The case for counterfactual history

Historians hate alternate history, but it's a good way to understand causal claims

I’ve long been a fan of alternate history novels. As a kid, I saw a copy of Harry Turtledove’s “The Guns of the South” on a Barnes & Noble bookshelf, and the image of Robert E. Lee holding an AK-47 really struck me.

The book, as it turns out, is more of a time travel story. The plot involves white supremacists from South Africa, despairing at the collapse of apartheid, traveling back to the 1860s and equipping the Confederate States with modern small arms that enable them to establish a white supremacist republic in the American south. It’s a sort of intriguing story, though also odd. But Turtledove is widely considered, as the cover described him, “the master of alternate history,” and “The Guns of the South” led me to his other work.

This included a more grounded book, called “How Few Remain,” that posits a universe in which the Union does not intercept Robert E. Lee’s Special Order 191, there is no Union victory at Antietam, and the South wins the war. This spins out a whole multi-volume series:

• The independent Confederate States of America is ushered into being with diplomatic assistance from England and France, so the postwar United States finds itself aligned with Prussia and the German Empire.

• The United States joins the Central Powers during World War I, and they prove victorious, setting the stage for the rise of a Nazi-like regime in the 1930s CSA and a Second World War.

He also has a series based on the very outlandish premise of an alien invasion in the middle of World War II. And a much more mundane series premised on the idea that the Munich Agreement doesn’t happen and World War II starts in 1938.

As I read more alternate history books, I noticed that an outsized share of those written in the United States are about these two specific conflicts: World War II (“Fatherland” and “The Man in the High Castle” are my favorites) and the American Civil War (Newt Gingrich, weirdly, has a decent series on this).

This makes sense, I think. These are the two most popular historical topics in the US, and people like to read fiction about them. But as longtime Slow Boring readers know, I really enjoy alternate history speculations about a wider range of topics. I think it’s actually a valid and important line of inquiry, and I wish we had more work in this vein, drawn from a whole range of styles, including serious scholarship and fanciful fiction.

I’ve enjoyed watching “For All Mankind” on Apple TV over the past few years, precisely because it features a fresh point of departure — the brilliant Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev does not die unexpectedly at 59. In this world, the Soviets beat the United States to the Moon, resulting in a much more intense version of the Space Race with far-reaching implications for technology and geopolitics. The show is a show, of course, with characters and plots and all the rest. But like all good alternate histories, it features (or at least implies) a strong thesis about our actual world: The upshot of the show’s departure from our timeline is that the world becomes much more technologically advanced and adventurous, with a permanent Moon base and a nuclear-powered space shuttle by the early 1980s and a thriving Mars base by 2003.

Causation and counterfactuals

In the Turtledove series where the South wins the Civil War and the United States aligns with Germany and Austria-Hungary, one of the sub-plots is that the Gilded Age US develops a meaningful socialist movement. The movement isn’t strong enough to win the presidency in the 19th Century, but it does elect members of congress and influence events. Then in the wake of the Great War, Upton Sinclair becomes America’s first Socialist Party president. Twentieth Century American politics is driven by an alignment between the Democrats on the right and the socialists on the left, with the Republicans discredited by the initial defeat in the Civil War and cast aside.

This is in part just a plot flourish, but it’s also an implicit entry in the long-running historical debate over why there’s no socialist or labor party in the United States.