JOE STEELE

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Harry Turtledove’s novel Joe Steele grew out of his short story of the same name which, in turn, grew out of Janis Ian’s 2000 song “God and the FBI,” which includes the line “Stalin was a Democrat.” In Turtledove’s version of the twentieth century, Iosef Dzhugashvili’s parents moved to Fresno shortly before he was born and in 1932, Iosef, who changed his name to Joe Steele instead of Joseph Stalin, was a congressman battling Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the Democratic presidential nomination.

While the short story is told in a machine gun style outline, the novel introduces two brothers, Mike and Charlie Sullivan, to tell the story. Both brothers work as reporters and their fates are set in motion when Charlie Sullivan overhears a phone call while covering the 1932 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Steele’s association Vince Scriabin appears to be ordering a hit on Roosevelt. Covering Roosevelt in Albany, New York, Mike winds up covering the fatal fire in the Governor’s mansion. Their lives, however, don’t quite play out as expected, with Charlie eventually taking a job as a speech writer in the Steele White House and Mike, convinced that Steele is bad for the country, writing articles attacking the President even after it becomes clear that the First Amendment won’t necessarily save him.

Turtledove not only takes Stalin’s actions in the Soviet Union as a model for his activities once he’s in the oval office, but also seems happy to include a variety of modern conspiracy theories from both the left and the right about presidential aspirations. The result is a 1930s United States that manages to recreate many of Roosevelt’s initiatives, but also incorporates forced labor, political assassinations, and other political shenanigans to make the US more like Stalin’s USSR. Meanwhile, the USSR is ruled over by Leon Trotsky.

Despite the two leader’s mutual hatred, they join together with Churchill to wage war against the Germans, with Mike Sullivan seeing action as part of a penal squadron in the Pacific. Without an atomic bomb to end the war in Japan, Mike is part of the invasion forces that must try to secure the Home Islands at the end of the war, as well as keep a lid on them in the peace that follows. While much of the macrohistory remains the same, there are differences, with a Japan divided between the US and USSR becoming a flashpoint for a battle between Communism and Capitalism instead of Korea.

Joe Steele portrays our world as an extremely lucky one. While much of Western World was flirting with various forms of fascism in the 1930s, and Roosevelt certainly took some steps in that direction, the United States managed to avoid falling down the rabbit hole. Turtledove isn’t making the claim that we live in some sort of Candidesque best of all possible worlds, but the novel does clearly point out that things could always get worse. And even as bad as the United States of Joe Steele is represented to be, many of the actual governments of the period were worse.

Joe Steele differs from many of Turtledove’s novels in its paucity of viewpoint characters. Rather than using a plethora of characters to get the story across, he focuses on the two Sullivan brothers to show what is happening in Washington and what happens to people who cross President Steele. In many ways, Mike’s story is more interesting, simply because it shows a view of the encampments set up, the war in the Pacific, and eventually life as a conqueror, while Charlie’s world is set amongst the relatively settled environment of Washington, DC, even as Charlie attempts, in his own small way, to minimize the impact Steele is having on the country.

The novel offers an intriguing alternate history which is more politically based than militarily based, although Mike Sullivan’s experiences in the Pacific theatre certainly offer fans of military science fiction a chance to see combat. The political focus, however, means that Joe Steele provides a more nuanced and philosophical exploration of history than many of alternate histories that have a military departure point.

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