an American preserve, as did Belize (formerly British Honduras), Jamaica, and the Bahamas after they gained independence in the 1960's, though the former British colonies remained democratic states. To a considerably greater extent than Canada, the region of Central America and the Caribbean was transformed by process of integration into a collection of near-protectorates.
In the middle of the continent, though, the independent states of Mexico and Yucatán and the American territory of Cuba, enjoyed tremendous economic booms even as they reinforced their nominally democratic political systems. To a considerable extent, the prosperity of these three countries depended upon their preferential access to the United States, via bilateral trade treaties. Still, the three countries' economic growth throughout the quarante glorieuses would never have happened if their enlightened governments had not made the provision of basic services to their citizenries a top priority, and followed sensible macroeconomic policies that attracted substantial foreign investment. The growth of tourism, of manufactured exports, and -- most importantly -- of large domestic consumer markets helped drive modernization. By the late 1970's, Mexico and Yucatán had securely achieved Second World status and were only a decade away from achieving First World status, while Cuba had managed to blossom into a prosperous country thanks to massive federal investment in the Isle of Pines spaceport.
During this period, the United States evolved into the fulcrum of an increasingly integrated continent. Pro-business Republican Presidents in the 1950's and 1960's had signed bilateral trade agreements giving the United States' smaller and poorer neighbours preferential access to the United States market. Still more importantly, below-replacement fertility rates among Anglo-Americans made the recruitment of foreign labourers essential to maintain a large enough workforce to supply the wants of the United States economy.
In 1960, the United States had a total population of 140 million people, including roughly 105 million Anglo-Americans and 20 million African-Americans. In the two decades after 1960's, ten million Hispanic immigrants and three million more Canadian immigrants migrated to the United States, even as the Anglo-American population slowly decline. In 1980, there were more than 150 million people living in the United States, now including 25 million African-Americans and 20 million Hispanics; Anglo-Americans, now numbering barely 100 million people, were far outnumbered by non-Anglo-Americans in the Deep South, New Mexico, parts of Texas, and most of southern California. Although Anglo-Americans retained a solid majority in New England, French Canadian immigration transformed the north of the region into a bilingual area. Too, Louisiana during this period became increasingly Francophone, as it capitalized upon its Francophone/American biculturalism to become the main gateway for European investments into the United States, while in the Deep South and the working-class suburbs of the northeast African-Americans began to demand full civil rights.
As late as 1970, most observers predicted that the United States would ride out its demographic changes. To be sure, the new self-assertion of Louisianais and African-Americans made Anglo-Americans aware of the United States' new pluriethnicity, while the emergence of self-sustaining Hispanophone communities on the United States side of the Mexican-American border was a new phenomenon. Still, almost all United States citizens identified their country as a civil republic, not as an ethnic homeland; the country's federal democratic structure could well lend itself perfectly to minor reforms that would make the United States a Switzerland writ large. The rising generation of American politicians were multilingual -- almost as likely to speak French or Spanish as English --, strong supporters of civil rights for all American residents, free-traders, and people who supported bring the United States into the League of Nations. Indeed, African-Americans in most parts of the Deep South and in the black working-class suburbs and inner cities of the north, had been making substantial progress from the early 1950's on.
Unfortunately for the United States, the rapid pace of change across the country was too much for some people. Although there was some tension concerning the civil rights movement among African-Americans working classes in the North, and the efforts of the Hispanics in the United States' territories bordering Mexico and to secure equal civil and cultural rights with Anglo-Americans, the greatest tensions were in the Deep South.
In the three states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, with their overwhelming black majority populations, over the late 1950's and the 1960's civil-rights activists managed to mobilize local African-American populations. Agricultural and credit cooperatives were formed to let black sharecroppers pool funds to buy their own lands, while literacy activists from Florida and the Northern States gave uneducated African-American the basic literacy skills that they needed to qualify for the vote. In those three states' 1965 state elections, African-Americans made up majorities of the electorates of all three states. Even though anti-black terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) killed more than three hundred people in a series of lynchings and assassinations, anti-segregationist Republican-"Liberty" coalition governments were elected by a significant majority in all three states. With general popular support and despite the opposition of the old white planter class, these state governments began to take apart the old mechanisms of segregation.
In the March 1966 state elections in the neighbouring state of South Carolina, though, the Republican-"Liberty" coalition was defeated by the incumbent Democratic party, thanks to the political terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. After the South Carolina elections, the KKK began a second campaign of terror. Soon, though, for the first time the KKK found itself attacked by organized groups of African-Americans fed up with more than a century of oppression. Terrorist organizations of all stripes, most explicitly Marxist in ideology, claimed to fight on behalf of the African-American peasantry, and by 1970 South Carolina was trapped in a vicious cycle of political violence. Worse, the news from South Carolina destroyed the progress made by African-Americans elsewhere, as they came to be suspected for harbouring terrorists. The sufferings of African-Americans outside South Carolina resulted in the bloody race riots of February of 1971, and gave South Carolina's terrorist groups the chance to expand -- most notoriously, by the New African People's Liberation Front's bombing of Capitol Hill in January of 1972.
Across the United States, assassinations and terror attacks proliferated. To cope with this threat, the FBI began to militarize its procedures, beginning a series of raids against suspected terrorists that alienated far more people and did more harm than the destruction of the terrorist cells in the raids ever did. The August 1973 raids against Hispanic cultural organizations managed to radicalize a population entirely opposed to the terrorism advocated by elements of the African-American community, and the first bombings by Hispanic terrorist groups began barely a month later. Finally, by the end of 1973 white-organized terrorist groups had become active, claiming to favour the destruction of the American plutocracy.
By 1975, the United States had descended into a deep recession after a series of attacks against United States industrial facilities, and the 1976 Presidential elections were fought largely on the question of terrorism. College professor John Hosperger led the Constitutional Liberty Party -- a coalition of constitutionalist Dixiecrats, libertarians and disaffected Republicans -- to win 5% of the vote for President, even as he became famous enough to run for and win a seat in Congress at the same time. Democratic candidate Richard Nixon 's hardline approach resonated with voters, and in January of 1977 Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. Under Nixon, conditions worsened markedly: Not only did the terrorism continue, but the "One Nation" political group formed at the beginning of the Nixon Administration advocated the harsh treatment of all minority populations, and the FBI under David Schine (head after the purge of Hoover in February of 1977) began to collaborate with reactionary terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan in attacking their mutual political opponents. Soon, political opponents of the Nixon Administration and the FBI came under attack, with many disappearances and mysterious bombings all around the country.
Naturally enough, the United States' neighbours in North America were all profoundly affected by the marked deterioration in their vast neighbour. The smaller states of the continent -- Haïti, Santo Domingo, and the Central American republics -- were worst-affected, as the decline of their patron into police-state terror gave local dictators every chance to return to power and to gain the support of the Nixon Administration in putting down local "Communist" rebels. Although Yucatán remained a thriving pluralistic democracy, Yucatecans soon found themselves close to war with their larger southern neighbour, Guatemala, as that country continued its reign of terror against their Mayan co-ethnics after a 1977 rebellion. Aside from small and insignificant Jamaica and the Bahamas, and Yucatán, Mexico and Canada were the only stable democracies left in the continent. Both countries were badly affected by the near-civil war conditions prevailing inside the United States, although the Mexican economy benefitted from the exodus of almost one million United States citizens -- many well-trained professionals -- and one hundred thousand million écus worth of investment across the border. These five democratic states generally followed their League of Nations allies in taking care to quietly condemn the violence of the Nixon Administration, even while distancing themselves from possible allegations of supporting these terrorist circles.
As the declare came to an end, conditions worsened remarkably. In 1979, Yucatán began to absorb the first large number of Guatemalan Maya refugees, fleeing a military-government repression that had quickly taken on the characteristics of a campaign of mass murder. Despite the gradual mobilization of Yucatecan public opinion in favour of war against Guatemala, the country was restrained by the near-certainty of some kind of United States military attack in response. Canada took great care to avoid any possible involvement while repatriating some of its nationals from the industrial centres of New England after the FBI's Operation Wolfe raids in June of 1979, as did Mexico with Hispanic refugees from the southwestern United States.
Conditions inside the United States itself steadily worsened. By 1979, almost everyone in the United States, regardless of their ethnicity, recognized that the Nixon Administration's policies were only worsening the terrorist situaton. Refugees were fleeing the enfeebled terrorist groups and the increasingly vicious FBI death squads by the hundreds of thousands, and almost 350 thousand million écus in capital had fled to Swiss or Uruguayan accounts before the imposition of capital controls in March of 1979. Members of the Republican and Libertarian Parties, along with moderate state and territorial governments such as those of Louisiana, Cuba, and New England, and leaders among the African-American and Hispanic communities, tried desperately to try to quiet the situation, but almost inevitably the FBI death squads disappeared Nixon's opponents. Nixon's Vice-President, San Franciscan Elizabeth Chang, took a special interest in the elimination of anti-government opinion.
The move, under the Nixon Administration, towards an alliance with the virulently anti-Chinese states of post-colonial Southeast Asia, further worried opponents of the Nixon Administration. In an attempt to please domestic anti-Communist who (falsely) accused Communist China and Siberia of sponsoring the terrorists, and in an effort mobilize public opinion behind his government, Nixon took great care to lay the seeds for a protracted confrontation between the United States and its Southeast Asian allies and the People's Republic of China on the other. This confrontation, he had judged, would be enough to justify his administration's claims to be working to defend the United States from its domestic and foreign enemies. Many of his opponents feared that Nixon was laying the groundwork for a major war. Certainly the inordinately expensive construction of arsenals in Earth orbit and even on the Moon, with anti-satellite satellites, nuclear-armed satellites, manned space stations, and Moonbase Washington, all built at a cost of 500 thousand million écus, signalled a willingness on Nixon's part to make any war a truly global conflict.
Despite foreign speculation that the election would be postponed, the 1980 presidential election in the United States did go ahead. From the start, it was fiercely fought. The Republican party was paralyzed by infighting between the Liberty and establishment wings, and George Bush was the sincere but ineffective nominee of the establishment-Republican party. John Hosperger ran again in 1980 with the backing of many Republicans in a desparate attempt to stop Nixon, even as he ran for his seat in congress at the same time. Although Chang tried to rig the election, Hosperger easily won his congressional seat and captured 25% of the Presidential vote, while two dozen Con-Lib party members were elected to the House of Representatives. While John Hosperger was elected minority leader of a Republican "Liberty"/Con-Lib coalition, the closeness of the vote for the House of Representatives forced a coalition between One Nation Democrats and the establishment factions of the Republican Party. James Callender, a "One Nation" conservative and a racist, but a rival of Chang and someone devoted to democracy so long as he benefitted, was elected speaker. Hosperger's status as House minority leader protected him from the FBI, while also giving him protection of the capitol police and the US Marshalls that the House had requested for protection against "terrorism".
Moderate Dixiecrats in the Deep South had become concerned about the neo-fascist and racially divisive elements of the Nixon Administration and supported Florida Governor Reubin Askew in the Democratic primary campaign. Although Nixon won, Askew lost the Democratic Party nomination only by a margin of 5%. Recently-released tapes -- smuggled to Cuba in 1982 by former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy -- suggest that in an effort to try to boost his popularity, Nixon even considered replacing Chang, identified by the public with the most extreme racists and death squads, with a Republican non-entity named Gerald Ford. Thus would be formed a "National Unity" ticket that would make it easier for Nixon to take measures against extremists in his own party and opponents to restore order.
Even though Nixon ultimately decided, through blackmail, to keep Chang as his vice-president, and Nixon was elected President for a second term -- thanks, in large part, to the practical exclusion of Republican and non-white votes from broad swathes of the country -- Chang was horrified that her political career came so close to being ended. This close call persuaded Chang, with her FBI connections secure, to make sure of her continued political survival by any means necessary. Soon, she began to realize that based on FBI polls, own polling Hosperger's Con-Lib party could potentially pick up 50 seats in Republican areas and another 20 seats in Democratic areas in the 1982 elections, while the Presidency could well fall to Hosperger in 1984.
The first priority of Chang, and of the FBI under Schine, was the liquidation of the "disloyal" Dixiecrats. In November and December of 1980, a mysterious series of bombings -- claimed by the previously unknown National Liberation Front of Georgia and Carolina -- took the lives of three dozen leading opponents of Nixon's nomination. Mysteriously, those Dixiecrats who lived in Louisiana and Cuba -- from which the FBI was practically excluded by concerned governments -- managed to survive. Despite these deaths, plans for the inauguration of Nixon on the 25th of January, 1981, went ahead as planned.
On that date, in front of a televised audience estimated at 65 million people, just as Nixon was about to be sworn in by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, his appointees watching, and surrounded by a dozen Marine guards, a New African People's Liberation Army suicide squad penetrated a hole in the security surrounding the President and opened fire. Although the terrorists were killed within minutes of opening fire, Nixon, most of his secretarial appointees, the Chief Justice, and more than a dozen bystanders were killed. Miraculously, Chang had fallen to the floor behind a podium just as the shooting began, as was the only survivor. As the nation looked on in shock, Chang was evacuated from the site of the assassination. Research suggests that a week after the assassination, House Speaker Callender had acquired a home movie film henceforth known as the "Macgruder Film" that showed in its frames Chang starting to turn and fall seconds before the shots were fired, thus proving she knew the attack was coming. Most unfortunately, Callender chose to use this film to blackmail Chang instead of bringing her down. One of Callender's aides decided to have the film fall into the hands of Deputy Federal Prosecutor Jim Garrison in New Orleans. (Garrison is quoted as saying shortly before his death, "If that dumb redneck had given me that tape just six months earlier, Chang would be in jail, Hosperger would be president, and the world would have three billion more people on it. C'est la vie.")
On the 26th of January, 1981, Elizabeth Chang was sworn in as President of the United States of America.
On to: Prelude to War (1981-1982)