Why I Wrote Chasing Shadows
By Bob Mumby.
It's been mentioned before amongst these articles how prevalent micro-fiction, especially in the form of lists of heads of state or government, is in the alternate history community. It’s an easy way of exploring a scenario, as the familiar gives way to the unfamiliar, in a digestible and non-time consuming format. But it has a secondary purpose. As a test drive for ideas which might expand beyond mere micro-fiction.
That's how Chasing Shadows started. A germ of an idea, realised as a list on a forum, which I then couldn't leave alone. The premise is simple – the Business Plot happens. A cabal of businessmen, distressed at the seeming anti-capitalist tack taken by a newly elected President amidst the febrile situation of the Great Depression, approach a decorated war hero and former Major-General of the Marine Corps, tasking him to lead a militia of veterans to intimidate the President into handing over all real power to the newly created office of Secretary of General Affairs.
This course of events are not an original one. They are described as part of historical record, allegations of treason laid before a congressional committee. The Business Plot has become fodder for many alternate history scenarios, whether it be about Corporate Americas where the vestiges of the state have withered away before the masters of Wall Street, or Fascist Americas where the Secretary of General Affairs becomes the equivalent of Italy's Mussolini.
What all these scenarios missed, I felt, was who those plotters turned when they wanted a war hero on a white horse to overturn democracy. It was the same man who laid out his version of events before Congress – Major General Smedley Darlington Butler.
Butler is a fascinating figure to me. Raised in a family of wealthy Quakers, tribal Republicans with a history of high political office, Butler rebelled by joining the Marines in his youth and distinguishing himself through acts of immense courage and physical fortitude. He was awarded the Medal of Honor twice and even recommended to receive the Victoria Cross for his bravery in saving the life of British soldiers during the Boxer Rebellion. He fought for the Stars and Stripes in a storied military career in which he seemed to catch every tropical disease and nearly succumbed to an infection when he elected to have a tattoo poked into his skin by a travelling artist while he was stationed in the Philippines – a tattoo of the Marines seal stretching from his throat to his waist.
He was a soldier, through and through. But in his retirement, he seems to have had time to reflect and return to the pacifist thought of his Quaker upbringing. Butler was a fiery advocate for veterans he saw as abandoned and he regularly compared himself to a mob enforcer when he considered his actions in Latin America, East Asia, the Caribbean, and who those conflicts actually benefited. By the 1930s, Butler's politics had completely unmoored from his Republican roots. He met with and made speeches alongside Communists and African-American socialists. But his favourite topic was on pacifism, the emergent military industrial complex and the international gangsterism that he saw in American foreign policy.
When Butler spoke to Congress, he made wide ranging allegations as to who was precisely involved in the Business Plot. His point of contact, Gerald MacGuire, was killed in a car accident before he could substantiate anything, and Butler had priors on alleging things that made people he didn't like look bad – most notably alleging that Mussolini committed vehicular homicide, a statement that American ambassadors were forced to apologise for at the League of Nations. My personal view is that the Plotters spoke with one another and threw around talk of overthrowing the government but probably in an idle, non-committal fashion.
But that's boring isn't it?
I decided to assume the worst. And that, for whatever reason, the Plotters overlooked Butler's brazenly opposed political beliefs. I found the idea far too funny, that these schemers, so opposed to even the modest adjustments to untrammelled capitalism that the New Deal represented that they should seek to overthrow democracy, should then deliver absolute power into the hands of a man who absolutely hated their guts.
From there, things rapidly spiralled. One list inspired a handful more, in more pulpy, silly scenarios. But I had stumbled on something in the original list that would make it into Chasing Shadows – what I felt to be the original idea of Al Smith winning the Democratic nomination in 1932 by peeling away Southern populists from Roosevelt's camp. Smith is slain by Zangara, and suddenly an isolated Huey Long is thrust into the Presidency with all of his arrogance and corruption and talk of ‘Every Man A King’.
Here was the cocktail I felt justified what followed. Rather than the aristocratic Roosevelt, we have a flamboyant, rabble-rousing Southerner. Any assurance that the President was a class ally is washed away. Long was at times more radical in his propositions than Roosevelt – but a committed defender of democracy he was not. The Plotters being more willing to follow through on their plans, Butler is also more willing to lend a sympathetic ear. Better for power to be in his hands than for it to be in the lap of the graft manufacturing Long.
When I realised I had something, the immediate comparison I made in my head was Agent Lavender. Here was an alternate history novel which fundamentally asks the question ‘what if this conspiracy theory… was true?’ And with Lavender as my lodestar, I immediately thought this could be a novel.
I mapped out a basic sketch of a plan, roughly divided into four parts, which would take us from Butler's March on Washington in 1934 to his death in the midst of the Second World War in 1940. I wanted to assemble on an ensemble cast and in the first draft it followed the lines of the granular political thriller I initially envisaged. The POV characters were politicians mostly. But I began to lose momentum and struggled for why.
The answer soon became obvious. There's only so many times you can have a character explain some convoluted process of congressional politics. The cast of my tale was overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. The Butler Regime as I saw it represented an opportunity to tell the story of a very different 1930s. There's no New Deal. Something very different is made while Butler turns upon his crypto-fascist sponsors. And I researching my POV characters I found that I could spread my wings wider if I replaced them with their spouse. Both Delores Delaney and Leslyn Heinlein's tales began as Alvin Karpis and Robert A Heinlein's, and I believe the story is much stronger for their perspectives rather than their OTL husbands’.
My novel took shape over half a decade in which I was repeatedly put out by real life events outstripping my unpublished work. The fascist paramilitary, the Black Legion, uses skulls in their iconography partially as an evolution of the real-life anti-trade union KKK splinter and partially because I wanted them to look the part of evil Nazis. It was silly and self-indulgent, I thought. Imagine my surprise when the alt-right in America, including Blue Lives Matter, began appropriating the Punisher skull for their own symbology. In late 2019, I wrote a scene in which the right cannot cope with Butler's formal election as President and attempts a coup – an uprising ultimately ended by a mixture of trade unions and the left-paramilitary Victory Legion marching on the White House. Barely two months later, came the events of January 6th.
The work continued to evolve. Feedback from Marion Digena indicated that amongst the perspectives I had presented, what was missing was the thoughts of the fascists who was briefly empowered by the Business Plot before being marginalised by Butler. Through the Behind the Badtarfs podcast I stumbled on Otto Meiners, member of the explicitly Nazi German-American Bund, and founder of the Portland police union. Adding his perspective was difficult, but rewarding as it gave me the opportunity to show rather than tell what was going on beneath the surface of those who had been radicalised into marching with Butler and were then cast aside.
The question of why I wrote Chasing Shadows, is more like how did I finish Chasing Shadows. When I began, it was about satisfying that amusing concept of quasi-fascist businessmen accidentally installing a socialist government. As I wrote it, we went through the events of 2020, and these real events of radicalisation, the rise of the alt-right, the protests of Black Lives Matter and the militarization of the police, increasingly made my writing feel like a polemic about current events. By the time it was published, these events were in the past but the radicalisation and fears of American fascism are still with us.
I always knew how Chasing Shadows would end. That I reached that end still astonishes me, but I think it was only made possible by the real world events we lived and continue to live through. Chasing Shadows feels to me like a relevant story to the current time, one that I hope resonates with those who read it.
Chasing Shadows is on sale from Amazon and all Books2Read platforms now.
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