The Collapse of the South

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

In October of 2074, the Ford Motor Company was embroiled in political catastrophe after Vermont senator Henry Walsh accused unionism in its East-Coast plants of traitorism by allowing foreign spies to acquire jobs in the Company. Whether the spies were Soviet or Chinese changed several times in Walsh’s accusations, but the claims themselves were not entirely unfounded. An investigation by the FBI received by congress found that several high-ranking Auto Workers Union members in Ford plants had connections to communist organisations, which were then discovered to have smuggled foreign agents into the country.

The recognition of Ford as a traitorous company, combined with an ailing combustion-engine automobile catalogue, sank the company into receivership and then bankruptcy. In a few short weeks, the titan of American industry, and the grandfather of mass-production, had ceased to exist except in name (which was acquired by Chrysler and branded tokenistically on several models of Chrysler vehicles).

Forty-thousand jobs disappeared by the new year. The economy was bad and the plants of the company were unsold and were bleached by the sun. The Southern states, which had served as primary hubs of the auto industry after Detroit’s collapse a decade before, saw unemployment jump ten percent. Is it any surprise what followed?

It would be misleading to categorise everything that has happened since as a consequence of the Ford Motor Company’s collapse, but in the minds of most Americans — and most importantly, blue-collar men of the Southern States — it was the beginning of the end for the Union, and the secession of the Southern States from the United States four years later had rolled off the back of the economic collapse spurred by Ford.

Hungry and anguished by economic collapse, and increasing fragmentation of Southern culture as cities, companies and universities diversified culturally, Southerners found conspiracy in many sectors of modern American life. There were Jews, who controlled big money in the East Coast cities and relished the South’s failures. There were capitalists, who were often conflated with Jews as enemies of the noble small business community. There was the Federal Government itself, and a cabal of socialists, communists and leftists who had wrought their jealousy upon the south. And there were blacks and hispanics, who were brothers in victimhood or conspirators depending on what county you were in.

Although the South would gain some measure of independence after the heat of the fighting had tapered out, the Southern States would never fully recover, and both the secessionist and Union states continued to maintain a single U.S. military.

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