History of the United States (from the Breach onward)

1910s

Until April 30th, 1919, identical to our timeline (but for secretive events that escaped the notice of historians, such as the existence of the occult).

• April 30th, 1919: the Armistice is rocked by news of a calamity in central Germany. Unknown "things" have made mincemeat of the German army and are spreading rapidly into the countryside. Over the coming weeks, a hasty alliance between all former belligerents would form to combat this existential threat.
• May 1919: the American Expeditionary Force, two million strong and packing to go home, instead marches east. The U.S. Third Army under Pershing crosses from the Koblenz bridgehead into the Harz as the western arm of the coalition. The AEF loses more men in five weeks than in the whole of 1917.
• May 29, 1919: the Battle of the Rift: the alliance pushes the invaders back to the Rift on the Brocken, and heroically defend a circle of mystics who utilize the 7 minute long solar eclipse to complete a spell sealing the Rift, hopefully for good.
• June–October 1919: the AEF holds its sector of the new Harz Exclusion Zone perimeter until relieved by the Reichswehr. The first American Touched, several thousand soldiers changed by the Zone, come home with the Army and are quietly discharged.
• November 11, 1919: the US signs the Treaty of Versailles, saddling Germany with the blame for the Breach, but offering millions in investments to rebuild their shattered infrastructure--with American industrialists at the helm of the recovery. The Senate, which had been preparing to fight Wilson over the League of Nations, ratifies the treaty and the League Covenant together: a country that has just watched the sky open over Germany wants a world body with the power to keep it shut.

1920s

A decade of massive economic growth, as post-Breach research and development drive new industries, with private investment enabling an endless wave of startups, all promising massive returns. It's a great time to be an engineer or an investor...at least until the bubble bursts in 1929.

• January 1920: the Eighteenth Amendment is ratified, granting Congress authority over "the practice, teaching, and traffic of the arcane." There is never a Volstead Act; the temperance movement loses its moment to a louder fear. The Veil Act of 1920 follows in March, creating the Bureau of Veil Enforcement under Treasury, the federal permit system, and the Veil Rolls on which every Touched citizen must register.
• 1920: the United States joins the League of Nations as a founding member and its largest funder. American officers sit on the Inter-Allied Arcane Control Commission that polices Germany's research ban.
• 1921: the Old Academy, the wizards' ancient self-governing body, makes itself known to the federal government and negotiates formal neutrality: it will 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 of the Masquerade peoples get no such deal.
• 1921–1924: the Dresden model. Ford, Mellon, and the National Arcane Research Council's young director (the future President, "the Engineer") architect an entire new German industrial region in Saxony on American capital and American methods. It is the largest private investment in history and the origin of the ties that will later make appeasement profitable.
• 1922: Veil-engineering faculties open at MIT, Chicago, and Caltech. Patents for aether compasses, resonance lamps, and Veil-shielded vaults are filed by the thousand. Any company with "arcane" in the name gets a free briefcase full of money.
• 1924–1931: the Veil Survey maps the continent's thin places. The Four Corners team stops reporting in 1928 and the file is closed.
• 1925: the first arcane speakeasies are raided in New York and Chicago. The Five Families and the Outfit discover that the Veil Act has handed them a better business than liquor ever was.
• May 1927: Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic on a hybrid aether engine.
• 1928: the first Veil-plant, at Niagara, draws on the field directly and feeds arcane power into the Buffalo industrial grid.
• October 1929: the Crash. The arcane start-ups, built on speculation, collapse faster than the real industries. A few giants (Continental Arcane, Transamerica Resonance, the Ford-Edison interests) survive and carry the torch into the thirties.

1930s

If the news of Black Friday couldn't get worse, the Dust Bowl arrives on schedule, and things get worse. Instead of a New Deal, the government creates massive private-public partnerships, promising to "do in America what we did in Germany". A nationwide VAT is levied to fund billions in investments, creating jobs for the millions made unemployed by the Stock Market crash and the downfall of so many industrial startups of the 20s. To quote the architect of the Square Deal, Henry Ford: "I'll pay a man to dig a ditch, and pay another to fill it in...as long as I make a buck in the process."

• March 1932: the Lindbergh kidnapping. The aviator's infant son is taken from the family home in New Jersey by something that leaves no footprints. Lindbergh follows it, by means never fully explained, through a thin place in the Sourland Mountains and returns three days later with the child. The story makes him the most famous man in the world a second time.
• November 1932: the Engineer, research administrator and Republican reformer, is elected President on the promise to "do in Detroit what we did in Dresden."
• 1933: the Square Deal. A nationwide value-added tax funds billions in chartered public-private corporations; Henry Ford chairs the partnership board. The Civil Defense Corps puts two million men in uniform with shovels. The Transcontinental Arcane Grid breaks ground. There is no Social Security Act and no Wagner Act.
• 1933: the dollar leaves gold.
• 1935: the United States breaks diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union over the Reissner government's "export of revolution," and never restores them.
• 1935: Germany openly repudiates the arcane clauses of Versailles and begins interning its Touched. The State Department expresses concern. The partnership corporations sign new contracts in Dresden.
• 1936: the Engineer is re-elected. The Lafayette lobby, interventionists in Congress and the independent press, forms around the Spanish war and the first American volunteers.
• 1937: the Reich invades the Ottoman Empire. The United States sells both sides trucks. The Neutrality Act of 1937 forbids arms sales to belligerents and does not define "trucks."
• 1938: Munich. The American observer raises no objection to the transfer of Czechoslovakia's relic vaults.
• September 1939: Poland. The Neutrality Acts hold. Cash-and-carry is extended to Britain and France.

1940s

• May–June 1940: France falls in six weeks. The President tells the country that Europe's wars are Europe's, and a majority agrees.
• 1940: the Selective Service Act establishes peacetime registration. No draft is called. A fifth of the Army Air Corps' pilots resign over the next two years to fly for someone else.
• November 1940: Charles Lindbergh is elected President. The Engineer, who could have broken the two-term tradition, instead anoints the aviator as the capable leader a frightened country is looking for. Lindbergh runs as a Republican on the Square Deal's record, an open admiration for the German Reconstruction, and a promise to keep America out of any European war.
• March 1941: Lindbergh inaugurated. The Office of Strategic Services is chartered as a "research coordination" agency; its European desk acquires a director with a broad view of his mandate.
• 1941: the Lindbergh program. The FBI's budget is tripled to combat "magical crime." The Immigration and Naturalization Service is reorganized under Justice, and the Special Alien Repatriation Commission is forked from the Border Patrol.
• December 7, 1941: the Imperial Japanese Navy strikes Pearl Harbor. Four battleships, two thousand men, and the forward base are lost. The country expects war.
• December 1941–February 1942: the President asks for negotiations instead. "The United States has no interest in building Empires abroad. That's exactly why these terrible wars keep happening. We must rise above this barbaric trend. War is obsolete. America is above it."
• February 14, 1942: the Pacific Accord, signed at Honolulu. Japan takes "protection" of the Philippines and the cession of Guam, Wake, and American Samoa, and pays a token reparation to rebuild the fleet; the United States keeps Hawaii, the Canal, and its shipping in the eastern Pacific, and regains the China trade on Japanese terms. The Senate ratifies it 61 to 35. The public, by every poll, hates it.
• March 1942: the Terrestrial Soil Act. "Terrestrial Soil for Terrestrial Sons": the Touched are declared, for the purposes of immigration law, foreign nationals whose domicile lies beyond the Veil, and the Special Alien Repatriation Commission is authorized to return them there. The first repatriation gateway, at Ellis Island, is under construction. Nobody has yet said where, exactly, the repatriated go.
• Spring 1942: now. The United States is at peace with every power on earth.