Joe Steele by Harry Turtledove
Cover art by Paul Youll
Published by Roc Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
This novel had its beginnings in a line from Janis Ian's song "God and the FBI," in which it was stated that "Stalin was a Democrat." When Harry Turtledove was invited to contribute a story to a tribute anthology, Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, he thought about what it would be like if that line weren't just a metaphor, but a literal fact. What would it mean for Joseph Stalin, or some alternate version of him, to be a member of the Democratic Party?
The result was the story of a world where Stalin's parents decided to immigrate to the US, settling in California just in time for their son to be born a US citizen (presumably he was conceived before that decision, since even a slight change in the timing of the reproductive act will make it likely that a different sperm will unite with the ovum, resulting in a child with a very different genetic makeup). He grew up to enter local politics, becoming mayor of Fresno and then that part of California's Representative in Congress. And in 1932, amidst Herbert Hoover's failed response to the Great Depression, he sets his sights on the Presidency.
It's a fascinating concept, yet at least for me it fell short in the execution. I have not read the original short story (the anthology being difficult to find), but I am wondering if some of the elements that I find problematic in the novel were originally clever in-jokes in the short story.
Some of the problem may just be the difference between a short story and a novel. A short story is typically something that you can read in a single sitting, so you don't really get an opportunity to ruminate over the likelihood of things like the families of three of Stalin's biggest cronies (Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan) all immigrating to the US and just happening to be in positions where they could be drawn into the orbit of this alternate Stalin. If you recognize them, you may well chuckle over the reference to Primary World history, but you don't really think about what would be necessary for it to actually happen.
By contrast, a novel is a work of such magnitude that it's typically consumed over some period, a few chapters at a time. This gives the reader plenty of time for fridge logic to intrude on the enjoyment of the book. Say you read a couple of chapters in the morning, then you need to head off to work. While you're driving, you start to think about just how likely it really would be for so many elements of Stalin's life to replicate themselves in the United States, and it just keeps nagging at you when you return to the book that evening, in a way that just wouldn't get a chance to happen while you're reading a short story, for the simple reason that you're reading that short story all at once, with no pauses to ponder whether this or that element is actually all that likely. As a result, the novel can end up feeling like a more flimsy world that doesn't hold together as well as it did at shorter length.
That said, the novel version isn't badly written. It's just not really rigorous alternate history, and for a person who wants to just read an interesting what-if without tugging at every change, it can actually be quite thought-provoking: what would happen if a dictatorial type, an American Stalin, were to come to power. How much would the Constitution mitigate his abuses, and how much would he be able to work his way around Constitutional restraints on central power to force his plans and programs through?
One of Harry Turtledove's distinguishing characteristics in his alternate histories is his way of holding the great men of history at arms' length, focusing instead upon the ordinary people whose lives are affected by the change in history. This novel is no exception, and he actually takes it further than usual.
Most Turtledove novels have a large number of point-of-view characters, particularly when events are happening all over the world. In this novel, we have exactly two: brothers Mike and Charlie Sullivan, Irish-American newsmen from New York City. Mike has remained in the Big Apple, working as a reporter for the New York Post, while Charlie found work with the Associated Press and is now in their Washington Bureau, covering political events.
When the novel begins, Charlie is in Chicago, covering the 1932 Democratic National Convention, which is about to nominate the party's candidate for President. There are two leading candidates, Joe Steele of California and Franklin D. Roosevelt, governor of New York. After a brief encounter with the titular character, Charlie heads out to do a little necessary business and overhears one of Joe Steele's cronies making a hasty phone call, telling someone to "take care of it," and insisting that tomorrow will be too late. Although it leave Charlie uneasy, it's just a hunch. There's no substance upon which he can hang an actual suspicion, so he moves on.
Meanwhile, his older brother is in Albany, covering the goings-on at the Governor's Mansion. And then the entire place is engulfed in flames, so rapidly that only a few people could escape. FDR, disabled by polio, never has a chance, and his charred remains are later found by those of Eleanor. Which is awfully convenient for his opponent, who takes the Democratic nomination and will go on to take the White House.
The investigation by the fire inspector cannot rule out arson, and then the documents mysteriously disappear, which only serves to make Mike even more suspicious. With a little poking, he finally obtains a copy of the report, from someone who is clearly very afraid to be known to have been in possession of them.
When Joe Steele actually takes the oath of office and begins to enact his four-year plan (only four because that's the length of a presidential term), we get to see a fascinating mix of Stalinist ruthlessness and an essential Americanism that can never quite be completely suppressed. For instance, when the Supreme Court declares a number of his programs unconstitutional (as happened to FDR in our own timeline), Joe Steele doesn't bother with any schemes to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices of his selection. Instead, he has evidence fabricated that the four most obdurate Justices were colluding with the Nazis, and has them tried by a military court, in which all four of them plead guilty and thrown themselves at the mercy of the court.
This scene was particularly of interest in me because of the roles of several well-known World War II military leaders -- Ray Spruance, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton and Omar Bradley -- as military judges. It was frighteningly effective to see these men doing something that was so fundamentally contrary to the traditions of America -- and it's a big reason why I think it would've worked better if, instead of having three of Stalin's henchmen having also immigrated (which adds additional departure points), we'd seen some American political leaders gravitating into this alternate Stalin's orbit, and how it changed their political trajectories.
Joe Steele isn't satisfied with destroying the elites who aren't on board with his grand scheme for getting America back on his feet. He decides that wherever things aren't going as smoothly as they ought, it has to be the result of wreckers sabotaging things, and they must be punished. Since there's no use of having them lounging around in prison eating their heads off, he's going to put them to work. So he creates a system of labor encampments, particularly in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains, where the wreckers will help rebuild, in a sort of cross between FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps and Stalin's GULAG Archipelago.
Here's where Mike Sullivan runs afoul of Joe Steele, and as a result Charlie is drawn into the White House inner circle. Mike still believes that the First Amendment actually means something, and writes up a lengthy article going point by point on what particular points of the Constitution Joe Steele's various acts have violated. He takes it to his editor, fully expecting to have the boss tell him to bury that so deep it'll never be found. Instead, the editor goes to print with it.
Shortly thereafter, a squad of J. Edgar Hoover's Jeebies (from GBI, a cross between the FBI and the NKVD or KGB) show up at Mike's door and arrest him. He's tried and convicted by an "administrative judge" with no real examination of evidence, no jury, and no justice, and then it's off to the labor encampments in an overcrowded train in which a number of the prisoners die of the horrific conditions. Meanwhile, Mike's wife calls Charlie and begs him to use his growing connections with the Administration to do something. Charlie's dubious, but he tries -- and in the process comes to the attention of people in high places, and ends up being hired away from the AP to work as Joe Steele's speechwriter.
I started having real problems with the worldbuilding when World War II started and we start to see more of what's actually going on in Trotsky's USSR. There are a lot of places where it really feels as if the author just plugged Lev Davidovich into the Stalin-shaped hole left in the Soviet political landscape by Beso Dzhugashvili's decision to emigrate to America. For instance, why should the Red Army still collapse at the beginning of Operation Barbarosa with Trotsky in charge? Yes, there are good arguments that there would've been some sort of Terror in the 1930's no matter who was in charge, just on the basis of the inherent contradictions of Marxism, but it seems likely that Trotsky would've kept Lenin's New Economic Policy around, maybe phasing it out gradually rather than going for forced collectivization and rapid industrialization, which were a big part of the whole "spies and wreckers" moral panic that fueled the Terror under Stalin. And it's far less likely that Trotsky would've launched a massive purge of the leadership of the Red Army right as the Little Austrian with the Big Mouth was pretty clearly showing his territorial ambitions in the East. After all, Trotsky was Jewish, and would no doubt be very aware that the National Socialist German Workers' Party (better known as the Nazi Party) had anti-Semitism as a fundamental plank of its political platform.
And there's no good explanation for just why Joe Steele, born and raised in California, should have such a ferocious animus toward Trotsky, even more than his hostility toward the Little Austrian with the Big Mouth. Although Stalin in the Primary World was quite anti-Semitic, Joe Steele is not shown to have any particular animus toward the Jews as a people (he has Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was also Jewish, heading his nuclear weapons program). And while Trotsky did spend some time in exile in the US before the Russian Revolution, it was all of three months and he spent it entirely in New York before heading back home. Unless Beso Dzhugashvili's move to the US butterflied Trotsky's stay in the US to send him to Hollywood, it feels like either quantum crosstalk between timelines or the author unthinkingly carrying over an element of the original's personality that would not be genetically driven.
On the other hand, the story of nuclear weapons in that timeline is an excellent extrapolation: worried about Joe Steele's casual brutality and reduction of the Constitution to mere window-dressing, Albert Einstein and several other leading figures in theoretical physics all decided to keep mum about the actual potential for building an atomic bomb. As a result, the US doesn't discover it until the fall of Nazi Germany, at which point the President has questions for which there can be no acceptable answers. When he finds out the truth, he orders Einstein and several other leading scientists executed, and throws a number of others into labor camps. When he gives Rickover the task of creating an atomic bomb, Rickover has to ask him to release the surviving scientists to work on the project, creating the US equivalent of the sharashka system in Stalin's USSR.
However, because the US is now starting its nuclear weapons project several years behind, the first fission weapons will not be available in time to use against Japan. Instead, the war in the Pacific will be one long, brutal campaign of hitting the beaches, right up to the Home Islands themselves. And while the US is crushing Japanese resistance on one island after another, Trotsky is able to grab all of Korea and install Kim Il-sung as puppet ruler over it, as well as grabbing massive chunks of China and handing it to Mao. Furthermore, the USSR will also spend blood and treasure on the Home Islands, resulting in a divided Japan, with the North being the People's Republic of Japan and the South being the Constitutional Monarchy of Japan, with Eisenhower overseeing the occupation (since Doug McArthur was sacked and executed for getting caught by surprise in the Philippines after the attack on Pearl Harbor). As a result, the first military confrontation between the US and USSR in Asia will occur along the DMZ that runs across Honshu (the largest of the Home Islands of Japan), and will feature the first uses of atomic bombs in warfare -- except that the US one is answered immediately by Trotsky with one of his own.
And Mike Sullivan gets a worm's eye view of that whole bitter conflict, having gotten out of the labor encampment by volunteering to join the Army. Instead of being put into the regular Army, he's put into what they call a punishment brigade. Their insignia are marked with a P of shame, and they're sent wherever the fighting is thickest, with the idea that they are completely disposable, to be used up in order to spare regular soldiers for less severe fighting. Even after World War II is over, there's nothing for him to go back to, since he can't return to New York or to his old line of work, so he decides to stay in the Army, and thus experiences the Japanese War firsthand, and finds a new love (his first wife having divorced him for "abandonment"). Mustered out for age, he finally has no choice but to return to the US, where he looks up an old buddy from the labor encampment and tries to put together a new life for himself in Wyoming, working as a carpenter and writing stories on the side. The latter leaves me wondering if he might one day become a sort of American version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The ending is a mix of that carryover of items from this world and excellent, albeit grim, extrapolation of the consequences of an American Stalin. Joe Steele dies on the exact same day as Stalin did, and of the same cause -- a cerebrovascular accident, a stroke in layperson's terms. Unless one subscribes to Neil Armstrong's belief that we each have an allotted number of heartbeats, it seems that the author didn't really think about how living a different lifestyle, presumably with better medical technology than was available in the USSR at that time, would affect the man's longevity. On the other hand, there is the problem that one man has been President for twenty years, governing with a heavy hand. A whole generation has grown up with an Administration that only pays lip service to the Constitution, which uses blackmail and the threat of fabricated cases and military trials to reduce Congress and the Supreme Court to obedient lapdogs. Even if the elderly Vice President John Nance Garner, whom Charlie describes in the wonderful metaphor of "America's spare tire," is up to the job of the Presidency, how much of We the People are still up to the task of reclaiming their heritage as Americans?
For all its flaws in terms of rigorous allohistorical extrapolation, this novel is full of food for thought, about the powerful draw of the Strong Man On A White Horse, and of the fragility of civil society. As JRR Tolkien put it, not allegorical, but very applicable.
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Review posted July 17, 2021.
