Sobel Wiki: And Close the Door

This month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Conservative Party, one of the two original major parties in the Confederation of North America.

In our own history, British politics in the 19th century was dominated by two parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, both the product of mergers of earlier parties. This has led to the use of "conservative" and "liberal" to describe the dominant political ideologies of modern developed nations. This also influenced the development of political parties in British Commonwealth nations. For instance, when Canada was confederated in 1867, the names and ideologies of the British parties were adopted by Canadian politicians.

Thus, when Sobel described the formation of political parties in the C.N.A. in the early 19th century, they were called the Conservatives and the Liberals. This is actually an anachronism: the name Conservative wasn't adopted in the U.K. until 1834, and Liberal wasn't adopted until 1859. It may be that the names came into use in the Sobel Timeline Britain around the same time as they did in the C.N.A. Sobel mentions a Liberal government in Britain falling in 1835 and being replaced by a Reform-Conservative coalition. It appears that the economic shock of the late 1830s disrupted British politics to the point where these names fell out of use, and the older names Whig and Tory were revived. British politics in the Sobel Timeline was still dominated by the Whig and Tory Parties in the 20th century.

As for the C.N.A.'s Conservative Party, it and its rival Liberal Party appear as separate confederation-level parties in the 1810s and 1820s, during the period of the First Britannic Design, when the C.N.A. is a loose collection of semi-autonomous British dominions. The same economic shock that disrupts the British party system in the late 1830s unleashes various forms of chaos on the confederations of North America. It is in response to this chaos that the North American parties lead the push for political centralization that results in the Second Britannic Design of 1842.

Under the first forty years of the Second Design, the Conservatives and Liberals take turns controlling the new national government, both becoming corrupt. The corrupt equilibrium is upset in the late 1860s when the Conservatives push through electoral reforms expanding the franchise and reapportioning Grand Council seats. The reforms are meant to solidify Conservative rule, but they end up allowing a populist third party, the People's Coalition, to appear and flourish. The Coalition's gains come, ironically, at the expense of the Conservatives -- by 1883 the Coalition has displaced the Conservative Party as the official opposition, and by 1893 the Conservatives have ceased to play a role in national politics. By 1903 the party has dwindled to the point where it can no longer nominate a candidate for governor-general, and it effectively shuts down.

Sobel Wiki: Remaking a Continent

This month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Kinkaid Canal, the Sobel Timeline counterpart to our own Panama Canal.

As is often the case with the Sobel Timeline, the Kinkaid Canal is a sort of funhouse-mirror version of the Panama Canal. First and foremost, it is in Nicaragua rather than Panama. This is actually a pretty high-probability event. There were a number of proposals in our own time for a canal through Nicaragua, one of them made by none other than then-Secretary of State Henry Clay in 1826. Clay's proposal was turned down, due in part to political instability in Central America, and due to the fact that the British controlled a lot of the territory in the vicinity of the proposed canal route.

The British were not a problem in the Sobel Timeline, for reasons that Sobel never revealed. He makes no mention of the British colony at Belize, though his frontispiece map shows it as part of the Mexican state of Chiapas. He also doesn't say how the British lost control of the Mosquito Coast, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. All he does say is that Central America is united into a single country called Guatemala (or as he inexplicably spells it, Guatamala), and that this country has spent years disputing possession of the Isthmus of Panama with the South American nation of New Granada. It is this, more than anything else, that convinces Sobel's master Robber Baron, Bernard Kramer, to opt for a canal through undisputed Guatemalan territory.

Kramer Associates was originally formed in 1865 as a consortium of California businessmen with the purpose of improving transportation links between their state and the North Atlantic nations, and especially with the Caribbean coast of the United States of Mexico. Building an interoceanic canal is the obvious project for K.A. to undertake, and Kramer spends his first five years as head of K.A. laying the groundwork for it.

In our own history, the U.S. Navy assisted Panamanian separatists who seceded from Columbia in 1903, as part of a project by President Roosevelt to build a canal. In the Sobel Timeline, it was Kramer's company, acting independently of the Mexican government, that financed a coup d'etat in Guatemala as part of the canal project. The canal received its final name after Mexican President Omar Kinkaid was assassinated, and Kramer decided to name the recently-completed canal after him. This may have started a trend in the Sobel Timeline, because a British canal in Egypt was named, not after the Gulf of Suez, but after Queen Victoria.

Btw, the map of the Kinkaid Canal at the top of this blog post was created by For All Nails mastermind Noel Maurer, who later went on to co-author a book on the Panama Canal with his fellow FAN alumnus Carlos Yu.

Sobel Wiki: The Modern Moses

 

In recognition of the holiday season, this month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Galloway Speech of December 25, 1922, wherein North American locomobile magnate Owen Galloway outlined his plan for averting civil war in the C.N.A. Galloway's Big Idea was that since the country was divided between two irreconcilable factions, the most sensible thing to do would be to separate the two groups by encouraging the minority faction to emigrate and establish their own society. To that end, Galloway created an endowment that would subsidize emigration within and from the C.N.A.

Initially, Sobel makes it sound as though Galloway's plan represents a triumph of private initiative, saying that "Governor-General Wagner promised cooperation, but none was asked of the government. The entire operation, the bulk of which took seven years, was handled without partisan or political involvement." Later, Sobel admits that the operation did indeed receive considerable assistance from the government: "Although there was no direct connection between the Galloway Trust and the Confederation bureaucracy, government men cooperated whenever possible with the Trust, and did more to aid in relocations than was believed at the time. Minister of Home Affairs Douglas Watson noted that more individuals relocated within the C.N.A. without Trust assistance than did so with its aid, and that only 29.7 percent of those who emigrated received more than N.A. £40 from the Trust, while 31.8 percent asked for no such aid."

Sobel also notes that the administration of Liberal Governor-General Henderson Dewey benefited politically from the Galloway Plan. He quotes from Richard Maltz's Better Than Any of Us? The Ambitious Galloway: "Since most of the emigrants were intellectuals or thought of themselves as such, and since the [[opposition People's]] Coalition was the natural home of intellectuals, Dewey was in fact exporting his political opposition. Those who relocated within the C.N.A. were more often middle-class and professional in background, likely candidates for the Liberal parties in their new homes. Aid from the Home Office oftentimes made a vacillating Coalitionist into a staunch Liberal."

Apparently the consensus within the Sobel Timeline is that Galloway's emigration scheme was the solution to the country's problems that he hoped it would be. Sobel himself states that "The Galloway Plan destroyed much of the basis for the protest movements. Pro-government critics argued that the Galloway Plan would 'shut up the anarchist units for good. Now these weepers will have to accept the Plan or show themselves the cowards they are,' while the more radical reformists welcomed the opportunity to 'denude the nation of its most precious possession, its people. Galloway has done more to destroy this corrupt society than any man in history.' Of course, both sides exaggerated, but neither could restrain their emotional outbursts." Later in the book, Sobel praises the Galloway Plan as "rational, well-considered, and on the whole, led by people with an ability to isolate a problem, find an answer, and organize to achieve results."

You have to wonder, though, whether the Galloway Plan would work as advertised. Suppose in 1968 J. Paul Getty had offered to pay for the emigration of the anti-war protesters of his day to some other country. No doubt some of the draft resisters would have been happy to take him up on his offer, but the larger anti-war protest would have continued, because opposition to the Vietnam War was motivated by larger moral concerns rather than simply being due to military-age men seeking to avoid the draft. There might have been more young men fleeing to Canada, but otherwise the anti-war protests would have continued undiminished, with all the social dislocations and political fallout that they occasioned.

Sobel Wiki: A Study in Manipulation

This month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Age of Renewal, an era in the history of the Confederation of North America. The era gets its name from a speech given by Governor-General John McDowell in October 1882 that marked the start of his re-election campaign.

McDowell is one of the most ambiguous figures in Sobel's alternate history. Most of the national leaders we encounter are acting from clear motives, whether good or bad. Henry Gilpin wants to conquer Mexico; Emiliano Calles wants to abolish slavery; Pedro Fuentes wants to bring Kramer Associates under control; Bruce Hogg wants to maintain North American neutrality in the Global War. But with McDowell, we're never quite certain whether he really is the dedicated reformer he claims to be, or whether he's cynically exploiting the reformist impulse at large in the country to keep himself and his party in power.

Sobel notes the ambiguity several times in his account of McDowell's career. When McDowell unexpectedly finds himself in command of a plurality of the seats in the Grand Council in February 1878, he refuses to consider any proposals for a coalition with one of the other parties. In the end, McDowell is able to gain a majority thanks to crossover votes from the other two parties, and he claims that "I come to this office without a single pledge to any man." Sobel notes that McDowell knew full well that he was the only viable choice for governor-general, and so had no need to cut any deals. Thus, he won a reputation for honesty without running the risk of losing the race for governor-general.

In his first two years in office, McDowell passed a series of reform bills that "did much to quiet Coalition demands," as Sobel puts it. However, most of these bills lacked effective enforcement provisions, so that the abuses they were meant to curb continued. Thus, as Sobel again notes, McDowell achieved a reputation as an opponent of abuses by big business without having to pay the price of pushback by the business interests.

The highlight of McDowell's time in office was the Age of Renewal speech which gave his administration its leitmotif. McDowell proclaims in his speech that "Every North American has the right to hold a job, to a fair wage, to a fair return on his investment, to a decent place in which to live, to security in his home, to the knowledge that his government knows of his needs, and is prepared to help him help himself." However, when he was asked to clarify his statements afterwards, he, as Sobel puts it, "evaded questions on this and related points, deliberately leaving himself as many options in the future as possible." Sobel concludes that "The Age of Renewal was not, as was believed at the time, a blueprint for a new society, but rather a catch-all for any future programs the Governor-General might deem necessary."

Sobel's choice of reference works reflects the ambiguous nature of McDowell's record. Some have titles like The Age of Renewal: The First McDowell Administration and John McDowell and the Fruits of Reform. Others have titles such as McDowell: Appearance and Reality and John McDowell and the Press: A Study in Manipulation. Sobel ultimately makes no final judgments, letting his readers decide for themselves who the true John McDowell is.

Sobel Wiki: "Heaven, thy name is California"

This month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on California, the wealthiest and most populous of the United States of Mexico.

Sobel's California is not like Sobel's Southern Confederation. The S.C. was a sort of funhouse-mirror version of our history's Southern Confederacy, voluntarily abolishing slavery in 1841 rather than clinging to the institution to the bitter end. Sobel's California, however, is an awful lot like our history's California. It had a gold rush just like ours (albeit ten years early), it's an agricultural wonderland just like ours, and it seems to have an Anglo majority just like ours.

Sobel's California is rather larger than ours, since it also includes our world's Baja Peninsula, most of our world's Oregon, and about half of our world's Washington state. The major difference between Sobel's California and ours is that his gave birth to Kramer Associates, the One Big Zaibatsu of the Sobel Timeline. Bernard Kramer, the founder of K.A., was a firm believer in the need to keep as many politicians as possible beholden to him, a tradition that was faithfully followed by all of his successors. Kramer's money bought Omar Kinkaid a Senate seat, then two terms as President of the U.S.M. When Kinkaid turned against K.A., he was assassinated. Two years later, Bernard Kramer decided that buying politicians was too much trouble, so he installed his business ally Benito Hermión as dictator. After that, as Sobel records, California was basically a fief of Kramer Associates.

Twenty years of dictatorship ended when Kramer's successor, Diego Cortez y Catalán, decided that Hermión was getting out of hand, so he had the dictator deposed and restored republican government, presumably because elected officials who get out of hand are easier to get rid of than dictators. By the 1930s K.A. President John Jackson decided the Mexican government was too hard to handle, so he moved the company to the Philippines, which had a more easily influenced government. Sixteen years later, Jackson's successor, Carl Salazar, relocated the company to Taiwan, another country with a pliable government.

Meanwhile, California continued to grow and prosper, and though it accounted for a quarter of the country's voters, its diverse population kept it from becoming the arbiter of Mexican politics. Albert Ullman was the last Californian to receive a major party's presidential nomination, and that was in 1914. Since the departure of K.A., California has been just another state of the U.S.M., sharing in the rest of the country's triumphs and disappointments.

Sobel Wiki: Always the Bridesmaid

This month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Liberty Party, the oldest major political party in the United States of Mexico. The Liberty Party was formed in opposition to Alexander Hamilton's Continentalist Party in the late 1790s in the quasi-independent state of Jefferson. Although Robert Sobel never explicitly linked the formation of the parties to the outbreak of the Trans-Oceanic War, the timing makes it clear that Hamilton's actions during the war precipitated the partisan split in the settlement.

As I've noted previously, the foundation of Jefferson was the Sobel Timeline counterpart to the settlement of Canada by the United Empire Loyalists in our history. Having lost the Rebellion, the most intransigent Patriots chose to leave the Thirteen Colonies (as they now were again) to establish an independent settlement. They chose the province of Tejas in New Spain as their final destination, and life was sufficiently hard there that it was only continued immigration from the British colonies that allowed the new settlement to survive.

Sobel makes it clear that there was no compelling reason for the Jeffersonians to rebel against Spain. The government of King Carlos IV had no interest in affairs in Spain's New World colonies, and as far as we can tell, the Jeffersonians were left alone by administrators in Mexico City and San Antonio. And yet, rebel they did. Specifically, according to Sobel, the Jeffersonians used the outbreak of war between Spain and Great Britain in 1795 as an excuse to rise up against Spanish rule and seize control of as much of Spanish Tejas as they could manage. They were able to get away with it because the rest of Spain's New World colonies rose up in rebellion after the Spanish Bourbons were removed from the throne and a member of the Protestant House of Hohenzollern set in their place in the 1799 peace settlement.

The decision to launch a rebellion against Spanish rule was made by Hamilton himself, who resigned from the office of co-Governor of Jefferson to lead an army of conquest against San Antonio and the other Spanish settlements in Tejas. The object apparently was to seize as much land as possible to ensure that the cotton boom of the 1790s kept booming. This of course would mean establishing a slave-based cash crop economy in Jefferson like the one that was already established in the Southern British colonies (by now organized into the Southern Confederation). And this, ultimately, was the issue that brought partisan politics to Jefferson: Hamilton and his allies wanted Jefferson to become a slave society, while his opponents believed that slavery was contrary to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. And so Hamilton's opponents called themselves the Liberty Party.

As we know from our own history, the profits from the cotton boom were great enough to override most peoples' moral scruples, and so it proved in Jefferson. Slavery was immensely popular; so much so that, from what Sobel tells us, the Libertarians never formed a single government for all of Jefferson's existence as an independent state -- which admittedly only lasted until 1820. After that, Andrew Jackson oversaw the merger of Jefferson and the republic of Mexico to create a sort of Greater Jefferson that he called the United States of Mexico. Since participation in the national government of the U.S.M. was restricted to English-speakers, it was the Jeffersonian parties that contested the new country's national elections. And again, the Libertarians kept losing to the Continentalists, now led by Jackson.

During the sixty-year period that one might call the First Republic (though Sobel never uses the term), from 1821 to 1881, the Libertarians only managed to win two out of nine national elections. After the restoration of republican rule in 1902, the Libertarians again looked set to remain a perpetual opposition party, losing the elections of 1908 and 1914. But then, in 1920, the issue of slavery once again came to the fore. The Libertarians ran a military hero, General Emiliano Calles, as their candidate, and his great personal popularity allowed them to win at last. However, in order to abolish slavery, Calles had to make a devil's bargain with the real ruler of the U.S.M., Douglas Benedict, head of the One Big Zaibatsu that ruled the Mexican business world and controlled the Mexican economy: Kramer Associates.

Ever since the rise of K.A. in the 1860s, the company's financial control of the Mexican election system had made them the natural enemy of the Liberty Party. And so they remained, until Calles and Benedict reached their gentleman's agreement on 30 April 1920. Calles and the Liberty Party would leave the company alone, and Benedict would use his financial control of the Mexican government to ensure the abolition of slavery. And so it was done.

With K.A. now allied to the Libertarians, the U.S.M.'s other major party, the United Mexican Party, turned against the company. President Pedro Fuentes of the U.M.P. spent six years attempting to bring the company under control, to no avail. With K.A.'s help, the Libertarians were able to elect Senator Alvin Silva president, and under Silva the policies of the two parties completed their reversal. Now it was the Libertarians who supported an aggressive foreign policy, and the U.M.P. who agitated for domestic reforms. Silva remained in power until 1950, leading Mexico into war against Japan and the United British Empire, before being overthrown in a military coup that brought an end to the Restored Republic and returned Mexico to dictatorship.

So it was, in one of the many ironies with which the Sobel Timeline abounds, that the Liberty Party ushered in a dictatorship that was still in power when Sobel was writing in 1971.

Sobel Wiki: what the Dickinson

This month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Dickinson Era, the period immediately following the implementation of the Britannic Design in 1782. Unlike other historical periods such as the Era of Faceless Men and the Years of the Pygmies, this coinage does not come from For Want of a Nail itself. Sobel never provided a name for this time period, so I had to come up with "Dickinson Era" myself.

It's odd that Sobel devotes only three of the book's pages to this period, because it involved the transition of the rebellious colonies from direct military occupation to the re-establishment of civil authority, and the translation of the Britannic Design from words on a piece of paper to a functioning system of government. In a sense, it is the Sobel Timeline's counterpart to our own history's Federalist Era -- the two periods even last the same time, 13 years, and partially overlap chronologically.

Among the details of the Dickinson Era that Sobel leaves out are:

• the abolition of slavery everywhere in the C.N.A. except the Southern Confederation, 
• any interaction between the new government and the Indians who occupy most of its territory, 
• any interaction between the new government and the British government (including the standing army that the British government garrisons in the C.N.A.), and 
• the dismantling of mercantilism.

What Sobel does mention is the mutual suspicion that existed between the two rebel confederations and the three Loyalist ones, as well as the rivalry between the Northern and Southern Confederations. Sobel regards this as an unexpected flaw in the Design, but it actually makes perfect sense. After all, why divide the thirteen rebellious colonies into two confederations if not to set them against each other? The more contentious they are, the less likely that they'll unite against the mother country again.

Which raises the question of just how subtle Sobel was being. The British had a reputation for using divide-and-rule tactics to make their empire easier to manage. Were the divisions of the First Design deliberate, and alt-Sobel missed it (or refused to believe in it)? Or did our Sobel intend that the reader should accept that the First Design wasn't working the way its creators intended? It's a shame that he's no longer alive to settle the question.

The two independence days

It is a popular bit of historical trivia that there are actually two candidates for the date of the attempted secession of the thirteen North American colonies in July 1776. This is due to the fact that there were two processes in motion related to the secession movement. The first was a motion introduced in the Second Continental Congress on June 7 by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, the so-called Resolution of Independence, that the colonies "are, and of right ought to be, independent states." Lee's resolution also called on the Congress to "take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances," and to prepare a plan of confederation for the thirteen colonies. Four days after Lee's resolution was introduced, the second process was set in motion when a committee of five members was appointed to draft a document formally announcing (and justifying) the break from Great Britain.

The two processes moved in tandem throughout the month of June 1776. While Lee and John Adams of Massachusetts worked to raise support for the resolution among the less radical members of the Congress, Adams was also serving on the committee drafting the formal declaration of independence. Adams clearly saw the former as more important than the latter, for he left the drafting of the declaration to the youngest and, in many ways, least renowned member of the committee: Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.

The two processes came to a head slightly out of sync with one another. Jefferson and the other committee members presented a draft declaration to the Congress on June 28; however, the Congress chose to set aside consideration of the declaration, and instead focus on Lee's resolution. It was not until July 2, 1776, that Lee and Adams were able to bring the rest of the Congress to the point where twelve of the thirteen colonies were prepared to approve the resolution (New York choosing to abstain in the absence of any instructions from the colonial government). This is the date that most people in the United States of Mexico, the political heirs of the rebels, choose to celebrate as Independence Day.

Once the resolution passed the Congress, the matter of Jefferson's declaration was taken up. The Congress spent two additional days editing the text, which was finally approved on July 4 and sent off to be printed. It is a matter of historical record that a year later, in July 1777, most supporters of the rebellion chose to mark the anniversary of independence on July 4, the date Jefferson's declaration was approved, and not July 2, the date Lee's resolution was approved.

The suppression of the North American Rebellion in June 1778 meant the end of celebrations of the attempted secession. It was only after the Rebellion's surviving leaders (including Adams' widow and children) made the Wilderness Walk to Jefferson that the celebration of "Independence Day" resumed. Mrs. Adams, recalling her husband's prediction that July 2 would be "celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival," chose that day to mark the anniversary in 1783, and in every subsequent year. From her and her family, the event spread to the rest of the settlers of Jefferson, and from them to the people of the U.S.M.

The other Southern confederacy

This month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Southern Confederation. Typically for Sobel, it's pretty much the opposite of our own world's Southern Confederacy.

To start with, the Southern Confederation stops at the Mississippi. The far side of the river is occupied by the independent nation of Jefferson, which merges with Mexico in 1820 to become the United States of Mexico. Thus, unlike our own history, the South borders a foreign country where slavery is also legal. Per Sobel, about 20,000 white Southerners emigrated from the Southern Confederation to Jefferson in the 1780s, bringing about 4,000 black slaves with them. Sobel doesn't mention any additional emigration from the S.C. to Jefferson, but it stands to reason that there must have been. Jefferson has much more unsettled land than the S.C., so it would be a natural destination for land-hungry Southerners.

The biggest difference between the two Souths is that the S.C. doesn't cling to slavery the way our own South did. Again, Sobel never says that having Jefferson next door made the difference, but again, it stands to reason. In our own history, die-hard white supremacists had only two options: submit to the abolition of slavery and legal equality for freed slaves, or rise in revolt. In the Sobel timeline, they had a third option: pack up the slaves and head west to Jefferson.

In the Sobel timeline, a crippling recession in the late 1830s makes cotton cultivation and slave labor unprofitable in the Southern Confederation. The S.C.'s abolitionists offer slave owners a deal: if the slave owners agree to abolition, the Southern government will compensate them for their freed slaves at twice the going market rate. This deal wouldn't have worked in our version of the South, but for sixty years, the most intransigent white supremacists have been leaving Sobel's Southern Confederation for Jefferson, producing a more moderate populace than our own South had. In the end, the S.C.'s legislature approves the compensated manumission plan, and on New Year's Day 1842, the last slaves in the confederation are freed.

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 11

On January 11, 1885, Michigan City Mayor Ezra Gallivan criticized the policies of Governor-General John McDowell. Gallivan asked rhetorically why McDowell sought to increase military spending, "since we are not being threatened by any outside foe." Gallivan also asked why McDowell wanted to increase the size of the Confederation Bureau of Investigation "when the dislocations of the early part of our decade have diminished, and our nation fortunately has been spared the pains of our neighbors across the Atlantic."

Gallivan's remarks were reported in the next day's issue of the Michigan City Ledger.

* * *

And so we come to the end of the Johnny Pez blog's Today in the Sobel Timeline feature, which began with this post on January 15, 2014. Why do it? Partly, of course, because it gave me an excuse to blog on a regular basis, which is always important when you've got an always-hungry weblog to feed. Partly it was to provide a new way of looking at Sobel's alternate history, and a chance to reveal the full scope and unique nature of the work. There aren't many timelines where it would even be possible to post a day-by-day account of nearly two centuries' worth of imaginary history. And partly, of course, it was a chance to link back to the Sobel Wiki, and try to drum up some interest in my little geek project.

What will I do now? I suppose I'll get back to work on the sequel, which I have unfortunately let lapse for the last few months. For instance, Sobel was rather sketchy in describing Bernard Kramer's life before he founded Kramer Associates. Something needs to be done about that ...

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 10

On January 10, 1926, the United Mexican Party's presidential nominee, Assemblyman Pedro Fuentes, gave a speech in Tampico in which he stated that he considered the manumission and annexation issues closed. From that point on, the campaign between Fuentes and President Emiliano Calles was uneventful, with neither candidate making a major speech.

On January 10, 1935, North American Councilman Bruce Hogg introduced a bill of impeachment against Governor-General Douglas Watson.

On January 10, 1971, Robert Sobel interviewed Kramer Associates historian Stanley Tulin. Tulin discussed K.A. President John Jackson's efforts in the mid-1930 to avert the oncoming Global War. Tulin told Sobel, "From 1936 to 1939, Jackson spent more time searching for a way to peace than in running his companies.

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 9

On January 9, 1938, North American Governor-General Douglas Watson was nominated for a third term at the Liberal Party's national convention. In his acceptance speech, Watson made it clear that he intended to make the upcoming election a plebiscite for his arms program and internationalist foreign policy. He said, "Only a strong nation can be free and peaceful. If you vote for me, you are voting for the arms program. A vote for my opponent is a mandate for weakness, which would invite aggression and perhaps destroy not only Europe and us with it, but the world."

Watson's remarks were reported in the next day's issue of the New York Herald.

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 8

On January 8, 1883, North American Governor-General John McDowell gave a speech in Burgoyne attacking his political opponents in the Conservative Party and the People's Coalition, whom he called "men of the past and radicals who would destroy our future, who have hindered every attempt at justice I have made in the past five years." McDowell then listed the bills that had been rejected by the opposition in the Grand Council, saying, "Each of these measures was designed to better the lot of our people. Each, if passed, would have alleviated misery, created jobs, raised wages, or provided cleaner and better places in which our people could live and work. But they have been rejected by the merchants of fear and hate. The people know who their enemies are, and the people will reject them at the polls in February."

McDowell's remarks were reported in the next day's issue of the Burgoyne Times.

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 6

On January 6, 1916, North American Governor-General Albert Merriman announced that the North Americans who had taken part in the Chapultepec Incident had done so "without the knowledge of this government and certainly without its sanction. Measures will be taken at once to ensure that further incidents involving C.N.A. citizens in Chapultepec and other parts of the United States of Mexico will be prevented. Sobel notes that Merriman's words were carefully calculated to be firm, yet vague. Over the next two weeks, the passports of 10,970 North Americans in the U.S.M. were revoked.

On January 6, 1921, over 10,000 Mexican slaves petitioned President Emiliano Calles to be allowed to remain enslaved. Sobel states that while some of the names were forged, and others were acting under compulsion, a majority of the petitioners felt that under the circumstances, slavery would be preferable to freedom.

On January 6, 1968, former Minister for Home Affairs Grover Speigal gave a speech at the Liberal Party convention denouncing Governor-General Carter Monaghan's policy of disbanding the National Financial Administration. "Should this happen," said Speigal, "the nation will be the province of giant firms, and the freedom of enterprise will be gone, with the others to follow soon after."

Speigal's speech was reported in the next day's issue of the New York Herald.

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 5

On January 5, 1899, in response to a request from Kramer Associates President Diego Cortez y Catalán, the Japanese government attempted to mediate an end to the Great Northern War between the United States of Mexico and the Russian Empire. Ono Yamashita, the Japanese ambassador to Mexico City, met with Secretary of State Felicio Montoya to ask whether Chief of State Benito Hermión was willing to establish terms for a peace agreement. At the same time, the Japanese ambassador to St. Petersburg, Baron Keigo Kiyoura, spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Prince Pyotr Sviatopolk-Mirsky about possible Japanese mediation.

On January 5, 1926, there was a vitavised debate between Mexican President Emiliano Calles and his United Mexican Party challenger, Assemblyman Pedro Fuentes. Both candidates were wary of appearing too combative, and spoke guardedly about the issue of manumission.

On January 5, 1950, Jeffrey Martin of the New York Herald published a story discussing a recent tour of the Confederation of North America. Martin had taken an extensive tour of the country twelve years earlier, and met again with 476 people he had spoken to during the earlier tour. Martin wrote, "It is interesting to note that of the 295 individuals who told me they planned to vote for Coalition councilmen and so elect Hogg, 203 claimed to have voted Liberal and had supported Watson. They apparently had convinced themselves that they had guilt for the war, and tried to expunge this sentiment with a retroactive PC vote."

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 4

Just before dawn on January 4, 1916, several fires broke out in the Negro sections of the Mexican city of Chapultepec, followed by rioting. The police were sent to the area to put down the riot, leaving the city's Federal Prison largely unguarded. At that point, more than 2,000 young people, including many North Americans, stormed the Federal Prison. The external guards were overpowered, and the mob began to batter down the prison gates. Despite being fired upon by the interior guards, members of the mob made it past the guards and into the prison, where they began freeing the 8,000 slaves being tried for treason. The slaves joined the attackers in subduing the remaining guards, then escaped with them into the streets of Chapultepec. Soldiers from Mexico City were rushed to the scene, followed by an investigative team. It was later determined that in addition to 4,000 injured, the attack on the prison cost the lives of 188 guards, 549 attackers, and 429 prisoners.

On January 4, 1955, self-appointed Mexican President Colonel Vincent Mercator responded to economic attacks by Kramer Associates President Carl Salazar by giving a vitavised speech in which he warned that "Mexico's enemies will not go unpunished. We will push in Mr. Salazar's ugly snout, and make him wish he hadn't thought of his slimy plan to destroy us."

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 3

On January 3, 1916, the Mexican army troops who were called out to assist police in Chapultepec four days earlier returned to their barracks in Mexico City after calm returned to the city.

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 2

On January 2, 1942, the United States of Mexico and Japan exchanged declarations of war, one day after a Mexican sneak attack on the Japanese brought both nations into the Global War. Mexican President Alvin Silva insisted that the attack was necessary to forestall a planned Japanese attack on Mexico.

Sobel Wiki Year End Report: 2014

A year has gone by since my last blog post on the general state of the Sobel Wiki. So what's been happening with my quixotic geek project?

In the last year, the number of pages has increased by 130 from 2124 to 2254, and the number of photos by 85 from 436 to 521. For those of you keeping track at home, that's an average of one new page created every 2.8 days, and one new photo added every 4.3 days.

Sadly, the sudden flood of new wiki participants that I anticipated would result from news that I was working on an authorized sequel to For Want of a Nail failed to materialize. Not only that, real life issues have kept my wiki colleagues David Mix Barrington and Christina Taylor from participating, putting me back in the position of being the sole author of new articles.

Despite this, I am undeterred. If nothing else, being the creator and chief administrator of the Sobel Wiki makes me one of the world's leading authorities on Sobel's alternate history, so at least I can claim to be a leading authority on something.

Today in the Sobel Timeline: January 1

On January 1, 1842, Negro slavery was abolished in the Southern Confederation under the provisions of the Lloyd Bill, with the owners receiving compensation of N.A. £32 per slave. Since the bill's passage in May 1840, nearly all the slaveowners in the S.C. had already freed their slaves at a compensated rate of N.A. £35.

On January 1, 1942, the allied nations of Siberia and the United States of Mexico launched a surprise attack against Japan. Military airmobiles based in Siberia attacked the Japanese port of Nagasaki, while airmobiles from Mexican aircraft carriers bombed the Japanese capital of Tokyo.