I've made a few small edits to the 1952 entry, tidying up a couple of mistakes I spotted on a re-read & fixing a word that lost its italicization in the transition from my Word document.
Well the Democrats fouled up big time. By selecting such a bigot they secured the white south - which as you point out was pretty much the only section allowed to vote here - but lost everywhere else. Hopefully they will regroup and take a more responsible stance as every viable democratic nation needs a strong opposition to keep it honest.
You were giving me palpitations with those early successes by MacArthur! Bloody glad he didn't get in. However it does mean that Dewey is going to face pressure to take a stronger stance against communism. Which could be awkward if the E German uprising occurs as OTL next year or possibly even more crucial Hungary in 56 as that would be an election year. It could also mean he plays a bigger role in opposing communist supporting operations in the 3rd world. This could mean supporting Batista more against Castro or ending up supporting or at least not opposing Britain and France if the Suez crisis develops as OTL.
Quite possibly. At the very least, Russell's defeat will have proven that doing a total 180 from Truman's support for civil rights is just as much, if not even more of a bad idea, and that the party cannot realistically win national elections on just the segregationist bloc's back. The Democratic party bosses will surely have noticed that, since it's increasingly impossible to ignore the issue of civil rights altogether, charting a more moderate course might be their best bet going forward - though that will also probably be rather hard since the Republicans now have a trifecta with which to ram through some serious civil rights advances at last, which will just inflame the issue and particularly the Dixiecrats' position on it even more...
Haha, well, if nothing else a MacArthur-McCarthy administration would have been...exciting, and certainly interesting in the Chinese sense of that word. The rest of the planet probably dodged a bigger bullet than America itself when Dewey rallied. In the future, while Dewey will try to abide by his own 'bite-and-hold' doctrine as much as possible, the continued presence of the MacArthurite faction in the GOP (even if they no longer support the general personally, his ideas have shown that they aren't going anywhere anytime soon) means that he'll have to appease or at least be more careful around them if a crisis or several kick off, I agree.
Congressman John F. Kennedy has lost the close 1952 Senate election in Massachusetts, as incumbent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (Nixon's running mate in our 1960) was not distracted by the need to draft Eisenhower & then serve as his campaign manager ITL. This is not to suggest that JFK no longer has a political future: he's young, highly charismatic and still enjoys the backing of his rich & well-connected father, and can easily return to the House in two years' time. But any presidential ambitions he and his old man harbor will certainly be delayed by this setback.
Dwight D. Eisenhower is still Supreme Allied Commander - Europe, or SACEUR for short. As an obvious counterweight to MacArthur's lingering influence, he will have a more prominent role in the next update.
As for Richard Nixon, he's still the junior Senator from California, having been elected back in the 1950 midterms. Being a staunch anti-Communist, but one who isn't quite as rabid as Joe McCarthy nor as hawkish as his senior Bill Knowland, he's well-positioned to mediate between pro-Dewey liberal Republicans and conservatives like the latter. While not being Vice President means he's got a lower national profile than IOTL, he can realistically expect to enjoy a bright & promising career in the Senate for a good while.
President Dewey hit the ground running immediately after his second inauguration, knowing full well that he had to make maximal use of the Republican trifecta he had while it lasted. First and foremost came a major cabinet shakeup: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander – Europe or SACEUR for short, was offered the position of Secretary of Defense, replacing Robert Lovett. Dewey had been shaken by MacArthur’s successes early in last year’s primaries and remained worried about the influence of his allies within the Republican Party, so he believed Eisenhower (as the great American hero of WW2’s European theater and a man whose liberal & internationalist inclinations were much more like Dewey’s own) would be a valuable counterbalance to the titan of the Pacific War. Eisenhower accepted after giving the matter much thought, and brought with him an innovative new approach to defense policy: to keep the USSR at bay he favored a rapid buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal at the expense of the conventional armed forces, the opposite of what Lovett had advocated before him[1].
Next, in the realm of general domestic policy, Dewey and his Congressional allies continued to pursue orthodox Republican policy; which is to say, modest rollbacks of the New Deal coupled with efforts to incentivize and strengthen private enterprise. The Agricultural Act of 1953 provided the Commodity Credit Corporation with reserve funds for domestic relief when deemed necessary, but also cut back on farm subsidies without eliminating them altogether – something which predictably annoyed, but did not enrage, farmers across the country, particularly in the Midwest and West. Further funds for education were disbursed to the states, and the earlier public housing program continued at a slower pace. Dewey strove to keep the budget as balanced as he could, which meant raising taxes when he spent more federal largesse and coupling tax cuts with cuts to social programs.
Dewey’s greatest and most groundbreaking push at home came in the realm of civil rights. The president took his comfortable victory over the arch-segregationist Russell as a sign that the nation, outside of the Southern diehards, was prepared to take larger steps forward on this issue, and acted accordingly. The thorough desegregation of the military was followed by an equally complete dismantlement of segregation in the federal bureaucracy, both in hiring procedures and in their physical facilities. Dewey also dictated an end to segregation within Washington D.C. itself, hammering another nail into the civil rights legacy left by Woodrow Wilson forty years before.
All this said, the president did not consider any of these achievements to be the most important milestones he’d reached on civil rights in 1953. That honor went to the passage of what was popularly known as the ‘Case Act’: the first federal anti-lynching law. Representative Clifford Case of New Jersey, one of the most vigorously pro-civil rights Republicans in the House, had revived the old Dyer anti-lynching bill from 1918. His own bill, almost an exact copy of Dyer’s, made lynching into a federal felony punishable by a minimum of 5 years in prison and opened law enforcement to prosecution if they failed to intervene during a lynching.
Like Leonidas Dyer’s original bill it passed through the House but was confronted with a filibuster in the Senate, in this case done by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina – oddly without the support of all but the most extreme of his Dixiecrat fellows, such as James Eastland of Mississippi. Despite Thurmond’s 20-hour filibuster speech however, the Case anti-lynching bill passed late this year unlike its predecessor, the Senate Republicans having found unexpected allies in freshman Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson, Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey and other liberal-minded Democrats[2]. Now it was obvious why Russell and the senior Dixiecrats did not join Thurmond: they must have resolved that the progressives in their own party would help the Republicans get this bill through come hell or high water, and that any public effort to block it was doomed as a result. Secretly Russell had attempted to get help from conservative Republican Senators such as Joe McCarthy and Patrick Hurley (R-NM) to block the bill, but they had unanimously spurned him, and after that effort fell through he seemed to have given up on doing anything but voting against it altogether.
While the Case Act was lauded by liberals in general and organizations such as the NAACP & Civil Rights Congress in particular, it predictably provoked outrage across the South. “What’s brought this on?” Eastland had been caught complaining in private, “We haven’t had to lynch anybody in two years! Now the damnyankee Republicans and their friends, the pinkos I have to put up with day after day, decide to outlaw it? Mark my words, those two years of peace and quiet we just had are gonna come to an end the instant the negroes hear they can act up without having to worry about a little discipline.” When these remarks were leaked to the public, the senior Senator from Mississippi defiantly stood by them, and no doubt many other Southern racists shared his sentiment in much cruder terms on the street level.
Dewey was not unaware that by signing the Case Act into law, he had won only half the battle. Actually making it stick on the ground would be as difficult or even more-so, given the longstanding tradition too many Southern courts and police departments had of ignoring or outright assisting lynch mobs and ‘night riders’ with bloodshed in mind. To that end, he must have confused many of the Case Act’s supporters when in the wake of Chief Justice Fred Vinson’s death in September, he decided to nominate – of all people – Attorney General Hoover to the bench, followed by replacing Hoover himself with FBI Director Tolson and in turn bumping Tolson’s deputy (and yet another Hoover loyalist) Lou Nichols up to the director’s seat. Hoover was not exactly known for having progressive or non-authoritarian views, after all.
In truth, while it is probable that this was the logical conclusion of whatever deals Dewey might’ve cut with Hoover back in 1948 and then again to appease him after passing him up for SCOTUS in 1949, Dewey also felt he absolutely had to have the FBI in his corner if he was to enforce the new anti-lynching law, and that meant appeasing Hoover and company despite his personal dislike of the man. Furthermore the president’s allies already preparing for an even bigger fight over voting rights next year, the bill for which was being prepared in the Senate, and Dewey himself was keenly aware that too was going to require zealous FBI enforcement to have any teeth. (All that and no doubt the president was also betting on his, Truman’s and Roosevelt’s more liberal appointees to contain Hoover)
Outside of Congress and the White House, the Rosenbergs were executed by electric chair in the summer, having been denied any chance at clemency by Dewey once more. And on a less violent note, Jonas Salk also announced his polio vaccine to the public this year, proving its viability by administering it first to 43 crippled and/or feeble-minded children in the previous year and now to his own children. It would still be some time before it was officially declared safe by the Food & Drug Administration, but the vaccine represented a huge step in combating the disease which had infamously plagued the second President Roosevelt and still afflicted thousands upon thousands of Americans annually.
In foreign policy, Dewey got two major breaks from the home front this year. First Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R-IA), a prominent isolationist on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of Bob Taft’s most important allies, attempted to introduce a constitutional amendment to impose hard limits on the executive branch’s ability to make agreements with foreign powers, in particular by requiring that Congress pass separate legislation before any newly-signed treaty could come into force[3]. The president rallied his own allies to counter Hickenlooper’s proposal, which he denounced as crippling his ability to fight Communism abroad, and found some unexpected reinforcements. The resulting intraparty battle saw the isolationists beaten once more not just by internationalist liberals like Dewey himself but also the younger, MacArthur-influenced generation of much more militantly anti-Communist Republican conservatives such as Arizona’s Barry Goldwater and their counterparts among the freshman Democrat Senators, in particular Lyndon Johnson and his cohort. Hickenlooper and Taft had fought hard to advance the amendment, but it was for naught, and indeed it would prove to be the last hurrah of the Old Right as a whole…
For Taft himself discovered that he had cancer at the beginning of summer – and that said cancer, having been caught too late, had already rapidly spread from his pancreas to the rest of his body. On June 10 he abdicated his duties as Senate Majority Leader to the next most senior Republican Senator, the fiercely hawkish Bill Knowland, and died a month later. Though Dewey publicly and privately mourned the loss of such a respected rival and faithful party man, he also expected that the passing of ‘Mr. Republican’ also meant the collapse of the isolationist faction of the GOP, and thus the unstoppable final ascendancy of international interventionism; his second big break, completely freeing him up to pursue a foreign policy without having to worry about the Taftites trying to stop or even just water his ideas down. In this he was soon proven right: the Republican Old Right, already long in decline, could not recover from the combination of the Hickenlooper Amendment’s failure and the death of its foremost statesman, and faded into total irrelevance not long after.
Overseas, the Communist bloc experienced its own seismic political shakeup – certainly one far more earth-shaking than Dewey’s re-election and Taft’s death combined were – when Josef Stalin himself dropped dead in March. On March 2 the longtime General Secretary of the Soviet Union (who had already suffered several massive heart attacks and general poor health in the past few years) had a stroke and was found comatose in his dacha by bodyguards who ironically could have gotten him medical aid sooner, if only he hadn’t ordered them to not wake him for any reason and they weren’t so deathly afraid of his rage that they obeyed his command to the letter. Three days later, the Man of Steel had rusted completely and was declared dead. Various cliques within the Communist Party, military and bureaucracy promptly sharpened their knives even as they publicly mourned Stalin together and planned a lavish funeral procession for him, for the ever-paranoid General Secretary had never anointed an heir and his immediate legal successor, Deputy Premier Georgy Malenkov, was not strong enough to immediately and indisputably consolidate power.
At first a troika of Malenkov, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, and Internal Affairs chief Lavrentiy Beria. Of the three, Beria seemed the most likely to secure the reins: he was more ambitious than Molotov and assuredly much more feared than Malenkov. Despite being known as a thoroughly detestable man – a legendarily brutal secret policeman first and foremost, but also serial predator of young girls who Stalin himself had described as ‘my Himmler’ to his allies and who the latter also warned his own daughter to stay away from – Beria had also unexpectedly pushed for the pardon of a million (non-political) gulag inmates, made some positive noises about the need for liberalization and even pitched a proposal to reunite the two Germanies into one neutral entity, so Dewey and the State Department dared look to his seemingly imminent assumption of power with guarded optimism.
That optimism was dashed when Malenkov and Molotov showed more spine than Beria himself expected and had him purged. The Mingrelian left hand of Stalin had made countless enemies over his long and bloody career, and immediately proving the truth of Machiavelli’s maxim that ‘nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated’, said enemies seized the chance to descend upon him and tear him to pieces. Betrayed by his partners and arrested by Marshal Georgy Zhukov before he could defend himself, Beria was quickly tried for treason, found guilty and executed before the year was over, experiencing for himself the most merciful fate any past political prisoner in his custody could expect.
Following Beria’s downfall, Ukrainian party secretary Nikita Khrushchev – who had been one of the masterminds behind the anti-Beria coup and helped turn Beria’s deputies, Ivan Serov and Sergei Kruglov, against him – seemed to be the most likely to seize power away from Molotov and Malenkov. Such a development too would have been regarded with a degree of measured optimism on the part of the West, for he had seemed more liberal-minded than Stalin (not that that was hard to achieve) and didn’t have the odious reputation Beria did. But it was not to be: the remaining parts of the troika instead brought in Labor Minister Lazar Kaganovich, another ruthless enforcer of Stalin’s and engineer of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, to replace Beria. To sideline Khrushchev’s military ally Zhukov, the new troika further selected Rodion Malinovsky to be Minister of Defense and tasked him with controlling Zhukov.
Kaganovich, whose volcanic temperament made for a dramatic contrast to the stern but unambitious Molotov and charming but weak Malenkov, took the lead in closing ranks and consolidating the troika’s power against all comers[4]. By the year’s end Khrushchev joined Beria in the grave and ‘Iron Lazar’ himself was back to doing what he did best: murderously purging Ukrainians (in this case, specifically the Ukrainian elements of the Communist Party, regardless of how many or few ties they might have to Khrushchev). Molotov was left to his element – foreign affairs – and in addition to announcing the Soviets’ possession of a hydrogen bomb he promised no change to the Stalinist policy of interminable hostility to the capitalist powers, while Malenkov remained both his and Kaganovich’s nominal superior as Premier of the Soviet Union; but there was no questioning whether Kaganovich was running the show within the Union itself now and that, being a zealous Stalinist himself, he would definitely not be changing anything for the better; “Businessas usual,” was how the Dulles brothers described the situation to President Dewey. The most Malenkov could do was attempt to shift production efforts toward consumer goods and light industry at the expense of heavy industry, and even that already put him on thin ice with both the military and the Stalinist two-thirds of the troika.
The Western powers were not sitting idle while the Soviets were distracted by internal feuding. While Egypt’s monarchy formally came to an end with the proclamation of a republic by last year’s victorious putschists, the Anglo-Americans took advantage of the disorder in the Kremlin to save the Iranian one unhindered, and in so doing cast down the nationalist and increasingly authoritarian Mosaddegh. As British economic pressure didn’t work, the CIA and SIS plotted with General Fazlollah Zahedi, spearhead of the military’s anti-Mosaddegh factions, to topple him with more direct means and strongarmed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into supporting the planned coup, which was sprung after Mosaddegh tried to dissolve the Majlis (Iranian parliament) and give himself legislative authority.
After four days of chaos, in which the Shah himself temporarily fled to Baghdad, the plotters pulled off an elaborate scheme involving false-flag Communist actors (both to send the population into a panic about a Communist takeover and to bait actual Tudeh Party activists into the streets), the recruitment of gangsters (for additional manpower) and the reassertion of General Zahedi’s authority over the Iranian army. Mosaddegh was unable to withstand the pressure and surrendered to Zahedi’s forces. The Shah returned in triumph, Zahedi was made Prime Minister and Mosaddegh was initially sentenced to death, but had his punishment commuted to house arrest to build positive PR for the new royal dictatorship. For their part, Britain got the AIOC restored and shored up the position of their monarchic allies in the region, while the US got the former’s monopoly on Iranian oil revoked – conveniently allowing American oil companies to move in on the market.
[1] Much like the ‘New Look’ of the Eisenhower presidency IOTL.
[2] Overall Dewey’s domestic policy, particularly his economics, doesn’t differ much from Eisenhower’s. The only real difference is that Dewey is slightly more willing to lower taxes and cut programs, and significantly more willing to aggressively fight for civil rights.
[3] The ITL equivalent to the Bricker Amendment, which Bricker himself is unable to come up with due to being Dewey’s Secretary of Commerce.
[4] Almost needless to say, Khrushchev failing to gain power represents the next big divergence from IOTL’s foreign developments. The Malenkov-Molotov-Kaganovich troika, being 2/3rds composed of staunch Stalin disciples and 1/3rd weak-willed opportunist, champions a continuation of the Stalinist status quo both at home and abroad; no domestic thaw or even limited détente with America can be reasonably expected out of this bunch.
The Malenkov-Molotov-Kaganovich troika, being 2/3rds composed of staunch Stalin disciples and 1/3rd weak-willed opportunist, champions a continuation of the Stalinist status quo both at home and abroad; no domestic thaw or even limited détente with America can be reasonably expected out of this bunch.
Depending on how this eventually plays out, Douglas "we should have carpet-nuked them when we still had the upper hand" MacArthur may end up getting vindicated in the public's opinion, long after the fact.
Depending on how this eventually plays out, Douglas "we should have carpet-nuked them when we still had the upper hand" MacArthur may end up getting vindicated in the public's opinion, long after the fact.
Thanks for reading! I'm inclined to agree - the Soviet Union remaining 'orthodox'-Stalinist (to an extreme that not even Brezhnev, who at least had some sense of pragmatism and was a Khrushchev ally, would have gone to) in the long run makes them dangerous even outside of the 1950s and early '60s where there won't be any thaw with the West. Unless another reformer manages to displace the ruling troika in time, the still-Stalinist Soviet command economy with little to no relaxation of production quotas, the extreme emphasis on heavy industry to the detriment of light industry/consumer goods or really, any other economic reform points to an earlier meltdown and two equally dismal paths for the Red Giant: falling apart harder and probably earlier than IOTL, or limping onward as a massive North Korea. That the troika's Stalinism also makes them less likely to push the disastrous Virgin Lands Campaign as hard as Khrushchev did historically is only temporary relief, it's not for no reason that even *Lavrentiy Beria* thought economic reform was necessary by this point in time.
Given the sheer scale of daily misery both outcomes are likely or certain to feature, and the inevitable usual Stalinist treatment meted out to anyone who rises up against Communism, I foresee a lot of historians and alternate-history posters will be able to make that exact argument ITL. Assuming any non-mindlessly-Stalinist but also not West-friendly Russian historians exist, their counterargument would probably be something along the lines of 'well if Dewey/MacArthur never used nukes in the first place, maybe more liberal-minded guys like Khrushchev would retain enough credibility to take over instead' - though (as we know from OTL) 'more liberal than Lazar Kaganovich' does not necessarily mean 'nice non-authoritarian leader' either, after all, Beria is in that category. It'd certainly make for interesting academic and forum debates ITL.
I'm inclined to agree - the Soviet Union remaining 'orthodox'-Stalinist (to an extreme that not even Brezhnev, who at least had some sense of pragmatism and was a Khrushchev ally, would have gone to) in the long run makes them dangerous even outside of the 1950s and early '60s where there won't be any thaw with the West. Unless another reformer manages to displace the ruling troika in time, the still-Stalinist Soviet command economy with little to no relaxation of production quotas, the extreme emphasis on heavy industry to the detriment of light industry/consumer goods or really, any other economic reform points to an earlier meltdown and two equally dismal paths for the Red Giant: falling apart harder and probably earlier than IOTL, or limping onward as a massive North Korea. That the troika's Stalinism also makes them less likely to push the disastrous Virgin Lands Campaign as hard as Khrushchev did historically is only temporary relief, it's not for no reason that even *Lavrentiy Beria* thought economic reform was necessary by this point in time.
Given the sheer scale of daily misery both outcomes are likely or certain to feature, and the inevitable usual Stalinist treatment meted out to anyone who rises up against Communism, I foresee a lot of historians and alternate-history posters will be able to make that exact argument ITL. Assuming any non-mindlessly-Stalinist but also not West-friendly Russian historians exist, their counterargument would probably be something along the lines of 'well if Dewey/MacArthur never used nukes in the first place, maybe more liberal-minded guys like Khrushchev would retain enough credibility to take over instead' - though (as we know from OTL) 'more liberal than Lazar Kaganovich' does not necessarily mean 'nice non-authoritarian leader' either, after all, Beria is in that category. It'd certainly make for interesting academic and forum debates ITL.
That's all solid reasoning. I'm looking forward to seeing how this ends up going. One possible outcome that's also possible, of course, is that an even-more-terrible USSR that collapses earlier leads to a far more anti-communist mindset afterwards, in the former USSR. In that case, a sort of "all's well that ends well" mentality might prevail instead. And Dewey gets vindicated as having stemmed the tide right in time, before digging in to wait out the commies -- because "of course" a system that terrible as going to crash and burn. (Which implies, obviously, that MacArthur's plan would have killed countless people in order to destroy something that was going to destroy itself anyway.)
Dewey and the Republicans kicked this spring off with increased efforts to advance civil rights. Last year’s passage of the Case Act had been cause for celebration and would hopefully save many black lives if – or when – violence in the South should increase, but now they were moving on to tackle an issue that could affect a seismic change in American politics: voting rights. Besides considering it the right thing to do, its Republican supporters were also interested in the prospect of decisively cracking the Solid South by enfranchising the long-repressed black vote there: Northern blacks who had moved to the industrial cities north of the Mason-Dixon Line had steadily trended Democratic after the implementation of the New Deal, placing economic concerns ahead of social ones, but it was hoped that their Southern cousins might form a reliable voting block for the Party of Lincoln and leave the Democrats without any electoral strongholds.
So began the battle over the proposed Voting Rights Act of 1954, which the GOP hoped to make into the crowning achievement of their governing trifecta while it lasted. In the House, the bill enjoyed bipartisan support from both Republicans and most Northern Democrats, in particular the few actual black Congressmen such as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D-NY) of Harlem for obvious reasons, and thus sailed fairly smoothly through the lower chamber. But the Senate was a different story. The Senate Democrats were almost completely unified in opposition to the bill, and unlike the Case Act last year, Russell and the other senior members of that cohort were hellbent on fighting it every step of the way. They battled it frantically in the Judiciary Committee, where none other than Mississippi’s James Eastland led the Democratic contingent, and did their utmost to kill it there. Complicating the president’s hopes was the fact that the Judiciary Committee was chaired by William Langer (R-ND), a Taftite ‘Old Right’ Republican who was supportive of civil rights but not zealously so, and had developed a years-long grudge with the Dewey Administration over their sidelining of his and Taft’s foreign policy concerns.
While Dewey and his allies in the Senate, chiefly Irving Ives (R-NY) and Robert Hendrickson (R-NJ), struggled to placate and arm-twist Langer into clamping down on Eastland’s attempts to derail the civil rights bill and get it to the floor, another development exploded onto the scene to further complicate their fight over civil rights. A certain class-action lawsuit filed against segregation in schools in 1951, Brown v. Board of Education, had first made its way all the way from the Kansas courts to the Supreme one in 1953, and this was the year in which they’d issue their fateful decision over it.
Though Chief Justice J. Edgar Hoover did not necessarily share Justice Stanley F. Reed’s direct support of segregation, he was inclined to side with Felix Frankfurter’s and Robert Jackson’s view that while segregation was not a positive thing, the Supreme Court also should not dabble in judicial activism and enforcing a ruling striking it down might be too much for law enforcement to handle. Conversely Justices Earl Warren and Harold Stassen joined William O. Douglas, Hugo Black and Harold Burton in trying to rule in the plaintiffs’ favor; Warren was especially adamant, having integrated Californian schools as that state’s governor after the Mendez v. Westminster case in 1947. He made an impassioned appeal to the other Justices at one meeting, asserting that ‘separate but equal’ had was an inherently unequal and detrimental concept to begin with, and that the only reason to sustain the policy was a sincere belief in the Negro being born unequal to any white man.
When it seemed Hoover would remain unmoved, the Dewey administration broke out all the tools they had at their disposal to pressure him to go along with Warren and Stassen. The Justice Department was already in support of the black plaintiffs, and Attorney General Tolson – an extremely close personal friend of Hoover’s and, some dare say, perhaps even more than that – was directed by the president to say or do anything he could think of to get Hoover to budge. The State Department, by way of Secretary John Foster Dulles, made the argument that every day segregation endured was one more day that the Soviets could claim the moral high ground over the United States and denounce America as a land of hypocrites, with baleful consequences for American foreign policy as Africans agitated for their own freedom across the Atlantic. Dewey himself invited Hoover to dinner at the White House, where he asked the latter: “Would you rather be remembered as another Marshall or another Taney?” At another point in the meeting, when Hoover pointed out that most of the white Southerners who wanted educational segregation upheld just didn’t want to run the risk of their children being seated next to ‘hooting negro hooligans twice their size’, Dewey reminded him that the Brown case was about an eight-year-old girl.[1]
In the end, what Hoover cracked under was not the pressure from the White House (although that certainly helped), but Justices Frankfurter and Jackson being swayed by Warren’s arguments. Realizing he was potentially staring down a 7-2 decision against himself and Justice Reed, he relented in the hopes that his legacy would be a positive one and to present a united front, hoping that a unanimous decision in the Brown family’s favor (or as close to it as humanly possible) would weaken the South’s resolve to inevitably resist the ruling and thus make his buddy Tolson’s life easier when he had to enforce it[2]. Justice Reed followed soon after, and so on May 17 the Supreme Court did rule 9-0 that racially segregated educational facilities are inherently unequal and unconstitutional.
The reaction from the Solid South was immediate. While blacks and liberals across the nation rejoiced, white Southerners were mostly opposed and vigorously so, with some newspapers going so far as to compare the ruling to the bombing of Pearl Harbor thirteen years prior. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. (D-VA) instigated a campaign of ‘massive resistance’, compelling officials from those in positions of local authority all the way up to Senators and Representatives in Congress to do everything they could to thwart desegregation efforts. Said congressmen would set an example by signing the ‘Southern Manifesto’, a document authored by Strom Thurmond which – fueled by Thurmond’s own outrage at the passage of the Case Act over his filibuster – accused the Hoover Court of abusing its power and pledged to use any and all means, including the theoretical state’s right of interposition (a position dangerously close to nullification), to fight the Brown ruling and any other attempt to advance civil rights for Southern blacks[3]. On the ground level, this meant state and local authorities across the South fought to deny funding to integrated schools, to fire black teachers and principals who worked at all-black schools and then avoid replacing or rehiring them, and even to outright close down schools altogether rather than allow them to be integrated.
Although the White House welcomed the Brown decision, they initially decided to prioritize passing the Voting Rights Act first instead of folding it into a larger general civil rights bill, which would be in the works and set to emerge as soon as the VRA-54 had passed through. However the Dixiecrat Senators had been so successful in delaying the voting rights bill in committee that in the end, the Dewey administration and its congressional allies decided to go ahead with introducing the future Civil Rights Act of 1954 on July 1 before the former had passed anyway, knowing that they were racing against the clock set by the midterm elections this year to get both through.
In the end, both bills made it through the House and out of committee by the start of September but were further held up by a coordinated Dixiecrat filibuster. Said filibuster, orchestrated by Senators Russell and Byrd, persisted for two months and did not crack even after the midterms came and went, resulting in the Republicans losing the House even as they hung onto the Senate majority by their – specifically Homer Ferguson’s (R-MI) – fingertips. Democratic Senators Johnson of Texas and Humphrey of Minnesota proved indispensable in helping Senate Majority Leader Knowland finally achieve a breakthrough, rounding up enough votes to achieve a two-thirds majority with which to finally get cloture and end the filibusters with underhanded strongarm tactics and vigorous appeals to the virtues of progress and human rights respectively. Both bills only cleared the Senate in November by 67-33 votes, with moderate Dixiecrat George Smathers (D-FL) unexpectedly breaking ranks (and enraging his fellows) to provide the final decisive vote on both after being hounded by Johnson for two weeks. Contrary to Dewey's and the GOP machine's hopes of flipping or at least threatening the many Southern Senate seats up for election this year, those Southern black voters bold enough to try registering now would still have to wait another two years to exercise their newly asserted right.
While not perfect – some of the bills’ most radically progressive clauses had to be watered down to get Smathers and company on board – the VRA and CRA of 1954 jointly represented a significant step forward toward racial equality and integration, and not just by virtue of being the first major federal civil rights legislation in many decades.
The VRA:
Imposed stiff fines and up to a year in prison for interfering with people’s right to vote
Defined said right as the entire process of registering and casting the ballot in addition to having said ballot counted (without exceptions for things like poll taxes and literacy tests)
Mandated the preservation of all voting records by election officials also under pain of a fine and/or one year’s imprisonment, and gave the Attorney General the right to access these records
Empowered the Attorney General and federal courts to crack down on attempts to suppress the vote even without getting a jury involved
And allowed the federal courts to appoint ‘referees’ to report cases of violation of voting rights, as well as to register voters in areas of known systemic discrimination
And the CRA:
Created a 3-year bipartisan Civil Rights Commission under the auspices of the federal government to investigate and make recommendations on how to address civil rights issues
Outlawed obstruction of court orders, namely those to integrate schools and other public spaces
Punished interstate transportation of weapons and explosives with the intent of causing property damage and fleeing across state lines to avoid prosecution
Freed federal jury selection from state selection rules, allowing for black and female jurors in federal courts; and provided financial aid to and for integrated or integrating schools[4]
Southern resistance to the passage of Dewey’s civil rights reforms and the Brown decision took both nonviolent and violent forms. Outside of the Southern Manifesto, White Citizens’ Councils rapidly sprang up across the South to become the most obvious public opposition towards school desegregation and voter registration efforts: these Councils organized boycotts of black businesses and integrated facilities, the firing and eviction of blacks and their sympathizers on any grounds they could find, and spreading racist propaganda. Many important Council members were also local or state politicians and officials, and mounted their own initiatives to complicate and delay the process of integration for as long as they could; indefinitely, where possible. And of course, much less peacefully, the Ku Klux Klan began to re-emerge as the spearhead of violent resistance to racial integration, targeting blacks who dared try to register to vote or send their children to previously all-white schools and local politicians or activists who helped them for intimidation, assault or murder – often with the connivance of local law enforcement, who were prone to at best putting in minimal efforts to stop & prosecute them, and racist communities, who allowed them to blend in and avoid detection. For their part, the federal government retaliated by beginning to withhold financial support to states and educational departments that refused to integrate, as well as ramping up the involvement of the FBI and federal courts wherever they could.
While the struggle over segregation continued to heat up in the States, the rest of the world continued to experience their own set of troubles and changes. With the Soviet Union remaining staunchly Stalinist, Yugoslavia’s Tito opted to listen to his liberal-minded lieutenant Milovan Dilas and introduce further democratic reform to bring their country in line with the West. Censorship and party discipline were both relaxed, the secularist and state-atheist religious policies rolled back, certain political prisoners released (most famously Aloysius Stepinac, a Cardinal and Archbishop of Zagreb who had been sentenced to 16 years in prison for treason immediately after World War II) or at least having their sentences reduced, and even the planned worker self-management increasingly scrapped in favor of conventional economic liberalization and the invitation of Western private companies to set up shop in Yugoslavia. Most tellingly, Tito increasingly referred to himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ rather than a Communist, and the State Department secretly reported on an increasing willingness among the Yugoslav leadership to transition to a multi-party democracy in time[5].
Further south, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser outmaneuvered his nominal superior Muhammad Naguib and seized the helm of the Egyptian government, then went on to heavily crack down on internal dissent – most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Supreme Guide Hassan al-Hudaybi and chief propagandist Sayyid Qutb were arrested after a failed assassination attempt on Nasser himself by a Brotherhood agent; al-Hudaybi was sentenced to death but had it commuted to life imprisonment, while Qutb was sentenced to imprisonment for 15 years. Ferociously committed to Arab nationalism, Nasser immediately set Egypt on a collision course with Britain over the Suez Canal Zone. Rather than rise to meet Nasser’s increasingly hostile and violent provocations, the Labour government agreed to withdraw its troop presence from the canal this year, with an eye on completing the withdrawal and dismantling their base within a year. In exchange for allowing the Suez Canal Corporation to continue operating, the UK was to provide Egypt with financing for a new Aswan Dam, something which Nasser was extremely interested in (unlike King Farouk). The US would also split the cost with Britain, covering a good part of the $270 million loan for the Dam[6].
But to Nasser’s surprise, the British withdrawal from Suez did not mean London was done playing games in the Middle East. They sponsored the creation of the Middle East Treaty Organization, or METO: a loosely NATO-inspired regional alliance including the United States, which joined over objections from Tel Aviv, and the Western-friendly nations of Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Iran and Pakistan. No doubt this project, colloquially dubbed the Baghdad Pact, was intended as a counterweight to Nasser’s hopes of placing Egypt at the head of the Arab World and a preserve of British influence in the region.[7]
Far to the east, trouble was stirring in Indochina, where the French had for years been combating a powerful Communist insurgency called the Vietminh. The situation had become more desperate for the colonial government than anyone could have expected by 1954, with much of France’s military strength in Indochina now dispersed among aerially-supplied ‘hedgehog’ bases built in remote areas to interdict Vietminh supply routes, while the Vietminh enjoyed greater Soviet support through China and had developed in many ways into a surprisingly professional, and even more shockingly heavily armed modern army rather than a ragtag militia. Starting in March, they besieged the prominent network of hedgehog-forts in the swampy valley of Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam, engaging the French with Soviet-provided artillery and anti-air from the hills around the valley – which respectively made quick work of the weakest French outposts and crippled French ability to resupply & reinforce the forts by air. Making things worse, the French had committed more troops to Dien Bien Phu than they could afford to lose, but not enough to defeat the Vietminh army amassed outside of it; approximately 15,000 men, including the latest batches of reinforcements flown in shortly before the Vietminh set up their AA guns.
The French government approached President Dewey, asking for help. Dewey was happy to have the CIA fly in supplies to the beleaguered defenders of Dien Bien Phu, but balked at the prospect of sending American troops into another land war in Asia so soon after Korea, and to maintain European colonial rule rather than defend a free & capitalist Asian country at that – especially when Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway expressed his belief that Indochina was of no strategic importance to the United States and overt American involvement there would be a needless distraction from other, more important theaters. Further, he reacted with uncharacteristic anger when Joint Chiefs Chairman Arthur Radford and Air Force General Nathan Twining suggested the deployment of tactical nukes against the Vietminh, categorically refusing to even consider the option with the argument that nuking a third Asian country in less than 10 years (and explicitly to uphold European colonial rule at that, a far worse reason than any justification for Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Korean War he could think of) would destroy whatever support America might still have in that part of the world[8]. In the end, under pressure from his Vice President and Secretary of State Dulles, Dewey agreed to a plan to bomb the hills around Dien Bien Phu and deploy eight divisions to Indochina on the condition that the British back him up; when the Attlee ministry refused to go along with the plan, the president took his opportunity to dive down the off-ramp and leave French Indochina to its fate.
With no help forthcoming, the Dien Bien Phu garrison’s position became obviously hopeless and they surrendered to Vo Nguyen Giap’s army in May. The resulting Geneva Conference saw France agreeing to leave Indochina under the pressure of a united Anglo-American front, where both the Dewey administration and the Attlee ministry agreed that some sort of negotiated end to French colonial rule was the optimal outcome. Indochina itself was to be partitioned; Laos and Cambodia went their own ways under indigenous monarchies, but Vietnam was to be divided between a Communist North, patronized by Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, while French troops regrouped in the south and prepared to hand over power to the non-Communist Vietnamese elite there.
Privately, Dewey sought to balance his administration’s concerns regarding the Communist victory with the need to dissociate American foreign policy from European colonialism (so as to not needlessly provoke the peoples of Asia and Africa) by backing a free, republican and non-Communist South Vietnam, much as he thought he had done well with South Korea. No doubt this line of thinking and the formation of the METO inspired him to organize the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO, this year to coordinate the Southeast Asian anti-Communist states; besides the US itself, the other founding members were France, the UK, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan and Australia.
Dewey had far less problems intervening closer to home. President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala had implemented a sweeping land reform program which, by 1954, had taken 1,400,000 acres away from the country’s big landowners and the United Fruit Company and parceled them out to 500,000 poor farmers. Unfortunately for him, the Dulles brothers were significant shareholders of the UFC and harbored close ties to the company leadership. While they were busy whispering in President Dewey’s ear about how critical it was that he prevent Guatemala from becoming a Communist foothold in the Western Hemisphere, the UFC was also aggressively lobbying for intervention and had hired professional propagandists, including Edward Bernays, to make Guatemala appear to be a Communist hellhole. Not helping matters was Arbenz himself: although he stridently insisted that he was no Communist and was actually trying to move Guatemala away from effective feudalism and toward a capitalist economy, with a lower and middle class that could afford modern consumer goods, his wife was accused of being a Communist sympathizer who was influencing his judgment, and his government did include several Communists.
As a consequence, Dewey bought into the Dulleses’ arguments and agreed to greenlight a coup attempt, confident that they could repeat their magic in Iran. Operation PBSuccess kicked off in June, spearheaded by the exiled hard-right Guatemalan commander Carlos Castillo Armas, and despite fielding only a few hundred mercenaries and Guatemalan exiles for its army they made maximum usage of the bombers and propaganda channels the CIA had outfitted them with, confounding the Guatemalan leadership and populace both into thinking they were a much more intimidating threat than they actually were. Several of Arbenz’s generals lost their nerve and turned on him, hoping to be spared when Castillo Armas seemingly inevitably won; Arbenz himself lost heart when he could find no other Latin American state willing to help him, and believing the situation to be hopeless, surrendered after nine days of skirmishes. He resigned the presidency and fled to Mexico, allowing Castillo Armas to seize power and later ‘legitimize’ himself with elections (in which his was the only name on the ballot) in October.
While the coup was internationally condemned, even by British Prime Minister Attlee and the most pro-American newspapers of West Germany, their sentiments were not shared within America itself, where these criticisms rolled off the US like water off a duck’s back. The Dulles brothers and the United Fruit Company’s board were ecstatic, few Americans on Main Street paid the coup much mind at all and fewer still thought America did anything wrong – as far as popular opinion went, Arbenz was at minimum a pinko who would’ve paved the way for a Communist takeover even if he wasn’t one himself, and had his deposition coming. This was even the opinion of Dewey himself: the president gave the matter much less thought than he did the idea of nuking Indochina, and spent the rest of his life genuinely believing that he’d just headed off a Communist takeover south of Mexico.
[1] Pretty much a complete inversion of Eisenhower’s OTL dinner with Warren, where the former was the one making the ‘nobody wants their little girl sitting next to overgrown negroes’ argument to the latter.
[2] This was actually an argument Earl Warren made in the Supreme Court’s deliberations IRL.
[3] This is closer to Thurmond’s draft of the OTL Southern Manifesto, as opposed to the final version edited by J. William Fulbright which was more moderate in tone, did not support using interposition and explicitly argued that the ‘massive resistance’ should be done in law-abiding ways.
[4] These acts are based on both the RL Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and ’60.
[5] Historically, Khrushchev’s ascension and the ensuing de-Stalinization encouraged Tito to reconcile with the Soviets somewhat, keeping Yugoslavia an officially Communist and Non-Aligned state. With no such thaw possible ITL, Tito has committed to liberalizing as Dilas proposed IOTL and aligning more closely with the West instead.
[6] Historically, this agreement was reached in 1955.
[7] Historically, the Baghdad Pact also came about a year later, but Labour – which prefers to maintain British influence diplomatically and indirectly where possible – brings it in earlier to balance out the results of their negotiations with Nasser. Moreover, the United States did not join it from the get-go due to the opposition of the pro-Israeli lobby and their congressional allies, the latter of which is less of an obstacle ITL considering the greater strength of the Republicans’ Senate majority from 1952 to 1954.
[8] Dewey here is mirroring Eisenhower’s RL sentiment when the nuclear option was suggested for Operation Vulture – “"You boys must be crazy, we can't use those awful things against Asians for a second time in less than ten years. My God!” – with even less willingness to actually use tactical A-bombs against the Vietminh.
Sounding very promising, although disappoint about the coup in Guatemala due to economic interests pulling the wool over Dewey's eyes. It makes it more likely that the US is likely to make other actions in the future and also it won't be trusted by reforming groups in the region who are more likely to turn toward Moscow for aid.
OTL Britain and the US made such a deal for withdrawal and the loans for the Aswan High Dam but IIRC this was withdrawn due to a decision in Washington after Nasser made major arms purchases from the Soviets. He had tried buying a lot of weapons from the US but had rejected any guarentee not to use such weapons against Israel. After the withdrawal of the loan for the Dam Nasser used this as an argument to seize the canal to provide alternative funding.
I don't know if this will be changed in any way and hence the OTL Suez crisis avoided. Or if Nasser still goes to Moscow for arms and then seizes the canal in defiant of agreements this prompts Dewey to support his allies - who might not go into such a round about route with Israel as a proxy in such a case.
Would also suspect that ~1955/56 might be the terminal point for Labour dominance in Britain. They would have been in power for a decade which would probably mean growing desire for a change. Likely to see a change to a Tory government in the next election, although its probably going to be a fairly moderate one and it won't have Churchill as a leader - him being seen as too elderly and out of touch after a defeat in ~1951. Giving up the military bases in the canal zone could also be a factor here as the Tories could argue that Labour is being weak on defence issues. Would also depend on what other policies differences and economic developments that Britain would have had under a continued Labour government in this period but don't know anything like enough to say what they might be.
Sounding very promising, although disappoint about the coup in Guatemala due to economic interests pulling the wool over Dewey's eyes. It makes it more likely that the US is likely to make other actions in the future and also it won't be trusted by reforming groups in the region who are more likely to turn toward Moscow for aid.
OTL Britain and the US made such a deal for withdrawal and the loans for the Aswan High Dam but IIRC this was withdrawn due to a decision in Washington after Nasser made major arms purchases from the Soviets. He had tried buying a lot of weapons from the US but had rejected any guarentee not to use such weapons against Israel. After the withdrawal of the loan for the Dam Nasser used this as an argument to seize the canal to provide alternative funding.
I don't know if this will be changed in any way and hence the OTL Suez crisis avoided. Or if Nasser still goes to Moscow for arms and then seizes the canal in defiant of agreements this prompts Dewey to support his allies - who might not go into such a round about route with Israel as a proxy in such a case.
Would also suspect that ~1955/56 might be the terminal point for Labour dominance in Britain. They would have been in power for a decade which would probably mean growing desire for a change. Likely to see a change to a Tory government in the next election, although its probably going to be a fairly moderate one and it won't have Churchill as a leader - him being seen as too elderly and out of touch after a defeat in ~1951. Giving up the military bases in the canal zone could also be a factor here as the Tories could argue that Labour is being weak on defence issues. Would also depend on what other policies differences and economic developments that Britain would have had under a continued Labour government in this period but don't know anything like enough to say what they might be.
Indeed, Dewey has grown significantly in the realm of foreign affairs over his first term, but it's still the area of policy where he's at his weakest. Or, at least, where he's most reliant on advisors who may have their own ulterior motives like the Dulles brothers. He's definitely more of a domestically-inclined reformer, given his gubernatorial background, and that is unlikely to change until the day he leaves office. As for Guatemala specifically, a certain Argentine medical student named Ernesto Guevara will have borne witness to the CIA's actions against Arbenz and is not impressed, to say the least...while he's still so completely insignificant as to not even merit a mention in the update itself right now, he has just found all the motivation he needs to become one of the most persistent thorns in the side of American foreign policy down the road. Something like a modern-day post-exile Hannibal in a beret, if you will.
At present the US impression of Nasser is much as the RL Eisenhower administration's was, that he's a non-Communist and republican local strongman they can work with (similar to Korea's Rhee and now with the fall of French Indochina, Vietnam's Diem). This view is also just as mistaken, because Nasser is a staunch Arab nationalist whose foreign policy is first and foremost pro-Nasser with no inherent loyalty to either superpower, just a willingness to work with both to advance his own interests. If anything I think he'll be even more determined to chart an independent foreign policy course since the US is now actively involved with the Baghdad Pact, which represents a blatant challenge to his hopes of dominating the Arab world from Britain & her remaining monarchist allies in the Mideast. Which means procuring Soviet arms (whether through Czechoslovakia or another partner) and moving towards a Suez Crisis is probably inevitable - and that's going to be quite a mess for Dewey, since whether he backs Britain or doesn't, he'll have failed in his goal of making Egypt into the Mideastern equivalent to South Korea/Vietnam.
I agree. Who do you think might lead the Conservatives in Churchill's absence? Eden as historically, Rab Butler, an earlier Harold Macmillan...I've also given some thought to less obvious outsider candidates, chiefly the 5th Marquess of Salisbury who seems to have been the hardcore imperialist with the most influence among the 1950s Tories. But all of the alternatives seem like they'd be much more inclined to hard-power solutions to the British Empire's overseas troubles than Labour, as I've read that all of them were supportive of the military approach to Suez as much as or even more than Eden himself, so no matter who it is I think they'd almost certainly butt heads with Nasser pretty soon.
Indeed, Dewey has grown significantly in the realm of foreign affairs over his first term, but it's still the area of policy where he's at his weakest. Or, at least, where he's most reliant on advisors who may have their own ulterior motives like the Dulles brothers. He's definitely more of a domestically-inclined reformer, given his gubernatorial background, and that is unlikely to change until the day he leaves office. As for Guatemala specifically, a certain Argentine medical student named Ernesto Guevara will have borne witness to the CIA's actions against Arbenz and is not impressed, to say the least...while he's still so completely insignificant as to not even merit a mention in the update itself right now, he has just found all the motivation he needs to become one of the most persistent thorns in the side of American foreign policy down the road. Something like a modern-day post-exile Hannibal in a beret, if you will.
At present the US impression of Nasser is much as the RL Eisenhower administration's was, that he's a non-Communist and republican local strongman they can work with (similar to Korea's Rhee and now with the fall of French Indochina, Vietnam's Diem). This view is also just as mistaken, because Nasser is a staunch Arab nationalist whose foreign policy is first and foremost pro-Nasser with no inherent loyalty to either superpower, just a willingness to work with both to advance his own interests. If anything I think he'll be even more determined to chart an independent foreign policy course since the US is now actively involved with the Baghdad Pact, which represents a blatant challenge to his hopes of dominating the Arab world from Britain & her remaining monarchist allies in the Mideast. Which means procuring Soviet arms (whether through Czechoslovakia or another partner) and moving towards a Suez Crisis is probably inevitable - and that's going to be quite a mess for Dewey, since whether he backs Britain or doesn't, he'll have failed in his goal of making Egypt into the Mideastern equivalent to South Korea/Vietnam.
I agree. Who do you think might lead the Conservatives in Churchill's absence? Eden as historically, Rab Butler, an earlier Harold Macmillan...I've also given some thought to less obvious outsider candidates, chiefly the 5th Marquess of Salisbury who seems to have been the hardcore imperialist with the most influence among the 1950s Tories. But all of the alternatives seem like they'd be much more inclined to hard-power solutions to the British Empire's overseas troubles than Labour, as I've read that all of them were supportive of the military approach to Suez as much as or even more than Eden himself, so no matter who it is I think they'd almost certainly butt heads with Nasser pretty soon.
Well that's a bad sign about a Suez crisis being even more likely. Pity Nasser was such an egotistical asshole.
I couldn't see a member of the Lords being PM at this stage. It was dubious enough with Halifax in 1940 and probably a significant reason why he turned down the job. Plus after a decade of Labour government while the Tories might go a little to the right in reaction - although possibly more to the centre to compete more for floating and soft-Labour voters - I wouldn't think they would risk such a move. Someone who can't play a role in the Commons would be at a serious handicap.
The issues most likely to make the Tories more conservative would be either:
a) A faster move towards decolonisation, especially possibly in those parts of east and southern Africa with a small but still politically dominant white settler minority.
b) Too much in the way of nationalisation or restrictions on private industry. Which might also happen if economic successes in recovering from the war means that elements in the [Labour] party are pushing for further such moves. Although Attlee himself was a pretty moderate leader.
c) Possibly if Labour have taken a too 'weak' stance on defence, especially probably against the communists states although again how likely this is I don't know.
Taking a quick look at the candidates Rab Butler, while he made attempts to cover it up seems to have continued with appeasment even after the occupation of the rump Czech state in 1939. That would seem to make him an unlikely option for Tory party leader if its campaigning more on a "Labour are weak on defence" stance. Also it seems to have made him unpopular with some of the younger Tory MPs in the 50's onward who had seen service during the war.
Looking at Eden his big weakness seems to be that he never held a major domestic role, being mainly concerned with foreign affairs. However he seemed to be popular although he clashed a couple of times with Dulles over the latter's process of brinkmanship. Possibly in TTL he does gain some domestic experience although this would be less likely if he replaced Churchill after a Tory defeat in 1951, which seems most likely. [I would say with a 1948 POD he's almost certain to be Churchill's replacement as he was deputy PM and doing a lot of the actual work after 1945.] However given his lack of experience in domestic issues possibly this could be shown up in a prolonged period as leader of the opposition in the early 50's so there a possibility he might be under pressure to step down.
Harold Macmillan is the more likely figure if the Tories moved towards the centre to compete with Labour. He supported a mixed economy and Keynesian economic policies and encouraged decolonisation. As such he would be a more radical option for the party if it desired to get over its 1930's image.
Dewey found his administration’s civil rights legislation sorely tested this summer. Three high-profile murders shook the nation and the president himself in those months: the first was that of George W. Lee, a pastor from Belzoni, MS who also happened to be a prominent local NAACP and Regional Council of Negro Leadership chief, and had been at the forefront of voter registration efforts in the Mississippi Delta. Unknown assailants riddled him with buckshot when he went out for a drive in mid-May, and the sheriff sought to close the case as a ‘traffic accident’.
As neither this sheriff nor Governor Hugh L. White of Mississippi were willing to provide anything resembling a minimally competent investigation, Lee’s family and aides, including a then-little known WWII veteran and activist named Medgar Evers, had to count on the feds to deliver any justice for the minister’s assassination. Dewey obliged and directed Attorney General Tolson and FBI Director Nichols to involve themselves with the case, privately expressing his thoughts on the matter: “Once, President Andrew Jackson declared that John Marshall made his decision, so let him enforce it. Well, we have made ours, and so has the Supreme Court; in this we are united, unlike Jackson and Marshall. Now let us rise to the challenge of enforcing it outside the walls of their courthouse.”
Three months later, another activist involved in Mississippian voter registration drives was killed. Lamar Smith of Brookhaven, MS was shot dead in front of a courthouse, and though there were as many as 30 witnesses to the event including the Brookhaven sheriff, not one would step forward. Since there was nobody willing to provide testimony, the three men arrested in connection to the murder were quickly released. By this point Dewey disclosed to his wife and closest associates his growing perception that the murders were more than just the usual racial violence directed at any blacks who got 'uppity', they were intended as personal insults to himself and the North – shows of force from the South to demonstrate that they wouldn't tolerate his (or anyone else's) efforts to 'meddle' in the affairs of their society, which he increasingly viewed in an antagonistic light as something almost as closed-off and hostile to the rest of America as the South of 1855 was, right down to its defense of abhorrent and violently oppressive racism as a traditional way of life.
While the president tried to think of how to best involve the feds in Smith’s case, another, even more viscerally harrowing one would burst onto the scene and derail his train of thought entirely just two weeks later, near the end of August. A black 14-year-old from Mississippi named Emmett Till was kidnapped, brutally murdered and thrown into a river for reportedly whistling and flirting with one of the men’s wives, and the sight of his mutilated and decomposing corpse at a widely publicized open-casket funeral horrified most of the country, including Dewey himself. While he outwardly remained calm and tight-lipped as usual, First Lady Frances Dewey disclosed to her friends that her husband was much more distressed than he was publicly letting on, and when Dewey’s personal diary was publicized many years after his presidency’s end his entry for September 6 (the day of Till’s funeral), written not with his normal immaculate penmanship but in a much messier style that suggested his hand had been shaking with an apoplectic rage, read: “There’s talk that many Nazis found shelter with Peron in Argentina after the war. Maybe, maybe not. But I should like to think, even to pray, that Himmler’s cruelest and most spineless butchers – the ones who are only brave enough to murder unarmed children – took the ratline straight to Mississippi. It would shame me beyond words if this boy Till’s killers turn out to be born-and-raised Americans.”
As the killers – Roy Bryant, whose wife Carolyn was the woman Till allegedly flirted with, and his brother John William Milam – told their county sheriff, George Smith, that they did in fact kidnap Till from his granduncle Mose Wright’s cabin and were promptly arrested, Dewey resolved to make the Till case into the testing grounds for the strength of his recently passed civil rights legislation, chiefly the Case Act, and the two men into examples of how America would no longer tolerate the casual lynching of 'uppity' blacks. Federal charges of lynching was filed against the pair with the US District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, where Judge Elijah A. Cox had presided since the Coolidge administration, and Tolson’s FBI spearheaded the investigation over the furious objections of the local and state authorities. A mixed-race jury, as selected under the Civil Rights Act of 1954, further lessened the previously-certain likelihood of the pair escaping justice, as did the remarkable willingness of Wright to testify to Bryant and Milam’s guilt: the first time in a very long time, indeed as far as anyone still living could remember, that a black man dared to do so to any white man in the South and still live.
In the end, despite a last-ditch effort by Missisippi’s Senators James Eastland and John Stennis to derail proceedings by revealing Till’s father had been executed for raping two women and murdering a third while serving in Italy, Bryant and Milam were convicted of lynching Till, but only given the absolute minimum sentence for the new federal felony – five years in prison. Milam, the older and more outspoken of the two, lost his temper and bluntly admitted to the killing when he was convicted, snapping (among many other unprintable remarks) “God damn right I made an example of him, what right-thinkin’ white man wouldn’t if he heard what that brat was sayin’ about white women that night?! Now the rest of his kind and the president who loves ‘em so knows where I stand – Leflore County and Mississippi oughta do the same!”[1]
This outcome left both blacks and whites in Mississippi and beyond seething; the former were pleasantly surprised that anyone was being punished for lynching for a change but still thought Till’s murderers had gotten off far too lightly, while the latter were furious because Bryant and Milam had been punished at all. The white crowd gathered outside Cox’s courthouse surged forward when they saw the pair being led out after the guilty verdict, most likely to try to free them in a bout of passionate rage, and had to be beaten back by US Marshals. Dewey, however, actually calmed down somewhat at the news and paraphrased Churchill when discussing it with Tolson and Chief Justice Hoover: “I would have tried much harder for much worse than five years were I the prosecutor down there, gentlemen. But as it is, this is just the end of the beginning. Dixie lynched that poor kid then and they’ll probably lynch someone else tonight just to vent; still, with any luck and seeing how for once we’re starting to deal out something resembling justice, they’ll think twice about lynching someone tomorrow, and the day after that...”
On the flipside, Till’s death and the much-publicized trial that followed electrified black resistance to segregation. As mentioned, although most blacks thought Bryant and Milam got off far too lightly, that they had even been found guilty and sentenced in the first place was a welcome surprise, and one that restored a degree of confidence (vital, however small it might have been) in the notion that they could still rely on the legal system and its mechanisms to attain their rights as American citizens. It was with this understanding that the NAACP took up the case of one Rosa Parks, an Alabaman woman who refused to vacate her bus seat for a white passenger at the driver’s demand and was arrested for it, near the end of the year, and the black community of Montgomery, AL started a boycott of the city’s public transportation system (coordinated through their churches and the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper). Parks’ case was not the first such incident on a bus, though it was certainly the first of its kind to attain a national profile – Claudette Colvin had done the same several months prior, but was ignored by the NAACP because her having become pregnant a few months after being removed from the bus made it less likely that she’d be taken seriously by polite society.
Even as America battled its internal race issues, countries overseas were most definitely not without their own racial troubles. In Europe, the Islamist-friendly government of Adnan Menderes engineered a pogrom against the Greek population of Istanbul by way of a false-flag bomb attack on Mustafa Kemal’s house in Thessaloniki, killing dozens if not hundreds and destroying much property (particularly Orthodox churches and cemeteries) before the police were finally told to act and the military sent in to help restore order. Turkey’s remaining Greeks began fleeing the country in general and Istanbul in particular at greater speed, and relations between Greece and Turkey soured dramatically despite their shared membership in NATO – doubly so when the Thessaloniki bomber fled to Turkey and Menderes refused Athens’ request to extradite him.
In South Africa, the National Party government (which, as its name might suggest, was dominated by and a vehicle for Boer nationalist interests) continued to tighten the Apartheid restrictions it had been imposing since 1948, and this was a sort of repression the blacks of America could understand much more easily and viscerally. Most notably, the government of Johannes G. Strijdom expanded and packed both the South African Supreme Court’s Appellate Division and the Senate to force through a removal of Coloured (mixed-race) voters from the electoral rolls. Strijdom also ordered the clearance of Sofiatown, Johannesburg’s only black suburb, and the forced removal of its 60,000 residents to a new planned town called Soweto. Similar removals followed in the years to come, and would not just be limited to blacks: Coloureds, Indians and even Chinese were targeted for deportation into their own segregated towns.
Elsewhere, less color-tinged changes in government rocked American allies. In Britain Clement Attlee called a snap election in May, hoping to increase the razor-thin margin of seats separating his Labour Party from the Conservatives since 1951. This turned out to be a mistake on the Prime Minister’s part, for the British public was ready for a change after ten years of Labour governance and in particular resented both the Attlee ministry’s seeming weakness abroad (an impression borne of the speed with which they demilitarized Suez) and increasing willingness to continue nationalizing the economy at home. The Tories swept into power with a majority of both parliamentary seats and votes, making their leader Anthony Eden – previously Churchill’s faithful deputy and natural heir – Prime Minister[2].
In the Americas, Argentina’s radical populist leader Juan Peron faced a military coup. Peron’s regime was at its core quite the jumble of contradictions, built on the support of blocs and institutions that would normally be at loggerheads with one another. He courted both socialist and fascist tendencies with a platform of nationalization, support for unions (particularly the General Confederation of Labor or CGT), and massive expansion of social programs; strove to maintain a non-aligned ‘Third Way’ approach to foreign policy while pulling in US help to modernize the Argentine military; and established positive relations with Israel while denouncing the Nuremburg Trials and actively harboring numerous Nazi fugitives from post-war Europe, including SS special operations commander Otto Skorzeny who even served as his late wife Evita’s bodyguard.
Perhaps it was inevitable that such a house of cards would eventually fall – and fall it did this year, when Peron alienated the Catholic Church in Argentina by legalizing divorce and prostitution, then expelling priests who spoke out against him. He also found himself mired in personal scandal when the tabloids began printing stories about his underage mistress, Nelly Rivas, with whom he’d engaged in an affair starting when she was just 13 and himself, 58. While addressing a rally of thousands upon thousands of supporters in the Plaza de Mayo on June 16, Peron found himself being bombed by his own navy and air force, having disregarded the warnings of his War Minister Franklin Lucero beforehand in the belief that anti-Peronists within the military’s junior ranks couldn’t possibly be so foolhardy as to make a public attempt on his life[3]. Obviously, they were and they did, resulting in his death along with over 300 of his supporters.
Overnight Peronist mobs (mostly, but hardly limited to, CGT workers) and loyalist soldiers clashed with the rebel forces moving to seize the Casa Rosada, in the process ransacking and burning multiple churches in Buenos Aires, but Peron’s death had left them demoralized and without a clear leader (despite the efforts of Vice President Alberto Teisaire to be that leader). The initial coup plotters were soon joined by reinforcements under Generals Eduardo Lonardi and Pedro Aramburu, while Admiral Isaac Rojas brought the cruisers General Belgrano and Nueve de Julio to shell the Peronists' own reinforcements as they assembled in Mar del Plata’s harbor. In the face of such firepower, Teisaire acknowledged defeat, resigned and fled to Cuba. Lonardi seized the presidency, but was himself removed in a coup for being too reconciliatory to the Peronists two months later, and the hardliner Aramburu instead ascended with the intent of purging Peronism from Argentina.
Finally, in Asia Ngo Dinh Diem, America’s newest ally in Indochina, was rapidly strengthening his grip over South Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese, particularly Catholics and more generally elements of the upper and middle classes who were now being targeted by the ascendant Communist government there, raced south of the partition line with the support of both the French and American navies in Operation Passage to Freedom. This represented both a propaganda boost and a major material benefit to Diem, himself a Catholic, for it greatly expanded and enriched his support base. Diem further engaged his biggest internal rival, the French-backed Binh Xuyen criminal syndicate, in open hostilities through April after removing Saigon’s Binh Xuyen-controlled police chief: discreetly aided by the CIA, Diem’s ARVN regulars crushed the Binh Xuyen (and with them France’s last significant proxy in Cochinchina) in an urban battle that left 1,000 dead and 20,000 homeless.
With his domestic opponents subdued or on the run, Diem felt confident in moving against his nominal liege, Emperor Bao Dai. He scheduled a referendum to remove the latter altogether and declare South Vietnam a republic in October, then banned the imperialists from campaigning while his own Can Lao Party ran a highly acidic campaign against Bao Dai. Diem’s younger brothers Nhu and Can further ran voter intimidation and electoral rigging operations of their own. Thus it was little surprise to even the most credulous observer when South Vietnam was proclaimed a republic and Diem its president with 108% voter turnout, 98.9% of which went to Diem.
[1] IOTL, Till’s killers were acquitted within just a little over an hour by their all-white jury – "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long”, one said – and being protected under double jeopardy, blithely admitted to murdering Till in an interview a year later. Milam’s outburst ITL is based on some of his words in that very same interview.
[2] Thanks to Stevep again for helping me navigate the major British personalities of this decade & their likelihood of gaining power.
[3] Peron historically took his War Minister’s advice and hid in a bunker that day, resulting in his survival and the defeat of the summer coup. He was deposed anyway in autumn of 1955, but lived to return to power later, which is clearly not going to be the case ITL.
On a side note, I've cleaned up the previous entry somewhat and corrected an error. Sayyid Qutb is not the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood (and never was IRL), instead that has been corrected to Hassan al-Hudaybi. Though that said, Qutb is an important figure in their upper ranks regardless and both he, al-Hudaybi and the Brotherhood as a whole will play an important role in Mideastern affairs soon enough...
The situation in the US is depressing but its always going to be a long haul and Dewey is having more success than OTL and hopefully he can maintain the momentum. Interesting that there was a potential forerunner for Rosa Parks but that the NAACP was too socially conservative to press the case of a pregnant women in such a case because she was a [unmarried??] teenager. Actually checking her wiki page although she was only 15 at the time she wasn't actually pregnant when she was arrested, but presumably soon afterwards. See Claudette Colvin - Wikipedia for details.
Very interesting and some intriguing changes. Not sure the impact of another 4-5 years of Labour government in improved economic circumstances would have been. Probably somewhat more spending on social issues and prehaps a little less on military, although Attlee was pretty conservative in most areas, as similarly Eden and Macmillan after him fairly liberal in many areas.
Vietnam sees to be going pretty much as OTL, which could be bad for its future. Argentina looks like it won't have a prolonged Peronist revival and no "Evita" musical. How that will affect things I don't know.
The situation in the US is depressing but its always going to be a long haul and Dewey is having more success than OTL and hopefully he can maintain the momentum. Interesting that there was a potential forerunner for Rosa Parks but that the NAACP was too socially conservative to press the case of a pregnant women in such a case because she was a [unmarried??] teenager. Actually checking her wiki page although she was only 15 at the time she wasn't actually pregnant when she was arrested, but presumably soon afterwards. See Claudette Colvin - Wikipedia for details.
Very interesting and some intriguing changes. Not sure the impact of another 4-5 years of Labour government in improved economic circumstances would have been. Probably somewhat more spending on social issues and prehaps a little less on military, although Attlee was pretty conservative in most areas, as similarly Eden and Macmillan after him fairly liberal in many areas.
Vietnam sees to be going pretty much as OTL, which could be bad for its future. Argentina looks like it won't have a prolonged Peronist revival and no "Evita" musical. How that will affect things I don't know.
Yes indeed, Colvin was not pregnant at the time of her removal from the bus but did become pregnant later that summer. I've gone back & edited that bit to try to clarify Colvin's situation, as well as to do some general clean-up & especially re-italicize a couple things that lost their italics in the transition from my Word document (again). In general the NAACP was quite moderate and attached to a legalistic approach to the civil right struggle at this point: Roy Wilkins and his faction, who were opposed to the Communists and Communist-friendly types in the civil rights movement (particularly Paul Robeson who Wilkins personally denounced for getting too buddy-buddy with the Soviets) and later the 'Black Power' advocates as well, are still firmly in control of the organization.
To my understanding Britain had its own form of the post-WW2 consensus America did, with both sides of the political mainstream endorsing a mixed economy (including nationalization), Keynesian principles and the NHS. They only differed in degree, similar to how both the American Democrats and Republicans (IRL as well as ITL) were broadly in favor of the New Deal and while the latter might have wanted to limit or cut back its growth, it was pretty much unthinkable to propose tearing it down altogether until the Reagan years at the earliest. Eden seems to have been content to let Butler, the major architect of the Tory half to that consensus, handle domestic matters while he was PM and the consensus itself didn't break down until the 1970s, so my guess is that he'd only mildly adjust Attlee's policies at home - it will instead be in foreign policy that the new Conservative gov't breaks in a much more obvious way from previous Labour policy...
As for Argentina, the death of Peron likely means more instability in the medium term, as there no longer exists anyone willing or able to reconcile the Argentine right and left together like he did. Aramburu was elevated specifically for being an uncompromising hardliner, who like his OTL counterpart will pursue a path of trying to annihilate Peronism from the country, which is unlikely to bode well for a return to internal peace. More like the struggle between the hard-right militarists (plus occasional civilian allies from anti-Peron parties) and the far left will be accelerated towards its pre-Videla takeover peak, IMO.
Another four years, another presidential election. As Dewey upheld his promise not to seek a third term despite the 22nd Amendment’s grandfather clause allowing him to, the Republican frontrunner was Vice President Charles Halleck instead. The latter had made no secret of his ambition to succeed his boss once Dewey’s eight years were up, so him announcing his candidacy surprised nobody; what did come as a surprise to many political observers, however, was Dewey publicly endorsing and campaigning for him. In truth, though Halleck belonged to the Republicans’ conservative wing, the liberal Dewey owed him much for pushing him to campaign more aggressively all the way back in 1948 (securing his victory over Truman) and constantly negotiating with said conservatives to bring them on board with (or at least getting them to stop seriously opposing) his agenda behind the scenes, and as both a staunch party man and someone who had come to respect Halleck’s fiery fervor, he followed through on paying his debts.
With Dewey came the support of much of the Eastern Establishment, who believed that if the president was backing his #2 man for the job, that clearly meant Halleck was going to moderate his positions and pick a liberal Republican for his running mate. This was not actually the case and Halleck never promised any such thing, although he certainly did very little to dissuade the liberal wing from believing it. As even Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York refused to step up against the VP after seeing Dewey working on the campaign trail for him, no doubt believing his was one name being considered for Halleck’s running mate, the only serious opposition came from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA)[1]. Lodge however was perceived as being too liberal to ever get the conservatives on his side, and backed solely by the most progressive Republicans, only ever had minuscule chances against Halleck’s overwhelming array of advantages.
In the end, Lodge bowed out of the race when it became obvious that his tiny chance of defeating Halleck had melted like a snowball in an inferno. Nevertheless, Halleck humored the elder statesman’s insistence on a public concession and, though surprised when Lodge asked that he consider appointing a black man to his cabinet if he should be elected, readily agreed to the proposition if he could find a qualified candidate[2]. The promise energized civil progressives & civil rights activists across the nation and went a long way to persuade them that despite his avowed conservatism in general, he wouldn’t be a bad choice – and just in time too, because when he formally accepted the Republican nomination unopposed at the National Convention in August, he shocked the liberal Republicans by not nominating any of their number to be his running mate. Instead, his choice was Bill Knowland of California: well known to be one of the most hawkish Senate conservatives, who Halleck had personally talked out of running for his state’s gubernatorial chair to take the Vice Presidency instead[3].
While the Republicans had a smooth primary and convention, the Democrats enjoyed no such luxury this year. The civil rights debate had only escalated with time and was damaging party unity much as slavery had done a hundred years prior, with Dixiecrats and Northern progressives ferociously tearing at one another as well as the dwindling center between them. On one hand, Richard Russell and his cohorts were even more adamant about opposing civil rights reforms than usual, inflamed first by the Dewey administration’s advances on that front and then doubly so by Halleck’s agreement with Lodge over nominating a black man to his cabinet. On the other, Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) fought to get the progressive voice heard at the Democratic table after years in the wilderness, and to impress upon the party bosses that the 1952 election had proven the party cannot win on a segregationist platform.
This acrimonious struggle only deepened when said party bosses, fearful not just a repeat of 1952 but also 1948, decided to try to avoid making a statement on the civil rights issue altogether and to instead paper over the ever-growing cracks in their party. At first they sought merely to nominate a centrist who they hoped wouldn’t offend either side too greatly, and thought they found their man in Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson: a man who was milder on civil rights than their failed 1952 choice, Estes Kefauver. But Stevenson’s candidacy was assailed from both sides: the Dixiecrats for not being a hard-line segregationist, and the progressives for not being, well, progressive enough.
In the end, Russell cut a deal with the party leadership toward the end of spring. He would not run for the nomination again, but instead push the candidacy of another Dixiecrat who, it was hoped, would be able to rein in their worst impulses. In other words, someone who wouldn’t come across as a frothing racist to the public and be amenable to picking a moderate running mate.
That man turned out to be Senator John Sparkman (D-AL)[4], a signatory of Thurmond’s Southern Manifesto whose ‘moderation’ mostly just consisted of vague public pledges to ‘respect the law’ and ‘accommodate everyone’s interests’. That said it did seem, at first, as though the Alabaman’s new course was more than just skin-deep when – after defeating Humphrey on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in mid-August – his acceptance speech contained no references to segregation and he chose Frank Lausche, the popular and decidedly non-controversial Democratic Governor of Ohio, to be his running mate. Humphrey agreed to wait and see if Sparkman was really going to be what Russell promised, and the party chiefs let out a big sigh of relief.
In hindsight, nominating a staunch segregationist after first getting him to promise he wouldn’t talk about segregation in such a racially-charged election was a decidedly poor idea. But at the time, it seemed like it might have worked: Halleck was not doing as well in the polls as might have been guessed from Dewey’s generally strong record on the economy, foreign policy and domestic reforms. The Vice President’s platform of uncompromising conservatism, business-friendly policies, a hard line on Communism and the continuation of Dewey’s efforts to break down segregation, coupled with his actions on the campaign trail to date, seemed contradictory and alienating to nearly all Republican voters. His radical support of civil rights and willingness to nominate a black cabinet member dismayed conservatives and even some moderates who thought he was moving too quickly and over-boldly, while his staunch conservatism in all other regards and choice of Knowland for running-mate worried the liberal wing which feared deep and lasting cuts to the New Deal under his administration. Sparkman, for his part, ran a populist campaign much as Russell before him had, focusing on expanded public assistance programs, the school lunch program begun under Truman and workers’ protections together with a repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act while studiously avoiding all mention of the black elephant in the room.
But the first polls to show he was ahead made Sparkman cocky. Halleck regained ground with a dynamic campaign across the country, in which he openly and animatedly discussed his platform with anyone who wanted to ask him questions, and within weeks the public grew tired of Sparkman’s attempts to deflect or change the subject every single time anyone asked him about his stance on segregation, which stood in contrast to Halleck’s brutally honest one. Matters came to a head when the Vice President challenged him to a debate early in September, to be broadcast on radio to any American who wants to listen, and the Alabaman Senator agreed to try to break the stalemate in the polls – seen as a foolhardy move even by contemporary observers.
Halleck, a fiery personality with many years of debating experience, proceeded to needle Sparkman into outing his real thoughts on the struggle for civil rights over the course of an hour. Though being a capable debater himself, he initially deflected Halleck’s attempts to bait him over Brown v. Board of Education (“Mr. Vice President, I am firmly of the belief that upset citizens have the right to protest a Supreme Court decision they disagree with…”) and Emmett Till (“Of course, I deplore the murder of an unarmed child by two misguided thugs who were acting solely on their own prejudices and have no connection whatsoever to myself or any other Democrat…”) and even momentarily turned the tables on the Vice President when the question of what to do with the New Deal came up, Sparkman was eventually sufficiently worn down and provoked to lash out. The fatal exchange began when Halleck asked him, “You have committed to ‘lawfully’ opposing the Supreme Court’s rulings in Brown v. Board of Education, have you not, Senator?”
“Where did I say that?” Was Sparkman’s reply.
“It is the most charitable interpretation of that so-called ‘Southern Manifesto’ you and your cohorts among the Senate Democratic caucus signed two years ago, which explicitly commits its signatories to resist desegregation by ‘any means necessary’…” Halleck had answered, sounding nonplussed at Sparkman’s denial. That said, though none could have seen it outside the recording studio, he had begun to smirk.
In response the Southern Senator attempted to deflect, “Well as a matter of fact, and as I have told you many times already, I support the right of American citizens to lawfully protest anything they disagree with, even federal law or a Supreme Court decision. To stand in their way would be nothing short of tyrannical conduct.”
“Do you feel the same way when it’s black American citizens protesting state laws and court rulings they deem unjust in a law-abiding manner, I wonder?” There had been no answer to that, and those in the studio could tell Halleck had to restrain himself from laughing – including the weary Sparkman, who grew more incensed at the sight and the realization that he’d gotten so sloppy as to walk into that trap. “No need to wonder, hmm? Your silence tells me all I need to know, Senator. If – and this is a mighty big if – you were to become president, would you use your power to stop using federal instruments to enforce those laws and decisions you deem unjust and, if Congress permits, to change the laws on the books to reinforce segregation?”
“I believe we have spent enough time discussing this topic,” Sparkman had irritably shot back, but the moderator (who, while nominally an independent, incidentally had voted for Dewey three times in a row starting with 1944) disagreed and deemed it a legitimate question, indeed even claiming he was going to ask it next if Halleck hadn’t gotten ahead of him. Frustrated, he had to instead retort, “What would be the point to answering, Mr. Vice President? You seem to already know what I would say.”
“I do. But the American people don’t. Aren’t we both here to tell them what we’re thinking, what our plans for the country are? I’ve already spoken at length about what I would do about segregation, Senator. Why won’t you do the same?”
The insinuation that he might be too cowardly to speak his mind certainly raised Sparkman’s hackles, tired and annoyed as he already was. “Are you suggesting I’m a coward, Yank – Mr. Vice President?”
“Us Hoosiers aren’t Yankees, Senator.” Such was the beginning to Halleck’s riposte – he had remained unfazed through Sparkman’s barely restrained outburst, and had been calculating his final provocation even as Sparkman was rising to match his previous one. “And I never called you a coward. But you know, if you can’t even answer this one question honestly, I would have to question your – “
“Never let it be said that John Sparkman is a coward or a liar! To answer your question, Mr. Vice President, yes, if the American people put me in the White House I would exercise my lawful prerogatives as President to enact my agenda, as much as I am able within the confines of the law. Does that satisfy your curiosity?” If Sparkman thought he had successfully weaseled out of Halleck’s trap with this remark, the coming days and weeks proved him horribly wrong. Halleck had peeled off his mask, and the Senator had confirmed – despite his efforts to keep his words as vague as possible even in this hour – that he was everything the liberals and blacks feared he was. Back on the campaign trail, Halleck and his spokesmen vigorously assailed what they described as Sparkman’s ‘hidden agenda’, describing him as ‘another Russell who’ll twist his own tongue into knots to not tell you what you already know’.
To Northern Democrats, there could be no more pretending that Sparkman's true colors and how he intended to deal with the question of race if elected. That did not mean they could just rush to Halleck’s side, however; unlike Dewey, Halleck had been quite vocal about rolling back the New Deal to a much greater degree than had been attempted in the past eight years and had said much about ‘cutting entitlements’ and ‘incentivizing businesses’, which they took to be code for deep welfare and tax cuts. The answer to their conundrum was provided by Senator Humphrey, who decided that he could no longer support Sparkman's candidacy in good conscience. Instead he resolved to teach the Democratic leadership that the progressive wing was just as capable of forcing a 1948-style disaster as the Dixiecrats, and that such would be the price of sidelining them for two elections in a row. With that in mind he took up the mantle of Henry A. Wallace’s moribund Progressive Party[5], easily securing their nomination and choosing Wayne Morse – the formerly Republican Senator from Washington who defected because he thought Dewey’s civil rights acts didn’t go far enough – as his running mate.
Humphrey made the wise choice of forsaking the Progressives’ overt friendliness to Communism, which had completely destroyed Wallace’s chances in 1948: he went so far as to insist that a statement denouncing Stalin and Communism be added to the 1956 Progressive platform as a precondition of his taking up their banner, which the remaining Progressive leadership (knowing they’d descend into total obscurity without such a high-profile candidate) agreed to. The Humphrey/Morse ticket, running on a platform that was both socially highly liberal and promised even more generous expansions to the New Deal than Sparkman had, proceeded to attract significant support from Midwestern & Western farmers fearful that the Vice President would cut their subsidies if victorious; urban bourgeois progressives who couldn’t stand either segregation or Halleck’s conservatism; and numerous black Northern Democrats. Between the flight of more moderate Northern Democrats and the rest of the black Democratic voters north of the Mason-Dixon Line to the Republicans, this effectively crippled Sparkman’s ability to win the election.
The months leading up to Election Day only further highlighted the battle over civil rights with firstly the Browder v. Gayle case, which involved Claudette Colvin and some other black women’s challenge to the segregation of public transportation, and secondly efforts by the segregationist forces to stop Southern blacks from voting. They pulled out all the stops to do so, further undermining Sparkman’s claim that they were just citizens lawfully exercising their rights to protest against judicial overreach; voter harassment & intimidation, unfair literacy tests, increased poll taxes, and outright assassination of organizers & voter-registration activists from the NAACP & other civil rights organizations as well as especially outspoken would-be voters were deployed across the Solid South.
To counter them, Dewey further relied on the FBI and the 1954 Case and Civil Rights Acts, with Justice Department attorneys fighting to get as many night-riders and other intimidators of black voters in prison as quickly as possible even as Tolson’s agents twisted the arms of local and state police to get them to cooperate or infiltrated and subverted the White Citizens’ Councils and the rest of their associations. Halleck himself (never one to shy away from a good fight, it seems) dared to campaign south of the Mason-Dixon Line, meeting with and helping to organize local ‘black-and-tan’ Republicans[6] as part of his broader attempt to revive the long-dead Radical Republican constituencies of the South.
In the end, the Progressive break coupled with several more major mistakes on the campaign trail (most infamously, calling for the police to roughly escort away a black demonstrator who was trying to ask him questions at a campaign stop in New York City while a gaggle of reporters and cameramen stood nearby) had sealed Sparkman’s fate. On Election Day Halleck got below 50% of the popular vote and theoretically may have lost if there had been no Democratic split, which would have been enough to deliver the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, Massachusetts and New York into Sparkman’s hands. As it was, Humphrey took away enough votes in all of these key states to either win them outright (in the Midwest and Northwest) or allow Halleck to swim up the middle (everywhere else). Halleck’s fortunes were further boosted by the Northern black vote breaking toward him at a high rate or otherwise staying home – Sparkman did not improve his share of that voting bloc compared to Russell four years earlier – and the emerging Southern black vote, which had increased by 13% since 1954 and overwhelmingly went his way[7]; thus did he win Oklahoma, Virginia and North Carolina, the first time any Republican had won those states since Hoover in 1928.
Party
Candidates
Popular Vote
Electoral Votes (266 to win)
Republican
Charles A. Halleck (R-IN)/William F. Knowland (R-CA)
29,708,216 (47.9%)
405
Democratic
John J. Sparkman (D-AL)/Frank J. Lausche (D-OH)
27,165,342 (43.8%)
91
Progressive
Hubert H. Humphrey (P-MN)/Wayne L. Morse (P-OR)
5,147,770 (8.3%)
35
The split further enabled the Republicans to hang on to the Senate and reduce the gap between themselves and the Democrats in the House; George H. Bender (R-OH) retained his seat in the absence of a strong Democratic challenger, black defectors to the GOP and Progressives put James Duff (R-PA) over the top in an extremely close fight, and Dan Thornton (R-CO) rode Halleck’s coattails to victory in a similarly close election. Civil rights advocates were further heartened by the Supreme Court’s decision on Browder v. Gayle three days after the election, affirming the lower court’s ruling that segregation on public transportation was indeed unconstitutional.
Unrelated to any electoral development, President Dewey also sought to undertake one last grand project as his term in office approached its close: the creation of the Interstate System, to connect all of America’s cities with a system of federal highways, in which he was supported and advised most closely by Secretary of Defense Eisenhower. Dewey believed the construction of these highways would improve the economy by further facilitating transportation across the continent and public safety by accommodating the car’s post-war surge in popularity, and was also the sort of public works project that was of actual practical use and not just the sort of egregious New Deal make-work program that he disapproved of. For his part, Eisenhower had been pleasantly surprised by the Autobahn while fighting in Europe, and believed an American counterpart would be crucial not just as an economic measure but also for national defense on the off-chance that the Soviets invaded the American mainland. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which would construct 40,000 miles of highways using a transportation fund fueled by a gasoline tax, smoothly passed through both chambers of Congress this June, opposed only by the Dixiecrats (who were determined to obstruct Dewey even in things they agreed with him on) and a few Republican fiscal hawks.
The election aside, this was a year of great change abroad, too. In Cuba, the highly respected colonel and Cuban attache to Washington Ramon Barquin was recalled by his boss Batista and promoted to general, as the latter thought he’d make a valuable supporter. But in truth Barquin detested the corruption of the Batista regime, and in April he had set in motion a ‘Conspiracy of the Pure’ – so called because of how its ringleaders, himself included, were untainted by said corruption – to depose the tyrant. The coup, involving hundreds of Cuban Army officers, caught Batista completely by surprise and drove him into exile in Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic[8].
Barquin seized power only to call a snap election, in which he refused to run himself, and opened negotiations with the rebels who’d been fighting Batista for the last three years while hunting down and making examples of the deposed dictator’s most egregiously brutal and/or corrupt lieutenants to shore up the popularity of the new regime. Ramon Grau, a former president who led the democratic opposition to Batista and had unsuccessfully run against him in the rigged election of 1954, emerged as the victor of the election: his center-left Authentic Party also took the most seats in the Cuban Chamber of Representatives, but not a decisive majority, and the solidly left-wing Orthodox Party took the second most. Among the newly seated Orthodox representatives was former guerrilla leader Fidel Castro, who had just returned from Mexico after first being pardoned under an agreement with Barquin in exchange for renouncing his arms – much to the disgust of his far less conciliatory ally Che Guevara, a doctor who’d witnessed the American overthrow of Arbenz two years prior. Even as Castro accepted Barquin’s offer and sailed for Cuba, Guevara disappeared into the Mexican night with weapons still in hand, swearing to fight for revolutionary justice elsewhere.
The ‘Revolution of the Two Ramons’, as Barquin’s coup and Grau’s election came to be called, produced a Cuban leadership that – while not interminably hostile to Washington – did desire, and was openly elected to enact, significant reforms which were sure to raise America’s ire. Grau formed an alliance with the Orthodox Party to solidify his rule and enacted elements of their platform, in particular a land reform program that set a 1200-acre limit on land ownership and expropriated the estates of the biggest landowners for division among the Cuban campesinos (peasants). He also nationalized infrastructure deemed critical to the Cuban state – railroads, power plants and so on – and made plans to further nationalize the remainder of the American companies’ property next.
It was at that point that the Dewey administration approached Grau. Expropriation of their companies’ lawfully-obtained property was unacceptable unless compensated, the State Department and ambassador to Havana Philip Bonsal expressed, and they warned that the compensation for such vast sugar & fruit plantations and oil refineries was not something the Cubans could possibly afford. Instead, they and Grau hammered out a compromise: the companies could retain their assets, but had to pay much higher tax rates which Grau deemed fair (as well as the back-taxes they had dodged under Batista), to accede to significant worker protections and to tolerate state support for smaller Cuban-owned sugar mills.
Furthermore, to Grau’s own surprise, the Americans offered to allow him to nationalize the casinos, hotels and other properties accumulated by the Mafia with Batista’s permission, entirely without compensation: Dewey himself personally approved the proposal because he was still as ardently anti-Mob as he was when he just started out as New York’s top prosecutor, and thought this was a win-win solution that would allow him to financially ruin Meyer Lansky and associates while giving Grau another big bone to throw to the Cuban people. That known and well-publicized Mafia influence in Cuba had indeed been a major reason, perhaps the most important, as to why the crime-busting Dewey had been so much more willing than most of his advisers to accept Batista’s downfall. Of course, Cuba’s continued alignment with American foreign policy would have to continue, despite Batista’s downfall: in this the Americans were very insistent and Grau saw no other choice, anyway.
Grau used most of the seized funds and properties to support a massive social welfare drive, particularly in opening numerous schools and clinics, to improve the living standards of the Cuban populace. That which he didn’t spend on social programs, he saved up with an eye on legitimately buying out the property American companies still had in Cuba later. He billed himself as a clean populist president, waging a moral crusade against the degeneracy Batista had allowed to flourish and the squalorous poverty in which too many Cubans lived, and the first years of his third term in office gave no-one cause to suspect anything to the contrary. For their part, Dewey’s America publicly recognized the election of his government as legitimate on the assurance that he would never work with Communists. Again – so far, so good on that count, for the liberal Grau had learned well from Arbenz’s downfall; he was careful not to appoint any Marxists or even self-described ‘democratic socialists’ to his cabinet despite maintaining his alliance with the leftist Orthodox Party.
As spring turned to summer, the regime change in Cuba found itself rapidly overshadowed by developments in Europe and the Middle East. In the former, two Warsaw Pact republics were shaken not just by any rebellion, but by full-blown anti-Communist revolutions. The death of Polish dictator Boleslaw Bierut in March from pneumonia, coupled with poor working and living conditions, opened the path for large demonstrations in the major city of Poznan involving up to 100,000 protesters. And to the south, Matyas Rakosi’s extremely brutal police state – one of the worst in all of the Pact – finally attracted more hatred than fear, with a crowd of 20,000 students spontaneously protesting the forced disappearance of their more liberal-minded professors & friends rapidly swelling to one of 200,000 in the streets of Budapest.
The Polish and Hungarian government response was of course to send in the tanks and riflemen, egged on by the troika in Moscow. But the crowds had grown to, and were still growing past, the point where even thousands of armed soldiers and policemen couldn’t control them anymore. The order to open fire on the crowds wound up turning them into mobs, while some Polish and Hungarian soldiers (exclusively regulars outside of the specialized state secret police/special suppression units, namely the KBW and AVH respectively) turned on their superiors after failing to find it in them to mow down their countrymen and fatally disrupted the chain of command[9]. As of July 24, Polish government forces had been expelled from Poznan and rioting in support of the anti-Communist revolutionary council proclaimed in Poznan was starting to flare up in nearby cities, while the Rakosi regime had abandoned Budapest altogether and flown to Debrecen. Imre Nagy, the recently fired Interior Minister who sought to govern with a much softer hand than First Secretary Rakosi, was chosen by the revolutionaries to lead the counter-government in Budapest and appeal for Western aid.
While Dewey considered his next move, Kaganovich was howling for Soviet troops to amass for an invasion of the two unstable people’s republics (at the invitation of their beleaguered puppets in Warsaw and Debrecen of course) and Tito was frantically contacting Washington for help in case the Soviets took the chance to drive past the Hungaro-Yugoslav border after dealing with Nagy, America’s European powers were plotting a move of their own that would complicate the geopolitical situation even further. Earlier in the year, just as unrest was bubbling toward boiling point in Poznan and Budapest, Nasser had decided to buy a huge amount of Warsaw Pact weapons through Czechoslovakia, for Dewey (reluctant to further antagonize Israel after signing on to METO over their objections) had refused to allow an American arms sale to Cairo.
In response to this arms sale, the US and UK went back on their deal to fund Nasser’s construction of a larger Aswan Dam; and in response to that, Nasser abrogated his own treaty commitments to nationalize the Suez Canal outright. The Egyptian dictator not only further antagonized Britain by supporting Arab nationalist rioting in Jordan, against which King Nayef had to further rely on his British commander Glubb Pasha and the Arab Legion in addition to making desperate appeals to Britain to get rid of Nasser[10], but also made an enemy out of France by supporting the FLN rebels in Algeria. Coupled with his own blatant and intractable hostility to Israel, which was naturally worried about what he was buying all those Soviet arms and munitions for, and he had created a web of three powerful enemies who would like nothing more than to set his head on a pike. Unfortunately for him, Anthony Eden (despite his reputation as a peacemaker) was not remotely as inclined to peaceful solutions as Attlee had been, and vigorously denounced him as an Arab Mussolini. The so-called ‘tripartite powers’ drew up plans to invade Egypt, and the distraction of Nasser’s new Soviet patron by the recent developments in Europe gave them the perfect window of opportunity.
Starting on July 29[11], the three allies sprang Operations Musketeer and Kadesh: under the former an Anglo-French task force would decimate the Egyptian air force and seize the Canal Zone in an airborne assault, while Israel stormed into the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt’s army, though freshly equipped with their new Warsaw Pact gear, was led by an officer corps promoted on the basis of unquestioning loyalty to Nasser rather than competence, and their top commander Abdel Hakim Amer exemplified this trend – a most un-Islamic alcoholic incompetent who grossly overestimated his own abilities. The field marshal did not order the troops to assume a fully battle-ready posture for an entire day, mistakenly assuming the Israelis were just mounting a raid, and further unwisely ordered all forces on and east of the Canal to stay put and fight even after the British and French were attacking said Canal, thinking they could first defeat Israel and then turn on the Western powers. Amer compounded these errors by pushing Nasser to deploy even more troops into the Sinai while the Canal was being fought over, believing Egypt’s forward forces in the peninsula could use more reinforcements with which to defeat Israel.
As anyone with an elementary understanding of strategy might have guessed, by the first week of August Amer’s decisions left the bulk of the Egyptian military stranded in Sinai without air support thanks to the destruction of the Egyptian air force, hemmed in from two sides after the British and French overran the Canal Zone, and about to be completely crushed between the tripartite armies. At this point however, the Soviets intervened to protect their newest client: Kaganovich pushed Premier Malenkov to spout Molotov’s words, threatening to smite Britain, France and Israel with the expanded and improved Soviet nuclear arsenal if they did not back off. The United States responded by inviting the Soviet leadership to a discreet summit in occupied Vienna at which they’d work out all the problems Europe and the Mideast had been having without starting WWIII. President Dewey himself would represent America, with Vice President Halleck leaving the campaign trail to back him up in person.
That meeting was off to a rocky start: the Soviet troika were not cooperative, and the Americans had initially been divided over what to do. As was the case with Vietnam, Dewey did not particularly care to protect European colonial interests, while Halleck was all for supporting the tripartite powers and toppling Nasser. In the end, Halleck won Dewey over: his arguments were that if Nasser wasn’t completely hostile to the West before Musketeer & Kadesh he certainly would be now, and that they could intimidate the Soviets into backing down. (No doubt it went unspoken that he thought a foreign policy triumph would help him break the then-stalemate in the polls against Sparkman, as well) Dewey agreed to support the tripartite powers on the condition that they did not restore the Egyptian monarchy, which would represent an overt re-imposition of British colonial rule on Egypt; a concession that Eden was more than willing to make just to eliminate Nasser.
When the two superpowers’ leaders convened again, at first the Soviets refused to talk of what happened other than to denounce Halleck as a madman while praising Dewey for his restraint. Years later it was revealed that Halleck had apparently lost his temper (and his mind), suddenly seizing a moment to rise and respond to Molotov’s threat that “If you will not listen to our words, perhaps you will listen to the whistling of our atomic bombs; of which we have more than enough to reduce all Britain, France and Israel to radioactive cinders even as our valiant proletarian soldiers liberate your workers and Negroes from beneath your boot – “ with some explosive threats of his own:
“No, how about you Bolsheviks listen to what I’ve got to say? You think the bombers you reverse-engineered from those of ours that crash-landed in Siberia[12] and your piddly little missiles can get past the US Air Force? Well let me tell you, they can’t! And even if they could, Uncle Sam’s got the nuclear weapons to turn every city from Minsk to Vladivostok into a parking lot, and still have enough left over not just to finish MacArthur’s work in China but to make your ghost glow down in Hell!”
At that point, Dewey physically held him back before the shocked and appalled Soviet leadership and hastily added, “But we won’t do any of that unless we absolutely have to. And we don’t have to, do we, Premier Malenkov? Ministers Molotov and Kaganovich?”
In truth, both sides were playing an extremely high-stakes game of chicken. The Soviets did not, in fact, have the nuclear capabilities Molotov claimed they did; instead they were trying to bluff the Americans and the tripartite countries into backing down, allowing them to preserve a foothold in the Mideast while they dealt with the uprisings in Hungary and Poland. Meanwhile the US Air Force had sent a number of Lockheed U-2 spy planes to determine whether Molotov was telling the truth, but the mission was still ongoing at the time of this August summit and so Dewey and Halleck didn’t actually know the Soviets were bluffing at that table. The president had assumed they were, based on his own experience dealing with Stalin’s anger in the aftermath of MacArthur’s nuclear bombings of Korea and China, and Halleck not only agreed with his assessment but suggested that they turn on a good cop-bad cop routine: Halleck himself would pretend to be a frothing-at-the-mouth maniac of a bad cop to shock and intimidate the troika[13], while Dewey would play the level-headed good cop to deescalate the situation and bring them around to an agreement that would surely sound better compared to the nuclear annihilation his Vice President was promising. Even Dewey himself privately admitted that Halleck’s choice of words had frightened him, however.
Regardless, as Dewey had successfully held firm against Stalin in 1950, so too did he now succeed in getting Stalin’s heirs to back down. An agreement was hashed out soon after Halleck’s outburst: the USSR would abandon Nasser to his fate and tolerate Yugoslavia’s entry into NATO, creating an overland connection between Italy and Greece for the capitalist bloc. In exchange, the US would give them a free hand to ‘restore order’ in Poland and Hungary. Furthermore, Austria (where the summit had taken place) would finally regain its independence as a neutral buffer state between the two superpowers[15]. The agreement favored the United States – they gained an ally in addition to removing an enemy, while the Soviets merely got to keep what they already had – but in hindsight, had Dewey pushed harder he might have saved Poland and Hungary (or at least turned them neutral like Austria), considering just how hollow Molotov’s threats had been: the Soviet Union in 1956 had little over 500 nukes to America’s 3,700, and all of six completely untested Semyorka ICBMs to deliver them[14]. Unfortunately for the Poles and Magyars, Dewey did not know that at the time and (as averse as he was to starting WWIII) decided that he had already pushed the Soviets hard enough in the wake of his Vice President’s fury.
The most immediate consequences of the fall’s Vienna Summit had fully manifested by the end of the year. Poland and Hungary were back under the Soviet boot, with Nagy and thousands of Poles and Hungarians choosing death over renewed subjugation and the Soviet Army promptly obliging them while Washington issued vehement denunciations of ‘the barbarous slave-drivers in the Kremlin who prove, yet again, that they cannot spread their odious ideology by reason and persuasion, only brute force against sovereign peoples who seek to chart their own destiny’ but otherwise did suspiciously little to actually help them. Conversely, Nasser was intercepted and killed by a joint party of British and French paratroopers while attempting to flee Cairo on foot as it fell to the tripartite armies. Israel continued to occupy and settle the Sinai peninsula (in so doing also securing the Straits of Tiran), while the Suez Canal Company’s control over the eponymous canal was restored and said canal patrolled by a garrison entirely made up of British and French troops. Muhammad Naguib was freed from house arrest and placed in control of the Egyptian provisional government, from where he called for a free election by no later than April of 1957 – and the immediate release of all of Nasser’s political prisoners, including all Muslim Brotherhood members who were in prison for anything other than directly committing terroristic acts.
While the Soviets denounced Nasser’s downfall as ‘the reinforcement of ruthless colonial exploitation by the sneering imperialists of Britain and France, aided in no small part by their bourgeois friends in Tel Aviv and Washington who even now have the gall to babble about ‘freedom’ and ‘sovereignty’' they, much like the United States, did not lift a finger to actually help him when they still could have. Nor did the troika act beyond words when Yugoslavia pledged to join NATO within a year, to the cheers of its members, and to hold free and fair elections also by no later than the spring of 1957 (in preparation for which Tito even struck the ‘People’s’ from the country’s name and rebranded his own party the Socialist Workers' Party of Yugoslavia). Austria too was finally pieced back together as a free republic and all foreign troops removed from its soil, with little fanfare – all the events in its neighbors & Egypt had overshadowed its recreation, and few newspapers outside of Austria itself reported the country’s independence for more than a day or two.
In the grander scheme of things, the Soviet troika grew ever more fearful of America: the Vienna summit had convinced them that détente was well and truly off the table for good, and that they had to redouble, no, quadruple the pace at which they were massing arms – particularly nukes and delivery systems for them – if they were to ever achieve parity with the United States, or better still, surpass them. Only then would they be safe, perhaps even find themselves capable of starting and winning the Third World War, and all other considerations (like say, keeping their people fed or improving living standards) were at best secondary. That Halleck was largely hailed as a great hero (Dewey allowed him to claim most of the credit for these foreign policy victories specifically to boost his chances in the American election) and went on to actually win the November election with a running-mate known to be similarly aggressive further hardened their belief, nevermind that the new President-elect was not as unhinged as he had made himself appear and sought to continue the Dewey Doctrine as much as possible – suffice to say, he had left quite an impression on Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich at Vienna, and it was anything but positive.
[1] As I’ve mentioned before, Lodge held on to his seat back in the 1952 election in Massachusetts, since him not having to draft & then campaign for Eisenhower gave him time to actually campaign against JFK.
[2] Halleck was a strident advocate for civil rights IOTL, and voted for every civil rights act from 1957 to ’68 in addition to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For his part, Lodge made this promise while running alongside Nixon in 1960, without consulting Nixon himself.
[3] Historically, Knowland actually did run for Governor of California in 1956 and lost to Pat Brown by 19 points.
[4] IOTL, Sparkman was Stevenson’s running mate in 1952.
[5] Historically the Progressives disbanded in 1955. The butterfly effect has allowed them to survive just long enough for Humphrey to take up their banner.
[6] Since the end of Reconstruction (and until 1964 IOTL), the few remaining Southern Republicans had been divided into two factions: the ‘black and tans’, who supported continued biracial cooperation and the civil rights struggle, and the ‘lily whites’ who sought to exclude blacks in favor of courting Southern white voters.
[7] Historically, the weak CRA of 1957 and anemic federal enforcement thereof produced only a 3% increase in the black vote by 1960.
[8] The ‘Conspiracy of the Pure’ was historically foiled because a lieutenant betrayed Barquin & the other conspirators to Batista at the last minute, which did not happen here; the result being that Batista is ousted early by non-Communist forces before Castro even returns from Mexico.
[9] Historically, the Poznan uprising happened in summer rather than autumn and was snuffed out by Konstantin Rokossovsky. Also, while the Polish uprising did happen in the summer IOTL (specifically in June), the Hungarian one did not get fully underway until October.
[10] King Hussein of Jordan fired Glubb Pasha and took measures to Arabize the Legion’s officer corps to appease the rioters IOTL.
[11] IOTL the tripartite powers struck in October, after British tempers at home had cooled somewhat over the canal nationalization. With the anti-Communist European uprisings exploding in summer instead, the opportunity to do so presents itself a couple months earlier, and Eden, Mollet and Ben Gurion are happy to take it.
[12] Halleck is referring to the Tupolev Tu-4, which was indeed reverse-engineered from B-29 Superfortresses (previously used to bomb Japan) that crashed in Soviet territory during WW2 and which the Soviets refused to return to the US afterward. It was still the Soviets' main strategic bomber as of 1956, as the superior Tu-95 was still only just entering service.
[13] Similar to Nixon’s ‘madman theory’ IOTL.
[14] IRL, without a post-nuclear Korea military buildup & extended Stalinist regime the Soviets had around 400 bombs in 1956, while the Semyorka only made its debut in 1957; there were four of them at the beginning of their service.
[15] Austria regained its independence in 1955 IOTL as part of the Khrushchev Thaw. Since Khrushchev is quite dead ITL, the hardline Stalinists who replaced him had to be ‘persuaded’ by Dewey and Halleck to agree to their independence and neutralization a year later instead.
Well a hell of a lot happening there. Going to be interesting in terms of what both Halleck does internally and events internationally.
If Halleck does too much to undermine the New Deal and alienate a lot of workers and the Democrats get their act together - surely they can't select another ardent segregationists? - then Halleck could be a one term President.
Agree that the Soviets will make greatly increasing their nuclear strength, and especially secure ways to hit the US, their top priority. They need to do so for their own security, having been threaten twice, let alone any desires for further conquests, which will be on hold for the moment but are likely to emerge when they feel strongly enough.
A tragedy about the Poles and Czechs although I suspect that Dewey was right not to push the Soviets too far else they might have decided to risk at least a conventional war. With a harder line after Stalin and the resentment after the brutal crushing of both nations its likely that the empire could face further problems soon on the economy if nothing else.
I must admit I'm rather dubious about Tito becoming a convert to democracy although it does add a useful ally to the NATO powers and means another front in the event of a war between the two blocs. It also physically isolated Albania so assuming Hoxha still gained power he's going to be a bit more isolated still.
Its going to be different, at least in the short term in the ME with Britain still the dominant political power, although US influence will no doubt continue to grow and the Israel-Arab relationship is going to be important and possibly at least as explosive as OTL. Given the west still dominant in Iran as well I wonder if the Soviets might seek to support regime opponents there. We might also get an earlier rise of Islamic reactionary forces [I think its stupid and inaccurate to call them radicals as that's the last thing they are] in the secular national option seems to have failed earlier. Eden continuing as PM is also going to have an impact in Britain although how I'm not sure. Since he's more a foreign affairs expert and the victory over Egypt could boost pro-imperial elements in seeking to maintain the empire there could be problems there, with less attention to internal matters.
I detect an underlying message that US-Cuban relations aren't going to stay as good as they see at the moment. With the US still in control of a lot of the economy and land and a more conservative President in Washington as well as the desire for further reform in Cuba itself I wonder if we're going to end up with Havana looking to Moscow as OTL.
Anyway a very interesting TL and looking forward to seeing what happens.
Well a hell of a lot happening there. Going to be interesting in terms of what both Halleck does internally and events internationally.
If Halleck does too much to undermine the New Deal and alienate a lot of workers and the Democrats get their act together - surely they can't select another ardent segregationists? - then Halleck could be a one term President.
Agree that the Soviets will make greatly increasing their nuclear strength, and especially secure ways to hit the US, their top priority. They need to do so for their own security, having been threaten twice, let alone any desires for further conquests, which will be on hold for the moment but are likely to emerge when they feel strongly enough.
A tragedy about the Poles and Czechs although I suspect that Dewey was right not to push the Soviets too far else they might have decided to risk at least a conventional war. With a harder line after Stalin and the resentment after the brutal crushing of both nations its likely that the empire could face further problems soon on the economy if nothing else.
I must admit I'm rather dubious about Tito becoming a convert to democracy although it does add a useful ally to the NATO powers and means another front in the event of a war between the two blocs. It also physically isolated Albania so assuming Hoxha still gained power he's going to be a bit more isolated still.
Its going to be different, at least in the short term in the ME with Britain still the dominant political power, although US influence will no doubt continue to grow and the Israel-Arab relationship is going to be important and possibly at least as explosive as OTL. Given the west still dominant in Iran as well I wonder if the Soviets might seek to support regime opponents there. We might also get an earlier rise of Islamic reactionary forces [I think its stupid and inaccurate to call them radicals as that's the last thing they are] in the secular national option seems to have failed earlier. Eden continuing as PM is also going to have an impact in Britain although how I'm not sure. Since he's more a foreign affairs expert and the victory over Egypt could boost pro-imperial elements in seeking to maintain the empire there could be problems there, with less attention to internal matters.
I detect an underlying message that US-Cuban relations aren't going to stay as good as they see at the moment. With the US still in control of a lot of the economy and land and a more conservative President in Washington as well as the desire for further reform in Cuba itself I wonder if we're going to end up with Havana looking to Moscow as OTL.
Anyway a very interesting TL and looking forward to seeing what happens.
Indeedy, this is the longest update so far (possibly the longest I'll write for this timeline) at 7k words. There's just so much happening this year - the election at home, of course, and then Cuba, the European revolutions and Suez abroad. Fortunately I think the foreign affairs half will calm down a bit in the next few years, as civil rights & the economy take center stage while the Soviets sulk and bulk-up in the aftermath of the Vienna summit, so we should be back to the usual 3-4k word updates.
The Democrats will definitely be avoiding more known segregationists after this debacle, as the progressives have once & for all just proven that they can be as deadly to the party's chances on the national level as the Dixiecrats did. Odds are they'll still have to stick a Southerner on their ticket (either for POTUS or VP) going forward because the Southern faction is too big to ignore, but the party bosses are going to make 110% sure that it's an actual moderate and not just take Richard Russell's word for it next time; Southern moderates, even Southern liberals to a lesser extent, do exist by 1956-60, but only Kefauver and LBJ have really distinguished themselves so far, and those two have the opposite problem of being hated by the Dixiecrats as 'sellouts' to the North. It will be a fine needle to thread. As for Halleck - other than the GOP starting to get long in the tooth, economics is definitely going to be what he's most vulnerable on next time, as the economic boom of the 1950s can't last forever and the US is almost due for a recession. It remains to be seen if his conservative economic strategy can survive that test, it will after all be very tough to sell the sort of cuts he's after to the public in a time of hardship.
Yugoslavia actually includes Albania ITL, as one of the first butterfly-affected changes to the timeline immediately after Dewey's election was Hoxha losing out to the pro-Yugoslav clique of Koci Xoxe all the way back in 1948. You're right to be skeptical of Tito's apparent embrace of democracy: above all he wants to stay in power and you can bet he will do everything he can (short of blatantly posting soldiers outside the polling stations) to ensure that he does. Though he's still left-of-center he's a staunch pragmatist however, and keenly aware that neither Dewey nor (especially) Halleck will tolerate him being a full-on NATO ally as long as he's marching around with a big red star on his chest and openly calling himself a Communist. His calculation is that it's better to drop those aesthetics and buddy up to the West, while staying in power through as illiberal a 'liberal' democratic structure as he can get away with, than to stay out in the cold and vulnerable to the revenge of a Soviet Union that's going to be looking for victories after Suez - the Republicans have a record of not protecting anti-Stalinist forces in Europe without a formal and overt alliance first.
Yes: at first it certainly seems as though the colonial powers have won a decisive victory by toppling Nasser. Arab nationalism and socialism have just been kicked in the groin with a steel-toed boot, and the signal that embracing it will get Britain/France to drop on you like a sack of bricks has been broadcast and received all across the region. The Hashemite kings of Iraq and Jordan in particular have almost certainly just been saved in the short term. But in the long run, Arab anger at enduring colonial domination won't go away (just momentarily repressed) and they're going to be searching for other outlets. The only distinctly anti-colonial ideology in that part of the world not yet tainted by defeat is, of course, Islamism - and it's not for nothing that I've been mentioning the Muslim Brotherhood with increasing frequency these past few updates...
Victory at Suez also likely means France and Britain will be inclined to fight for their empires, at least for a little bit longer than they did historically, which means more expenses and probably growing unpopularity at home over time. There is no need to ditch everything 'east of Suez' when they still directly control the Suez, after all. In addition American alignment with the colonial powers here means that more and more, indigenous resistance groups fighting the colonial powers will have to look to the USSR for help as we enter the 60s, especially with the firmly pro-Anglo-French Halleck now set to replace the more anti-colonial Dewey in the White House. If the situation in the colonies ever spirals out of London's and Paris' control, the West could be looking at the threat of there being no Third World at all, just a really big and even more impossibly pissed off Second World.
At the moment, the Cuban leadership doesn't seek to antagonize Washington, but they will leap at the chance to more fully 'Cubanize' their economy whether it's presented with the approval of future presidents (good luck getting Halleck to agree to that when even Dewey wouldn't, hah) or not, if the US is distracted by other events. And who knows? Representative Fidel Castro might attempt get legitimately elected President of Cuba somewhere down the road.
After being inaugurated as the 35th President of the United States, the ever-dynamic Charles Halleck immediately got to work. Much like Dewey before him, his first task was to assemble a cabinet. Said cabinet would turn out to be a combination of change and continuity from Dewey’s own. At his predecessor’s recommendation, the new President tapped Eugene Black, the president of the World Bank, for Secretary of the Treasury: a respected moderate, Black was not aggressively anti-Communist and favored building up the economies of America’s allies as both the best bulwark against Communism (as opposed to military action) and to help those which hadn’t yet matured into democracies reach that point. Furthermore, he made good on the promise he’d made to Senator Lodge ahead of the Republican National Convention by nominating the first-ever black cabinet member: Everett Frederic Morrow, the incumbent Administrative Officer for Special Projects, whose appointment to Commerce Halleck intended to tie in with his & the Republicans’ broader strategy to further economically empower the black community they were liberating from Jim Crow.
Aside from these liberal appointments, Halleck retained three members of Dewey’s cabinet. First he kept Secretary of State Dulles on board, a natural move as the two men agreed strongly on pursuing a strategy of brinkmanship against the Soviet Union. Next he retained Attorney General Tolson, viewed as a crucial intermediary with the FBI whom Halleck would need more than ever to battle Southern segregationist forces. Finally the president also retained the services of Labor Secretary Hartley, whom he considered to be a valuable ally in his other coming battle with the unions. As a patronage appointment of little political relevance Halleck also named his campaign manager, a Murray Chotiner who he'd hired on the recommendation of California's new senior Senator Richard Nixon, Postmaster General.
Finally came the conservative appointments that all of America’s right-wingers were looking forward to and who centrists and leftists feared, and the new president wouldn’t disappoint anyone in that regard. To head Defense Halleck chose none other than Douglas MacArthur, whose fearsome reputation and record Halleck intended to further intimidate the Soviets with. For Secretary of the Interior he chose Wisconsin’s own Joe McCarthy, anti-Communist extraordinaire: truthfully, Halleck intended to just ‘kick McCarthy upstairs’, giving him an ominous-sounding but relatively powerless and low-profile portfolio to get him out of the hair of the Senate Republicans, who had complained of his overzealous recklessness, shameless bravado and lack of respect for even his seniors in the party. McCarthy would certainly be disappointed to find out that his new job had nothing to do with locking up Communists and everything to do with tending to national parks. Lastly, Nebraska Senator Fred Seaton was chosen to be Secretary of Agriculture, by far the least objectionable of Halleck’s hard-right choices. Dewey privately questioned the wisdom of putting MacArthur and McCarthy in the new cabinet, but Halleck cheerfully reassured him, “Don’t worry Tom, I was House Majority Leader – compared to herding the Grand Old Caucus back in the day, keeping the Two Macs on a leash should be child’s play.”
Secretary of State: John Foster Dulles Secretary of the Treasury: Eugene R. Black Sr.[1] Secretary of Defense: Douglas MacArthur Attorney General: Clyde Tolson Secretary of Commerce: E. Frederic Morrow[2] Secretary of the Interior: Joseph R. McCarthy Secretary of Agriculture: Frederick A. Seaton[3] Secretary of Labor: Fred A. Hartley, Jr. Postmaster General: Murray Chotiner[4]
With his cabinet installed, Halleck wasted no time in trying to ram his agenda through. On the economic front his allies among the conservative Congressional Republicans, spearheaded by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, drafted a bill to really begin taking an ax to the New Deal. Goldwater’s bill featured deep and comprehensive cuts to virtually every New Deal program, most notably (and deeply) targeting farm subsidies and unemployment insurance, coupled with a similar downsizing of the federal bureaucracy: Goldwater proposed eliminating fully half of the two million bureaucrats still employed as of January 1, 1957 (having fallen to that point from a wartime high of 3.6 million over the Truman and especially Dewey administrations). Separately from the Goldwater bill (although certainly supported by him), the GOP also pursued anti-union legislation up to and including a national right-to-work bill and across-the-board tax cuts for everybody under Halleck’s direction.
Almost needless to say, what Halleck was trying to do aroused the ire of virtually all non-conservatives in and adjacent to American politics. This was not by Goldwater’s design, but it certainly was by Halleck’s: applying his foreign strategy of brinkmanship at home, Halleck sought to push for such outrageous measures at first that he’d be able to make himself and his allies seem magnanimous when they moderated their proposals to compromise, hiding from the Democrats and moderate Republicans that the new ‘moderate’ cuts were what they were after all along. In the end, virtually all of the conservative Republican proposals were considerably watered down to get the necessary non-conservative support to pass; this greatly frustrated the uncompromising Goldwater, but Halleck could live with it as long as he got more cuts done than Dewey did (or frankly, ever wanted to). The greatest cuts still fell on agricultural subsidies and the federal bureaucracy, which the conservatives had fought hardest to preserve as much as they could, and the latter was set to shed 500,000 employees – fully half of what Goldwater and Halleck had initially sought[5] – and in addition, unions were now required to submit to a secret-ballot vote managed by the National Labor Relations Board before they could strike.
Unfortunately for Halleck, he signed off on the passed cuts right before the US officially entered a recession late in the summer, bringing the post-war economic boom to a halt. The natural end of the earlier period of economic expansion was exacerbated by a drop-off in car sales and slowed housing construction, with the result being two million (and growing!) Americans finding themselves out of work. The Midwest was especially hard-hit, with Detroit in particular reporting a 20% unemployment rate by the end of the year, and though the recent Republican cuts to unemployment insurance were much milder than initially proposed, the workers of these states were unlikely to forget how vigorously Halleck had pushed for those cuts and how big he wanted them to be before being blunted by moderate & liberal opposition anytime soon. For his part, the president sought to fight the recession while maintaining as balanced a budget as possible: while he accelerated various infrastructure programs, particularly directing Agriculture Secretary Seaton to hasten pre-existing rural electrification and water programs, and restrictions on no-down-payment mortgages were lifted, he pointedly refused to go back on any of the cuts he’d made or to threaten the balanced budget he’d been working toward by initiating any new federal welfare programs. From his perspective, he and the other conservative Republicans had already waited long enough to get some real attacks on the post-Roosevelt welfare state in, having long been frustrated by the economically mild Dewey.
Outside of economics, this year also featured a dramatic confrontation in the struggle for civil rights. On September 4, the Little Rock White Citizens’ Council organized a protest against the integration of the city’s Central High School, and state governor Orval Faubus sent in the Arkansas National Guard to back up these protesters and lock nine black students out of the school building. While news reports of armed soldiers and angry mobs physically keeping unarmed teenagers out of school polarized the nation, Little Rock mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann appealed to President Halleck to step in before the situation escalated as it was sure to do.
Halleck was happy to step in: his first act was to federalize the Arkansas National Guard, removing them from Faubus’ control, after which he ordered them to stand down and stop blocking the ‘Little Rock Nine’. Immediately following that, he sent in 1,000 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division into the city to actively escort the students into the Little Rock Central High School. The presence of black troops among the federal contingent infuriated the crowd beyond reason, however[6], and the most reckless and ill-tempered of the segregationist protesters surged forward to physically attack the Little Rock Nine and their protectors. While they were beaten back easily enough by the soldiers, some of their compatriots were known Klansmen who had brought guns to the event and took the chance to open fire, aiming to kill the students; in that they failed, but their bullets struck home regardless – two of the paratroopers were killed, one black private and one white corporal, and three others wounded just as 16-year-old Ernest Green and 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford crossed the school’s threshold. The soldiers fired back at the immediate threat, killing four of the attackers, but the rest had retreated into the crowd which, as feared by 101st commander Edwin Walker, half-fled away in a stampede and half-turned into a seething mob more determined than ever to lynch the teenagers and any paratrooper protecting them.
The chaos that followed left no other American soldiers dead, but 17 more were wounded. In retaliation they struck dead no fewer than 9 rioters with bullets and bayonets, and left as many as 25 others wounded…most unfortunately including one middle-aged woman, shot in the back of the head while fleeing hand-in-hand with her husband, who in turn had tried to take a potshot at the paratroopers with his personal revolver before running away. Most likely she’d been shot by a soldier aiming for said husband instead. While it wasn’t clear who had shot the female protestor, much less what race he was, rumors that it was a black soldier spread much faster than the authorities could possibly contain them.
The notion that a white woman could be killed by federal troops for protesting the thought of her children sitting with blacks was a mortal offense to Southern chivalry (or at least how the notion was conceived in far too many Southerners’ minds in 1957) and its chief defenders, the Klan and other local militant segregationist cells; these in turn experienced a surge in recruits, all swearing revenge. The most immediate consequence had been a riot consuming Little Rock’s streets, though the 101st had done a valiant job protecting blacks and anti-segregationist whites considering how little support they received from the National Guard and local police. A week after the clashes and ensuing riot, the federal tax office in Little Rock was firebombed by unknown assailants; it was the first time, in a very long time, that Southern white supremacists had actively targeted a symbol of federal authority. A similar attack on the Jackson, MS federal post office & courthouse just one week later, leaving its exterior damaged, proved that this new step in Southern ‘massive resistance’ was not going to be limited to Arkansas.
President Halleck, for his part, was not swayed from his course on civil rights by this surge in violence. He sent reinforcements to the 101st in Little Rock, and kept federal soldiers in the city until he was sufficiently assured that he could count on the federalized National Guard to take over and not simply let the Little Rock Nine (and any other black students who joined them) get lynched. Elsewhere across the country, US Marshals and deputy marshals were sent out to protect other colored students who sought to attend previously all-white schools. The Halleck administration’s message had been broadcast nation-wide: they were prepared to trample over any notion of state’s right to sustain Jim Crow, and if a state dared mobilize its National Guard for this purpose, the president would exercise his authority to federalize said NG and send in US Army troops to enforce the Supreme Court’s rulings. “All those terrorists throwing bombs at federal courthouses and taking shots at their local postmaster, Marshal, or Screaming Eagle aren’t going to make me or the Supreme Court go back on giving negroes their human rights,” Halleck had defiantly proclaimed. “They’re just making me want to fight even harder, to do everything in my power to banish ‘em to the dustbin of history where they belong with Mussolini and his mistress.”
Halleck also sought to further build on Dewey’s efforts to dismantle the institutional disenfranchisement of black Americans. To that end he found further support from Senator Lodge, who was fast becoming one of his most important allies in the battle with Jim Crow. Late this year, Lodge revived his grandfather and namesake’s Force Bill from 1890[7]. Like its predecessor, the bill introduced federal regulation of elections (not just for the House but also for the Senate in its updated form, as when Lodge Sr. proposed his original bill Senators weren’t popularly elected); expanded the duties of the court-appointed voting ‘referees’ introduced by the Voting Rights Act of 1954; and gave said referees the ability to involve US Marshals to stop attempts to turn away black voters at the polls when force became necessary.
Also similar to its predecessor, due to Dixiecrat filibustering and liberal Democratic anger over Halleck’s New Deal cuts the ‘New Force Bill’ failed to secure support from the likes of Texas’ Johnson and make it through the Senate by December 31, 1957 even though it did get past the House on the back of Democratic defectors there. Lodge and his cohorts publicly appeared unfazed, refusing to give up and swearing to reintroduce it as many times as they had to until and unless it finally passed. Behind closed doors however, the Republicans were concerned that they were headed for a clobbering in the 1958 midterms due to the ongoing recession and the unpopularity of the Halleck cuts in the Midwest, and the pressure to find a compromise with Johnson, Stuart Symington (D-MO) and other progressive Democrats before time ran out mounted accordingly.
Overseas, as the Soviet Union was busy licking its wounds and once more consolidated control over its errant Warsaw Pact clients, 1957 proved to be a much less exciting year than the previous one. Yugoslavia and Egypt held their promised elections on April 30 and June 20, respectively, and the victors were well within observers’ expectations. In Yugoslavia, the newly-christened Socialist Workers’ Party comfortably defeated all comers to secure an easy majority across the Federal Assembly, with Milovan Dilas’ Radical Democratic Party coming in a very distant second, while their chairman Tito retained the presidency. The SWP, as the only legal party in the country before Tito called the election, enjoyed a massive advantage in existing political infrastructure over its rivals, and while they didn’t go to the extreme of posting soldiers and policemen at every booth to ensure the voters ‘voted correctly’ they were definitely not above open bribery of said voters with cash handouts, promises of political appointments or more comfortable jobs, and even sacks of potatoes. Nevertheless, the West hailed the election as free & fair and NATO would welcome the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into its ranks just before Christmas, having fast-tracked its accession due to (quite rightly) distrusting the Soviets’ word that they wouldn’t invade the rebellious ex-Communist country while it remained outside the alliance.
Meanwhile in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood swept to a decisive victory, securing a nearly three-quarters majority in the National Assembly and almost completely shutting out the reliably pro-Western liberals of the Wafd Party, much to Britain’s disappointment. Hassan al-Hudaybi, the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, was promptly made Egypt’s Prime Minister: an oddball by Brotherhood standards, al-Hudaybi was both a devout Islamist and a genuine man of peace, who had consistently denounced the violence the Brotherhood’s ‘Secret Apparatus’ had engaged in since 1949 and tried to disband said combat organization without success. His first acts in office were to declare Egypt an Islamic republic, impose sharia law on the public and institute religious courts: however he also refrained from the harshest measures being demanded by Brotherhood propagandist Sayyid Qutb and other hardliners, such as forcing non-Muslim women to wear the hijab or levying the jizya tax on Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority.
The Supreme Guide also embarked on an economic policy of infitah, privatizing Egypt’s economy and striving to invite American financial investment – which the Halleck administration was all too happy to provide, seeing in these Islamists a more reliable bulwark against Communism than Nasser had ever been – while shutting out the British, who al-Hudaybi resented for the Suez Crisis and earlier exploitation of Egypt much like most other Egyptians did at this point, as much as possible. Both of these courses of action mortally offended Qutb, who was much more violently inclined than his boss and had visited America only to hate every second of having to deal with its individualism, ‘loose’ women and jazz music among many other things, and the more extreme elements of the Brotherhood’s membership; all of whom began debating whether and how to achieve a ‘change in management’ before their Supreme Guide even finished his first year in office.
Also in Africa, even as the fire went out in one British colony, troubles began to brew in others. In Kenya the Mau Mau were almost completely crushed, the British having finally captured and executed their paramount leader Dedan Kimathi early in the year; emboldened by the victory at Suez, Prime Minister Eden remained committed to stomping out the last of the rebels, and Kenya’s Central or ‘White’ Highlands would soon be deemed safe for continued settlement. Far to the west, the failure of Kwame Nkrumah’s pro-independence, pan-Africanist Convention People’s Party to score an overwhelming majority in the colony’s election allowed Britain to put off granting Ghanaian independence and intrigue with the rival Ashanti-centric National Liberation Movement to undermine the former[8]. And in Nigeria, continuing tensions between the Islamic north and Christian south despite efforts to federalize the colony led the British authorities to increasingly consider partitioning Nigeria in half: a proposal which was opposed by both pan-Nigerian nationalists, who considered (perhaps rightly) such a plan to be a British effort to keep them divided and at the Colonial Office’s mercy, and the Nigerian southerners, who themselves were divided between the Yoruba and Igbo – fierce competitors over the colony’s political machine and most prosperous economic sectors.
The Soviets did also achieve one up over America in October of this year: the launch of the satellite Sputnik into space, a much-needed morale booster for the Stalinist troika and their people after Yugoslavia's escape from their orbit and the downfall of Nasser in the previous year. For his part, Halleck was furious at being outdone by the Communists and had the Congressional Republicans draft a 'National Aeronautics and Space' bill to create a special administration dedicated to matching and surpassing the Soviet Union in the realm of space exploration. The Space Race was on.
[1] Black had been the president of the World Bank since 1949.
[2] In addition to being the first black executive officer at the White House ITL as he was IOTL, Morrow was a businessman, WW2 veteran, NAACP activist and previously worked for the Commerce Department.
[3] Seaton owned a ranch & farm in addition to a small Midwestern media empire, and was Eisenhower’s Secretary of the Interior historically.
[4] Chotiner was Nixon’s campaign manager in 1950 and ’52 IOTL.
[5] This brings the bureaucracy down to about 1.5 million employees. For comparison, IRL Washington had about 1.8 million bureaucrats in 1960.
[6] Historically, Eisenhower was careful enough to leave black soldiers out of the 101st Airborne troops he sent to Little Rock.
[7] Lodge’s grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., introduced this exact bill and actually got it through the House, but it was killed in the Senate between the Democrats’ filibustering and the Republican Senate leadership prioritizing getting their economic policies through.
[8] Historically Nkrumah and the CPP won that election decisively enough to force Britain to give them independence in March of 1957. Nkrumah’s efforts to fight tribalism and the power of the hereditary tribal chiefs in favor of a unitary pan-Africanist state also brought him into conflict with the country’s more traditional north IOTL.
As always a fascinating read.
BTW - conscription - IIRC by the late '50s the draft was contributing something like 30K men a year for the forces. The rest were volunteers. So, kill it?
No pentonomic division nonsense ITTL?
As always a fascinating read.
BTW - conscription - IIRC by the late '50s the draft was contributing something like 30K men a year for the forces. The rest were volunteers. So, kill it?
No pentonomic division nonsense ITTL?
Thanks! Getting rid of the draft in favor of a smaller, sleeker and more efficient all-professional military would be in line with Halleck's budget priorities; however it would likely conflict with Defense Secretary MacArthur's own preference for a huge conventional military. As president Halleck is MacArthur's boss and will not let the latter forget it, as he mentioned in the update, but he's also only got so much political capital - and between the civil rights battles and the one over New Deal cuts, it is likely that he'd put off challenging the popular war hero for at least the next little while.
That said, perhaps contrary to expectations even MacArthur was averse to just throwing around a massive conscript army willy-nilly, and wouldn't support sending huge numbers of GIs into Vietnam (or anywhere else) unless he genuinely thought there was no better option on the table (although his list of 'better options' would 100% include nukes, as you might guess). Historically Mac actually recommended not involving huge numbers of troops in 'Nam to JFK, after all, and was the source of the 'never fight a land war in Asia' quote.
Bloody glad he didn't get in. However it does mean that Dewey is going to face pressure to take a stronger stance against communism. Which could be awkward if the E German uprising occurs as OTL next year or possibly even more crucial Hungary in 56 as that would be an election year. It could also mean he plays a bigger role in opposing communist supporting operations in the 3rd world. This could mean supporting Batista more against Castro or ending up supporting or at least not opposing Britain and France if the Suez crisis develops as OTL.
