Hot Dry American Summer – May 1938 – October 1938
They ill-fated Longist offensives against Detroit and Cleveland of May 1938 had left 10,000s of Baton Rouge’s best troops caught behind enemy lines. The final loss of these soldiers was far from a certainty following their encirclement – with only thing Red lines separating the main of the Longist army from the cut off troops. For the next weeks the Longists, having already worn their fighting potential down through their initial offensives, attempted to secure a breakout and the safe return to friendly lines. The syndicalists, believed to be a spent force just weeks before, showed incredible resilience to hold out against these counter attacks, maintaining their encirclements while launching wave after wave of attacks on the beleaguered Longist troops in the two pockets – slowly wearing them down as their supplies dwindled to nothing.
The first to fall was the Cleveland pocket on 13 June after nearly a month cut off. The Michigan pocket lasted a further 3 weeks – giving in only on 3 July by which malnutrition and disease were claiming lives at a faster rate than syndicalist bullets. All told, almost 40,000 men had been captured and around a 10,000 further lost in the fighting – this included many of the best trained and equipped forces under their command. This represented a loss of a little under a tenth of the entire Baton Rouge army in the field, and a fifth of their total casualties in the war to date. For a military that had spent most of the conflict firmly on the front foot – this was by far the largest disaster the Longists had faced in the war. The offensive potential of Baton Rouge’s army had been seriously degraded, forcing Huey Long’s government to rebuild its lost strength before taking the battle to the enemy once more. As such, the front lines with the syndicalists in the Mid West, after months of progress, settled into stable trenches for the rest of the summer.
Beyond the United States, the international situation was evolving at pace; with the shadow of syndicalism making great strides across the world. In Europe, the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that had brought the Germans, Third Internationale and Entente into a fiercely contested proxy war, reached its end in July 1938 with the syndicalists triumphant, albeit with Entente-aligned Portugal occupying Galicia. This represented a tremendous victory for the international revolution, expanding the block of European syndicalist states and greatly improving France’s strategic position.
Mere weeks before the victory of the Spanish syndicalists, another was had broken out on European soil in the Low Countries. The Kingdom of Flanders-Wallonia had been unhappily yoked to German imperial power since the end of the Great War. Widespread opposition to German domination had always bubbled close to the surface, before finally erupting in the Belgium Revolution of early 1938 that saw nationalist and monarchist forces collaborate alongside syndicalist revolutionaries to bring down the German-backed regime and restore an independent Belgian state. As the Belgian revolutionaries benefitted from a flood of arms from across the French border, they sought to negotiate their independence from Mitteleuropa and neutrality in the European alliance system. Although some in the Social Democrat-led German government sympathised with the democratic demands of the Belgians, the country was simply too great in strategic significance for Berlin to meekly surrender.
Instead, after a stand off through the spring months, in June 1938 the German Empire invaded with the goal of restoring Flanders-Wallonia. What the Germans had expected would be a short and victorious intervention soon turned into an international embarrassment. The invaders were halted at the Meuse River and quickly driven into a stalemate, with the Belgians even humiliatingly succeeding in counterattacking to retake some land on the east bank of the river later in the summer. The Belgian revolutionaries would proudly fight on until the overwhelming superiority of Germans arms eventually broke their resistance early in 1939 – but not before revealing the limitations of Teutonic power to the entire world.
This was not the end of European warfare in 1938. Benito Mussolini, charismatic Totalist leader of the Socialist Republic of Italy had been rapidly preparing his country for war for some time. The victory of the Internationale in Spain and the distraction of the Germans in Belgium had appeared to create an ideal opportunity for him to push forward with his dreams of a second Risorgimento, the reunification of Italy. In September, he struck – invading the Italian Republic in the north east and the pro-Entente Kingdom of Two Sicilies in the south. Mussolini’s armies proved highly successful, making rapid progress across the peninsula with the aid of significant French and British assistance.
While the breakout of war in Italy saw the Red tide spread yet further around the world, and excited many leftist Italian-Americans, it represented a depressing milestone for American syndicalists who had been holding on to the feint hope that their European allies might come to their aid through an intervention in the American Civil War through Mexico – especially with the Spanish Civil War coming to an end. Since the collapse of their front in Minnesota and Wisconsin, many American syndicalists had been clinging to the desperate belief that while they might no longer be capable of winning the Civil War outright themselves, they could hold out long enough for their comrades in the Internationale to come to their aid. Now, with Paris and London’s interest drawn back to Europe, the chances of such a major play were greatly reduced.
While syndicalism was making gains in Europe and struggling for survival in the United States, the revolution reached the crescendo of a rapid expansion across Latin America over the summer of 1938. After Colombia and Venezuela joined Mexico as full members of the Third Internationale earlier in the year, Chilean-Patagonian forces stormed Buenos Aires to achieve total control over the southern cone of South America in September.
Confident of further successes, the syndicalists then turned their eyes to the small and vulnerable republics of Central America. By early 1938, with the exception of Entente-aligned Panama, the entire region had fallen into a state of anarchy, with powerful revolutionary and counter-revolutionary insurgencies, the growth of rampant criminal gangs and without a functioning government to be found. Fearful of extending growing influence of syndicalism to their south, Baton Rouge sought to re-exert American influence in the area – working alongside a cabal of high ranking military officers across Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, agents from Huey Long’s government made plans to restore order to the region and create a strong central government capable of resisting Internationale influence.
Over the spring of 1938, around 5,000 American marines were deployed to support military coups across the region and provided technical aid in a brutal crackdown on syndicalists – which included a joint invasion of El Salvador, where the Reds had been invited as a junior partner in government. In July, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador were formally united as the Central American Republic, under the control of a federal military junta controlled by generals from all constituent nations. The Central America junta would focus on continuing its campaigns against internal enemies, while building up its ability to resist the looming threat of Mexican invasion.
Baton Rouge’s activist anti-syndicalist policy in Central America was associated with a wider diplomatic push in the wider region. Having burnished its credentials as a power that would actively resist the Red tide in the region and by now appearing to be the most likely eventual victor in the American Civil War, 1938 would see the only two major states in the region that still stood against the Internationale – Brazil and the Peru-Bolivian Confederation – formally recognise Baton Rouge as the rightful government of the United States. By the end of the summer this would result both states offering material aid to the Longists in their fight to restore order in the United States. The Brazilians and Peruvians were undoubtedly motivated by self-interest – seeking to ingratiate themselves with the likely future American government, while also speed along the reconstitution of unified United States that could chase away Europe’s growing influence in the Western Hemisphere.
The Western Front of the Civil War, waged between Baton Rouge and Sacramento, had only started to truly heat up in the autumn of 1937 as the Pacific Staters launched the First Battle of Denver in an effort to take the key city and open up a path to the Great Plains, while also pushing into Nebraska to the east. Ultimately, the Pacific Staters and their Japanese allies were held back in Colorado and, while capturing the majority of the state, were held back from securing the Nebraskan capital of Omaha. In the spring of 1938, the Longist-Pacific frontier was extended by the collapse of syndicalist power west of the Great Lakes, although the new frontlines in Minnesota proved fairly static as the Longists adopted a defensive posture and the Pacific Staters concentrated their energies elsewhere. Indeed, Colorado, and to a lesser extent Nebraska, remained the foremost battlefields of the continent-spanning front, with the first half of 1938 witnessing two further major assaults in Colorado in the Second and Third Battles of Denver, costing tens of thousands of lives.
These contests would act as a prelude to the most intense operation on the Western Front to date in the Fourth Battle of Denver. The Pacific Staters would engage in a three pronged attack, assaulting the city from the north and west, with an additional strike aimed at Colorado Springs to the south of Denver – with the aim of cutting off its rail and road connections from the south. Combined, Sacramento fielded around 45,000 American and 20,000 Japanese troops, while the Longists could field a little over half that number – but benefit from the mountainous terrain and heavily entrenched battlelines. With around 100,000 men in the field, the battle was far larger than any previously seen on the front and would rumble on for months.
For a time, prohibitionism had been one of the most powerful global movements in the Protestant world – shaping legislation from Sweden to Canada and coming close to achieving the grand prize of a nationwide constitutional ban on the sale and importation of alcohol into the United States in the late 1910s. At that time, the American prohibitionist movement possessed bi-partisan majority support in Congress and mass backing among the public – with Catholics and allies of the drinks industry being the only major obstacles to its victory. Yet this marked the peak of the movement, as after the failure to legislate for a constitutional amendment during the Wilson administration, the dray cause went into steady decline – failing to make any progress during the McAdoo Presidency of the 1920s despite the President’s own dry sympathies. William Jennings Bryan’s ill-fated 1928 Presidential campaign, cut short by the Great Commoner’s untimely death, represented the last effort to lead a nationwide political campaign with prohibition at its centre. In the 1930s, the drinks issue would continue to shrink as other social and economic issues took precedence and the energy continued to sap out of the political movement. However, despite its decline, the prohibitionist cause remained popular among many Protestants, particularly in rural area, while most states in the South and West maintained dry laws that limited or banned the sale of alcohol within their jurisdictions.
Through his political career, Huey Long, had attempted to hold a fine line between leaning into the prohibitionist movement while retaining a plausible degree of ambiguity. Attentive to sentiment in Catholic southern Louisiana and his key Catholic allies in the Mid West and Mid Atlantic, Long understood that wets were a key block in his America First coalition – leading to him seeking to quietly push the alcohol issue further down the agenda of the party in favour of more unifying anti-syndicalist and social reformist themes. For a time the outbreak of civil war pushed the prohibition out of minds entirely as all focus moved to the war effort – despite the dominance of dry states among those that sided with Long’s Baton Rouge administration in early 1937.
Unfortunately for Long, a confluence of factors would bring the drinks issue to the forefront of political discourse in Baton Rouge in 1938. Anti-alcohol writers in the press had been pushing the belief that drinking was a major source of ill-discipline on the front since the early stages of the war, while also whipping up popular distaste for big city revelry at an austere time of war. New Orleans, with its Catholicism, relative cosmopolitanism and libertine culture, became a focus of hostility that was only worsened by its use by the Russians as the nerve centre of their operations in America. It would be Gerald Smith and the Christian Nationalists who would skilfully knit together prohibitionist discontent, anxiety over growing Russian influence, anti-Catholicism and rural frustrations.
Since their formation in July 1937, the Christian Nationalists had been a thorn in the side of Huey Long’s government but had ultimately struggled to win a hearing from outside the America First tent. Indeed, the party spent most of its first six months of existence struggling for its very existence in the face of new anti-extremist legislation passed by Long’s government after the July 1937 Chicago Massacre. After the violence at Chicago, President Long had promised to create an organisation to combat subversion and political violence within the territories under his regime’s control – this would come together in the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a Congressional committee with extraordinary powers to investigate broadly defined ‘un-American’ extremism. The HUAC would come under the leadership of Texan Representative Martin Dies, a conservative Bourbon America Firster, who would make the Committee’s main focus the identifying and purging real and suspect syndicalists – supporting the arrests of tens of thousands of civilians. On the extreme right, the HUAC also sought to investigate the circumstances behind ‘politically-motivated’ lynchings of Southern Blacks, violence that had escalated rapidly in the first half of 1937, while deeming ‘non-political’ lynchings as outwith its remit. It also sought to ensure that Huey Long’s mandate for the Silver Legion to be disbanded as an independent organisation was enforced. This drew it into constant conflict with Dudley Pelley, who was accused of attempting to maintain the existence of the Legion as a paramilitary force despite the demands of the government. Smith’s Christian Nationalists found themselves tangled in the prosecutions of the HUAC for most of the rest of 1937 – focussing on defending Pelley, the Legion and the lynchers to the exclusion of all else and leaving themselves painted as an extremist force in the public eye.
Prohibition would be their path to broader appeal. In January 1938, after rumours spread that a large Russian ship had docked in New Orleans filled with vodka, a group of Christian Nationalists – aping the Boston Tea Party – stormed the unguarded vessel and proceeded to seize the liquor held aboard and pour it into the sea. As Gerald Smith celebrated this stand against Russian colonisation and the demon drink. With these actions, Smith and his radicals struck a nerve with the public, and indeed many sympathetic voices within America First. Soon the prohibition question loomed over the government in Baton Rouge, with significant internal and external pressure pushing for immediate action. Despite this pressure, Long attempted to maintain a compromise allowing for even greater restrictions at state and local level while resisted a federal ban. Most disconcertingly of all, the Christian Nationalists appeared to finally be gaining significant public traction organising around the issue.
With the Longists having been put temporarily on the backfoot by their defeats in the Mid West and the renewed Pacific Stater offensives on Denver, General MacArthur was making positive progress. In the east, his forces had finally completed the total envelopment of Philadelphia earlier in the summer and were in the process of starving its defenders into submission. Given the weakness of the syndicalists, the General sensed an opportunity to redirect his troops to take advantage of the struggles of his more powerful enemy in Baton Rouge. Although the Virginia-Washington front remained caught in the stalemate of trench warfare, the Baton Rouge regime’s long Atlantic coastline offered appetising opportunities for a bold attack. Equally, having conquered the largest part of the old syndicalist territory already, the Longists’ moment of relative weakness was unlikely to last long – the Federalists had to strike now if they had any hope of turning the balance of power.
The Federalists had previously launched an amphibious invasion of the Longist Atlantic coastline in the summer of 1937. But this operation had been supported by barely 30,000 poorly trained militia units – acting as a strategic experiment as much as a concerted effort to alter the balance of power. Operation Gatorclaw would be very different, involving more than four times as many men, including heavily armed and professional troops.
In early August 1938, this great army was unleashed on the eastern coastline of Florida and Georgia. Quickly the invaders overwhelmed the lightly defended beaches and pushed inland. After just two weeks the crucial port of Miami fell, its 5,000 defenders surrendering to the MacArthurites, to ensure a steady supply line to the invaders. To the north, the invasion faced much stronger resistance around the port of Savannah, where 10,000 Minutemen defended against more than twice their number bravely, and Tallahassee, where General Moseley demanded the Longists fight to the last man. Held up around these two cities, the Federalists were unable to expand their bridgehead as tens of thousands of Longist troops were redirected from other fronts to join the defence. Nonetheless, by the end of September a steady frontline had been established that left almost all of Florida and parts of southern Georgia firmly under Washington’s control.
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