O, eldritch Godwin!
It’s come up twice in separate conversations over the past few days, which means it goes up here, darn it. (“What I tell you two times gets blogged.”) So: that alternate history where H.P. Lovecraft gets elected president and invades Canada, among other things.
(Written by John J. Reilly, whose crankery I’m finding quite endearing this fine, damp evening, despite the inevitable cocked eyebrow or three.)
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Fascinating stuff, the guy is a bit of a right wing nut (that seems rather par for the course for conservative Catholics), but he's definitely an interesting nut.
It's his alternate universe, so Reilly can re-imagine Lovecraft however he wants, but it's fair to say that his vision of Lovecraft is wildly off the mark. HPL was an eccentric with the prejudices of his day, not a proto-fascist. He might've liked to dramatize his dislike of immigrants, but he also married a woman of Russian-Jewish ancestry. Besides, Lovecraft was 27 in 1917--a little old for WWI.
Actually, the key event in HPL's youth seems to have been the death of his grandfather. Had the family's financial security been insured after the man's death (had they not lost their house, etc.), Lovecraft might have had the emotional and financial ability to continue through high school and at Brown. A formal education (something he was always ashamed of lacking) might have given HPL the self-esteem to leave home as well as the rigorous grounding in subjects like science, politics, and literature that he lacked. From there, let's say, I could easily see him becoming enamored of a Walter Lippmann-style "scientific" reform politics. Not socialism, but good 1920's gentlemanly progressivism. HPL spends the 20's writing poetry and criticism for The New Republic--later generations will regard him as a fine, if minor, American Modernist poet (scads of papers will be written about HPL's friendship with Hart Crane)--and during the 1932 election--believing that capitalism must be saved from itself--campaigns for FDR.
Well, yes and no. You're supposing that whether or not one is a fascist, or of a fascist temperament, is something a priori, bred in the bone, something that would not change no matter how one alters history. --I have a somewhat less charitable view: one's politics end up being set by the experiences in one's life. Alter those experiences, and you alter the politics. (One is tempted, say, by the spectre of Robert Heinlein as a successful socialist candidate leading a genteelly rational people's revolution from the Greatly Depressed west coast.) Though I agree: yours is the more probable scenario, Paul (and can I say I love the idea of the lost Lovecraft/Crane correspondence), Reilly's is the more colorful; and since both are counterfactuals, they are equally likely.
But I don't think it at all probable that a Lovecraft of any political persuasion would ever have run on a ticket with L. Ron Hubbard. --That's my own particular sticking point.