Columbia League

The Columbia League was a political movement and party in the United States, founded in 1932 by Wesley Pruitt, which governed the country from 1937 to 1979. Its leader was elected president by the House of Representatives in January 1937 after an election in which no candidate won a majority of the electoral college, and its government ruled under emergency powers, while keeping elections, Congress and the courts. It led the United States in the First Euro-American War against the European states. The emergency powers ended with the Restoration Amendments of 1979, and the League renamed itself the National Party, which held the presidency for most of the following decades.

In the European Federation the League's period of government is called American fascism; in the United States it is called the Emergency.

History

Founding

The League was founded at a veterans' rally at the fairgrounds in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 11 November 1932, three days after the presidential election, by Wesley Pruitt (1891–1946), an Oklahoma state senator and former artillery officer whose Sunday radio programme, The American Hour, was carried by 140 stations by 1935. Its 1934 platform, the Twelve Points, combined demands for a cap on fortunes, a homestead for every family, old-age pensions and cheap federal credit for farmers with national service, the settlement of strikes by compulsory arbitration, the closing of immigration and the removal of "un-Americans", the extension of Southern racial segregation to the whole country, and the exclusion of the European powers from the Americas. Its speakers blamed the Depression on Wall Street and on "the money-lenders of London and Paris", and on the European governments' default on their war debts. The Ku Klux Klan merged into the League in 1934.

The League's paramilitary wing, the Minutemen, was formed in 1933 from veterans' posts. Its members wore grey shirts and a bronze badge, and numbered about 600,000 by 1936. They broke strikes, guarded polling stations, and stopped foreclosure sales of farms. Pruitt was elected governor of Oklahoma in 1934 and governed the state twice under martial law. The League had 1.1 million members in 1934 and 4.2 million in 1936.

Election of 1936

In the presidential election of 3 November 1936 Pruitt won 36.4% of the popular vote, the Democratic president Lyman Teague 33.1% and the Republican Alfred Severance 29.0%. In the electoral college Pruitt won 248 votes, Teague 156 and Severance 127, short of the 266 needed. Under the Twelfth Amendment the House of Representatives chose the president, voting by state delegation. Southern Democratic delegations and five Republican delegations from the industrial Midwest agreed to vote for Pruitt at a meeting at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the night of 5 January 1937, and on 6 January he carried 27 of the 48 delegations. The Senate chose his running mate, Everett Crane, a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, as vice president. Pruitt was inaugurated on 20 January 1937.

In government

In February 1937 Pruitt sent federal troops and the Minutemen to end the sit-down strike at the Flint car plants, in which 61 people were killed. The National Emergency Act of 21 April 1937 allowed the president to govern by executive order for the duration of a national emergency, suspended habeas corpus in districts of insurrection, placed the National Guard permanently under federal control and created the National Security Bureau. The Supreme Court was enlarged to fifteen justices in 1937. The Loyalty Act of 1938 banned the Communist and Socialist parties and, in 1939, the Democrats who supported Teague; the remaining Republicans merged into the League in 1948. Trade unions were merged into a single American Labor Council, and strikes were made illegal. Membership of the League became a condition of federal employment in 1940, when it had nine million members.

Under the League's government about 1.9 million people, most of them of Mexican descent, were deported between 1938 and 1946; about 520,000 people were held at the peak in 1944 in the forced-labour camps of the Federal Labor Reserves, where about 140,000 died; about 310,000 people were sterilised under the Federal Hygiene Act of 1938; and the National Order Act of 1939 made racial segregation federal law. Jews were excluded by quota from federal employment, the professions and the universities. Federal tribunals passed about 4,100 death sentences between 1937 and 1958.

The League's government invaded Mexico in 1938 and fought the European states from 1940 to 1947. Pruitt died in office on 2 November 1946 and was succeeded by Crane, who ended the war. Under Dale Mercer, president from 1958 to 1971, the United States built its interstate highways and its space programme, which landed the first people on the Moon in 1968.

Restoration and the National Party

After Mercer's death in 1971, the League's governors and its industrial supporters refused the vice president, Raymond Sowell, the candidate of the security services, and nominated the governor of Michigan, Glenn Mathers, in 1972. Mathers refused to use the National Guard against the general strikes of Constitution Day, 17 September 1974, and the Restoration Amendments, ratified on 12 October 1979, ended the emergency, restored habeas corpus, dissolved the Labor Council and voided the Loyalty Act and the National Order Act. The League renamed itself the National Party the same month. It won the first contested presidential election, in 1980, and held the presidency for 32 of the 40 years from 1979 to 2019. No one was tried for the Labor Reserves.

Legacy

In the European Federation the League's government is remembered as the enemy of the First Euro-American War, and the United States continued to be regarded as fascist for much of the Kaltkrieg. The National Party's presidents include Paul Garrity, elected in 2020.

See also

• United States
• First Euro-American War
• Kaltkrieg