The Beginning


Reed sighed, looked at the documents again, and sighed again. The brief spike in productivity had quickly eroded as factories across the country shut down in protest of Reed's inauguration. The Northwest ostensibly remained open for business, but so much of what they needed came from elsewhere that their output was drastically reduced as well. Before he even began the reforms, reactionary elements were stalling him and, more important, were stymieing the democratically elected syndicalist movement.


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I'll give a brief explanation of this now

Left to right, these icons represent manpower (1 = 1000 men), Nukes (Which need a huge investment of research and industry to create, but are hilariously destructive), Dissent (High dissent is very bad. It reduces your industry, and thus your income, supplies, and production of units. It also makes provinces rebel, and inflicts a penalty on your soldiers in combat. 55% is absolutely crippling.), Supply efficiency (The left number is the amount needed given your armed forces and their actions. The right number is what you have. This basically means that my men are getting less than three percent of what they need, so it takes forever to reorganize after a fight.), and Industrial Capacity or IC (Left to right, Wasted IC, which means the amount being spent on nothing at all, Effective IC, which is your IC after modifiers like dissent and technological breakthroughs, and Actual IC, which is simply the number of factories you have in your country.)

As you can see, we're in the devil's own pickle right here. Manpower is good, but dissent is so huge that it has utterly crippled our IC, which in turn means we can't invest into reducing dissent, which is primarily done by building consumer goods.

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There's little to do except keep an even keel while the country slowly recovers. Reed was confident that this would accelerate in time as people outside his heartland saw the wisdom of syndicalist leadership. He pushed the stack of papers aside for the moment, to study another communique, one which was not immediately relevant but which distracted him slightly from the country's troubles. To the south of Russia, the Don-Kuban Union and Alash Orda had come to blows over the Don-Kuban Union's attempts to stir up separatism among Alash Orda's cossacks. It was obvious to all but the two belligerents that this left them both open to Russian revanchism.


A small war for now, but if it gives Russia the chance to regain her glory, it could prove a momentous event.

Within hours, things had taken a turn Reed had hoped to avoid, at least for a little while. Frantic reports came in and it was soon clear that two more uprisings had occurred in the continental United States. Tacoma and Fargo, and their respective environs, were in open, armed revolt against the US government, claiming electoral fraud and the failure of the authorities to investigate it; effectively they thought a left-wing coup had occurred.


Reed knew he had to act fast if he was going to retain any credibility.

As Reed was overseeing the deployment of the US Army and USAAF to deal with the miscreants who threatened the peace of the nation, it became clear to him that others were resisting, if less violently, no less wholly. The laws of the land were being flouted by a consortium of resource businesses based mainly in California. In their eyes, the wealth of the Pacific states depended on being able to trade freely, not handing the oil over to D.C.; in reality, of course, the whole thing was an excuse for corporate fat cats to pocket obscene amounts of wealth while their workers went hungry and cold. Proclaiming “Solidarity throughout the nation”, Reed ordered an internal embargo of California, to force the rogue state to comply with the government's edicts.


Extraordinary times require extraordinary solutions.

As he waited for the army to reach their positions, and for California to heel, Reed turned his attention to the South. If the Southern trade unions could only gain their rightful positions of power, Reed and his cabinet agreed, the whole country could be put back on track. Huey Long was having none of this, and had whipped up feverish dissent and disobedience throughout the South, intimidating the trade unions and promising that the South would not brook the aggression Reed showed California. Reed ordered militia volunteers of the CSA, rather than the US proper, into the South to provide protection and escort for the trade unions, to help establish their power so that they could begin to properly represent the Southern worker.


It is hard to see a peaceful resolution now.

With the economic situation as dire as it was, the Army petitioned Reed for a significant increase in resources. What little industry the US had operational and under the control of Washington was dedicated to keeping the population happy, so Reed spoke to Syndicalist states with the goal of importing military supplies in exchange for some of America's huge raw resource abundance. International brotherhood was not high on the agenda of anyone; Britain and Georgia agreed to one-sided deals, whilst the French offer was so palpably unfair that the American delegation left in a storm of invective.



You would expect better from fellow travellers...

When he received news via wireless that Army elements had secured the town hall in Burns, Oregon, without a fight, Reed was quick to capitalize on it. The fighting had been done under Hoover's term in office, but Reed claimed it as a demonstration of his own determination to keep the country intact, and warned that other traitorous elements would be destroyed with great vengeance.


Sadly, Southwest Oregon would hardly boost American industry.
Every day in Washington was tense. Every hour brought a report of a new strike, a new speech, a new newspaper article. The cabinet wondered aloud, even knowing the minds of reactionary capitalists, that an elite so quick to proclaim itself democratic would so overtly turn against a democratic government. The days passed, and no good news crossed Reed's desk. Indeed, the reports from the South made it increasingly clear that the militia units were not able to restore order. Reed ordered the deployment of the US military proper in place of the CSA militias, to crush Long and his so-called 'Minute Men'.


A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The deployments created the worst wave of dissent yet. Three seperate uprisings took place during the night of and morning after Reed's order to deploy the military to the South. Two were no particular threat, but the uprising in Delaware and Maryland was a terrific blow to the Reed government. This was more now than dissenting mountain folk; this was a serious threat to the very heart of the federal government. Who knows how many institutions of government would be threatened if this was allowed to persist? Reed ordered every soldier in D.C. to fight the rebels immediately, and to their credit they crushed them in short order. Nonetheless the damage would be done, and compounded by persistent rumors that Jack Reed and his cabinet had fled D.C. in fear.



If this keeps up, the rebels will outnumber the army.

The emergency legislation which followed was quick to be enacted. Washington assumed unprecedented powers, consolidating Reed's legislation of the past few weeks, and the palpable threat of rebellion convinced those Republican and Democrat lawmakers who still attended the Congress that this legislation may be necessary to maintain the union's integrity.


Reed and his cabinet now have power which Mosley and Mussolini envy. Of course, this is only on paper; the US government's authority has less practical impact with every passing hour.

The blockade of California had proven futile. In amongst all the other problems, it had almost been forgotten, but reports of excessively harsh handling of a smuggling ring over the California-Nevada border propelled it back to the front page. California was doing just fine thanks to their trade with countries throughout the Pacific, such as Japan, Australasia, and the various Chinese states. The solution was obvious: the blockade must be extended to include a naval element. Nothing would enter or exit California until the illegal cadre of businessmen who had seized the state's apparatus were made to obey the rules which the people's government had wisely instituted.


No need to worry about their welfare if they wish to be selfish and not worry about the rest of America's.

And then, just like that, it happened. President Reed was reviewing a number of high-ranking military personnel for disloyalty, and top of the list was General Douglas MacArthur, who had recently absconded from his post in Panama and was reportedly speaking with politicians of the Democratic and Republican persuasion in secret. That alone was enough to see him dishonorably discharged, but before Reed could even sign the papers, William Aalto and a number of stern looking young men burst into his office. They bustled him out of the city with barely a word of explanation; Macarthur was on the march, and the knowledge of his had sent the local army units into complete and overt disobedience. They would not be stopping the rogue general's coup, they would be supporting it.





Contrary to the statements of the bourgeoisie, this was an actual coup, in modern America.

Within hours, MacArthur had siezed control of the US government, citing exceptional circumstances and a treasonous President installed under the most dubious of circumstances. Claiming that only the military could ensure the safety of the country now, he instituted severe measures to curb rebellious elements. Many in the Midwest and West were greatly mollified by this. The Northeast and South were another matter; though MacArthur was clearly more concerned with the CSA, he had little love for Huey Long, and the America Firsters knew it.

Despite the general's best efforts, Reed and his cadre escaped the capital and retreated to Chicago, where they were met with unmatched celebration. Thousands of American flags were burnt; the flag of the Combined Syndicates of America was flown from every building, even the governmental ones. Reed made a short speech in the early morning of March 1st;

“My friends, the reactionary enemies of the people and of democracy have overthrown us. It was our belief and our hope that the change this country needs would come from peaceful means, but we have not been allowed to do this. If anyone doubted it before let them see now that we tried our hardest, as democratically elected equals, to guide this land into the future, and that our attempts were met at every turn by dissenters, by reactionaries, by the forces of big business who care only for their profits, and who have overthrown an elected President and torn this country apart in their lustful greed! My legitimate election to the Presidency was overthrown; your votes have been trampled on, as your lives have been for so long. It was to be hoped that it never came to this, but our hands have been forced; the workers of this country have been forced. The United States of America is a dead nation, fit only to hide the reactionaries behind their false proclamations. The worker's state exists here, now, I have in my hand the articles of secession and we are as of this moment independence of the United States of America. Workers, Arise! Our time has come!”



The Second American Civil War has begun.