Campaigning in the World
of Atlas Shrugged
 

With this framework, I needed to decide what had happened to the various areas of North America. I started out by assuming that the impact of the Strike had hit the industrial eastern states hardest; they had the largest urban populations, the least favorable agricultural conditions, and the worst weather. I assumed that roughly 10% of their population was lost, most of it in the cities. As a result, the reestablishment of the old industrial heartland was more delayed than Rand hinted in her final pages.

Rather, a new Industrial Revolution took place in Colorado and the states close to it. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Kansas formed a new United States. Elsewhere, several other enclaves of civilization still held out: Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, in a loose confederation; West Virginia, with a few coal mines supporting small-scale industry; Quebec, seceded from a socialist Canada to form a nation of small proprietors; and the mining camps of the Yukon, starting to work toward self-government under mining law.

One question that arose from this was the nature of the new American Constitution. Rand showed Judge Narragansett adding the clause "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of trade and production"; I maintained this and added two others. One repealed Amendment XVI (income tax) and Amendment XVII (direct popular election of senators). The other provided legal formulas for the readmission of former states, the admission of new states (in case any Canadian provinces wanted in), and the effect of political collapse on Congressional representation.

Following Rand's statements, I assumed that the new United States would still have constitutional government; in fact, I assumed that it still charged some taxes — excise taxes at the national level (and customs duties, if trade ever revived) and property taxes at the local level.

Other areas survived with less advanced political systems, though often their governments were still twisted variants on American traditions. A group of southern states formed a new Confederacy, with an agrarian economy where black sharecroppers were at the edge of outright slavery. An industrial feudalist Texas had an aggressive military that had fought wars with both the Confederacy, in Louisiana, and the United States, in New Mexico, as well as turning much of northern Mexico into a colonial empire. New Orleans maintained independence as a buffer state; Chicago was ruled by a coalition of gangsters and federal bureaucrats and raided northern Illinois farms for food. Hawaii, once again independent, had restored the native monarchy.

Finally, the northern plains areas of the United States and the adjacent Canadian provinces were controlled by Indians — with some tribes accepting white men who proved their courage, others demanding actual Indian ancestry. And Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia had been seized by Japan, where a bizarre mixture of old-style imperialism and communism still supported a large military. The Japanese also were at war with the Yukon and were eyeing Hawaii.

I offered my players freedom to choose what sort of ambitions their characters would pursue; we ended up focusing on Illinois, with Taggart Transcontinental building a new bridge across the Mississippi River.

This led me to define the local political situation more closely. The Xylophone disaster near the end of Atlas Shrugged had devastated a large part of Iowa and some of Illinois, including the old Taggart bridge; I decided that the now empty land had been taken over by new farmers, including many blacks, some refugees from the Confederacy and others colonists from Chicago. The rest of Iowa was under a socialist regime set up by the state board of agriculture, one that deliberately aimed at subsistence agriculture because producing for the market had led to economic collapse. Minnesota was negotiating for readmission to the United States, giving an immediate payoff to the restoration of rail service, though the long-run goal was to reopen the old industrial states.
  

© 2001 William H. Stoddard