A Little Uchronia
Jan. 22nd, 2005 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowJack Finney's Time After Time is a very nice little book. The SFnal gimmick is a species of time travel, but the real beauty of the story lies in atmospherics rather than plot; Finney works hard to evoke late 19th-century New York, and for the nostalgia-prone (guilty, yerroner!) succeeds admirably. That's not what I want to talk about; I want to go off on a tangent from one plot point. For the sake of those who might read it in future, and who want to avoid spoilers, I'm going to put it under a cut.
The time-travel experiments in the story, which take place in the late 1960s or early 1970s, are conducted by a small and secret agency of the US government, and, as might be expected, its leaders have a Plan. Concerned by the presence of a Soviet client state, Cuba, so close to the United States, they decide to forestall the danger by arranging for the US to purchase Cuba from Spain in the 1890s. Apparently, during the second Cleveland administration, this purchase was actually considered, for the sake of avoiding the looming war between the two countries. A minor figure in the administration, however, got the President's ear and persuaded him not to make the purchase. The Plan, then, is to discredit him somewhat earlier, thus keeping him out of a position of influence and ensuring that Cuba would become a US possession.
Unfortunately for the plotters, it seems to me that this would have caused more problems than it would resolve, even from their viewpoint. (The assumption that the purchase would prevent the establishment of a Marxist regime in Cuba is itself problematic; the US might, after all, have given Cuba independence at some point, as it did the Philippines.)
Assume the purchase made, and that it forestalls the Spanish-American War. One of the consequences of that war, in our timeline, was the catapulting of Theodore Roosevelt into national prominence. Without the publicity of the Rough Rider campaign, TR might not have been put on the Republican ticket in 1900, and thus would not have become President upon the assassination of William McKinley. One of the major acts of the Roosevelt presidency was the great buildup of the US Navy, in particular the building of a large number of destroyers; with another man as President, this might not have happened, or it might have happened later, with, probably, a smaller number of destroyers as a result.
Why is this significant? Because (as I understand it) the major contribution of the United States to the Allied effort in World War I was not its army - the impact of those green troops is debatable - but the provision of destroyers to Britain for convoy duty, breaking the German blockade. Britain was in dire straits by 1917, and might have been forced to surrender without this aid. Remove the Spanish-American War, and you may hand victory in World War I to the Central Powers.
Or suppose this does not happen; suppose that the US does build up its destroyer fleet in a timely fashion, even without TR. The Spanish-American War had another significant consequence: the US came into the possession of the Philippines. Move downtime, then, to the late 1930s, and assume that events have generally followed the same path as in our timeline. Japan is waging war in Asia, and the US has imposed an embargo on, among other things, oil. There is another source of oil available nearby, in the Dutch East Indies, and with the Netherlands under the heel of Germany they should be easy pickings. In between lie the Philippines - but in this timeline, they do not belong to the United States, and can be taken without declaring war on the US. The attack on Pearl Harbor is not needed, and US entry into the Second World War is delayed if not prevented. The Axis probably will be defeated in any case, but the shape of the resulting world is not likely to be to the liking of our secret government plotters.
None of this is certain, of course. But I think these two scenarios are a little too plausible to make the game worth the candle. Is forestalling Castro worth the risk of such altered outcomes for one or the other of the world wars?
The time-travel experiments in the story, which take place in the late 1960s or early 1970s, are conducted by a small and secret agency of the US government, and, as might be expected, its leaders have a Plan. Concerned by the presence of a Soviet client state, Cuba, so close to the United States, they decide to forestall the danger by arranging for the US to purchase Cuba from Spain in the 1890s. Apparently, during the second Cleveland administration, this purchase was actually considered, for the sake of avoiding the looming war between the two countries. A minor figure in the administration, however, got the President's ear and persuaded him not to make the purchase. The Plan, then, is to discredit him somewhat earlier, thus keeping him out of a position of influence and ensuring that Cuba would become a US possession.
Unfortunately for the plotters, it seems to me that this would have caused more problems than it would resolve, even from their viewpoint. (The assumption that the purchase would prevent the establishment of a Marxist regime in Cuba is itself problematic; the US might, after all, have given Cuba independence at some point, as it did the Philippines.)
Assume the purchase made, and that it forestalls the Spanish-American War. One of the consequences of that war, in our timeline, was the catapulting of Theodore Roosevelt into national prominence. Without the publicity of the Rough Rider campaign, TR might not have been put on the Republican ticket in 1900, and thus would not have become President upon the assassination of William McKinley. One of the major acts of the Roosevelt presidency was the great buildup of the US Navy, in particular the building of a large number of destroyers; with another man as President, this might not have happened, or it might have happened later, with, probably, a smaller number of destroyers as a result.
Why is this significant? Because (as I understand it) the major contribution of the United States to the Allied effort in World War I was not its army - the impact of those green troops is debatable - but the provision of destroyers to Britain for convoy duty, breaking the German blockade. Britain was in dire straits by 1917, and might have been forced to surrender without this aid. Remove the Spanish-American War, and you may hand victory in World War I to the Central Powers.
Or suppose this does not happen; suppose that the US does build up its destroyer fleet in a timely fashion, even without TR. The Spanish-American War had another significant consequence: the US came into the possession of the Philippines. Move downtime, then, to the late 1930s, and assume that events have generally followed the same path as in our timeline. Japan is waging war in Asia, and the US has imposed an embargo on, among other things, oil. There is another source of oil available nearby, in the Dutch East Indies, and with the Netherlands under the heel of Germany they should be easy pickings. In between lie the Philippines - but in this timeline, they do not belong to the United States, and can be taken without declaring war on the US. The attack on Pearl Harbor is not needed, and US entry into the Second World War is delayed if not prevented. The Axis probably will be defeated in any case, but the shape of the resulting world is not likely to be to the liking of our secret government plotters.
None of this is certain, of course. But I think these two scenarios are a little too plausible to make the game worth the candle. Is forestalling Castro worth the risk of such altered outcomes for one or the other of the world wars?
