A state of disobedience

Interlude:

From: The End of the Dream: Reconstruction in

Post-Rottemeyer America by Patrick T. Hamilton

Copyright 2051, Baen Historical Publishing

The end, when it came, came suddenly.

With the Marines and soldiers to the west in rebellion against federal authority, with the main force, the Army's Third Corps having turned, it was a matter of hours before the Eighteenth Airborne Corps and 2^nd Marine Division likewise pointed poignant fingers in Washington's direction. Even the Navy, shadowing the Texas coast, refused to continue the blockade imposed by President Rottemeyer.

At that point the federals could count on nothing but their own law enforcement agencies, already badly depleted and demoralized, and the states' National Guards.

The states' National Guards were, of course, under the authority first and foremost of the state governors. These came from states of two different classes: northern and western urbanized states where the National Guards suffered a considerable degree of both unpopularity and benign neglect, and southern and rural states where the guard remained rather popular.

Thus, when California mobilized its National Guard in response to a presidential demand, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado did the same in response to California. Unlike California, however—which merely sat there, once those other National Guards were reinforced by the 1^st Marine Division, they advanced and California's Guard simply melted away.

In the deep southern states, aggressive action was also contemplated. That no fighting took place was largely the result of more moderate, even centrist, states like Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia whose collective reaction to both sides might well be summed up as, "Oh, no, you don't. Not again."

The first peacekeeping call is reported to have come from Utah to Governor Garrison of New Mexico and Governor Seguin of Texas. The substance of that conversation has never been reported. Yet, the very next day Utah's legislature—at her governor's behest—adopted what had come to be called "the Texas Program." The governor also called for a constitutional convention, a request heartily endorsed by his legislature.

Within the week that call for a convention had become general. From Alaska to Alabama, Mississippi to Maryland, New Hampshire to New Mexico—forty-one states demanded a new Constitution or at least substantial revisions to the old one. Only four of the six New England states, plus New York, Minnesota, California, Oregon and Hawaii, refused to join it. Elsewhere, the sentiment—or the scent of blood in the water—became overwhelming.

The popular reaction was more severe. Federal agents and bureaucrats were hounded, burned in effigy . . . sometimes beaten and in a few cases killed. Nor would local authorities protect them. The media, that group—ever so "ready to feed the masses on the carrion of events"—the same group for whom Rottemeyer had once been as near a goddess as one might hope to find on Earth, turned—if anything—more rabidly anti-federal than the national norm for the day. "Project Ogilvie" had soured more than a few in the industry on the federal goverment.

It was said, possibly truthfully, that—in any one day of the next three weeks after the defection of 3^rd Corps and its beginning to fan out to the north—more Americans sought refuge in Canada than had done so during the entire Vietnam war.

It was whispered too, perhaps unkindly if not entirely untruthfully, that some fleeing the fall of the Rottemeyer presidency had also fled the call to Vietnam.

These numbers picked up noticeably when states' troops began assembling along the political and philosophical boundaries between north and south, urban and rural, conservative and liberal.

When the Marine expeditionary forces in the Gulf of Mexico steamed back through the Panama Canal, this time without any strikes by Canal workers, even Hawaii decided to send a representative to the constitutional convention . . . even as that state's population began to drop from the many, many chartered flights to Vancouver, British Columbia.

The City of Washington would have come under siege, one suspects, except that the 3rd Infantry Regiment seized the Pentagon, all of the notable public places, and all of the roads leading into and from the city.

Rottemeyer herself, along with key staff, left via a Marine helicopter for New York City.

It was perhaps significant that the crew of that helicopter refused to fly until cleared to do so by the Commandant of the Corps. Possibly of greater significance, the commandant, signally, failed to consult with—allegedly refused to consult with—General McCreavy's replacement.

But if anyone believed that a constitutional convention was going to solve all of the problems of the United States, those persons were to be sorely disappointed. . . .