Amelia Earhart as the leader of a Fascist U.S. uprising
- Thread starter Bullmoose713
- Start date
I mean it's technically not impossible, but at the same time, it's technically not impossible that Amelia Earhart died when the air around her plane spontaneously turned to gold. The issue people keep trying to get out there is that Amelia Earhart had zero provable links to fascists thinkers and would take dozens upon dozens of PODs to make it seem even slightly possible.
@Bullmoose713 as thread OP--
I've said why I think it is pretty gauche for you to do this. It is not unkosher, just a bad idea IMHO.
It was silly to say "there is no way to know her politics" as though historical biography is not in fact pretty much all about uncovering the character of people; knowing that in an American context of the 1920s and '30s we would very reasonably have an excellent guess as to her politics. That at any rate is what we expect of most normal public figures, and it seemed strange you'd take another position.
But of course you are not a public figure, I have no way of knowing your reasons for this strange proposal except those you might wish to disclose--which you've been pretty cagey about.
Piece of advice if you are bound and determined to push this apparently tasteless and ugly tack--
Don't make her conversion to a fascist cause a late life, late 1930s sort of spur of the moment thing. Do you think people in general shift easily like that? Or that she was a particularly weak character prone to being swayed this way or that more easily than most people?
If you want a right wing Amelia Earhart, lay the groundwork early in her life, in the 1920s. It might not even bar her from being active as a National Women's Party supporter; as noted, some suffragists and other women's rights activists were indeed reactionary in other ways--it would indeed push her to a certain wing of the movement to be sure.
So she probably would not be fast friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, though for all I know Roosevelt had some conservative friends (I doubt it, but maybe she did). She might spend more time with people like Ayn Rand perhaps, and with Southern segregationist feminists, and be closer to Lindbergh, maybe even push him over the edge into more unforgivable forms of fascism. She might move in circles with people like Henry Ford.
I think it is bloody tragic to try to push her ATL self that way, and I suspect that in fact her fundamental character would not go so far in that direction, but that is based of course on very superficial pop culture impressions plus a quick skim of a couple Wikipedia articles.
If what is motivating you to bring this particular hobbyhorse to this race is that you actually know something obscure and yet documented to show a side of her not generally known, perhaps it is well for you to bring it out, painful though it may be for some of us to contemplate. Just be sure, saying such a radical thing about a well liked personality of OTL, any claims along these lines purporting to be based in the OTL historic person should stand serious critical scrutiny--it is OK if they are obscure, as long as stuff someone just made up is not presented as fact.
And as I understand the rules, you can of course make up anything you like about an ATL person.
I've said why I think it is pretty gauche for you to do this. It is not unkosher, just a bad idea IMHO.
It was silly to say "there is no way to know her politics" as though historical biography is not in fact pretty much all about uncovering the character of people; knowing that in an American context of the 1920s and '30s we would very reasonably have an excellent guess as to her politics. That at any rate is what we expect of most normal public figures, and it seemed strange you'd take another position.
But of course you are not a public figure, I have no way of knowing your reasons for this strange proposal except those you might wish to disclose--which you've been pretty cagey about.
Piece of advice if you are bound and determined to push this apparently tasteless and ugly tack--
Don't make her conversion to a fascist cause a late life, late 1930s sort of spur of the moment thing. Do you think people in general shift easily like that? Or that she was a particularly weak character prone to being swayed this way or that more easily than most people?
If you want a right wing Amelia Earhart, lay the groundwork early in her life, in the 1920s. It might not even bar her from being active as a National Women's Party supporter; as noted, some suffragists and other women's rights activists were indeed reactionary in other ways--it would indeed push her to a certain wing of the movement to be sure.
So she probably would not be fast friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, though for all I know Roosevelt had some conservative friends (I doubt it, but maybe she did). She might spend more time with people like Ayn Rand perhaps, and with Southern segregationist feminists, and be closer to Lindbergh, maybe even push him over the edge into more unforgivable forms of fascism. She might move in circles with people like Henry Ford.
I think it is bloody tragic to try to push her ATL self that way, and I suspect that in fact her fundamental character would not go so far in that direction, but that is based of course on very superficial pop culture impressions plus a quick skim of a couple Wikipedia articles.
If what is motivating you to bring this particular hobbyhorse to this race is that you actually know something obscure and yet documented to show a side of her not generally known, perhaps it is well for you to bring it out, painful though it may be for some of us to contemplate. Just be sure, saying such a radical thing about a well liked personality of OTL, any claims along these lines purporting to be based in the OTL historic person should stand serious critical scrutiny--it is OK if they are obscure, as long as stuff someone just made up is not presented as fact.
And as I understand the rules, you can of course make up anything you like about an ATL person.
Jesus, why the personal attacks? All I'm doing is asking a question.
Okay, to answer your question, if AE completed her trip around the world, and if(and this one is a pretty big "if"), she got converted to fascism, yes, Americans might like her, but probably no moreso than they would like anyone else leading a fascist party. Whatever aversion Americans IOTL had to someone like Lindbergh leading the country, isn't going to disappear just because it's Earhart instead.
The most prominent fascist or quasi-fascist of the era in question was Huey Long, and he is not much remembered today, apart from history buffs and people who live in Lousiana. Earhart would likely suffer the same dive into obscurity, with only her aviation career keeping her memory, to whatever extent, alive.
I think Earhart would've been even more famous had she completed her flight.
Guys, you're looking at the wrong female pioneering pilot:
en.wikipedia.org
Her entire bio seems tailor-made for the scenario in the OP.
It's good to note that Amelia Earhart is the one who we remember today, but she's far from the only noteworthy female pilot of the era. Personally I think that if Ingalls comes to power in some sort of dystopian fascist America setting, Bessie Coleman should be the one to shoot her down in a dogfight for the ages.
Laura Ingalls (aviator) - Wikipedia
Her entire bio seems tailor-made for the scenario in the OP.
It's good to note that Amelia Earhart is the one who we remember today, but she's far from the only noteworthy female pilot of the era. Personally I think that if Ingalls comes to power in some sort of dystopian fascist America setting, Bessie Coleman should be the one to shoot her down in a dogfight for the ages.
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Okay, best-case scenario, she's remembered like Lindbergh. Aviator who did something cool once, got suckered into fascism, went nowhere politically.
None of that affects the political system of the USA, especially assuming that everything else about World War II goes the same way.
Have you ever read Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique?
That's a big part of what the book was all about. Part of it was documenting how the post-WWII reaction to drive women back into the children-kitchen-church sphere to make room for men in the workplace had a bad impact on women, and much of the rest was pointing out how society in the 1920s-war era had in fact accepted that women were moving into the traditional male spheres and belonged there. Or so it was her impression growing up.
It is not in fact a deeply radical attack on patriarchy as such; it is very much in the vein of "hey, we already proved women are people too, just like men, why are we tolerating going back on the deal?"
As someone growing up in the 1970s witnessing the reaction against what we then called "Women's Liberation" with people like Friedan and Gloria Steinem as spokeswomen for it, and people like Phyllis Schaefly and a legion of smug (though plainly worried and alarmed) men talking down to them (when not looking around shiftily and nervously) I just naturally assumed Friedan was some sort of ultra-radical. But she was just saying, let's have the sort of half-baked equality we already had, and build on that, as I learned when I got around to reading it.
This applies to a lot of culture war verities. Quite often, people who look like wild-eyed trouble makers trying for some half-baked Utopia defying what is presented as the eternal wisdom of the ages are actually just opposing a quite recent rollback of perfectly reasonable tolerances that have already prevailed with no great disaster following, only to be pushed back hard in an Orwellian backlash that then pretends to be just about preserving what always has been and must always shall be.
We can see this with African American civil rights for instance. The gains of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s actually accomplished little more than the gains former slaves had in the 1860s; during the Reconstruction decade plus following the end of the Civil War, African Americans accomplished things quite comparable to the sudden and hailed transformations of the later 1960s. Jim Crow in the interim was a quite deliberate, terroristic and Orwellian rollback, involving the wholesale falsification of history and construction of a massive ahistorical mythology we know of as the Lost Cause here and with it a whole system of public-private partnership racist repression.
Similarly with gay rights; before the Cold War era, homosexuality was a bit like the practice of gray-area-legal abortion and birth control generally; it happened a lot, people knew about it but politely did not speak of it, Don't Ask Don't Tell writ large. Then in the mid-20th century a pushback happened and in reaction to that, the people involved pretty much had to take stock and either figure out how to survive as a repressed people--or speak out, defy the "polite" pretense these things were not in fact part of the normal order of things, and boldly and openly assert their right to exist and handle life on their own terms, without pretense.
This is the general nature of the culture wars, and I think you quite badly underestimate how much scope there was in liberal American society for a partial but significant feminism, and how much the apparent radicalism of later more strident movements is a reaction to brutal repression. A key to such repression is always a cover-up of how the real past was a lot more complicated and in contradiction to simplistic conservative formulas about how people ought to live--which are thus revealed as polemical and ideological constructs just as much as the most radical manifesto for an untried Utopia ever is.
So, were there OTL party leaders who were women? Especially extremely conservative right-wing parties? Led by women? In the 1920s-30s?
As I already mentioned in thread - Rotha Lintorn-Orman, founder of British Fascisti. Though, I admit it's only example I can remember, but still exists.
Rotha Lintorn-Orman - Wikipedia
As I already mentioned in thread - Rotha Lintorn-Orman, founder of British Fascisti. Though, I admit it's only example I can remember, but still exists.
Rotha Lintorn-Orman - Wikipedia
Sorry, the poster I was repyling to was talking about American society. While I did not repeat that, I referred to that.
There were some in the U.S.:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I'm sure there were a few more. There was actually a wave of female participation in far right movements in the '30s and '40s, probably because suffragettism and female empowerment applied to both the left and right.
en.wikipedia.org
www.press.uchicago.edu
(Book is available on Internet Archive)
I've discovered these groups/movements while looking for obscure ideologies that could potentially fit in Kaiserreich, and have come to realize that the U.S. was absolutely brimming with fringe pseudo-fascist and outright fascist societies during that era. It's just fortunate that most weren't huge in membership.
Plus, there were also the lesser-known Tokyo Rose types:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Elizabeth Dilling - Wikipedia
Alma Bridwell White - Wikipedia
I'm sure there were a few more. There was actually a wave of female participation in far right movements in the '30s and '40s, probably because suffragettism and female empowerment applied to both the left and right.
Mothers' movement - Wikipedia
Women of the Far Right
The majority of American women supported the Allied cause during World War II. and made sacrifices on the home front to benefit the war effort. But U.S. intervention was opposed by a movement led by ultraright women whose professed desire to keep their sons out of combat was mixed with militant...
(Book is available on Internet Archive)
I've discovered these groups/movements while looking for obscure ideologies that could potentially fit in Kaiserreich, and have come to realize that the U.S. was absolutely brimming with fringe pseudo-fascist and outright fascist societies during that era. It's just fortunate that most weren't huge in membership.
Plus, there were also the lesser-known Tokyo Rose types:
Mildred Gillars - Wikipedia
Rita Zucca - Wikipedia
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These are political activists, but not party leaders.
What they have in common with the British gal above is that none of the three ever had to face an election. Not just an open political election; but not even an internal party election. In that, you would have needed the members of the party to choose between having their party being led by a woman, or by the other candidate, a man.
And then, assuming the unbelievable happened, the woman would have needed to run for some political post, an open election in which all voters would have been called to choose between her and the other party's candidate, a man.
I doubt it would happen.