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Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline

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Maybe? It depends on what version of Batman they go with. The initial one was... rich but not literally a fucking billionaire or even the 1930s equivalent.

Maybe the Waynes take a huge economic haircut but survive because they side with the revolution, and the mansion becomes a historic monument while Bruce lives beneath it in the caves?
 
Or he could be a character who exists in a specific, just-barely-pre-revolutionary milieu, like how Zorro is always a dude in pre-1846 Mexico.
 
The Laurent said:
Maybe? It depends on what version of Batman they go with. The initial one was... rich but not literally a fucking billionaire or even the 1930s equivalent.

Maybe the Waynes take a huge economic haircut but survive because they side with the revolution, and the mansion becomes a historic monument while Bruce lives beneath it in the caves?
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Yeah, he essentially updates the Shadow archetype for the post Revolution, being an ex-bourgeois turned apparatchik type who has to go outside the confines of law to enact justice.
 
Miss Teri said:
Yeah, he essentially updates the Shadow archetype for the post Revolution, being an ex-bourgeois turned apparatchik type who has to go outside the confines of law to enact justice.
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I can see that depending on how worldly batman started out as in the 30's, basically Bruce Wayne's parents would have been bourgeois reformers basically Engels Lite who were assassinated by someone who was being threatened by their business practices and calls for reform. Batman goes off into the world to learn the skills necessary for his war on crime because for all he knows it was a criminal, but he sees the world for the first time away from his place of privalege and changes his crusade to be against crime and the corruption that creates crime.

Early batman would basically be the fantasy of revolutionary violence or proletarian revenge. I don't know how much legs this idea will have post WW2 and might see batman fade into obscurity in the 50's and 60's

Edit: In fact post 50's batman might become a character that is very counter to the spirit of the revolution, a pro vanguard figure that believes that if not for the stern guidance of the party the proletariat would fall into illegal and anti revolutionary behaviour. As writers shift the antagonists of batman away from fascists and the bourgeois and onto the lumpenproles/criminals post WW2. Just think the whole anti rock and roll joke from a 60's or 70's batman comic that linkara loves to use.
 
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GriffonCrimson said:
Edit: In fact post 50's batman might become a character that is very counter to the spirit of the revolution, a pro vanguard figure that believes that if not for the stern guidance of the party the proletariat would fall into illegal and anti revolutionary behaviour. As writers shift the antagonists of batman away from fascists and the bourgeois and onto the lumpenproles/criminals post WW2. Just think the whole anti rock and roll joke from a 60's or 70's batman comic that linkara loves to use.
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Another possibility is that Batman might become something of a "past" figure akin to the JSA or a man out of time like IRL Captain America due to his origin being tied to such a specific moment in history.

In fact if the later happened you might even have something like Gangbuster Batman be seen as something like how Commie smasher Cap is seen today, so out of step with the character in general as to be labeled an in universe imposter.
 
DracoDracul said:
Another possibility is that Batman might become something of a "past" figure akin to the JSA or a man out of time like IRL Captain America due to his origin being tied to such a specific moment in history.

In fact if the later happened you might even have something like Gangbuster Batman be seen as something like how Commie smasher Cap is seen today, so out of step with the character in general as to be labeled an in universe imposter.
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this might take us dangerously off rails, but I can imagine the storyline now it would be basically a soft reboot of the character where it's revealed that Gangbuster batman was the first robin masquerading as Batman/Bruce Wayne after some criminal beat Bruce Wayne into a deathlike coma traumatizing the boy wonder and putting him on the whole vanguardist line of thought. unfortunately this means doing Dick Grayson and Jason Todd as characters dirty.

I would also like to think that the contrast between vanguardist batman and salt of the earth pillar of the revolution superman would be really interesting to write.
 
Ah, Bat-Mite. My favourite character from The Brave & the Bold not named AQUAMAN.
 
Miss Teri said:
I'm still figuring it out. The tentative plan is that each book takes place in a slightly different universe.
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depending on IP law in the country it could be that the JL book is more an effort by fans to revive different golden age and silver age characters that have fallen by the wayside as public domain figures.
 
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Don’t Touch That Dial! A History of Radio in The UASR (Instant Sunrise)
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    • Don't Touch That Dial! A History of Radio in The UASR.

    The radio broadcast at its most fundamental level is a method of reaching the proletariat in their homes and a chance to simultaneously speak to the masses in a manner reminiscent of a more intimate conversation. - Louise Bryant, Culture Secretary 1933-1940

    Friends, Comrades, Brothers, Norman Thomas is dead. The bourgeois in Washington have shown their true colors and executed him for daring to have the will of the people behind him. Now is the time to rise up against the MacArthur Putsch. Put down your tools and take up your arms. The time is now! - Anonymous Freedom Radio Broadcast, February 1st, 1933​

    Since before the Revolution, communists and anarchists have known the power of radio for communication. From its earliest days when it was used exclusively for ship-to-shore communication to the Revolution Radio stations that cropped up during the Revolution.

    Pre-Revolution Radio

    From its earliest days in the second republic, radio has been a powerful tool for communications. Early pioneers in radio development had initially conceived of radio as a medium for point-to-point communications, and indeed the ability for people beyond the intended recipient of a message was seen as an undesirable problem and not a new method of communications. It wouldn't not be until 1906 with Lee de Forest that the idea of radio as a form of one-to-many mass communication was realized.

    While de Forest had worked for several years on the concept of regular entertainment broadcasts until the economic precarity of the second republic forced him to shutter his experiments in broadcasting, it would not be until 1919 that Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company Commercial Manager David Sarnoff would steal de Forest's idea and form the Marconi Wireless Music Company.

    Marconi on the other hand, refused to consider radio for any purpose other than point to point communications, and in 1907 the Marconi implemented a policy that their operators would refuse to speak to operators of non-Marconi telegraph sets.

    In all this time, Radio was still considered a toy or a curiosity, as the value of it was not yet fully realized.

    This would change on January 23rd, 1909.

    The RMS Republic

    At 15:00 hours on January 22nd, 1909, a White Star Lines steamship under the command of Inman Sealby, RMS Republic left New York Harbor en route to ports along the Mediterranean sea. Overnight the ship sailed up the coast of New England and stopped in Boston to take on additional passengers and more mail. In the early hours of the morning on January 23rd, the ship had entered a thick fog bank off the coast of Nantucket. With visibility reduced to near zero, the captain had ordered the Republic to reduce speed and to sound the foghorn at regular intervals.

    At 05:47, the Republic heard the foghorn of another ship, one that was approaching on a collision course. This was the SS Florida, an Italian passenger liner that was carrying refugees fleeing the recent Earthquake in Messina.

    The two ships exchanged horn blasts and the convention of the sea was that each ship would turn to starboard to avoid a collision.

    The Republic instead chose to reverse engines and come to a stop in the water, while the Florida continued moving.

    The bow of the SS Florida impacted the Republic on her port side. Three people onboard the Republic and three people onboard the Florida died instantly in the collision. The collision also knocked out the Republic's boilers and steam turbines, leaving the ship mostly unpowered, except for a secondary battery power system used to run the ship's Marconi Wireless Telegraph.

    Jack Binns, The Republic's Marconi Operator was able to reassemble his equipment after the collision and get it functioning on backup power. Taking initiative, he immediately sent out a CQD distress signal over the airwaves, one that was picked up by the Marconi station in Nantucket and repeated to all the ships on the eastern seaboard, scrambling a rescue for the stricken ships.

    With the Republic fatally damaged, Captain Sealby ordered the crew to evacuate the passengers to the Florida using the ship's lifeboat complement to ferry the passengers between the ships. Within hours, several additional ships, the first being the United States Revenue Cutter Service vessel Gresham and later the White Star Line vessel Baltic, which had been able to take the passengers from the Republic and the SS Florida.

    Miraculously, all but the seven passengers who died in the original collision managed to survive, with the credit for the successful rescue being given to the quick response of the Marconi operator.

    Radio Regulations in the Second Republic

    In many ways, the collision between the RMS Republic and the SS Florida was the first breaking news story that could be covered live as it was unfolding. The New York Herald printed 4 editions that day to capture the evolving situation at sea, with a reporter camping out in a Marconi station to hear the latest updates. With the public riveted to the spectacle of the ship collision and the success story of the rescue that was facilitated by the wireless telegraph, the pressure was on the newly elected President Taft to capitalize on this historical moment.

    However much Taft would have liked to have capitalized on the successful rescue, the stiff roadblocks of the Marconi Company themselves fought against were still ever-present in the Senate, particularly after the attempt to ratify the 1906 Berlin Convention had failed due to strong opposition by Marconi.

    Former Attorney General under President McKinley and then president of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America, John W. Griggs, testified in front of the Senate on behalf of the Marconi Company in 1906, in which he laid out a list of objections which contained many pages of arguments opposing ratification, because it would cut into profits of the Marconi interests and practically destroy the advantages which the company was expected to receive and were entitled to obtain from the priority of their inventions and from the establishment of their system.

    The salient points of this memorandum and his testimony were:

    • The convention is repugnant to the Constitution of the United States.
    • Radio is a recent discovery and assent to the convention would be premature.
    • The convention commits this Government to the policy of government operation of wireless telegraphy for commercial purposes.
    • The arrangement proposed represents an enforced partnership to which the Marconi companies contribute everything and the German manufacturers of radio apparatus nothing, neither invention, nor capital, nor skillful enterprise.
    • The rates fixed by the regulations would force Marconi operators to operate below an acceptable profit threshold.
    • Satisfactory operation involves not only uniform apparatus but uniform methods.
    Thus in 1910, a full year after the fateful collision at sea, Congress passed the Wireless Ship Act of 1910. Unlike the Berlin Convention of 1906, this new law gave the Marconi Company a de facto monopoly on radio broadcasting, with all ships and ground stations required to have at least two trained and licensed radio telegraph operators with one person manning the radio at all times.

    While in theory anybody could become licensed to operate a wireless Telegraph, the reality was that the Marconi company wrote the standards and they jealously guarded their equipment and patents, making them the owners of the airwaves.

    Under the auspices of ship to shore communications, the idea of radio as a one-to-many form of communication was absolutely verboten in the halls of the Marconi Company.

    In 1914 with the outbreak of the Great War, the federal government leapt into action. The War Industries Board swiftly nationalized the American branch of Marconi, barring any private individual or organization—save for Marconi—from owning a radio set and taking control of the company for the purposes of the war effort. Nonetheless, the US Navy, as the principal operator of radio technology continued to operate radio transmitters and receivers throughout the war, delivering time of day messages, weather reports and news updates to the troops at sea as well as those stationed in Europe, and towards the end of the war even some experimental broadcasts of musical concerts to soldiers at the front, a small remedy to the bitter fighting in Europe.

    When the war ended, the War Industries Board was eager to return the Marconi Company into private hands over the objections of the Navy, which it did on April 15th, 1919.

    During the war, the experiments in wireless audio transmission using an Alexanderson alternator had yielded promising results, but with the invention of the vacuum tube, it soon became possible to modulate a signal onto a fixed carrier frequency, allowing for multiple simultaneous transmissions, something that was not possible on the older spark gap systems.

    The Age of Radio

    With the war over and new technical innovations, the market was ripe for the new entertainment medium.

    Within Marconi, Commercial Manager David Sarnoff knew that there was a transformative opportunity for Marconi. And so in 1919, with the Marconi Company back in private hands, he pitched his superiors on a new form of radio, one-to-many broadcasting.

    On October 15th, 1919, Sarnoff was placed in charge of a new subsidiary of the Marconi Company, the Marconi Wireless Music Company.

    The first wireless music boxes would go on sale in 1920 to tremendous success.

    In every city, Marconi dealers offered an orchestra in every home.

    But it wasn't just music that the Marconi boxes were offering.

    On November 2nd, 1920, Marconi wireless station 8ZZ in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania broadcast the returns for the 1920 presidential election. Listeners in Pittsburg knew that Leonard Wood had been elected President hours before any other members of the general public knew.

    As successful as the sales of radio receivers had been, the business of providing content for them had been a loss leader for Sarnoff. Under pressure from Marconi to reduce costs without compromising service, Sarnoff decided on an ambitious scheme to consolidate the production of radio programming.

    With AT&T purchasing a 25.5% stake in the company, Sarnoff relocated all of the radio production into a single studio complex in New York. From here, the radio programming for all of Marconi's stations would be produced and transmitted through AT&T's phone lines to the various Marconi stations around the country.

    The new entity was called the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and it quickly expanded outwards from their New York Flagship station WEAF westward along AT&T's phone networks, adding stations along the Atlantic coast and moving as far west as Omaha.

    With the surging demand for radio sets, it soon became obvious that a second radio network would be needed, and so in 1924 Sarnoff turned the NBC Radio station WJZ in Newark into the flagship station of the NBC Blue Network. While the former NBC Radio stations would be known as NBC Red, they would focus primarily on entertainment while NBC Blue would be focused on News and Education.

    In spite of Marconi's attempt at monopolizing the airwaves, amateur radio operators soon began to figure out how to build their own radio transmitters and receivers. Stations began to sprout all over the country, with content ranging from people playing their favorite phonograph records to proletariat political messaging, by 1927 there were thousands of 'proletariat radio' stations scattered across the country.

    To Sarnoff however, the growth of other people on Marconi's airwaves was an undue imposition, particularly in cases where amatuer broadcasters would cause interference with his own NBC Radio stations.

    In an attempt to combat this, Sarnoff created a fleet of heavy-handed enforcers with radio direction-finding equipment to find the amatuer broadcasters and shut them down. Marconi's heavy-handed tactics had forced amatuer broadcasters into finding ways to avoid detection while still broadcasting, making radio transmission equipment as lightweight and portable as possible so as to make it easy to shut down in the event of a raid and to set up just as quickly in a new place.

    With how little regulation was put into place in the second republic at the time, there was ultimately very little that Sarnoff and the Marconi company could do to these broadcasters.

    That would change in 1927 with the passage of the Federal Radio Act. Now there was a new Agency to assign radio licenses and assign specific frequencies to each broadcaster.

    One of the first companies to take advantage of this and attempt to break Marconi's monopoly on the airwaves was Columbia Records executive William Paley. Columbia had wanted additional airtime on NBC's stations but had been frustrated at Sarnoff's unwillingness to give them preferential treatment.

    Flush with cash from a partnership agreement with Paramount Pictures, Paley's new Columbia Broadcast System began to quickly expand nationwide.

    Where Paley had innovated from Sarnoff was that for an affiliate of NBC, the network offered two categories of programming, sponsored and sustaining, radio stations would be paid for every sponsored show they carried, but at the cost of having to pay the network for the privilege of broadcasting a sustaining program. For larger cities such as Philadelphia or Chicago this was not an issue, but it proved to be a thorn in the sides of many NBC broadcasters in smaller cities.

    Where CBS differed was that CBS would give the sustaining programs away for free, with the caveat that the affiliated station must run all of the sponsored programs, which they would then get paid for.

    Paley's gambit was a success and by 1930 there were more CBS Radio Stations in the United States than there were NBC stations.

    Radio During the Revolution

    With the death of Norman Thomas and the attempted putsch by MacArthur, the American body politic had been thrown into a state of chaos. Desperate Americans turned to the radio for information about what had been going on in Washington.

    The initial news broadcasts on NBC and CBS broadcasted MacArthur's initial statements that the Workers Party was being indicted under the Sedition Act for "encouraging insurrection and the willful destruction of property," and thus ineligible to hold public office with little commentary or fanfare.

    Under the guise of 'objectivity,' NBC and CBS would treat the White forces as if their legitimacy was a done deal and refused to cover any news about the Red army that placed them in a positive light.

    More importantly however, NBC and CBS refused to cease their regular programming, citing contractual obligations, despite members of the Red army requesting that they broadcast emergency information when attacks were imminent.

    Proletariat Radio

    In spite of the unsympathetic and often outright hostile reception that members of the Workers and Farmers Revolutionary Army faced from NBC and CBS, the decade of amatuer broadcasters had created a strong cadre of radio broadcasters who had been used to evading detection. Amatuer broadcasters would link up with the nearest outpost of the WFRA and broadcast messages to the people in the cities. From messages of support and propaganda to covert instructions for sabotage to the workers within cities.

    In the field, improvised crystal radio sets were used to provide people with a covert means of receiving communications from the WFRA, or for the various units of the WFRA to maintain communications.

    By May of 1933 this cadre of amatuer broadcasters had been organized into the WFRA Signal Corps.


    Civil War Era "Foxhole Radio" - An improvised crystal radio receiver used by troops in the WFRA​

    The doctrines and procedures for the use of two way radio sets had been improvised in the field, as no military conflict up until then had used radio in a significant way. With a radioman carrying a two way set in each unit, commanders suddenly had greater flexibility in the field, able to adapt to new situation on the fly in a way that they couldn't do in the field.

    For saboteurs opening behind white lines, a crystal radio that could be easily concealed was a godsend. WFRA-controlled stations would broadcast "poems to our brave men and women fighting against reactionary tyranny" that would contain coded messages to them naming times and locations.

    As the first war to be found where radio played a significant role—Radio sets being too unreliable to use during The Great War outside of naval use—military strategists in the capitalist bloc had paid close attention to how it was used in combat, from broadcasting propaganda to its use in coordinating on the battlefield.

    The Battle for Radio

    The first strike in the battle for radio came on February 5th, 1932. Workers at WMAQ in Chicago had grown deeply resentful of their management, with the frustration boiling over following NBC's purchase of the station from the previous owner, the Chicago Daily News. The relationship between the station and the network had always been tense, with WMAQ going as far as changing it's network affiliation from NBC Red to CBS in 1927 before being bought out by NBC in 1930 and going back to a carrier of the NBC Red Network.

    The return to being an NBC Red station had never sat right with many of the people working there, especially as Sarnoff tried to centralize the management of all of NBC's Owned and Operated (O&O) stations from New York. In fact in some cities, local NBC stations had so little control over their own programming that the staff would evacuate and leave the national feed from New York running.

    In one harrowing instance, members of the WFRA were desperately trying to call and warn the staff at WWNC in Asheville of a gas attack in the center of the city by a white-affilliated group, only to discover after the gas cleared that the station had been evacuated days earlier and left to broadcast the national feed from New York.

    On February 5th, WMAQ briefly went off the air. Inside the building a power struggle was playing out between the workers at the station and the management that reported to Sarnoff in New York. After 5 hours off the air, WMAQ came back on the air as the "People's Radio."

    The station's programming changed, broadcasting news updates on behalf of the Reds, with music, talk and variety shows taking on a socialist theme.

    Following the lead of WMAQ, former NBC and CBS stations were seized by their workers with the assistance of the red guards.

    The end came for NBC on March 24th when two groups of soldiers from the WFRA along with a cadre of radio engineers managed to seize control of WEAF in New York and WJZ in New Jersey, bringing the NBC network off the air across the country and instead began broadcasting the "People's Radio Network" feed from WMAQ.

    Across the country the red forces that had been reported to be on the verge of collapse were suddenly on brink of victory. A radio network that had been doing its best to ignore the war raging around them was now a key asset for the Red army.

    Unlike Sarnoff, who fought to the bitter end against the WFRA, William Paley had the pragmatism to know a lost cause. Weeks before the seizure of WEAF and WJZ, Paley had gathered the staff in the Madison Avenue offices of CBS's flagship station WABC and told them that CBS was going to sit out this war. For all of his cutthroat business tactics to grow CBS to where it had gotten, Paley knew when to act and when to wait. CBS as a network would be taken off the air, with station mangers left to broadcast at their own discretion. Unlike Sarnoff who had demanded that any NBC station take a pro-White stance, Paley had left that up to each station, with many former CBS stations taking up the red banner.

    Paley himself surrendered WABC to the Red Army in exchange that they would not harm his staff or equipment and allow him safe passage to Canada. His conditions were accepted and upon handing the keys over, Paley left on the next boat to Newfoundland along with his wife and several mistresses.
     
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    Flagship Stations for PBS
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    • Flagship Stations for PBS

    • PBS1: WMAQ, Chicago (AM 670 kHz, 50 kW)
    • PBS2: WEAF, New York (AM 660 kHz, 50 kW)
    • PBS3: KPO, San Francisco (AM 680 kHz, 50 kW)
    • PBS4: KFI, Los Angeles (AM 640 kHz, 50 kW)
    All four of these stations are Clear Channel stations and have their frequency reserved across the entire UASR. At night due to the lack of the ionospheric D Layer, PBS3 and PBS4 can be picked up by a radio listener as far away as Hawaii or Denver, while WMAQ and WEAF can be picked up by an AM radio on most of the eastern UASR.
     
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    • You know, I'm really curious how some period-based stories would play out now in the pre-civil war setting.

    I can definitely see stories centered around groups of protagonists operating their own independent radio stations, constantly evading the local law enforcement. Like, a scene where the protagonists are operating out of a truck or bus, and they get caught in traffic and have to cut the broadcast as the antagonists pass them by mere feet.

    Really interesting entry.
     
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