Chapter ǴǴ: Uchronia, or Alternative History ȂȈȀMayor Cermak instead? What if the United States hadn’t adopted the
silver-purchase program of theȀȈȂǿs, which benefited domestic silver
interests but ruined China’s monetary system and thus improved the
chances of the Communists? What if von Papen and his associates, early
inȀȈȂȂ, had not expected to manage Hitler and make him a safe choice
for Chancellor? What if Hitler had decided to finish off England in
ȀȈȃǿ–ȀȈȃȀbefore tackling Russia? What ifFDR, seriously ill, had died
before the Yalta conference of FebruaryȀȈȃȄ—or earlier, while Henry
Wallace was still vice president? What if Hitler had died in the nearly suc-
cessful attempt to assassinate him inȀȈȃȃ? What if Lee Harvey Oswald
had proved a poor marksman at Dallas inȀȈȅȂ? How would Gerald Ford
and the country have fared if he had not pardoned Richard Nixon? Or
what would Nixon’s refusal of a pardon have meant? What if the tight
vote in Florida inȁǿǿǿhad gone the other way, as it might well have
gone, were it not for hanging chads, misaligned ballots, and accidental
votes for Pat Buchanan? A Gore administration would have been a disas-
ter, but of a different sort from the disaster Bush brought us. And would
today’s financial crisis be less or more severe if the rescue of Long-Term
Capital Management, orchestrated by the Federal Reserve inȀȈȈȇ, and of
other institutions before and later hadn’t worsened the dilemma of moral
hazard?
Sure, history has its deterministic aspects; Marx stressed technology.
But the possibilities inherent in many junctures of history discredit over-
emphasis on determinism and underline the element of chance. Suppose
that Pontius Pilate had saved Jesus Christ, forestalling his crucifixion and
the resurrection story. Would Jesus still have become the focus of a reli-
gion dominating, for good and ill, most of the Western world? Or would
he have remained an itinerant preacher scarcely mentioned in the history
of religion? Would one of the mystery religions of the Eastern Mediter-
ranean have become dominant instead of Christianity?
Consider an episode of British history. Queen Anne hadȀȇchildren,
more or less, counting miscarriages and stillbirths as well as live births. If
better medical care had managed to save even one of these potential heirs
beyond Anne’s death inȀȆȀȃ, the Protestants of her family, the Stuarts (the
Catholics among them being ineligible by law), would have retained the
British crown. But Anne died without leaving a Protestant Stuart heir, so
the crown passed to the distantly related House of Hanover. Hanoverians
had very different interests and political traditions. It was among them
that the British developed what came to be the characteristically modern