stoutfellow

I have always loved alternate history, ever since I first encountered it in one of Andre Norton's novels. (I'm tempted to deliver an extended lament concerning the state of the genre since the loss of Poul Anderson, but this is going to be long enough anyway, so I'll refrain.) In a sufficiently rich AH, I'm often drawn into trying to construct a timeline, gathering the bits of information doled out by the author and reconstructing them into a coherent whole.

In Ward Moore's classic Bring the Jubilee, Confederate victory at Gettysburg leads, by 1940, to a virtually third-world USA, doomed in the near future to vassalage to one of the great powers - Germany, the CSA, or perhaps Great Britain. Moore provides considerable historical information, in particular concerning the sequence of Presidents of the USA. Unfortunately, the data don't seem to be internally consistent.

In what follows, page numbers are from the paperback edition printed by Avon in 1972.

Moore describes a political rally during the 1940 presidential campaign:
outgoing President George Norris spoke, and ex-President Norman Thomas, the only Populist to serve two terms since the beloved Bryan. (p. 56)

So George Norris is President in 1940. Now, when was Thomas President? Norman Thomas was born in 1884. Since the Constitution mandates a minimum age of 35 years for the President, the first election in which he could have run was that of 1920. However, we have considerable information about that particular time-period. Moore describes the Populist debacle in the 1940 election thus:
State after state, hitherto staunchly Populist, turned to the Whigs for the first time since William Hale Thompson defeated President Thomas R Marshall back in 1920 and again Alfred E Smith in 1924, before Smith gained the great popularity which gave him the Presidency in 1928. (p. 63)

So Marshall was (presumably) elected in 1916, Thompson in 1920 and 1924, and Smith in 1928. (In our timeline, Marshall was Woodrow Wilson's VP, and Smith was governor of New York and the 1928 Democratic presidential candidate. I haven't been able to identify Thompson. Late note: He was a notably corrupt mayor of Chicago in the first half of this century, and is known to have had presidential ambitions.) So Thomas could not have been elected President any earlier than 1932; if he served two terms, he should still have been President in 1940. But he isn't; George Norris is.

This doesn't work.

I can see a few ways of forcing things to fit, none of them satisfactory.

a) Thomas was indeed elected in 1936, with Norris as his VP. He then stepped down for some reason. But why? Scandal? If so, surely he would be a liability on the campaign trail. (Well, the continuing popularity of Bill Clinton among Democrats today suggests that this isn't as strong a point as it might be.) Ill health? But would he be well enough to campaign, if he had been ill enough to surrender the presidency? I'm not very happy with this option, but the others seem to be worse.

The next couple of possibilities require either an amendment lowering the minimum age (which seems unlikely), or the assumption that this is not our Norman Thomas, but someone else with the same name, born rather earlier (which seems like cheating on Moore's part). But there's a constraint. One of the Haggershaven time-travellers pays a visit to October 1896, and is tempted to bet on the election:
Knowing President Bryan was not only going to be elected, but would serve three terms... (p. 194)

The most likely interpretation of this is that Bryan served as President from 1897 to 1908. That leaves the period from 1909 to (presumably) 1916 open. So:

b) Thomas was elected in 1908 and re-elected in 1912. This fits, but the phrasing the only Populist to serve two terms since the beloved Bryan seems odd if he was Bryan's immediate successor.

c) Thomas was elected in 1912, and was succeeded by, in order, Marshall, Thompson, and Smith; in 1932, he came out of retirement and won another term. This is not completely absurd, since Grover Cleveland won nonconsecutive terms in our timeline, but the gap between them was only four years. Sixteen seems rather a stretch.

There's one more possibility.

d) The narrator made a mistake somewhere. But Hodge Backmaker was a scholar, trained as a historian and specializing in relatively recent USAn history. Would he have made such a basic error? It's barely possible. He had been transposed through more than 75 years, unexpectedly landing in a different timeline, and was writing some fourteen years after that. Furthermore, his responsibility for the changed timeline might have affected his memory somewhat. Still, I don't quite believe this one either.

I'm stymied. I see no satisfactory way to reconcile the data Moore gives us.

I know, I know: I'm sick, I need help.