Joe Steele

"Joe Steele" sounds like an interesting book. I will see if I can find it at my local lending library.



I can give you a list of at least 80 Soviet Spies who were active in the USA in the 1920s-1940s. Some were spread throughout the government bureaucracy and even one was an advisor to FDR, so I have little doubt that the Dems of those times would have believed whatever Joe Steele told them.


Note: Janis Ian is a name out of the past. I loved her song "Society's Child" when it came out in 1965.  As with most pop songs, I didn't care about the lyrics, it was the music which interested me. I particularly liked the refrain, "I can't see you anymore baby, can't see you anymore" or words to that effect. Again, not because of the lyrics, but because it was in a mode which was somewhat haunting. 

Most of the spies were not known of until later, but some were suspected by the FBI and some of these were covered for by the Truman Administration when McCarthy started his inquiries.

There is no doubt that there were a good number of "fellow travelers" in and around government in those days. J. Edgar Hoover made his name in the early 1920s going after commies, many of whom, he help get expelled from the USA.

The state of affairs was even tacitly accepted once the Nazis invaded the USSR. The OSS had plenty of leftist as did the émigré scientific community.

Well, providing a link to the EPUB or KIndle Ready entry for a book in a library of thousands on my detachable hard drive would do no one any good. My tradition has been to make sure to include title and author, and it should be clear very soon what type of book it is. Of course, how I write a book review is very different if I write one as I go along (I'm about a quarter of the way through the book at present). As for size, I have no idea how many pages it is. The e-books don't provide that information (which can vary slightly between editions).

But I do have a few comments in my review intended to reflect what I think. Final conclusions will have to await the book's completion, though the fact that I'm reading it can be considered evidence that I expect to enjoy it. I once wrote an analysis of Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga, a set of stories set in a Kikuyu utopia (he's done a lot of trips to Kenya). I had already read the stories individually when the book came out, but didn't form my conclusion about the book until I finished the review. But I do try to write book reviews with the thought that this will help a potential reader decide whether or not to read it (and if I liked it, as is usually the case, I hope the reader will want to read it).

Sorry, but my book reviewing style comes from decades of writing them in FOSFAX, and during nearly all that time books were bought in bookstores. I did give the publisher as well as author and title in the heading. The structure here is a bit different, but I use much the same technique I got used to doing.

Steele wouldn't be Stalin without an American form of the gulags, and that comes up next. He proposes a bill to allow him to take prisoners out of jails and send them to the Dust Bowl to help rebuild it. It's a good idea, and it does ensure that the prisoners can't be held longer than their original jail terms.

Unless they break the rules, of course. That's reasonable, isn't it? Well, it is if the rules are enforced reasonably. If not, you can have Jean Valjean, who spent more time in jail for trying to escape (which only encouraged him to keep trying) than for the original trivial theft (bread for his hungry family, as I recall). One can suspect that there will be a lot of cases like that, but it will also be increasingly difficult to find out. America is still a free country. Nominally.

Meanwhile, Steele easily defeats Alf Landon just as FDR did in our timeline. (I have to wonder if Steele, so lacking in charisma, could really do so well. It's not like Stalin ever allowed himself to face an election, other than the voting in the Central Committee by party apparatchiks. And when Kirov got more votes than Stalin did, he soon ended up murdered. Funny about that.)

Charlie, still so helpful to Steele, is called in for an interview after the inauguration. It goes well -- until Steele brings up Mike's much less helpful writing. Charlie flees the room quickly after that. But he still can't bring himself to admit the implications of his level of fear when dealing with Steele and Scriabin.

Things continue to heat up in Steele's new America. At a speech in Chattanooga dedicating a newly completed nearby dam, Steele gets shot by a promising, but very political, Army officer. Unfortunately, the damage wasn't much at least the damage to Steele. The damage to the country is a lot worse. It turns out the officer had been outspoken in his dislike of Steele, and the latter and his henchmen start wondering if their failure to turn him in was because they agreed with him. (The fact that he had a legal right to say such things would be irrelevant to them.) So after awhile [x]Marshal Tukhachevsky[/x[much of the military leadership is arrested for treason and plotting with a foreign power. It isn't long before they're executed, though Turtledove doesn't cover their trial. (Did they all confess too? Doesn't say, which is a pity. That probably means they did.)

Steele arranges a law allowing him to send any "wreckers" -- i.e., anyone who displeases him, including hostile reporters like Mike Sullivan -- to the labor camps. Mike, after pointing out the danger of what's happening in an article in which he was very scrupulously accurate, finds out that the truth is irrelevant now. He gets arrested, sent before an administrative law judge, tried (and convicted) in about a minute, and sentenced to a term of 5 to 10 years of hard labor. His wife calls Charlie, who goes to the White House to see if he can do anything. They were expecting him, of course, and Mikoian assures him there's nothing he can do about it. Indeed, if Mike weren't Charlie's brother, he would have been arrested long before.

The gloves are off, and Charlie now knows what he has (in his own small way) helped to bring about. But, lacking the moral courage of his brother, what can he do about it? Indeed, even if he had that courage, what could he do but end up in a labor camp himself? (One thing to wonder about: Would J. Edgar Hoover really have gone along with creating and enforcing such a police state? I know most people on the left think so, and eventually he might become corrupted sufficiently to go along with it. But people forget that Hoover opposed the Japanese internment and, for that matter, the execution of the Rosenbergs. Somehow I have my doubts. But let's be real: if Hoover didn't, they would have found someone else who could and would.)

The events of World War II pretty much go as in OTL, though with different people involved. MacArthur had survived the purges, helped by the fact that he was running military affairs in the Philippines. But Steele was most unhappy that American planes at Clark Field were caught on the ground the day after the war began, and finally ordered Dugout Doug from Corregidor to Australia, and then eventually to DC. There he was arrested for the usual drumhead court-martial. Some notable military commanders, such as Nimitz and Spruance in the Navy and Eisenhower and Bradley in the Army. had survived the purges.

Charlie Sullivan continued to write speeches for a leader he no longer cared for -- but if he quit, he would probably get sent to a labor camp himself, or so he figures. His brother has adjusted fairly well to life in a camp, becoming a capable lumberjack, but he decides to volunteer for the Army. Now that the war is on, they're allowing that -- as long as they join punishment battalions, to do all the hardest and most dangerous tasks. The expectation is that most will be killed, and so it turns out, though some survive. Mike is one, despite landing on Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the two Japanese invasions. He even gets a Medal of Valor (awarded by Steele himself who no doubt enjoys the irony a lot better than Mike does), and after the war finally ends stays in the Army (and finally in the regular forces, not a punishment battalion). He sees no future as a civilian -- no one would hire him as a reporter, and he has no wish to be a lumberjack, so being a soldier is the best option available.

As the reference to the Japanese invasions indicates, there was (and as of the beginning of the 1948 campaign, still isn't) an atomic bomb. In our world, Einstein wrote a letter to FDR urging that it be built to forestall a German bomb. IN this one he sent no such letter, no doubt finding Steele to unsavory to be trusted with such a weapon. When this comes out at the end of the war, Steele considers Einstein the worst wrecker of all and has him (and some other nuclear physicists) executed for failing to inform him of the possibility.

Meanwhile, Mike finds himself with an ideal military posting, occupying Japan on the border with the portion taken by Trotsky. He's glad to be as far away from Steele as possible. He notices that a lot more Japanese flee from north to south than the reverse, an indication that even rule by Steele isn't as bad as Soviet rule. Everyone knows that sooner or later the two great powers will be fighting, but no one has any idea yet when. At this point (nearly 4/5 done) Steele is about to run for a fifth term (with Garner still his running mate).

J. Edgar Hoover at the Government Bureau of Investigation and his boss Wyshinsky as AG are pursuing Soviet spies now, and so are some local prosecutors. One of them is a very effective California lawyer who hasn't been named yet but is clearly Richard Nixon.