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The Red Napoleon By Floyd Gibbons Originally Published 1929 Reprinted 1977, Popular Library Afterword by John Gardner Various Prices ISBN: 0-445-04016-5 ---------------------------- Together with a Consideration of ---------------------------- Our Lords and Masters By the Unofficial Observer Simon & Schuster 1935 (New York) Robert Hale & Company 1936 (London) There are two ways to write alternative history. One is to imagine a different past and write about it. Another is to imagine the immediate future, write about that, and then wait a few years. The Red Napoleon, a novel published in 1929, is a particularly vivid example of the second procedure. This passage is a fair indication of the state of things in the book's alternative 1934: Red Revolutionary London, capital of the Pan-Eurasian Federation of Soviets and headquarters of the yellow military genius whose will and frightfulness had consummated this mighty amalgamation of force, was a startlingly different city from the London of King George V. And Margot's possible plight made us see it with eyes opened anew to those spectacles of horror to any American—that age-old horror born of pride of race that has set a desperate barrier between white women and men of colour. Yellow, Black, Brown, and Red, the Asiatic and African troops of the Red armies mingled with the white communistic soldiery of Europe in the crowded streets, hotels and bars of the Red capital. The author of The Red Napoleon is Floyd Gibbons (1887-1939). He was once among the most famous names in American journalism, best known for his military reporting, but he covered every sort of dramatic event. He lost an eye during World War I, this after being on a ship sunk by German submarines before America's entry into the war; before that he accompanied General Pershing's expedition against Poncho Villa. He managed to attend some conflict or other almost annually throughout the 1920s. As time went on, he gained added fame as a newsreel narrator and screenwriter; his machine-gun delivery became a signature for his time. In this book, not content with his coverage of the First World War, the author took it upon himself to imagine a second, this time including an invasion of North America (on three fronts, no less). These events are narrated by the author in his own person as a globe-trotting journalist, accompanied by a couple of spunky young colleagues and some damsels in occasional need of rescue. All of this is just as cartoonish as it sounds, but perhaps wiser than it seems, for reasons suggested in the Afterword contributed to the 1977 edition by the novelist John Gardner. The cause of the excitement is Karakhan of Kazan, born in 1900, the son of a Cossack and a Tartar woman. He had a grueling but ultimately strengthening childhood on the steppes before entering the Czar's service in the First World War. Come the Revolution, he sided with the Reds. In describing Karakhan's early exploits, the author creates a little alternative history intentionally by working him into the story of the consolidation of the Soviet Union, notably in connection with the campaign against a perfectly historical army of Czech nationalists who had fought for the Czar and later aided the counterrevolutionary Whites. Karakhan later became the commander of Soviet military and political activities in the Far East. These were aimed at subverting the European and Japanese colonial regimes throughout Asia. Canny Red strategy leads rapidly to the virtual absorption of China, Red revolution in Japan, and the expulsion of the British from India. Karakhan is aided, albeit unknowingly, by American policy, notably the recognition of the Nationalist government in China and the granting of independence to the Philippines. Floyd Gibbons (the character, whom we shall call “Floyd”) meets Karakhan in Moscow in 1932, the year in which Stalin is assassinated. Karakhan had been recalled from the Far East by Stalin, who had made him supreme commander to expedite the purge of the Trotskyites from the military. Karakhan unleashes a series of pogroms after the assassination and becomes the leader of the pan-Asian alliance of which Russia is the center. (Floyd also meets Madame Karakhan, an Irish-American radical who came to the Soviet Union in the early aftermath of the Revolution; as evidence of Asiatic misogyny, she is the only person in the book to whom Karakhan is ever rude.) For reasons that are never very clear, Floyd becomes Karakhan's chief media outlet to the West. Later, when Floyd falls into Karakhan's clutches again during the American War, Karakhan designates Floyd his official biographer. Under the pretext of a convenient diplomatic incident, the war starts in January of 1933 with an invasion of Poland. Floyd notes that Karakhan's tactics are designed to prevent a recurrence of trench warfare. Great emphasis is laid on his tactical use of air power in support of ground forces. However, in the European phase of the war, the ground forces being supported tend to be Central Asian cavalry; tanks make an appearance only quite late in the war, during the American campaign, and then only during an American counter-attack across the Hudson. Be that as it may, the Red forces wind up Eastern Europe in short order. The Hungarians just capitulate, pointing out that they are really Central Asians, too. Austria also surrenders without firing a shot, but the cabinet is slaughtered anyway, in order to inspire panic in Karakhan's enemies. Mussolini is killed when his attempt to drive the Reds from Austria miscarries. The accession of Germany to the Pan-Eurasian camp is more interesting. The already moderately socialist government in Berlin simply acquiesces in an open coup by the Communists. The German Soviet Republic then joins the Pan-Eurasians to spread the revolution and right the wrongs of Versailles. In this context as in others, readers may slowly realize that this is by no means an ill-informed book. The author had a fair grasp of Soviet politics during the early Stalinist period. He also seems to have had a passing familiarity with Eurasianism, a geostrategic doctrine that, in its German incarnation, held that Germany was essentially a have-not nation whose real community of interest was with Russia and the colonial world. The notion had always had some appeal for the pro-Soviet Left, but also, surprisingly, for some Nazis and post-war fascists. Similarly, the idea of an alliance between the radical left in the developed world with anti-colonialist Third World revolution was conceived much earlier than the second half of the 20th century. A few years after The Red Napoleon was published, Oswald Spengler would denounce the alliance of the White Revolution in the West with the Colored Revolution in the East and South as the work of the devil, but he also remarked that he could easily see how some adventurer could take advantage of it to make a bid for world dominion. In this novel we see that idea sketched out. Once Germany is in the Red camp, the drive to the West resumes. The event is not so different from a replay of 1914, but the Third Battle of the Marne goes the other way. This is partly because of the vastly greater resources of an alliance that extends all the way to Japan and partly because of Red domestic sabotage, but a contributing factor is American industrial neutrality. American firms were forbidden by law to supply military material to the combatants, thereby leaving the French, British, and Belgians to their own inadequate resources. The fall of Great Britain is a more sanguinary variation of the German case. After the capitulation of France, Winston Churchill's government falls (yes, that Winston Churchill) and the succeeding Labor prime minister orders the Fleet to remain in port as Karakhan's hordes cross the Channel. Some of the English put up a fight, but without success. The king decamps to North America, along with all the other crowned heads of Europe. The Japanese emperor had already been there for some time. The war with America begins in 1934. There is a gesture toward a casus belli, this time involving the seizure of a Mexican port on the western coast to ensure the payment of debts to Pan-Eurasian creditors. Karakhan does trouble to make a formal request to the United States to join the world union. He also appeals to the American proletariat to support the revolution, with promises of self-governing enclaves for every ethnic minority, from a Scandinavian soviet in Minnesota to a Black Belt in the south. (The latter was, by the way, a feature of the US Communist Party platform now and again.) The chief factor allowing an assault on the United States is Mahan's Doctrine of the Fleet in Being. The enemy's combined fleet is far bigger and even more modern than that of the United States, which moreover is responsible for two coasts. The Navy deals with the emergency by concentrating all its resources in the Caribbean, trusting to coastal defenses to guard the continental United States and the possibility of prevailing in any enemy attempt to break the naval deadlock. The result is two land invasions: one in the Pacific Northwest, the other in the Canadian Maritimes, an incursion that soon advances into New England. The president during all this is Alfred E. Smith. He defeated Herbert Hoover in a rematch in 1932, but put Hoover in charge of organizing war production. One of the things Hoover is praised for is the revival of America's inland water transportation network, since enemy air action had made railroad freight unreliable. Again, this is an acute conjecture: the US military had in fact been worried about just that vulnerability, in connection with air raids and labor strikes, since the First World War; the National Highway System was built in the 1950s specifically to address the matter. Whether or not this coincided with actual strategic thinking in 1929, we are given to understand that the defense of the United States comes down to the defense of the industrial infrastructure in and around Pennsylvania. This defense is successful, but harassing raids cause Washington D.C. to be abandoned. The capital moves to St. Louis, Missouri, where it remains even after the war. The war drags on longer than Karakhan anticipated; long enough, in fact, that he decides to end the matter by destroying the American fleet. The Battle of the Windward Islands in 1936 involves every major warship on earth, including the submarines. The author understood something of the effect that aviation would have on naval combat, but he was no better informed than the strategists of the time. Consequently, Floyd's first-person account (he had escaped Karakhan some time back) is confused and far too long. In any event, Karakhan is there, too. Since his fleet is nearly annihilated, he is taken prisoner. Counter revolution breaks out across Europe. And that is that. * * * This brings us back to the peril facing white womanhood alluded to in the quotation at the beginning of this review. In The Red Napoleon, it is not difficult to find passages like the following, describing the capture of Floyd and his scrappy sidekick in New England by Pan-Eurasian forces: I returned to a sleep of exhaustion and woke with a clearer head ten hours later in the middle of a flow of Yankee profanity. “You yellow hawk-faced Chink, I'll—How did you like that sock?—Now taste this—You like white women, do you?—You lemon-skinned mustard plaster—“ Speed Binney was raving in a delirium in the next bed where two blacks, wearing the uniform of the Red Senegalese Legion were holding him in bed. A Chinese doctor quieted the disordered mind with a hypodermic. In perfectly spoken English, he addressed me. “In addition to his fractured skull, your pugnacious friend suffers from that common psychosis Americana—the colour complex. He will get over it, but it will require thorough chastisement and a few years of subjection to educate the rest of your countrymen away from their prejudiced delusion.” Though we should always be careful not to project our own sentiments onto the literature of an earlier generation, it is difficult to escape the surmise that, even in 1929, the author intended the doctor to sound reasonable and Speed Binney to sound like a jerk. That is the burden of John Gardner's Afterword. Gibbons (the man, not the character) in this book reveals himself as a satirist in the manner of Jonathan Swift. The Swiftian satirist does not make fun of some folly that might be remedied by a greater wisdom that the satirist offers us. Karakhan does indeed get some of the best lines: “The earth will no longer stand divided—race against race, colour against colour, continent against continent. Instead of these bitter internecine struggles, there will be political unity and economic cooperation. All this will mean guaranteed world peace, for the first time in the history of the world.” However, Gibbons is not arguing for world revolution, or even necessarily for universal racial tolerance. His point, to the extent he has one, is that the world is a ship manned entirely by fools, and perfect virtue is to be found on neither side of any conflict. * * * At the risk of lengthening an already long review, it would be useful to mention another book of roughly the same period as The Red Napoleon. It sheds more light on the reception of the Left Eurasianist model in the United States. It has also become an exercise in alternative history. The book is Our Lords and Masters, with the author given as “The Unofficial Observer.” It was published by Simon and Schuster in New York in 1935. The British edition was published in 1936 by Robert Hale & Company. It's collection of gossipy biographical sketches of the world leaders of the day, which the author believed to be a time of global crisis that would last until about 1950. The book has something of the racialist view of the world met with in The Red Napoleon, but sympathetically expressed. The final chapter is “Asia Annexes the World,” where we find descriptions of the Soviet military leaders Klementi Efremovich Voroshilov and “General Bluecher” (apparently Vasily Konstantinovich Blücher). The latter was a man of ambiguous origins, according to the author. He made his name in consolidating Soviet power in the early years of the USSR, particularly his campaign against the Czech forces in Russia allied with the Whites. We read: General Bluecher's extraordinary career has given rise to the theory that he will become Russia's man of destiny—the mythical “Red napoleon.” Actually however, Voroshilov seems better fitted to the part if, indeed, Stalin himself has not already preempted it. Voroshilov survived Stalin's purges, by the way. Blücher did not. The book was reviewed by C.G. Poore in the New York Times of October 20, 1935. The reviewer found it provocative and “…some of the liveliest reading of the year.” He also noted the author's predilection for puns: These stimulants to vivacity take such horrible shapes as “Czechs and Balances,” “Spilt Greece,” “Is Asia's Face Red?” and other scraps possibly gathered by a frugal publisher from the floor of the cutting room where “Eyes on the World” was edited. Newsreel editing? American journalist with extensive international experience? The Red Napoleon? Surely we have caught Floyd Gibbons in pseudonymic drag. Alas, no, as further research proved. The author was John Franklin Carter (1897-1967), a journalist and sometime diplomat. He was, on occasion, a confidential investigator for FDR. (He was also a science-fiction writer in later years.) Be that as it may, his geostrategic sense painted a future not unlike that imagined by Floyd Gibbons: “…Fascist statesmen could not promise their people a higher standard [of living], for they would lack the resources to maintain such standard and there would be no means of obtaining such resources except, perhaps, by a general European affiliation with the Soviet Union…A Soviet Europe would, by definition, be the means through which a European Economic Union could be formed and could be linked to the resources of the Soviet Union and, through the Soviet Union, to those of a sovietized China and India… The implications of such a change for America would be very simple. In terms of politics, America would become the “West” and the Old World would become the “East.” The Western Hemisphere and the outlying portions of the British Empire would gravitate around the United States, as would at first Japan and Great Britain until they too were absorbed into the Socialist Confederacy of the Eastern Hemisphere. The reforms and alterations in American capitalism would be abruptly stopped and the United States would become a highly centralized, highly nationalistic nation on the order of present-day France and England. Social thought would be crystallized around the Catholic religion, which would take to moral if not physical exile in the New World. America would become a Fascist Confederacy, lagging behind European developments by at least two generations—as usual. Perhaps we have discovered Patrick J. Buchanan's favorite childhood reading.

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