The Breach and the Peace (1919–1920)

The United States had two million men in France when the Breach opened on the Brocken on 30 April 1919. The American Expeditionary Force, which had been preparing to go home, instead marched east as part of the hasty coalition of every former belligerent, and American divisions were in the line at the Battle of the Rift on 29 May, holding the perimeter while the circle of mystics sealed the Breach under the eclipse. The AEF lost more men in those five weeks than in the whole of 1917.

The experience changed the peace. President Wilson, who had planned to fight the Senate over the League of Nations, found the Senate had come around on its own: a country that had just watched the sky open over Germany wanted a world body with the power to keep it shut. The United States signed the Treaty of Versailles on 11 November 1919 and joined the League the following spring. Versailles blamed Germany for the Breach, but the reparations clauses were replaced by a reconstruction program, funded by American capital and run by American industrialists, that made Germany's recovery an American business proposition. This is the origin of the investment ties that would later make appeasement so profitable.

At home, the same Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, granting the federal government authority over "the practice, teaching, and traffic of the arcane," and the Veil Act of 1920 that enforced it. There was never a Volstead Act; the temperance movement lost its moment to a louder fear.

The Boom (1920–1929)

The twenties were the decade of the arcane start-up. Veil-engineering, the fusion of occult practice with electrical apparatus that the Rift had proven possible, became a field, then an industry, then a mania. Faculties opened at MIT, Chicago, and Caltech. Patents were filed for aether compasses, resonance lamps, Veil-shielded vaults, and a thousand devices that did not work. Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927 on a hybrid aether engine. Capital flowed into anything with "Veil" in its name, and Wall Street discovered that an arcane company's stock could rise on rumor faster than a railroad's ever had.

The Masquerade had broken in 1919, and the twenties were when the country learned what had been living in it. The Old Academy, the wizards' ancient self-governing body, made itself known to the federal government in 1921 and negotiated a position of formal neutrality: it would license its own members under the Veil Act and keep its own laws, in exchange for being left alone. The fey, the undead, and the rest got no such deal. Their position in the twenties was that of any immigrant community without papers: tolerated when useful, raided when convenient, and organized, in self-defense, along the lines the Italian and Irish communities had already pioneered.

The Crash and the Square Deal (1929–1936)

The bubble burst in October 1929, and the Dust Bowl arrived on schedule. By 1932 a quarter of the workforce was idle, and the arcane industries, built on speculation, had collapsed faster than the real ones.

The 1932 election put the Engineer in the White House: a research administrator and Republican reformer who had run the National Arcane Research Council through the boom and who promised to apply to America the methods that had rebuilt Germany. His program, the Square Deal, was neither relief nor regulation. It was investment: a nationwide value-added tax funding billions in public-private partnerships, chartered corporations in which the federal government held a stake and private industrialists held the management. Dams, highways, Veil-plants, the Transcontinental Arcane Grid, and the Civil Defense Corps, a standing labor army of two million men in uniform who built what the partnerships designed. Henry Ford, the Engineer's closest ally outside government, chaired the partnership board and set its terms; his remark about paying one man to dig a ditch and another to fill it was reported as a joke and meant as a policy.

There was no Social Security Act. There was no Wagner Act. The partnerships offered wage-and-pension compacts on the Ford model, and a worker who wanted one took the Ford terms. Organized labor, where it survived, survived outside the system and was called Communist for it.

Appeasement (1936–1941)

The Engineer was re-elected in 1936. His foreign policy was consistent throughout: the United States had investments in Germany, customers in Germany, and no quarrel with Germany, and Germany's quarrel with its own Touched was Germany's business. When the Reich invaded the Ottoman Empire in 1937, the United States sold both sides trucks. When Czechoslovakia's relic vaults were handed over at Munich, the American delegation was present as an observer and raised no objection. When Poland fell, the Neutrality Acts held; when France fell in six weeks in 1940, the President told the country that Europe's wars were Europe's, and a majority agreed with him.

Not all of it. The Lafayette lobby, interventionists in Congress and the press, pushed for aid to Britain and got, in 1941, a cash-and-carry arrangement that kept British convoys supplied and American shipyards busy. The Office of Strategic Services, chartered in 1941 as a "research coordination" agency, acquired a European desk whose director took a broader view of his mandate than the White House did. And a great many Americans simply left: for the RAF, for the Free French, for the Resistance, for the relic trade.

Lindbergh (1940–)

As the war heated up, the country looked for a capable leader to protect it, and the Engineer, who could have broken the two-term tradition, instead anointed one. Charles Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic on an aether engine in 1927 and, in 1932, had followed his kidnapped son through a thin place in the Sourland Mountains and come back with him; he was the most famous man in America twice over, a known admirer of the German Reconstruction, and the loudest voice in the country for staying out of Europe's war. He was elected in November 1940 on the Square Deal's record and a promise of peace, and inaugurated in March 1941.

His first year was domestic. The FBI's budget was tripled to fight "magical crime." The Immigration and Naturalization Service was moved under Justice, and the Special Alien Repatriation Commission was forked from the Border Patrol with a mandate that nobody outside the administration understood until the following spring.

Pearl Harbor and the Pacific Accord (1941–1942)

On 7 December 1941, in the first year of the Lindbergh administration, the Imperial Japanese Navy struck Pearl Harbor. The Pacific Fleet lost four battleships, two thousand men, and its forward base. The country expected war.

The President asked for negotiations instead, and called it putting his money where his mouth was. The Pacific Accord, signed at Honolulu on 14 February 1942, recognized Japanese "protection" of the Philippine Commonwealth and ceded Guam, Wake, and American Samoa outright. In exchange, Japan paid a token reparation to rebuild the fleet, guaranteed the Hawaiian Islands, the Panama Canal, and American shipping in the eastern Pacific, and reopened the China trade to American firms on Japanese terms. "The United States has no interest in building Empires abroad," the President told the country. "That's exactly why these terrible wars keep happening. We must rise above this barbaric trend. War is obsolete. America is above it." Opponents called it the greatest humiliation in the country's history and said so in every newspaper not owned by the partnership board. The Senate ratified it 61 to 35. The public, by every poll, remains strongly against it.

Terrestrial Soil (1942)

With the Pacific settled, the President turned to the Touched. The Terrestrial Soil Act of March 1942, under the slogan "Terrestrial Soil for Terrestrial Sons," declares that persons "of extra-terrestrial lineage or alteration" are, for the purposes of immigration law, foreign nationals whose true domicile lies beyond the Veil, and authorizes the Special Alien Repatriation Commission to return them there. The vast majority of the Touched are natural-born citizens who were accidentally exposed to planar energy. The Act does not distinguish. The first repatriation gateway, at Ellis Island, is under construction; nobody has yet said where, exactly, the repatriated will go.

As of the spring of 1942, the United States is at peace with every power on earth, and the Pacific Fleet, what is left of it, is anchored at San Diego.

Thin places

The Veil is not uniformly thick, and the Breach made it thinner everywhere. The National Arcane Research Council's Veil Survey (1924–31, the arcane equivalent of the Geological Survey) mapped the continent's thin places, and the map is a national secret with a great many copies. The best-known:

• The Mississippi delta, especially New Orleans, where the city's old hedge traditions turn out to have been working with something real.
• The Four Corners, where the Survey teams stopped reporting in 1928 and the file was closed.
• Salem and the Massachusetts North Shore, thin for reasons everyone pretends not to know.
• The Great Lakes, in particular Superior, where things have been reported since the fur trade.
• The Black Hills, a Veil-survey site and a Lakota sacred site, and the subject of a lawsuit the government has been losing for a decade.

Veil-plants and the Grid

The Square Deal's Transcontinental Arcane Grid follows the thin places. Veil-plants, brass-and-copper installations the size of a steel mill that draw on the field directly, sit at Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley, Niagara, and a dozen smaller sites, feeding arcane power into the industrial economy the way the TVA feeds electricity. The towns around them have the highest Touched birth rates in the country. The Council says there is no proven connection.

The partnership economy

The Square Deal's chartered corporations dominate heavy industry: Continental Arcane (Veil-plants and the Grid), the Ford Civil Works Company (highways, dams, housing), Transamerica Resonance (communications), and a dozen others. Each is nominally public, actually run by its private management, and protected by federal charter from competition, labor organization, and most lawsuits. The partnership board, chaired by Ford, sets wages, prices, and, increasingly, policy.

The result is an economy that recovered from the Crash faster than any other and a country in which the distinction between the government and its contractors has become difficult to draw. Critics call it corporatism. The President calls it engineering.

Trade

The United States trades with everyone, which is the point of neutrality. Germany buys machine tools, aluminum, and oil, and American capital still holds the German bonds issued under the reconstruction program. Britain buys everything it can afford under cash-and-carry. Japan, since the Accord, buys scrap steel and sells the China trade. The Soviet Union is embargoed, officially; a great deal of American equipment reaches Vladivostok by way of Japan.

Relics are a trade good. American museums, universities, and private collectors are the world's largest buyers of arcane antiquities, and the dig sites of Central America, where the Monroe Doctrine keeps the Europeans out, are an American preserve.

The black market

The Veil Act made unlicensed arcane practice a federal crime and created, overnight, the most profitable contraband in American history. Licensed practice is expensive, slow, and surveilled; unlicensed practice is available in every city from a man who knows a man. The trade in unlicensed workings, in relics without provenance, in sanctuary for the unregistered Touched, and in the soul-contracts that are the darkest end of the business, is estimated by the Bureau of Veil Enforcement at $2 billion a year, and the Bureau's estimates are low.

Veil Prohibition

The Eighteenth Amendment and the Veil Act have shaped American life for twenty years the way alcohol prohibition shaped it in no life but this one. The Bureau of Veil Enforcement, a Treasury agency, licenses arcane practice through a system of federal permits (research, industrial, medical, religious, and the rare personal permit), inspects licensed premises, maintains the Veil Rolls of registered Touched, and raids everything else. Its agents are called Veil men, or, less politely, wardens.

Unlicensed practice is everywhere. The arcane speakeasy is an American institution: a back room, a password, a hedge witch or a fey or a warlock on the premises, and a clientele that ranges from the curious to the desperate. The Bureau closes a hundred a month and a hundred more open.

Organized crime

The Veil Act gave the American underworld its modern form. The Five Families of New York, the Outfit in Chicago, and their counterparts in every city run the unlicensed trade, and they run it as the families have always run things: through neighborhood loyalty, political protection, and the recruitment of the people the law has pushed out. The Mob is Italian, Irish, and Jewish, as it always was, and it is also fey-blooded, demon-blooded, and Touched, because those are the people whose bodies are contraband and who have nowhere else to go. The Families protect their own from the Bureau the way they once protected them from the police, and they have no love for any government on earth.

The Masquerade peoples

The old peoples lived in the United States as they lived everywhere, hidden, until 1919. Since then they have lived in the open and in a state of permanent negotiation.

• The Old Academy is the only one of them with a legal settlement: its wizards are self-licensed under the Veil Act, its laws are its own, and its neutrality is absolute. It has chapters in Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco and a membership that does not exceed a few hundred. It disapproves of the government's wizards (the Council's researchers, the OSS's field arcanists, the Pinkertons' occult division) as warlocks with badges.
• The fey have no settlement and want none. They pass, as they always did, and when they cannot pass they live in the fey quarters that have grown up in every large city, next to the Touched and under the Families' protection.
• The undead are the least tolerated and the best organized. The vampire houses policed their own for centuries to keep the Masquerade, and they police their own now to keep the truce: no new Draculas, no public feeding, no turning without consent. The Bureau does not believe them and raids them anyway.
• Others. The country has ghosts, which are a nuisance; a scattering of things that came over with immigrant communities and kept their old names; and whatever was in the thin places before anyone arrived.

The Touched

The Touched are the people the Veil has changed: survivors of the Breach zone and the Rift, their children, and a growing number of Americans who were never near Germany and have simply been born near a Veil-plant. The change shows in different ways (a gift, a mark, a hunger) and in different degrees, and the Veil Act does not distinguish. All Touched must register. Registration means a card, a file, a travel restriction, and a standing invitation to the Council's research programs.

The United States does not intern its Touched. Until this spring it did not need to. Registered Touched cannot hold federal employment, most state licenses, or a passport; they are refused by the partnership corporations and by most unions; and they live, for the most part, in the quarters they share with the fey and under the protection they can buy from the Families. Since March the Terrestrial Soil Act has made them, in law, foreigners, and the Special Alien Repatriation Commission has begun serving notices. The Touched Underground, which moves people out of the Reich by routes the Reich does not know, also moves people out of Ohio, and its traffic has tripled.

Press, radio, and the pictures

The country has 1,900 daily newspapers, 900 radio stations, and a film industry that produces five hundred pictures a year. The partnership board owns, outright or through the chartered corporations, about a third of the newspapers and both of the national radio networks. The remaining two-thirds of the press is the most vigorous opposition in the country, and the only one with an audience; the Lafayette lobby's case against appeasement is made every morning on the front page of the Herald Tribune and every night on the independent stations.

Hollywood makes war pictures about the last war and gangster pictures about this one. The Veil man is a stock hero. The Touched are stock villains. The arcane speakeasy is a stock set, and every studio has one.

Religion

Protestant, Catholic (about one in five), Jewish (about one in thirty), and in the aftermath of the Breach a great deal of everything else. The mainline churches took the Rift as proof of the devil and the eclipse as proof of God, and the Veil Act's religious permit is the most contested category in the Bureau's system: a Catholic exorcism is licensed practice, a hoodoo working is not, and nobody has yet explained the difference in court. Revival movements built on Breach prophecy have come and gone through the thirties; the current one, the Church of the Sealed Door, has a radio audience of four million and an opinion about the Touched.

The Constitution

The federal structure is unchanged: a President, a bicameral Congress, a Supreme Court, and forty-eight states with their own governments. The Constitution has twenty amendments. The Eighteenth (1920) gives the federal government authority over the arcane; the Nineteenth (1920) is women's suffrage; the Twentieth (1933) is the lame-duck amendment. There has been no repeal of the Eighteenth and no serious movement for one.

The Square Deal coalition

Lindbergh inherited, and governs through, the coalition the Engineer built over eight years: the Republican Party, the partnership board, the chartered corporations and their workforces, the farm belt (which the Civil Works Company irrigated), and a large share of the middle class that remembers 1932. It controls the White House, the Senate, and, narrowly, the House. The Engineer himself has returned to the National Arcane Research Council as its chairman and is widely assumed to still be running the economy.

Opposition

• The Lafayette lobby. Interventionists, mostly Eastern, mostly in the independent press, some in both parties. They want aid to Britain, an end to the German trade, and, since February, repudiation of the Pacific Accord. They do not have the votes and have never had them.
• The Democrats. Out of power since 1933 and divided between a Southern wing that likes the Square Deal fine and a Northern wing that wants a New Deal nobody will fund. The party's arcane policy is to repeal the Veil Act's registration provisions, which has won it the Touched vote and lost it everything else.
• Labor and the left. The CIO, outlawed in all but name by the partnership charters, survives as a movement without a contract. The Communist Party is small, watched, and blamed for everything. Both are honestly represented among the Americans fighting in Europe, which the administration considers proof of its point.
• The Sealed Door. The Breach-prophecy churches, which want the Veil Act tightened to internment and the Touched quarters cleared. They vote Republican and the Republicans would rather they did not.

Federal agencies

• The Bureau of Veil Enforcement (Treasury). Licensing, the Veil Rolls, raids. 11,000 agents.
• The National Arcane Research Council. The civilian research establishment the President once ran; funds the universities, the Veil Survey, and the Veil-plants' engineering. Its field teams compete with the Ahnenerbe for every dig site in the Mediterranean, and its leadership trades with the Reich.
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation (Justice). J. Edgar Hoover's bureau handles the Communists, the Mob, and, since Lindbergh tripled its budget for "magical crime," a growing share of the Veil cases the Bureau of Veil Enforcement used to keep for itself. The two bureaus despise each other.
• The Special Alien Repatriation Commission (Justice). Forked from the Border Patrol in 1941 and given its mandate by the Terrestrial Soil Act in 1942: to identify Touched "aliens," serve them with repatriation orders, and deliver them to the gateways. Its agents are called repatriation men, or, in the Touched quarters, the Sons.
• The Office of Strategic Services. Chartered 1941 as a research-coordination agency. Officially has no field operations. Its European desk runs Americans into France under a director who has not been told to stop in words he is required to obey.
• The Pinkerton National Detective Agency (private). Not a federal agency and the largest arcane security force in the country, under contract to the partnership corporations. Its Occult Division recovers relics for clients who do not ask where they go.