Freedom Party (Harry Turtledove)
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In Harry Turtledove's American Empire and Settling Accounts series of novels, the Freedom Party is a fascist political organization that takes power in the Confederate States of America during the 1930s, and leads the nation into a version of the Second World War.
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6.1 Remaking the Confederacy |
Beginnings
The Party was headed by Jake Featherston, a Southern analog of Adolf Hitler. Like Hitler, he was an army sergeant who served in the Great War, in Featherston's case as a gunner in, and later, commander of Captain Jeb Stuart III's battery in the prestigious First Richmond Howitzers. Both were embittered by their country's defeat in that conflict, and in the postwar crisis turned their considerable energies towards taking revenge on those they see as responsible.
The Freedom Party was founded in Richmond, Virginia sometime after the Great War (the exact date is unclear) by a man named Anthony Dresser (analog of Anton Drexler). Its rather vague ideology encompassed extreme Confederate nationalism and white supremacy, and hatred for blacks, socialists, the United States and the Southern aristocracy that dominated the political and military establishments.
Featherston was the seventh member to join, and became the Party's chief speaker after he salvaged one of Dresser's ham-handed speeches from hecklers. A mesmerizing orator, Featherston ranged all over the country on speaking engagements that brought new recruits and donations rolling in. Featherston soon challenged and won from Dresser leadership of the Freedom Party.
The Freedom Party rose quickly to national prominence, electing several Representatives to the Confederate Congress in 1919. It was not the only such organization in the postwar Confederacy: the Redemption League, the Red-Fighters, the Tennessee Volunteers, the Knights of the Gray, and others all had similar ideas, but the Freedom Party rose further and faster than any of its rivals (excluding the Tin Hats, a veterans' organization which did not contest political offices). In Congress its members often came into political and physical conflict with the Whigs, the traditional ruling Party, and the Radical Liberals, the main opposition.
The Party pioneered political warfare in the Confederacy, using war veterans and young men as shock troops to break up meetings of other parties. These troops, called "stalwarts," dressed identically in "uniforms" of white whirts and khaki (butternut) pants, and seem to be an analog of the Nazis' Sturmabteilung (SA) or "brownshirts". Its members also comprised a substantial amount of the Confederate volunteers who fought in the Mexican civil war for Emperor Maximilian III against the republican rebels, in an analog of the Spanish civil war.
The Presidential Election of 1921
The Freedom Party National Convention of 1921, held in New Orleans, illustrated both Featherston's simultaneous weakness and strength. On one hand, he had been forced to move the convention to the Mississippi River as a concession to westerners, especially Willy Knight of the Texas-based Redemption League, who had agreed to endorse the Freedom ticket despite his own ambitions. On the other, he won the support of Amos Mizell, leader of the Tin Hats, and easily captured the nominations of both himself for President and his protege Ferdinand Koenig for Vice-President.
The Whigs nominated Wade Hampton V of South Carolina, scion of one of the Confederacy's richest planter families, and the Radical Liberals chose Ainsworth Layne, a Harvard-educated lawyer. The 1921 campaign is well-noted for violence: several dozen people were killed as the Whigs and Rad Libs attempted to emulate Freedom tactics, and political rallies degenerated into pitched battles.
In the election itself the Freedom Party performed above most observers' expectations by outpolling the Radical Liberals and taking Texas, Florida and Tennessee. Featherston lost, however, to the Whig nominee Hampton, who took every other state but the Radical Liberal strongholds of Cuba, Chihuahua, and Sonora. The Party improved its standing in the Confederate House of Representatives and picked up its first Senator and Governor, from Florida and Tennessee respectively.
The Hampton Affair
Bitter over this defeat, Featherston nevertheless resolved to concentrate on the 1923 and 1925 midterms and build up strength for the 1927 Presidential election, which he believed would be a certain Freedom Party triumph. (The messianic aspects of Featherston's personality had already begun to assert themselves.)
Featherston's mentality aside, the Party had great momentum and eventual victory appeared likely. This likelihood evaporated in 1923, when President Hampton was assassinated by a deranged Freedom Party member named Grady Calkins in Birmingham. The Party's protestations of innocence, no matter how truthful, fell on deaf ears: their reputation for political violence was well-earned, and the stalwarts had in fact been preparing to raid Hampton's rally the night he died. Freedom Party fortunes began to rapidly fall across the nation.
(The Hampton assassination was semi-analogous to the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, in which the Nazis under Hitler attempted to seize power in Bavaria and, eventually, all of Germany. Although the Hampton affair appears to be the act of one individual, the Munich putsch was a deliberate act on the part of the Nazi leadership. Both, of course, were failures which sparked the decline of a once-thriving party.)
Burton Mitchel was sworn in as President of a grieving nation: it was the first assassination of a national leader in the history of either the CSA or USA. The heretofore little-known Arkansas Senator quickly took advantage of the new climate and asked US President Upton Sinclair to end the war reparations that were so damaging to the Confederate economy. Sinclair agreed, and the Socialist-majority United States Congress forgave the remainder of Confederate reparations that year. The Confederate government was finally able to end the Weimar-style hyperinflation that had plagued the country postwar, and full recovery finally began, further taking the wind out of the Freedom Party's sails.
The Post-Hampton Years
The Freedom Party spent the next six years "wandering in the desert." The Hampton-inspired backlash, the recovering economy, and newly-harmonious relations with the United States combined to bring the Party to its lowest point since 1918. The Party lost several seats in the 1923 midterm elections, mostly to Whigs, and common members and prominent backers alike fled.
Not all was dark: this period marked the beginning of the Party's use of wireless communication (radio broadcasting), which would prove so effective in later years. The Party continued its support of Imperial forces in the Mexican civil war, which resulted in eventual victory over the republicans. The Freedom Party guards, troops who were better-trained than the stalwarts and dressed in uniforms similar in color and cut to that of the Confederate Army, gained prominence at this time.
The 1925 election did little to raise the faithful's spirits: though it won the Governor's house in Texas, the Party fell further in the House. It suffered another blow when the Confederate Supreme Court decided that Burton Mitchel, elected Vice-President in 1921 and serving as President since 1923, could run for the office in his own right in 1927, despite the provision in the Constitution limiting the President to one six-year term. Mitchel easily won the election against Featherston and the Radical Liberal candidate Hugo Black, despite the Whigs' lethargic response to the damage caused by the Mississippi floods that year, which destroyed the homes of over half a million people. The Freedom Party seemed doomed to third-party status, like the Republicans in the USA.
The Economic Collapse
Late in 1928, a consortium of Austro-Hungarian banks called for repayment of a loan to the Russian imperial government. Czar Michael's government, bankrupted by the long socialist revolution which had finally ground to a halt a few years before, defaulted, sending shockwaves through the European banking community. They teetered for a few months into spring of 1929, when the entire debt structure in Europe collapsed, taking banks and stock exchanges with it. The crisis slowly crossed the Atlantic, and in June the New York exchange finally crashed. The Great Depression had begun.
Perversely, bad economic news had always lifted the Freedom Party, and this year was no different. As the Mitchel Administration stood by and watched helplessly as the economy collapsed, The Freedom Party stormed to victory in the Congressional elections, elbowing the Radical Liberals out of second place. Freedom was once again on the march.
The Freedom Party disappointed some of its optimists by failing to win a majority: such was its prospects that capturing slightly more than a third of the House seats and winning several Senate and gubernatorial races was seen as a defeat. They could take heart, however, from the US's Democratic Party, whose nominees Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover defeated the Socialist incumbents Hosea Blackford and Hiram Johnson in 1932. (Coolidge died of natural causes before he could be sworn in, and Hoover took his place.)
The Party greeting of "Freedom!" was on every other set of lips, its symbol, a reverse-colored Confederate battle flag, on every other wall and telephone pole. Featherston was nominated unanimously on the first ballot at the FNC in Nashville. Ferdinand Koenig, two-time vice-presidential nominee and a Virginian like Featherston, was put aside in favor of the Texan Willy Knight, in order to ensure success in western states. (The actual motive was to sideline the ambitious Knight by placing him in the nigh-useless Vice-President's office.)
They needn't have worried: The Freedom Party won every state but Arkansas and Louisiana, routing the Whig and Radical Liberal nominees Samuel Longstreet and Cordell Hull, and captured a majority in the House of Represenatives. On March 4, 1934, Jacob Featherston was inaugurated as President of the Confederate States of America.
President Jacob Featherston
Remaking the Confederacy
For the first time in over fifty years, since the formation of Confederate political parties shortly after the War of Secession, someone other than a Whig had captured the Presidency. Featherston quickly set out forming his government. The Freedom majority in the Senate easily confirmed all of his Cabinet selections, including right-hand man Koenig as Attorney General.
Of perhaps equal importance were the lower civil-service positions. In both the US and CS systems the President appointed thousands of civil servants; for decades these positions had nearly all been filled with Whigs. Featherston fired nearly the entire bureaucracy, replacing them with Freedom Party supporters. For instance, the police was chiefed by stalwarts and yes-men, and unleashed on the Party's enemies.
Featherston acted quickly to carry out his campaign promises. The passbook system used to monitor blacks had fallen into disrepair during the war and afterwards; in the Featherston Administration it was rigorously enforced, with stiff penalties meted out to any blacks found to be lacking a passbook or in possession of counterfeit papers. He used government investment to stimulate business, and established public-works projects throughout the nation.
One of these public-works, a bill to dam the Confederacy's rivers to control flooding and generate electricity, brought the President into conflict with the Supreme Court. The Court, led by Chief Justice James Clark McReynolds found the bill to be in violation of the Constitution, specifically the clause forbidding internal improvements to rivers unless they aided in navigation - which dams assuredly did not.
Having maneuvered the Court into striking down an extremely-popular law, Featherston knew he had public opinion on his side, and thus acted boldly, declaring in a famous statement that "James McReynolds has made his decision, now let him enforce it!" (much like Andrew Jackson's statement: "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!") The Supreme Court, head of the judicial branch so vital to the life of American democracy, was put out of existence. The Justice Department rationalized this action by noting that the CS did not have a Supreme Court for the first six years of its existence, and thus Featherston's order was not without precedent.
As for the unfortunate McReynolds, Featherston bullied him and threatened him with his life should the former chief justice go to the papers about how the Supreme Court had really been brought down.
The Unredeemed Territory
One of the most prominent planks in the Freedom platform had called for the return of the "stolen lands," or, more diplomatically, the "unredeemed territory": the now-US states of Houston (formerly western Texas) and Kentucky, the occupied state of Seqouyah (Oklahoma, in our history), and the annexed chunks of Sonora, Arkansas, and Virginia.
The Freedom Party organizations in the US states of Kentucky and Houston were nominally independent of Richmond. Soon after the economic collapse began, these states began sending Freedom Congressmen to Philadelphia, who loudly fulminated for their states' return to the Confederacy.
The Confederate Freedom Party supported the resistance movements in these states, which had their genesis in the Great War. While Kentucky and Houston had never been peaceful as part of the Union, the simmering rebellions there exploded soon after the Freedom Party took power in the South. The Freedom Party also actively, though much more quietly, supported the resistance movement in Utah, which had been under martial law since the 1915 rebellion against the Federal government.
Foreign Relations
These actions carried the risks of angering the United States, much more powerful than its southern neighbor. Though the Confederate States were growing strong again, the United States still had the ability to crush them on the battlefield. Though Featherston had used anti-Yankeeism as a tool to gain power both before and after his election, he had to be careful not to upset his icy but civil relations with US President Hoover and his 1936 successor, Socialist Al Smith.
It was with this disparity in strength in mind that Featherston began searching for allies. Early in 1934 the Freedom Party sent several unofficial envoys to like-minded organizations in Europe. Of special interest was Action Française in France, which bore the same relationship vis-a-vis Germany as the US did to the CS. A quiet, working relationship between the two governments was agreed to.
The Freedom Party's efforts were hampered by the fact that it had very few members with foreign-service experience, and was thus forced to retain the Whigs in the State Department for several years. Eventually, though, this too fell to the Party.
Freedom Party soldiers with experience from the Great War and Mexican civil war fought for the Phalangists against the Monarchists in the Spanish civil war (though their contribution was small compared to that of the French under Action-Francaise and the British under Winston Churchill's Conservative Party).
The Louisiana Affair
In the Confederate political elections of 1933, 1935, and 1937, Freedom had gradually seized the reins of national and state power. President Featherston ran the country and the national party from the Gray House in Richmond, and from there power sifted through the governors and state legislatures on down to the city-level Party chairmen, who also directed stalwart and guard actions.
Those who dared speak out loud against this undermining of democracy were quickly silenced. Newspapers and wireless stations that didn't go along with Party lines were replaced by more agreeable services, while opposition leaders and loudmouths were arrested in the name of "public safety and decency" and placed into state correctional camps, which were run by Party stalwarts and guards.
The one place that took exception to this new power in the land was the state of Louisiana. There the local Radical Liberals, led by Huey Long, captured the elections of the mid 1930s and did unto Louisiana what Jake Featherston and his Freedom Party did to the CSA. Naturally, this change of events didn't cotton into Featherston's ultimate plans, which involved consolidation of every state in the CSA under Freedom rule. The "Sarge" dispatched his errand person, Anne Colleton, to persuade Governor Long to "get in line with the rest of the CSA."
Of course the stubborn "Kingfish" refused to comply with Colleton's warning. Shortly thereafter, Long was gunned down by a starving black janitor in the employ of the Freedom Party (the assassin himself was cut down by Long's bodyguard; there persists a rumor to this day that the bodyguards themselves were in the employ of Featherston, and the black janitor was a patsy used to further the excuse that the subsuquent Freedom occupation of Louisiana was a reaction against the rising Red rebellion going on in that state).
In due course, following Long's assassination, the Freedom Party and Confederate States Regular Army occupied Louisiana, and incarcerated Long's supporters into camps, such as Jefferson Pinkard's Camp Dependable. (This whole "Louisiana Affair" was semi-analogous with Hitler's takeover of Austria in 1938.)
The Road to War
Remolding the Armed Services
Following the outbreak of several black uprisings in many states across the Confederacy after the midterm elections of 1935, Jake Featherston had wired his U.S. counterpart Herbert Hoover for permission to boost the size of the Confederate armed services. Hoover assumed that Featherston would limit the Army to a size that would enable it to put down the uprisings, and by 1940, the rebellions were more or less quiet--but not out.
Featherston had other plans for the Army's future. He enlarged it even further than Hoover had expected, adding several thousand stalwarts into the ranks. In 1939, conscription was reintroduced. Sharp military-looking airplanes labeled "Confederate Citrus Company" fly about, armed with machine guns and bombs. In the Navy, observing the successes at sea during the last war using submersibles, naval warfare planners plotted out new doctrines.
One of Featherston's platform planks had called for a complete makeover of the Confederate War Department--home to some of his most bitterest enemies. Following an assassination attempt made against him by a black terrorist during the 1936 Richmond Olympics, Featherston exacted his revenge against his arch-nemesis, General Jeb Stuart Jr, the Army chief of staff. The two exchanged some heated words before Featherston blackmailed Stuart into resigning, in light of what the general had done during the Great War. After General Stuart had left the office, Featherston released the story anyway. By the next morning, thanks to the Director of Communications Saul Goldman, the story was out across the country, and the reputation of many long-time officers ruined.
In Stuart's place came another officer with a famous name: Nathan Bedford Forrest III (great-grandson of the first Nathan Bedford Forrest, skilled Confederate cavalry tactician during the War of Secession). Unlike most other aristocratic military officers in the C.S. Army, Forrest was a bright and gifted man who had many ideas on how to employ barrels in modern warfare, building upon the doctrine established by U.S. Great War hero, General George Custer. Another officer who would become prominent in the upcoming war was George Patton, a Virginian who had served in the Confederate Barrel Brigade in the Great War.
Exit Willy Knight
Ever since becoming Vice President of the Confederate States in the election of 1933, Willy Knight had figured very little into the workings and schemes of Featherston and the other Freedom Party bigwigs. Aside from making speeches on the wireless and barnstorming when Featherston was busy with other matters, Knight (as any vice president would know) did very little as far as running the country was concerned.
The Confederate States Constitution had limited the length of a president's stay in office to one six-year term. Since the CSA had always been an arch-conservative/traditional country, very little on the C.S. Constitution had been amended (aside from the manumission of slaves). In the summer of 1938, after the Louisiana Affair had been wrapped up, Freedom Party delegates attended a Constitutional convention and soon rapped out an amendment to "repeal the seven words"--referring to the last sentence of the part of the Constitution limiting the Confederate president to one term (Article II, Section 1,1). The amendment passed through the Freedom-controlled halls of state power, and became law in time for the 1939 presidential election.
Willy Knight saw at once that the Constitutional amendment was the kiss of death for any ambition of his own to hold power. He assembled some disgruntled stalwarts and unleashed them on President Featherston's motorcade. Featherston killed off his attackers, and soon uncovered Knight's role in the plot. The vice president was impeached, convicted, and forced to resign. Freedom Party guards secretly hauled Knight off to Camp Dependable, which by this point had replaced its white political prisoners with captured black "troublemakers". At some point in the late summer of 1941, soon after the outbreak of war, Knight was murdered.
The post of vice president was given to an amiable nonentity named Donald Partridge, a Tennessee senator known mostly for his incredibly dumb jokes.
The Richmond Agreement
Secure in the Gray House after the relatively-uncontested presidential election of November 1939, Jake Featherston moved on toward his next plank: reintegrating the unredeemed territories of the CSA lost to the USA back into its original country. The rioting in Houston, Kentucky, and Sequoyah increased. Freedom Congressmen fulminated in the U.S. Congress about the possibility of holding plebiscites.
Al Smith, always a happy and outgoing man, finally gave in after repeated fighting in the states and the Congress, not to mention Featherston's constant wireless attacks ("Confederates, wake up!"). In June of 1940, President Smith traveled by train from Washington to Richmond to meet personally with Featherston (compared with Neville Chamberlain's 1938 visit to Adolf Hitler in Munich). The two of them agreed to hold the plebiscites in the occupied states in return for Featherston's promising to allow blacks to vote for their state's self-determination, to leave said states demilitarized for twenty-five years in the event of their return to Confederate sovereignty, and also promising to not make any more territorial demands in North America--and all this dependant on whether Al Smith or the Democratic frontrunner Robert Taft won the November 1940 U.S. presidential election.
Smith won re-election, and on January 7, 1941, the plebiscites were held in Houston, Kentucky, and Sequoyah. The first two states voted to return to the CSA; Sequoyah voted to remain in the United States. People in both the USA and the CSA hoped that with these plebiscites peace would remain in North America for a long time.
One Minute to Midnight
Those hopes were cruelly dashed in February 1941 as President Featherston, in a wireless broadcast to the nation, announced a rebuttal of President Smith's conditions and demanded the return to Confederate control the remaining pieces of C.S. territory still in U.S. hands: parts of Arkansas, Sonora, and Virginia--along with the state of Sequoyah, even though the plebiscite there went against the Confederate States.
It finally started to dawn on the leaders and citizens of the United States that Featherston was looking for trouble, and whenever he was appeased or ignored, he would look even harder. It was generally assumed that if he was appeased one more time, then he would start demanding other things--like a spoiled child. Al Smith refused Featherston's latest demands, and mobilized the U.S. armed forces. By then it was too late for an easy showdown: the Confederacy had begun preparing for war years before the USA, still reeling from the effects of President Sinclair's armament reductions of the 1920s, started to catch up. This gap would almost cost the United States the war that was about to begin.
Further cause for alarm in the USA occurred when the Confederates moved troops, barrels, and planes into Kentucky in direct violation of the Richmond Agreement. Featherston himself traveled through Kentucky, making speeches and gauging his new state's mood for war. The international situation became ever more tense once Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II passed away in June, followed by the outbreak of the Second European War. In a gesture to his allies in Britain and France, (and, perhaps, though this is not clear, to goad the United States to follow through on its alliance obligations to Germany by declaring war on the CSA and its European allies), President Featherston asked the Freedom Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. The United States stubbornly stayed neutral.
Featherston finally decided to take the final fatal step himself. He cut diplomatic relations with the United States and gave the War Department the final go for Operation Blackbeard. At half past three in the morning on June 22, 1941, Confederate artillery opened fire on U.S. positions across the Ohio and Rappahannock rivers, while bombers struck Philadelphia in the predawn darkness. Featherston, sitting at his desk in the executive mansion, reportedly gave a Rebel yell when he heard the guns roar.
Freedom at War
Commander-in-chief Featherston
Unlike most other modern leaders, Featherston preferred to lead from the front, or at a spot not too far away. He spent much of his time near the First Richmond Howitzers, his army alma-mater from the First World War, and even yanked the lanyard of the guns a few times. He also enjoyed firing at US airplanes the new automatic rifle Confederate soldiers used - a reckless feat that greatly alarmed his bodyguards. The propaganda value of being at the front was also used to his advantage: Saul Goldman's media crews filmed him visiting the troops and shooting at the enemy, and then circulated the footage to boost morale at home. Jake Featherston would never be shown to be a shirker at home, not when he shared the same risks as his soldiers.
While the president played artilleryman at the front in northern Virginia, Ferdinand Koenig and General Forrest ran the administration in the capital. Koenig directed domestic civilian and Party affairs, such as rooting out saboteurs and running the camp system while Forrest directed the war from his headquarters in the War Department at Mechanic's Hall. But not everything could be done by flunkies; Featherston did devote a fair amount of time to paperwork, often wishing he could ditch the presidency and return to being a sergeant of artillery. But he also knew that without him at the helm, the Confederate States would lose a most valuable asset to the war effort.
The Machinery of Death
Defreedomization
Prominent Members of the Freedom Party
- Jake Featherston
- Ferdinand Koenig
- Saul Goldman
- Willy Knight
- Roger Kimball
- Anne Colleton
- Amos Mizell
- Strom Thurmond
- Ben Chapman
- Caleb Briggs
- Anthony Dresser
- Jefferson Pinkard
- Robert Quinn
Sayings, Slogans, and Mottos
- "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!"
- Chant used by members and supporters at rallies.
- "Featherston and Freedom!"
- Stalwarts' battlecry during street-fights.
- "The truth is..." or "It's time to tell you the truth."
- The Freedom Party made much use of the word "truth," often using it as a cover to project lies and false justifications for their actions.
- "Repeal the seven words!"
- A slogan used during the campaign to amend the part of the Confederate Constitution limiting the president to a single-term - the last seven words of the aforementioned section. Once amended, the Confederate Constitution allowed Jake Featherston to run multiple times; this, combined with his strong-arm control of Confederate politics, effectively made him president for life.