Second American Civil War

The Second American Civil War was a war fought in the year 1933 that marked the fall of the old United States. It was fought between the fascist Government of National Salvation (known as the "Whites") who had taken power on 1 February by overthrowing the incoming socialist government-elect of Norman Thomas in a military coup d'etat, and Communist forces representing the parties of the Popular Front and those who opposed the coup (known as the "Reds"), and from May onwards, the nascent Union of American Socialist Republics (UASR).

In spite of early victories, the Whites soon found themselves facing insurrection on the West Coast, while Red forces pushed eastwards from their midwestern strongholds, with the Red victory at the Battle of Chicago marking a major turning point. White forces would also face unanticipated partisan resistance in the South, a presumed conservative stronghold, thanks to an alliance between blacks and poor whites against the Bourbon ruling classes which had been cultivated by leftists over much of the 1920s. Much of the Red leadership was made up of radicalized World War I veterans, most notably George Patton, who had been secretly working as an agent for the Workers' Communist Party within the upper echelons of the US military before leading a mutiny among members of the Bonus Army upon being dispatched to win them over as recruits to the White cause. By the end of the year, Douglas MacArthur's military government has been forced to flee to Cuba, along with aligned members of the bourgeoisie, where they set up a government-in-exile with the initially reluctant collaboration of Cuban elites.

With the victory of the United Republics, the war marked a major realignment in global politics, with the UASR going from being one of the key centres of international capitalism to becoming one of the two superpowers of the Third Communist International, breaking their alliance with the United Kingdom and becoming one of Nazi Germany's main enemies. The United Republics would also be able to aid the alliance of agrarian and socialist rebels in Mexico, leading to the success of the near-simultaneous Second Mexican Revolution and the establishment of a Socialist Republic the following year, and from there socialism would gain significant influence over much of Latin and South America. The Revolution would also sow the seeds for America's conflict against international fascist governments during World War II. Along with the rise of Communism in the American continent, the war also marked the beginning of the First Cultural Revolution, a period of upheaval and challenge to established social norms.

Terminology
The "Second American Civil War" is the most common name for the conflict, differentiating it from the First American Civil War, more commonly known today as the Slavers' War. It is also widely known as the Second American Revolution, with the first American revolution in turn being the war of independence from Great Britain fought between 1775 and 1783. The phrase "Second American Revolution" however, can also specifically refer to the Red May Revolution, which is the point at which Red forces officially abandoned the struggle to restore the democratic constitutional government, and instead proclaimed the formation of the United American Republics.

Background
Although some leftist scholars have argued the revolution was in the long term inevitable, the more immediate root causes of the events can be linked to the failure of the Progressive movement in the 1900s to achieve dominance in the Republican and Democratic parties, leading to the continuation and intensification of class conflict. With reforms lacking, high levels of corruption and inequality persisted post-Gilded Age. The Socialist Labor Party and Social Democratic Party first entered Congress in the 1906 elections, and would only gain influence in the years ahead, while Progressives were marginalized from the two traditional major parties, facing Supreme Court-ordered reversals of their limited victories and eventual splits. In 1914, the United States entered the Great War, a conflict which would prove extremely harsh and take a huge toll on working-class soldiers, many of whom were radicalized by their experiences. The post-war period, with an economic downturn as the country demobilized, would see a surge of labour unrest, strikes and factory occupations, known as the Biennio Rosso.

January 1918 would see the New York City government and police force refuse to allow SLP mayor-elect Morris Hilquist to take power, culminating in a widespread uprising temporarily taking hold of Manhattan and an attempted crackdown by the national government, only ending following negotiations an an agreement to recognize the municipal government in exchange for the disbanding of workers' militias. In the meantime, similar uprisings had spread across the countries to major cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco and Seattle. Even though these "communes" were short-lived, unrest continued. Radicalised soldiers, fresh from their war experiences, would be drawn into armed conflicts defending striking workers from hired thugs. During the summer of 1919, an estimated five million Americans were involved in some kind of factory occupation. Class conflict would finally peak during the Red Summer of 1920, before labor groups began to lose steam. General Leonard Wood, former Secretary of War, rose to prominence in the Republican Party as the government hastily move towards reform to stem the upsurge, even attempting to address uprisings from black veterans in the Jim Crow South. Wood was elected president in November 1920.

While the overall situation nationwide calmed following this, a precedent had been set. During the 1920s, parallel institutions linked to the socialist movement became more well-developed and prevalent through American society. The International Labor Defense Committee, formed in 1920, would defend labor and left-wing activists, soon affiliating themselves into the International Red Aid network. The Pioneer League, a socialist alternative to the Boy Scouts, was established in 1921, and would develop a strong rivalry with their bourgeois counterparts. Joining the nascent Third Communist International, the further radicalized SLP would change its name to the Workers' Party of the America, in accordance with the conditions of TCI membership. This would mark a new period in the newly-christened WPA's history, as it came to make up a seperate pillar of American civil society, against the "official" institutions, de facto representing the Republican Party, and organizations in the South supported by the Democratic Party.

With a growth of an African-American protest movement against Jim Crow laws and discrimination in the Deep South led by disaffected black veterans dawning, the Workers' Party began to move its efforts into fighting racism and segregation in the region, adopting the "Southern Strategy" in October 1921. With this new alignment formalized, the WPA would begin to focus on building alliances between the white working class and African-Americans of the South against the elites and bourgeoisie. They would come into conflict with white supremacist groups of the region such as the Ku Klux Klan, who would step up their campaign of racial terror in an attempt to destroy the movement. As early as 1919, the Omaha Race Riots, sparked after a group of armed black Great War veterans successfully thwarted an attempted lynching, gave America its first taste of a black population that had the capability to defend itself, and reactionaries responded in kind. The Vicksburg Pogrom on July 14, 1922 saw a series of killings as the KKK attacked a meeting of the local Tenant Farmers Union, which was responded to by a wave of strikes and counterattacks by the Communist-aligned TFU, and later on, the Mississippi Red Army. By November, as the government forcibly restored order in Missisipi, 72 white and 4 black citizens would be charged with violating the Anti-Lynching Act. Meanwhile, the Republican-lead national government began to rapidly move towards reform in an attempt to stem racial violence in the region. The federal government, invoking the Fourteenth Amendment, threatened to reduce the representation of states that practiced voter suppression proportionately to the percentage of the population denied ballot access. Poll tax laws targeting the black community would be ruled unconstitutional, and by the 1924 elections, the Republican Party would begin to actively campaign on civil rights issues in the South, deepening the societal rift between them and the Democratic Party, which having lost most of its left-populist flank to the splinter Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, became the party representing the interests of the Southern ruling class. However, even they would be forced to distance themselves from the excesses of far-right groups such as the KKK. The elections were once more won by the Republican Party with Wood re-elected to a second term, and with the Democratic Party coming second on electoral college votes. However, having already lost most of their voter base outside of the South to the DFLP (which aligned itself with the Republicans), they won a measly 11.4% of the national popular vote, while the Workers' Party, in spite of being narrowly beaten by the Democrats in the electoral college, won over a third of the popular vote, a sign of their growing power. The following February, the New York edition of the socialist Daily Worker would equal the New York Times in total circulation.

The growth of the socialist movement was tempered somewhat by the economic boom of the 1920s, but this was in many ways compensated for by ongoing events in the South. The Civil Rights Act of 1925 was passed by the federal government on June 18, prohibiting segregation and racial and sex-based discrimination in employment, housing and other services, sparking a renwed violent backlash from the far-right. State police were mobilized during the "Days of Rage" incidents that summer, which saw local black figures being attacked and murdered by mobs in rural areas. August 14 would see clashes in Washington D.C. between marching Klansmen, who managed to mobilize in large numbers, and WPA counter-protestors before police intervention, effectively ending the rally. By the end of the summer, the Army would be sent to the South to both prevent further conflict and to pre-empt a more co-ordinated response from Communist Spartacus League paramilitaries. The National Bureau of Investigation would soon recieve official authorization to begin crackdowns on the Klan, while opening links to covertly funnel intelligence to and from left-wing groups. That October, a Spartacus League member who had recieved information from an NBI contact would assassinate Hiram Evans, Imperial Wizard of the KKK, triggering a power struggle within the organization.