The Kiat
09-07-2010, 11:41 AM
James Dean; The Actor, The Politican, The Legend
The Origins
The 37th President of the United States was born on February 8, 1931, to Winton and Mildred Dean in Marion, Indiana. Like many from the Midwest, Dean was born on a farm. He lived on the farm, one of many corn farms in Indiana, until the age of four. In 1935, the overproduction of corn drove down the prices on the commodity’s market and drove the family farm out of business. Though he was barely old enough to remember the farm, such fluctuations in the market would direct him in his future life to fight against unregulated markets and exchanges. The demand for corn was not low, and the United States exported large amounts of its corn around the world. Yet, because speculators decided to all sell at the same time, his family lost the farm.
Winton Dean was an able mechanic and deft tinkerer, which his son inherited to an extent. With a booming aerospace industry in Southern California, Winton sold the farm and moved his family to Santa Monica, California. There, he successfully landed a job as a machinist for Northrop. The Dean family settled down to life in the Los Angeles suburb, where Dean attended Santa Monica Public School. His grades were average, and Dean was seen even at a young age as a stubborn and defiant person. Numerous pranks landed him in trouble while in grade school. He was not alone in this respect, as his brother Jack landed in further trouble, including a week’s worth of suspension.
Dean’s life took a dramatic change on May 7, 1940, when one of the few Confederate air raids hit the Los Angeles area. Only a handful of these raids were launched, as the Confederate aircraft were soon pushed out of range as the United States Army easily turned their westward advance in Jefferson. For April and May of 1940, the Confederates were able, and did target the defense industry in California. In the afternoon of the 7th, Confederate bombers hit the Northrop plant where Dean’s father worked. Winton Dean, as well as 274 other workers were killed as part of the plant was destroyed.
The loss of his father to enemy bombers sparked a lifelong nationalistic passion in James Dean, making him instantly hostile towards anybody who disrespect his country. With the bread earner dead, his mother was forced to enter the workforce. With World War II in wide swing, munition, arms and aircraft plants across Southern California were attracting workers from hundreds of kilometers around, and they were taking all comers. Mildred Dean took a job at a Colt Manufacturing plant in Glendale, commuting an hour by train each way, and putting in ten hours of work a day.
School served as Dean’s home for part of the time; before and afterwards he spent with neighborhood grannies who have taken to watching kids as their mothers go off to work and fathers off to fight. One such old woman was Joan McFearson, sister to a Methodist Minister by the name of Edward Brinn. Brinn acted somewhat as a surrogate father to the young Dean, guiding the youth. Dean looked up to Brinn, even into his adult years.
Even at the age of 10, Dean was driven to help the war effort. Among the children in his neighborhood, he organized recycling campaigns. One such campaign was to the delight of the parents; a paper drive that swept of many stacks of comic books. Other targets of this first campaign were old tires, glass bottles, cooking grease and tin cans. Instead of spending what little money he made from recycling on candy or toys, he bought war bonds. This would serve him well after the war ended and he was old enough to attend college.
He entered Santa Monica Public High School in 1945, after the Japanese surrendered. The war in Europe was dragging on, and Dean made plans to enlist in the army to fight the Nazis after graduation. Many youth, upon reaching 16 or 17, simply lied and entered the armed forces. Dean would later recount how he too was tempted to follow suit in his youth (much to his later frustration, the war was over the next year and he had no chance to fight for his country). However, his father had always stressed the importance of education and Brinn told him not to be so eager to go off and "fight in the trenches". Brinn was a veteran of the Great War, and had served his country in the trenches of the Ohio Front.
For all intent purpose, World War II came to an end on April 20, 1946, when the Swedes took Berlin (though it would not be for several days that the official surrender took place), and Dean joined his fellow countrymen in celebrating the end of the war. Dean spent the rest of his High School years not thinking about foreign enemies, but focusing on sports and education, in that order. He excelled at basketball and forensics, and studied both drama and mechanics. When his mother remarried in 1947, to William Howard, a Los Angeles lawyer, Dean’s interest turned to law. Though he was never as close to his stepfather as he was his real father or Father Brinn, their relationship was far more cordial than most stepfather-stepson relationships.
The Actor
Dean discovered he had a gift for public speaking while in High School, that and his interest in law and law enforcement propelled him to enroll into Santa Monica College and majored in pre-law. As with many students, Dean completed what he called ‘peon classes’, that being requirements for one’s specific major. In 1950, he transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles with intent of majoring in law. It was during this freshman year at UCLA that Dean met Angela Pier, a fellow law student. Many couples claim to have fallen in love at first sight, or hit it off immediately, but not Dean and Pier. Constant tension existed between the two, and often lead to fights.
Dean was with her for seven months before their first breakup. Dean took the separation in stride, but Angela transferred from UCLA shortly afterwards. As it would turn out, she would only have had to wait a few months before Dean would have dropped out of college altogether. James Dean always had some interest in acting; living so close to Hollywood, it was hard not to. During his Freshman year, Dean was distracted from his legal studies by drama. After he completed his first year, he changed his major to drama, much to the horror of his mother and stepfather. Father Brinn, who was at the end of his own life supported the change, telling Dean he must do what he believes is right.
In late 1950, Dean beat out more than three hundred other students for the role of Malcolm in MacBeth. It was his first big role and Dean reveled in the attention of the spotlight. After several more leading roles, Dean finally dropped out of UCLA in May 1951, to pursue a full-time acting career. He would soon learn that making it big on a university set and making it big in pictures, were two very different things. For two years, he played what he coined "two-bit part", including a walk on for Fix Bayonets. Aside from movies, he also dabbled in television, mostly in the form of commercials, such as a 1953 Pepsi Co. commercial.
His first big break in the big time came in 1954. In December of 1953, Dean met who would become his short-time agent Roger Bracket while working a side-job as a parking attendant in CBS Studios. Dean took several part-time jobs while chasing after a leading role. Many times during this two year period, he regretted dropping out of college. During this hard time, he never asked his mother for financial aid. Dean was too proud, and could not stand to hear a I-told-you-so speech by mother and stepfather.
Dean’s personality also served as a barrier for his breaking through in Hollywood. He was known as a tough character who tolerated no nonsense or disrespect. Dean has a reputation as a man with a bad attitude, a rebel of sorts, though nobody would use that word to his face. It happened once in 1953, when a fellow actor advised him to stop being so rebellious, which in turn caused Dean to deck the man. The fight almost ended his career as an actor before it even began. Dean would not stand for any reference to the former Confederacy, including rebel, though in later years his response to said accusations would be tempered.
Bracket knew his reputation and offered him a job. Bracket knew of a new movie about World War II in North America that was taking auditions at Warner Brothers’ Studio. Bracket explained the movie centered around the tough-as-nails commander of a company within the 71st Mountaineers, tasked with rooting out Confederate resistance in the hill country of Tennessee and North Carolina. Hearing that the role would involve beating Confederate holdouts, Dean jumped at the chance. As with his role in MacBeth, he beat out several known actors to gain the role as Lieutenant Standford in Rebel without a Cause, the biggest hit of 1954.
Fate would turn a twist in his life, as Dean encountered his former girlfriend, Angela, on the set. She served as a walk-on in one of the scenes that took place in Greensborough. Their rocky relationship started up again, only to last two months before Dean’s uncompromising attitude brought it to an abrupt end. After filming was complete, Dean would not see her again for another year. Being a newly minted Hollywood star, Dean had more than enough girls in his life, but none ever caught his fancy the same way as Angela.
In 1956, Dean starred in two blockbuster movies (though neither grossed as much as his first), East of Eden and All’s Quiet on the Ohio Front. In the latter, his role greatly reminded him on his departed friend, Edward Brinn, whom he drew much influence for his on-screen persona. This direction brought on the ire of the critics, who said that it was a 180 degree turn in his usual roles. As with most critiques, Dean did not care what the critics thought.
He took his last leading role in 1957 in Long Road to Gettysburg, where he played the role of Steven Chamberlain, a sergeant whose squad held off a Confederate charge up Little Round Top. The small hill was a critical link in the Battle of Gettysburg, which was largely an armored battle (one of the first in history). The movie brought in more than Rebel without a Cause and earned Dean a nomination for an Oscar. However, the mood in Hollywood was drifting away from jingoism and a more peaceful movie brought in the Best Actor Oscar.
Dean’s love of acting slowly eroded over the year as his attention turned towards directing. His change came from the fact that Dean was sick of being jerked around like a puppet on the stage. He also thought he could do a better job than some directors, and aimed to prove it. During the 1950s, directing was not his only new direction. While he was a struggling actor, Dean took up Bull Fighting, a rather dangerous sport, much to his mother’s horror. To put his mother’s nerves at ease, he gave up the ring and took up the race track. His favorite race car was a 1955 Dodge Cobra that he purchased with his pay from Rebel without a Cause. He raced in amateur circuits in his Cobra until 1958, when changes in his life forced him to give up racing. Despite his death-defying acts on closed circuits, Dean was always in favor of public safety on the road, citing several close calls of his own by drivers who were not paying attention.
Again, after filming his last movie, Dean encountered his former girlfriend. They dated for a month before Separating again, only to getback together in September of 1957. This time, Dean and Angela found a balance between their passion and personalities. Dean took his first directing job on a minor movie called Giant, and soon discovered that directing was not as easy as he believed. Despite the difficulties, he preferred the commanding role of a director than the obeying role of an actor. Dean was never a man who followed orders just because he was suppose to.
His life changed for the better in the Summer of 1958, when he finally married Angela Pier, after years of rocky roads and separations. Despite the fact that they spent more time apart than together since first meeting did not discourage either of them. Unlike many weddings in Tinsel Town, the Dean-Pier wedding was a small affair, conducted at a church in Santa Monica, where Edward Brinn once preached, where only family and friends were invited. Dean posted a sign in front of the church on their wedding day stating "Media Need Not Apply". As with most Hollywood weddings, the so-called experts gave them two years at the most.
The Politician
James Dean was always a nationalist at heart, especially since his father’s death. Fifteen years after the Confederate States surrendered, immigration was once again allowed in the United States. Though the southern states were not fully integrated into American society, a labor shortage caused the Federal Government to open the doors. Even to this date, Progressives and Socialists blame big business and their puppets in the Democrat party for opening the door to allow in cheap labor. The Progressives were angry because it took jobs away from loyal Americans. Socialists were mad because they saw it as exploitation. Unlike decades past, immigrants did not come from Europe, but from Mexico.
All through the 1950s, Mexican rebels fought their French masters, who have been ruling the country since the late 1860s. Hundreds of thousands of refugees took advantage of guest worker programs sponsored by the Democrats, and supported by Socialists, despite exploitation worries. Dean would later say of this that Socialists were so afraid of offending anybody, even those who were not eligible to vote. Part of it was due to the humanitarian problems in Mexico, the same that France cause in their wars in Algeria and Indochina. Dean would admit, grudgingly, that most of the refugees were simply seeking a better life for their children. By 1960, Dean could sympathize with that after his first born, Winton Edward Dean, came into the world.
However, with the refugees came the type of people who would exploit the situation. When the borders were opened, not only did the dispossessed come north, but so did some of the corrupt elements and their vices. The Federal Government did nothing to stop the tide of less-than-legitimate peoples from crossing into the United States. From 1956 to 1966, cases of drug abuse in cities in the Southwestern States soared through the roof. Before 1960, morphine was the most serious abused drug in the United States. Afterwards, marijuana eclipsed it, followed by harsher drugs from further south.
Crime was only part of the problem. What really galvanized Dean was the fact that these immigrants had little interest in becoming Americans. Worse yet, Socialists supported them and tried to foster cultural diversity in a country that has always prided itself on its Melting Pot. America was a fusion of European, West African and Indian cultures. Dean was raised to believe that Americans were one people, one nation. Of course, the realization of just how difficult it was to incorporate tens of millions of Confederates, whose ancestors were Americans only a few generations before, only added to danger seen in foreigners coming into the country in the hundreds of thousands.
Dean was apart from much of Hollywood, which largely supported the Socialist Party, and his outspoken criticism of foreigners and the eroding of American boundaries largely blacklisted him in the eyes of the cinema elite. Dean was still popular among the people, and he began to earn his pay by speaking for the Progressive Party at rallies around California. The Dean family moved to Cholame in 1962. The event that finally drove him from activism into actively politicking came in 1965, with Lyndon Johnston’s ‘Great Society’. This program effectively ended immigration restrictions and put emphasis on cultural diversity.
Dean’s first shot at politics came in 1966, when he ran for mayor of Cholame. His opponent was a lifelong resident, but lacked the energy of Dean, who was twenty years his junior. When Walter Cautz accused Dean of being racists in a time when that concept was being cast upon the ash heap of history, Dean retorted by saying "It’s not racism; it’s nationalism. I don’t care what color they are, just that they become good Americans." One of Dean’s more notorious quotes were taken from these early years of his political career: "We’re Americans. We don’t embrace other cultures, we assimilate them."
Dean won the 1966 Election for Mayor by 61%. His opponent had been mayor for four terms, and the voters decided it was time for new blood. His tenor as mayor was largely uneventful, and to Dean, boring. Mayors, especially of small towns, had little power or influence. He wanted to be at a place where he could make a difference. In 1970, James Dean ran for State Assemblyman. The Progressive Party has always been the most nationalistic of America’s parties, and Dean’s role in his movies as a proud American battling the Confederates only added to his appeal. By 1966, the people of California began to see the Great Society as not working the way Socialists had promised, and the voters blamed Johnston, a Texan. The fact he was a veteran in the American Foreign Legion in Europe did not seem to matter at this point. Johnston did not even win the nomination for his part in 1968s.
Dean’s time in Sacramento was spent more productively. When he was not blasting the problems caused by open borders and foreigners, he actually tackled issues that all parties could agree upon. In 1971, he pushed for lower speed limits on California’s highways and for traffic safety. To push this through the Assembly, Dean recalled his numerous close calls on the highways around Los Angeles, and cited one instance, that if not for fast reflects, he would have collided with a car that pulled right across his lane. "Keep hot rods and racing on the track where it belongs," Dean would say. "The roads should be safe for all of California’s citizens."
In 1973, Progressives joined with Socialists in passing clean air laws. Dean would recount his own youth, when one could actually breath the ocean breeze in Santa Monica. Years had passed since he last lived their, but over a million automobiles and unrestricted dumping of toxins into the air by factories have turned the skies of Los Angeles a beige instead of blue. This was one of the rare times the two parties could see eye-to-eye. Later that year, when the Socialists tried to have Spanish installed as a second official language in California, Dean and the Progressives fought it tooth and nail. With the support of some Democrats, the bill was defeated. It was later placed on the 1974 ballet as a Constitutional Amendment, where it was soundly defeated by 74%.
By law, California could not regulate its own immigration. In order to fight that battle, Dean would have to propel himself on to the national stage. He was already well known across California for his hot-headedness and anti-immigration stance. This turned off many voters in the coastal cities, but much of rural and central California loved him. He had quite the fight for his Congressional District in the 1974 election, when he challenged incumbent Frederick Campbell. Campbell, a Democrat, had held the District’s seat for the past sixteen years.
During the debates, Campbell response to Dean’s simplistic solution to the problem (i.e. just close the border) by calling Dean a Rebel without a Clue. In his younger days, reference to the Confederates would have sparked a fight. Instead, he responded by telling the story of his youth during World War II, when the neighborhood would come together to help each other. During the past twenty years, the people have turned more towards the Federal Government for handouts and entitlements, instead of reaching out to help each other. The spirit of the neighborhood was dying, and though he freely admitted it was not Campbells’ fault, he clearly pointed out that the Democrats have done nothing to stop the Socialists’ expanded welfare programs.
Dean won the election by only a small margin; not even a clear majority, just 43% of the vote against Campbell’s 42%. Dean knew he had an uphill battle against him on the Hill, but he went off to Washington in 1974, with the goal of changing the nation for the better. In Washington, he constantly butted heads with Socialists, Democrats and the more senior members of his own party. When told to cool down and let the more experienced party members handle the situation, Dean responded with "My constituents didn’t elect me to sit on my hands for my first three terms." To most of the American people, experience and stagnation in the city of Washington were the same thing.
His Rebel-without-a-Clue tag stuck with him through that first term. This was one of the gentler terms his opponents would use in describing him. Dean would shoot back at both parties, accusing the Socialists of appeasing foreigners and the Democrats of being owned by their corporate interests than keeping honest and loyal Americans employed. True, many of the jobs taken by immigrants were agricultural jobs, in sector that had the greatest labor shortage to begin with. When asked by the press what the Progressive Party cared about, Dean replied "The American People, first, last and always." Despite his clearly pro-American stance, Dean never called for immigrants to leave or be expelled. He had no problem with people who came to American and wished to join the American family. His problem came from the Cartels of Mexico and drugs they are spilling on to American streets. They were not the only drug runners, for there were plenty of domestic drug dealers in the 1970s (and in fact many domestically grown and produced drugs) but the Cartels were by far the most violent.
However, he did have a problem with the decaying stance on the southern border, which was beginning to resemble the Wild West of the 1870s instead of American of 1970s. Dean was so outspoken about this, that in February of 1976, he received the shock of his life. Senator Phil Patrick of Pennsylvania and Congressman Alfred Fitzgerald of Chicago, the most senior Progressive Party members in the Senate and House respectively, tapped Dean for a larger job. At a meeting in Dean’s Washington apartment, they asked him how he would feel about running for President. After only a single term in office, Dean was starting to think about re-election to Congress. The office of President never entered his mind. He asked the Obvious question "why me?"
In 1976, after twelve years of Socialists and four of Nixon, and sixteen years of nothing being done, the American people were growing apathetic about politics. What the Presidency needed was young blood, somebody who could energize the American people into acting. "You mean energize the base into getting off their sofa and voting," Dean retorted. The older men, and later the chairmen of the Progressive Party, Walter Roosevelt, told Dean that his years as an actor made him a known name and face, and his uncompromising attitude made him popular among non-party members. Dean would agree to give a shot, but under one condition: he would not be a puppet, whose strings are pulled at the whims of the party. He had enough of puppetry in Hollywood.
He fought a hard primary against his major contender, Walter Forwell, a twenty-year veteran of Congress. Dean constantly pointed out that Forwell was in Congress for twenty years, and has not changed a thing. He clinched the primary during the debate in Milwaukee, where he gave his famous ‘Neighborhood’ speech. In that speech he told the voters about the neighborhood where he grew up, about neighborhoods were average Americans grew up. Then he gave accounts of the inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Houston and Port Sinoloa, where drug dealers and Cartel men would move into nice, suburban neighborhoods, and be followed by the gangs, the muggers, vagrants. How the policies of the Socialists and Democrats were causing a rot, a cancer in the heart of America. Despite Forwell’s performance, Dean would later comment to his wife that he was starting to wonder if Forwell was simply put up to give the illusion of democracy during a party’s primaries.
He took this same message with him during the general election. The Socialist candidate, Martin Freeman, was a non-contender. Nixon was Dean’s main opponent, and Dean blew him wide open with accusations of selling out America’s future so his corporate masters can rake in higher profits from cheaper labor. The election was close, with the entire south going Democrat. The Socialists carried New England. Dean managed to squeak by with 300 electoral votes, becoming the 37th President of the United States. Many media commentators had written off Dean as, at best, a second place finisher. Enough people where angered by the past four presidents to throw in their lot with Dean. One reporter covering the election for CBS commented that maybe having an actor for President was for the best; they were natural born liars after all.
The President
Dean’s meteoric rise from small town mayor to President of the United States, in the space of ten years was as much testimony to luck and dissatisfaction of the people to Dean’s own charisma. Though he tended to step on the toes of those who were above him in ranks, Dean had the ability to reach out to masses of people, making each listener believe he was talking directly to them. His neighborhood speeches were a contributing factor to his victory in November of 1976. As was his style, he did not waste much time with red tape. After being sworn in, his first act was to light a fire underneath the seat of INS, ordering them, along with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to go out and enforce the immigration laws. Though the borders were open, immigrants still had to fill out their papers. Any who did not have those papers were to be immediately shipped back to their country of origin, mostly Mexico. When some in Congress called for reforms, Dean told them "No reforms, we already have the laws, we just need to enforce them."
The Progressive Party has a near majority in Congress, but not so much they could cram their bills through both houses. On April 16, 1977, all Progressives and enough Democrats pushed through a resolution closing American borders to immigration for a period of thirty years, to ‘allow for proper integration of present immigrants into American society’. Dean was prepared to deploy the Army to the Mexican border to make certain nobody crossed the border. Following the end of Anglo-American hostilities and the end of the Confederacy, the United States had no real enemies on its borders. As such, its standing army was reduced. The total number of Americans in the army was 1.5 million, with 80% of them in various National Guard units. All soldiers were professional and well trained, but only three hundred thousand were full-time. The rest of the citizen soldiers remained at home, with work and their families, but ready to be called up on short notice.
The Army had fought its last war in 1946. During the Dean Administration, Guard units were called up on a rotational basis for extensive training in urban combat. Critics in the Congress accused Dean of planning a war of aggression, but Dean could only reply that the soldiers need to be ready. A few Socialists began to wonder if paranoia had not gotten the better of the new President. When Dean tried to propose a budget for 1978, with expanded military expenditures, it was soundly rejected. Five years earlier, Nixon had referred to Federal and State efforts to combat drug abuse as a ‘War on Drugs’, and some began to wonder if Dean took that phrase literally.
Most of 1977 and 78 was spent on handling domestic issues in the United States, other than immigration. The Progressive Party, with help from some Socialists, passed legislation in Congress breaking up the largest banking-investing firm in the country, Wells Fargo. A financial scare in New Amsterdam in 1977, just weeks after Dean took office, caused both parties to see this near monopoly as a risk. The Progressives saw a single large bank as a danger to the country, especially if it was allowed to grow so large that it could threaten to drag down part of the American economy with it.
Another bill passed with the aid of the Socialists was that of raising import tariffs. Democrats fought this bill, with not a single one voting in favor. Industrial jobs in the United States have been slipping in the past ten years, and both Socialists and Progressives aimed to keep those jobs in America. Dean championed the bill, claiming that the loss of industrialization would weaken the United States, especially in the extremely unlikely event of a major war. No industry means no weapons, which would make for a short war.
One thing Dean did oppose in making America strong was the construction of more nuclear weapons. In 1978, he did authorize the replacement of the oldest two hundred of America’s wrought seven hundred warheads, but thwarted plans to raise the total number to one thousand. If a nuclear war ever happened, Dean said "Seven hundred. One thousand. What difference would it make? If the other side launched all theirs’, we’d be just as dead." More over, none of the nuclear powers ever had more than a thousand warheads at any given time. Dean believed the United States should have just enough weapons to destroy and enemy, not the whole world.
The Progressives worked with the Democrats to push through various Americanization Programs. These were Dean’s personal project. His aim from the beginning was to turn immigrants into Americans. He tried to ban Federal funding to schools that taught foreign languages and colleges that required it for entry. Spanish, French and Swedish were easily enough removed, but the German Empire protested when he attempted to have even that language removed. Dean believed strongly that Americans do and should speak English. Foreign considerations with American’s only formal ally forced Dean to relent, much to his frustration. He was not a man to back down easily. Sweden did not overly care, and France responded by removing English from its own schools, which in turn caused issues between them and Britain.
When not stepping on toes or rattling sabers, James Dean spent his time in the White House and traveling the world with his family. Angela took to her role as First Lady with more enthusiasm than Dean took to being President. Their two sons had a harder time adjusting, mostly to the constant security of the Secret Service. Both of the Dean children attended private school; Dean would not send his children to public school until those were cleaned up and lifted to a standard befitting America. Many foreign dignitaries who visited the White House left with a positive impression of the first family.
Both Angela and the President charmed guests, and on a personal level, they were quite popular. Many dignitaries asked Dean about his acting career, and he would regale them with tales of his youth, including racing and bull fighting. Dean was also an avid sports fan, especially baseball. In one incident in 1977, when the King of Austria made a state visit, Dean invited him to watch a baseball game in Baltimore. Dean’s informality did scandalize some European royalty, he was intent on giving them an authentic America experience. When he made a state visit to Austria, the King invited him to a football game in Vienna.
There was one national delegation that Dean could not and would not play nice with, and that was the embassy from Mexico. Ever since the border was closed, the Mexican Ambassador. Protests across Mexico were held, or staged as some Progressives put it, against the closure of the border. When the ambassador brought this to Dean’s attention, the President simply shrugged and told him he could not care less about protests outside American borders. In one heated exchange, where all pretense for professionalism and civility was thrown out the window where Dean said he would not bow to the whims of a post-colonial dump The Mexican ambassador responded by accusing the United States of "stealing" their land. In response, Dean said "Keep it up and we’ll come down and take the other half of your country, then they’d have no country at all."
The low point in American-Mexican relation came on August 12, 1978. For years, the Cartels have thrived on bribery, effectively owning politicians and city police forces, with the more powerful ones owning units of the Mexican army. On August 12, drug runners crossed the border in Durango, escorted by a corrupted platoon of Mexican soldiers. The Cartel paid them more than three times what the government in Mexico City offered, and the soldiers gladly accepted the bribes. During the night, several border patrol agents came under fire from the Mexican Army as they attempted to stop the smugglers. Three agents were wounded, with one dying two days later. The local Guard commander, his unit aiding the Border Patrol, responded to the attack by wiping out both the drug smugglers and corrupted unit.
The point of no return had been passed as American blood was spilt on American soil. On August 14, Dean stood before Congress, calling for a declaration of war against Mexico. After years of such incidents, though no documented ones involving the Mexican Army, Congress treated this as just another such case. The declaration was not given, and war was not to be. At least, not officially. Despite the defeat of the Declaration, Dean used his powers as Commander-in-Chief to send in forces to root out the Cartel responsible.
What followed was a two year struggle that resulted in tens of thousands dead, only a fraction of which were Americans. The Cartels were little to no match for the United States Army and Marine Corp, nor could they hope to match the Air Force. Mexico did not just stand by while American poured across their border, and went to face the Americans. The Mexican Air Force ceased to exists three days after attempting to stop American jets. When the Cartel attempted to smuggle drugs, or even escape by sea, the United States Navy intercepted them. One of the larger freighters was sunk by the U.S.S. Tarpon. This intervention was not as clean and surgical as the Administration would have liked. As with all wars, mistakes were made; the most costly was when the wrong address was given by informants within the Cartel, and lead to the destruction of an apartment building and the death of most inside.
Some in Congress wanted to move to censure Dean for excessive force, while a few wanted to impeach him. However, the Party bosses of both the Socialists and Democratic Party warned against it. Any move against Dean would play into the Progressives’ hands, for they have been foretelling this sort of border war for years. There was some anger among the legal immigrants from Mexico, but no mass demonstrations. Most of them left Mexico to escape the violence of the Cartels, and suffered when they followed. In American cities of the southwest, the war was waged as Cartel men inside the United States struck out at American authorities. Dean would no unleash any standing army upon an American city, but several Guard units did serve as support for the police forces. In parts of Los Angeles, familiar to Dean as a youth, gang violence was so strong, that the California National Guard was forced to march into a Cartel neighborhood stronghold under the support of armor and helicopters.
By January of 1979, the United States had virtually wiped out the Cartels in northern Mexico to the man, and set up a hundred mile policing zone where the Army would patrol and keep the peace. When confronted with this by his detractors in the media, Dean simply replied "The Mexicans had their chance to police it and failed. Since they can’t do it, we’ll do it for them." Destroying the Cartels was popular among the American people, but occupation was another matter. Protests were held in many northern cities over this matter, causing Dean to lose points in the polls. Rooting out the rest of the Cartels, further south, took well in the September of 1979. By this point, soldiers in the Mexican Army were surrendering just to escape the corruption of their own system.
By the start of 1980, Dean’s little adventure, as the Democrats and their allies in the media called it, came to an end. With its army battered, air force and navy gone, and no outlet for malcontents, Mexico soon plunged into another civil war, which would dragon American forces back into it throughout the 1980s. In one of history’s little ironies, the policing zone that was so protested turned out to be the safest place in Mexico during its civil war.
Dean’s actions in Mexico did not completely cure what ailed American, though it did destroy a considerable amount of the supply side of narcotics, nor did it go by without a response. Not all of the Cartel were killed. On March 1, 1980, James Dean learned this while he attended a Progressive Party rally in San Diego. On Diaz Santos, formerly of the Nuevo Leon Cartel, slipped past security, approached the stage and gunned down Dean with a concealed revolver. The assassin’s true motives were never to be known, for the Secret Service shot him dead on the spot. Dean was rushed out of the convention to the nearest hospital, where he was announced Dead on Arrival.
The Legend
President James Dean was both loved and hated, but despite differing opinions, the nation came together to mourn the murder of its leader. The immediate aftermath to having an American President killed by a Mexican National was swift and beyond the control of law enforcement. A wave of attacks against Mexicans legally residing in the United States, and on their way to become Americans left hundreds dead across the southwest. Even hispanics, whose great-grandparents and beyond came to America long before Dead was even born, were targeted. Not only people but institutions were targeted. In Phoenix, two Mexican restaurants were fire-bombed. The arsonists was eventually found, tried, convicted and finally executed in 1984.
For the first time in its history, the United States experienced a wave of emigration, as hundreds of thousands of Mexican Nationals as well as American citizens left the United States to settled in the policing zone, beyond the reach of angry mobs. Order was restored in the cities, and hundreds of Americans were arrested for the violence. Several of the United States amended their constitutions, removing Spanish as one of its two official languages. All of these involved were formerly part of New Spain. Only Cuba, which was never part of Mexico, did not amend its constitution. However, after generations of American and Confederate rule, nobody there spoke Spanish as a first language any longer. Much of this backlash, and the excesses, cost the Progressives the White House in 1980.
A new president, and another former actor, Ronald Reagan, inherited a mess in Mexico and was forced to send in American forces more than once deep in to Mexico to intervene. Much of the chaos was blamed upon Dean, and rightfully so. However, he was merely an instrument that caused the collapse, not the system that failed itself. Thirty years after Dean’s invasion, the Mexican situation has righted itself and a new republic has risen from the chaos. Not surprisingly, considering interventions in the 1980s, the new government is cordial towards the United States and relations have normalized, though both countries have leveed high tariffs against each other, and Mexico has refused more passport requests than it has granted to Americans.
In the following Decade, numerous high schools across the country, as well as an airport in Los Angeles, changed their names to honor the fallen President, and numerous statutes were erected in his honor. The 37th President of the United States is wrapped in a shroud of controversy. The closing of the borders to immigration has only recently been lifted, though under tight regulation. Following the violence after Dean’s assassination, immigrants are not as eager to flock to the United States as they are to Canada, Australia, the Boer Republics, and South America. Dean has left America with its gaze set inward instead of out across the world. This was exactly the way James Dean believed America should act.
The Origins
The 37th President of the United States was born on February 8, 1931, to Winton and Mildred Dean in Marion, Indiana. Like many from the Midwest, Dean was born on a farm. He lived on the farm, one of many corn farms in Indiana, until the age of four. In 1935, the overproduction of corn drove down the prices on the commodity’s market and drove the family farm out of business. Though he was barely old enough to remember the farm, such fluctuations in the market would direct him in his future life to fight against unregulated markets and exchanges. The demand for corn was not low, and the United States exported large amounts of its corn around the world. Yet, because speculators decided to all sell at the same time, his family lost the farm.
Winton Dean was an able mechanic and deft tinkerer, which his son inherited to an extent. With a booming aerospace industry in Southern California, Winton sold the farm and moved his family to Santa Monica, California. There, he successfully landed a job as a machinist for Northrop. The Dean family settled down to life in the Los Angeles suburb, where Dean attended Santa Monica Public School. His grades were average, and Dean was seen even at a young age as a stubborn and defiant person. Numerous pranks landed him in trouble while in grade school. He was not alone in this respect, as his brother Jack landed in further trouble, including a week’s worth of suspension.
Dean’s life took a dramatic change on May 7, 1940, when one of the few Confederate air raids hit the Los Angeles area. Only a handful of these raids were launched, as the Confederate aircraft were soon pushed out of range as the United States Army easily turned their westward advance in Jefferson. For April and May of 1940, the Confederates were able, and did target the defense industry in California. In the afternoon of the 7th, Confederate bombers hit the Northrop plant where Dean’s father worked. Winton Dean, as well as 274 other workers were killed as part of the plant was destroyed.
The loss of his father to enemy bombers sparked a lifelong nationalistic passion in James Dean, making him instantly hostile towards anybody who disrespect his country. With the bread earner dead, his mother was forced to enter the workforce. With World War II in wide swing, munition, arms and aircraft plants across Southern California were attracting workers from hundreds of kilometers around, and they were taking all comers. Mildred Dean took a job at a Colt Manufacturing plant in Glendale, commuting an hour by train each way, and putting in ten hours of work a day.
School served as Dean’s home for part of the time; before and afterwards he spent with neighborhood grannies who have taken to watching kids as their mothers go off to work and fathers off to fight. One such old woman was Joan McFearson, sister to a Methodist Minister by the name of Edward Brinn. Brinn acted somewhat as a surrogate father to the young Dean, guiding the youth. Dean looked up to Brinn, even into his adult years.
Even at the age of 10, Dean was driven to help the war effort. Among the children in his neighborhood, he organized recycling campaigns. One such campaign was to the delight of the parents; a paper drive that swept of many stacks of comic books. Other targets of this first campaign were old tires, glass bottles, cooking grease and tin cans. Instead of spending what little money he made from recycling on candy or toys, he bought war bonds. This would serve him well after the war ended and he was old enough to attend college.
He entered Santa Monica Public High School in 1945, after the Japanese surrendered. The war in Europe was dragging on, and Dean made plans to enlist in the army to fight the Nazis after graduation. Many youth, upon reaching 16 or 17, simply lied and entered the armed forces. Dean would later recount how he too was tempted to follow suit in his youth (much to his later frustration, the war was over the next year and he had no chance to fight for his country). However, his father had always stressed the importance of education and Brinn told him not to be so eager to go off and "fight in the trenches". Brinn was a veteran of the Great War, and had served his country in the trenches of the Ohio Front.
For all intent purpose, World War II came to an end on April 20, 1946, when the Swedes took Berlin (though it would not be for several days that the official surrender took place), and Dean joined his fellow countrymen in celebrating the end of the war. Dean spent the rest of his High School years not thinking about foreign enemies, but focusing on sports and education, in that order. He excelled at basketball and forensics, and studied both drama and mechanics. When his mother remarried in 1947, to William Howard, a Los Angeles lawyer, Dean’s interest turned to law. Though he was never as close to his stepfather as he was his real father or Father Brinn, their relationship was far more cordial than most stepfather-stepson relationships.
The Actor
Dean discovered he had a gift for public speaking while in High School, that and his interest in law and law enforcement propelled him to enroll into Santa Monica College and majored in pre-law. As with many students, Dean completed what he called ‘peon classes’, that being requirements for one’s specific major. In 1950, he transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles with intent of majoring in law. It was during this freshman year at UCLA that Dean met Angela Pier, a fellow law student. Many couples claim to have fallen in love at first sight, or hit it off immediately, but not Dean and Pier. Constant tension existed between the two, and often lead to fights.
Dean was with her for seven months before their first breakup. Dean took the separation in stride, but Angela transferred from UCLA shortly afterwards. As it would turn out, she would only have had to wait a few months before Dean would have dropped out of college altogether. James Dean always had some interest in acting; living so close to Hollywood, it was hard not to. During his Freshman year, Dean was distracted from his legal studies by drama. After he completed his first year, he changed his major to drama, much to the horror of his mother and stepfather. Father Brinn, who was at the end of his own life supported the change, telling Dean he must do what he believes is right.
In late 1950, Dean beat out more than three hundred other students for the role of Malcolm in MacBeth. It was his first big role and Dean reveled in the attention of the spotlight. After several more leading roles, Dean finally dropped out of UCLA in May 1951, to pursue a full-time acting career. He would soon learn that making it big on a university set and making it big in pictures, were two very different things. For two years, he played what he coined "two-bit part", including a walk on for Fix Bayonets. Aside from movies, he also dabbled in television, mostly in the form of commercials, such as a 1953 Pepsi Co. commercial.
His first big break in the big time came in 1954. In December of 1953, Dean met who would become his short-time agent Roger Bracket while working a side-job as a parking attendant in CBS Studios. Dean took several part-time jobs while chasing after a leading role. Many times during this two year period, he regretted dropping out of college. During this hard time, he never asked his mother for financial aid. Dean was too proud, and could not stand to hear a I-told-you-so speech by mother and stepfather.
Dean’s personality also served as a barrier for his breaking through in Hollywood. He was known as a tough character who tolerated no nonsense or disrespect. Dean has a reputation as a man with a bad attitude, a rebel of sorts, though nobody would use that word to his face. It happened once in 1953, when a fellow actor advised him to stop being so rebellious, which in turn caused Dean to deck the man. The fight almost ended his career as an actor before it even began. Dean would not stand for any reference to the former Confederacy, including rebel, though in later years his response to said accusations would be tempered.
Bracket knew his reputation and offered him a job. Bracket knew of a new movie about World War II in North America that was taking auditions at Warner Brothers’ Studio. Bracket explained the movie centered around the tough-as-nails commander of a company within the 71st Mountaineers, tasked with rooting out Confederate resistance in the hill country of Tennessee and North Carolina. Hearing that the role would involve beating Confederate holdouts, Dean jumped at the chance. As with his role in MacBeth, he beat out several known actors to gain the role as Lieutenant Standford in Rebel without a Cause, the biggest hit of 1954.
Fate would turn a twist in his life, as Dean encountered his former girlfriend, Angela, on the set. She served as a walk-on in one of the scenes that took place in Greensborough. Their rocky relationship started up again, only to last two months before Dean’s uncompromising attitude brought it to an abrupt end. After filming was complete, Dean would not see her again for another year. Being a newly minted Hollywood star, Dean had more than enough girls in his life, but none ever caught his fancy the same way as Angela.
In 1956, Dean starred in two blockbuster movies (though neither grossed as much as his first), East of Eden and All’s Quiet on the Ohio Front. In the latter, his role greatly reminded him on his departed friend, Edward Brinn, whom he drew much influence for his on-screen persona. This direction brought on the ire of the critics, who said that it was a 180 degree turn in his usual roles. As with most critiques, Dean did not care what the critics thought.
He took his last leading role in 1957 in Long Road to Gettysburg, where he played the role of Steven Chamberlain, a sergeant whose squad held off a Confederate charge up Little Round Top. The small hill was a critical link in the Battle of Gettysburg, which was largely an armored battle (one of the first in history). The movie brought in more than Rebel without a Cause and earned Dean a nomination for an Oscar. However, the mood in Hollywood was drifting away from jingoism and a more peaceful movie brought in the Best Actor Oscar.
Dean’s love of acting slowly eroded over the year as his attention turned towards directing. His change came from the fact that Dean was sick of being jerked around like a puppet on the stage. He also thought he could do a better job than some directors, and aimed to prove it. During the 1950s, directing was not his only new direction. While he was a struggling actor, Dean took up Bull Fighting, a rather dangerous sport, much to his mother’s horror. To put his mother’s nerves at ease, he gave up the ring and took up the race track. His favorite race car was a 1955 Dodge Cobra that he purchased with his pay from Rebel without a Cause. He raced in amateur circuits in his Cobra until 1958, when changes in his life forced him to give up racing. Despite his death-defying acts on closed circuits, Dean was always in favor of public safety on the road, citing several close calls of his own by drivers who were not paying attention.
Again, after filming his last movie, Dean encountered his former girlfriend. They dated for a month before Separating again, only to getback together in September of 1957. This time, Dean and Angela found a balance between their passion and personalities. Dean took his first directing job on a minor movie called Giant, and soon discovered that directing was not as easy as he believed. Despite the difficulties, he preferred the commanding role of a director than the obeying role of an actor. Dean was never a man who followed orders just because he was suppose to.
His life changed for the better in the Summer of 1958, when he finally married Angela Pier, after years of rocky roads and separations. Despite the fact that they spent more time apart than together since first meeting did not discourage either of them. Unlike many weddings in Tinsel Town, the Dean-Pier wedding was a small affair, conducted at a church in Santa Monica, where Edward Brinn once preached, where only family and friends were invited. Dean posted a sign in front of the church on their wedding day stating "Media Need Not Apply". As with most Hollywood weddings, the so-called experts gave them two years at the most.
The Politician
James Dean was always a nationalist at heart, especially since his father’s death. Fifteen years after the Confederate States surrendered, immigration was once again allowed in the United States. Though the southern states were not fully integrated into American society, a labor shortage caused the Federal Government to open the doors. Even to this date, Progressives and Socialists blame big business and their puppets in the Democrat party for opening the door to allow in cheap labor. The Progressives were angry because it took jobs away from loyal Americans. Socialists were mad because they saw it as exploitation. Unlike decades past, immigrants did not come from Europe, but from Mexico.
All through the 1950s, Mexican rebels fought their French masters, who have been ruling the country since the late 1860s. Hundreds of thousands of refugees took advantage of guest worker programs sponsored by the Democrats, and supported by Socialists, despite exploitation worries. Dean would later say of this that Socialists were so afraid of offending anybody, even those who were not eligible to vote. Part of it was due to the humanitarian problems in Mexico, the same that France cause in their wars in Algeria and Indochina. Dean would admit, grudgingly, that most of the refugees were simply seeking a better life for their children. By 1960, Dean could sympathize with that after his first born, Winton Edward Dean, came into the world.
However, with the refugees came the type of people who would exploit the situation. When the borders were opened, not only did the dispossessed come north, but so did some of the corrupt elements and their vices. The Federal Government did nothing to stop the tide of less-than-legitimate peoples from crossing into the United States. From 1956 to 1966, cases of drug abuse in cities in the Southwestern States soared through the roof. Before 1960, morphine was the most serious abused drug in the United States. Afterwards, marijuana eclipsed it, followed by harsher drugs from further south.
Crime was only part of the problem. What really galvanized Dean was the fact that these immigrants had little interest in becoming Americans. Worse yet, Socialists supported them and tried to foster cultural diversity in a country that has always prided itself on its Melting Pot. America was a fusion of European, West African and Indian cultures. Dean was raised to believe that Americans were one people, one nation. Of course, the realization of just how difficult it was to incorporate tens of millions of Confederates, whose ancestors were Americans only a few generations before, only added to danger seen in foreigners coming into the country in the hundreds of thousands.
Dean was apart from much of Hollywood, which largely supported the Socialist Party, and his outspoken criticism of foreigners and the eroding of American boundaries largely blacklisted him in the eyes of the cinema elite. Dean was still popular among the people, and he began to earn his pay by speaking for the Progressive Party at rallies around California. The Dean family moved to Cholame in 1962. The event that finally drove him from activism into actively politicking came in 1965, with Lyndon Johnston’s ‘Great Society’. This program effectively ended immigration restrictions and put emphasis on cultural diversity.
Dean’s first shot at politics came in 1966, when he ran for mayor of Cholame. His opponent was a lifelong resident, but lacked the energy of Dean, who was twenty years his junior. When Walter Cautz accused Dean of being racists in a time when that concept was being cast upon the ash heap of history, Dean retorted by saying "It’s not racism; it’s nationalism. I don’t care what color they are, just that they become good Americans." One of Dean’s more notorious quotes were taken from these early years of his political career: "We’re Americans. We don’t embrace other cultures, we assimilate them."
Dean won the 1966 Election for Mayor by 61%. His opponent had been mayor for four terms, and the voters decided it was time for new blood. His tenor as mayor was largely uneventful, and to Dean, boring. Mayors, especially of small towns, had little power or influence. He wanted to be at a place where he could make a difference. In 1970, James Dean ran for State Assemblyman. The Progressive Party has always been the most nationalistic of America’s parties, and Dean’s role in his movies as a proud American battling the Confederates only added to his appeal. By 1966, the people of California began to see the Great Society as not working the way Socialists had promised, and the voters blamed Johnston, a Texan. The fact he was a veteran in the American Foreign Legion in Europe did not seem to matter at this point. Johnston did not even win the nomination for his part in 1968s.
Dean’s time in Sacramento was spent more productively. When he was not blasting the problems caused by open borders and foreigners, he actually tackled issues that all parties could agree upon. In 1971, he pushed for lower speed limits on California’s highways and for traffic safety. To push this through the Assembly, Dean recalled his numerous close calls on the highways around Los Angeles, and cited one instance, that if not for fast reflects, he would have collided with a car that pulled right across his lane. "Keep hot rods and racing on the track where it belongs," Dean would say. "The roads should be safe for all of California’s citizens."
In 1973, Progressives joined with Socialists in passing clean air laws. Dean would recount his own youth, when one could actually breath the ocean breeze in Santa Monica. Years had passed since he last lived their, but over a million automobiles and unrestricted dumping of toxins into the air by factories have turned the skies of Los Angeles a beige instead of blue. This was one of the rare times the two parties could see eye-to-eye. Later that year, when the Socialists tried to have Spanish installed as a second official language in California, Dean and the Progressives fought it tooth and nail. With the support of some Democrats, the bill was defeated. It was later placed on the 1974 ballet as a Constitutional Amendment, where it was soundly defeated by 74%.
By law, California could not regulate its own immigration. In order to fight that battle, Dean would have to propel himself on to the national stage. He was already well known across California for his hot-headedness and anti-immigration stance. This turned off many voters in the coastal cities, but much of rural and central California loved him. He had quite the fight for his Congressional District in the 1974 election, when he challenged incumbent Frederick Campbell. Campbell, a Democrat, had held the District’s seat for the past sixteen years.
During the debates, Campbell response to Dean’s simplistic solution to the problem (i.e. just close the border) by calling Dean a Rebel without a Clue. In his younger days, reference to the Confederates would have sparked a fight. Instead, he responded by telling the story of his youth during World War II, when the neighborhood would come together to help each other. During the past twenty years, the people have turned more towards the Federal Government for handouts and entitlements, instead of reaching out to help each other. The spirit of the neighborhood was dying, and though he freely admitted it was not Campbells’ fault, he clearly pointed out that the Democrats have done nothing to stop the Socialists’ expanded welfare programs.
Dean won the election by only a small margin; not even a clear majority, just 43% of the vote against Campbell’s 42%. Dean knew he had an uphill battle against him on the Hill, but he went off to Washington in 1974, with the goal of changing the nation for the better. In Washington, he constantly butted heads with Socialists, Democrats and the more senior members of his own party. When told to cool down and let the more experienced party members handle the situation, Dean responded with "My constituents didn’t elect me to sit on my hands for my first three terms." To most of the American people, experience and stagnation in the city of Washington were the same thing.
His Rebel-without-a-Clue tag stuck with him through that first term. This was one of the gentler terms his opponents would use in describing him. Dean would shoot back at both parties, accusing the Socialists of appeasing foreigners and the Democrats of being owned by their corporate interests than keeping honest and loyal Americans employed. True, many of the jobs taken by immigrants were agricultural jobs, in sector that had the greatest labor shortage to begin with. When asked by the press what the Progressive Party cared about, Dean replied "The American People, first, last and always." Despite his clearly pro-American stance, Dean never called for immigrants to leave or be expelled. He had no problem with people who came to American and wished to join the American family. His problem came from the Cartels of Mexico and drugs they are spilling on to American streets. They were not the only drug runners, for there were plenty of domestic drug dealers in the 1970s (and in fact many domestically grown and produced drugs) but the Cartels were by far the most violent.
However, he did have a problem with the decaying stance on the southern border, which was beginning to resemble the Wild West of the 1870s instead of American of 1970s. Dean was so outspoken about this, that in February of 1976, he received the shock of his life. Senator Phil Patrick of Pennsylvania and Congressman Alfred Fitzgerald of Chicago, the most senior Progressive Party members in the Senate and House respectively, tapped Dean for a larger job. At a meeting in Dean’s Washington apartment, they asked him how he would feel about running for President. After only a single term in office, Dean was starting to think about re-election to Congress. The office of President never entered his mind. He asked the Obvious question "why me?"
In 1976, after twelve years of Socialists and four of Nixon, and sixteen years of nothing being done, the American people were growing apathetic about politics. What the Presidency needed was young blood, somebody who could energize the American people into acting. "You mean energize the base into getting off their sofa and voting," Dean retorted. The older men, and later the chairmen of the Progressive Party, Walter Roosevelt, told Dean that his years as an actor made him a known name and face, and his uncompromising attitude made him popular among non-party members. Dean would agree to give a shot, but under one condition: he would not be a puppet, whose strings are pulled at the whims of the party. He had enough of puppetry in Hollywood.
He fought a hard primary against his major contender, Walter Forwell, a twenty-year veteran of Congress. Dean constantly pointed out that Forwell was in Congress for twenty years, and has not changed a thing. He clinched the primary during the debate in Milwaukee, where he gave his famous ‘Neighborhood’ speech. In that speech he told the voters about the neighborhood where he grew up, about neighborhoods were average Americans grew up. Then he gave accounts of the inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Houston and Port Sinoloa, where drug dealers and Cartel men would move into nice, suburban neighborhoods, and be followed by the gangs, the muggers, vagrants. How the policies of the Socialists and Democrats were causing a rot, a cancer in the heart of America. Despite Forwell’s performance, Dean would later comment to his wife that he was starting to wonder if Forwell was simply put up to give the illusion of democracy during a party’s primaries.
He took this same message with him during the general election. The Socialist candidate, Martin Freeman, was a non-contender. Nixon was Dean’s main opponent, and Dean blew him wide open with accusations of selling out America’s future so his corporate masters can rake in higher profits from cheaper labor. The election was close, with the entire south going Democrat. The Socialists carried New England. Dean managed to squeak by with 300 electoral votes, becoming the 37th President of the United States. Many media commentators had written off Dean as, at best, a second place finisher. Enough people where angered by the past four presidents to throw in their lot with Dean. One reporter covering the election for CBS commented that maybe having an actor for President was for the best; they were natural born liars after all.
The President
Dean’s meteoric rise from small town mayor to President of the United States, in the space of ten years was as much testimony to luck and dissatisfaction of the people to Dean’s own charisma. Though he tended to step on the toes of those who were above him in ranks, Dean had the ability to reach out to masses of people, making each listener believe he was talking directly to them. His neighborhood speeches were a contributing factor to his victory in November of 1976. As was his style, he did not waste much time with red tape. After being sworn in, his first act was to light a fire underneath the seat of INS, ordering them, along with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to go out and enforce the immigration laws. Though the borders were open, immigrants still had to fill out their papers. Any who did not have those papers were to be immediately shipped back to their country of origin, mostly Mexico. When some in Congress called for reforms, Dean told them "No reforms, we already have the laws, we just need to enforce them."
The Progressive Party has a near majority in Congress, but not so much they could cram their bills through both houses. On April 16, 1977, all Progressives and enough Democrats pushed through a resolution closing American borders to immigration for a period of thirty years, to ‘allow for proper integration of present immigrants into American society’. Dean was prepared to deploy the Army to the Mexican border to make certain nobody crossed the border. Following the end of Anglo-American hostilities and the end of the Confederacy, the United States had no real enemies on its borders. As such, its standing army was reduced. The total number of Americans in the army was 1.5 million, with 80% of them in various National Guard units. All soldiers were professional and well trained, but only three hundred thousand were full-time. The rest of the citizen soldiers remained at home, with work and their families, but ready to be called up on short notice.
The Army had fought its last war in 1946. During the Dean Administration, Guard units were called up on a rotational basis for extensive training in urban combat. Critics in the Congress accused Dean of planning a war of aggression, but Dean could only reply that the soldiers need to be ready. A few Socialists began to wonder if paranoia had not gotten the better of the new President. When Dean tried to propose a budget for 1978, with expanded military expenditures, it was soundly rejected. Five years earlier, Nixon had referred to Federal and State efforts to combat drug abuse as a ‘War on Drugs’, and some began to wonder if Dean took that phrase literally.
Most of 1977 and 78 was spent on handling domestic issues in the United States, other than immigration. The Progressive Party, with help from some Socialists, passed legislation in Congress breaking up the largest banking-investing firm in the country, Wells Fargo. A financial scare in New Amsterdam in 1977, just weeks after Dean took office, caused both parties to see this near monopoly as a risk. The Progressives saw a single large bank as a danger to the country, especially if it was allowed to grow so large that it could threaten to drag down part of the American economy with it.
Another bill passed with the aid of the Socialists was that of raising import tariffs. Democrats fought this bill, with not a single one voting in favor. Industrial jobs in the United States have been slipping in the past ten years, and both Socialists and Progressives aimed to keep those jobs in America. Dean championed the bill, claiming that the loss of industrialization would weaken the United States, especially in the extremely unlikely event of a major war. No industry means no weapons, which would make for a short war.
One thing Dean did oppose in making America strong was the construction of more nuclear weapons. In 1978, he did authorize the replacement of the oldest two hundred of America’s wrought seven hundred warheads, but thwarted plans to raise the total number to one thousand. If a nuclear war ever happened, Dean said "Seven hundred. One thousand. What difference would it make? If the other side launched all theirs’, we’d be just as dead." More over, none of the nuclear powers ever had more than a thousand warheads at any given time. Dean believed the United States should have just enough weapons to destroy and enemy, not the whole world.
The Progressives worked with the Democrats to push through various Americanization Programs. These were Dean’s personal project. His aim from the beginning was to turn immigrants into Americans. He tried to ban Federal funding to schools that taught foreign languages and colleges that required it for entry. Spanish, French and Swedish were easily enough removed, but the German Empire protested when he attempted to have even that language removed. Dean believed strongly that Americans do and should speak English. Foreign considerations with American’s only formal ally forced Dean to relent, much to his frustration. He was not a man to back down easily. Sweden did not overly care, and France responded by removing English from its own schools, which in turn caused issues between them and Britain.
When not stepping on toes or rattling sabers, James Dean spent his time in the White House and traveling the world with his family. Angela took to her role as First Lady with more enthusiasm than Dean took to being President. Their two sons had a harder time adjusting, mostly to the constant security of the Secret Service. Both of the Dean children attended private school; Dean would not send his children to public school until those were cleaned up and lifted to a standard befitting America. Many foreign dignitaries who visited the White House left with a positive impression of the first family.
Both Angela and the President charmed guests, and on a personal level, they were quite popular. Many dignitaries asked Dean about his acting career, and he would regale them with tales of his youth, including racing and bull fighting. Dean was also an avid sports fan, especially baseball. In one incident in 1977, when the King of Austria made a state visit, Dean invited him to watch a baseball game in Baltimore. Dean’s informality did scandalize some European royalty, he was intent on giving them an authentic America experience. When he made a state visit to Austria, the King invited him to a football game in Vienna.
There was one national delegation that Dean could not and would not play nice with, and that was the embassy from Mexico. Ever since the border was closed, the Mexican Ambassador. Protests across Mexico were held, or staged as some Progressives put it, against the closure of the border. When the ambassador brought this to Dean’s attention, the President simply shrugged and told him he could not care less about protests outside American borders. In one heated exchange, where all pretense for professionalism and civility was thrown out the window where Dean said he would not bow to the whims of a post-colonial dump The Mexican ambassador responded by accusing the United States of "stealing" their land. In response, Dean said "Keep it up and we’ll come down and take the other half of your country, then they’d have no country at all."
The low point in American-Mexican relation came on August 12, 1978. For years, the Cartels have thrived on bribery, effectively owning politicians and city police forces, with the more powerful ones owning units of the Mexican army. On August 12, drug runners crossed the border in Durango, escorted by a corrupted platoon of Mexican soldiers. The Cartel paid them more than three times what the government in Mexico City offered, and the soldiers gladly accepted the bribes. During the night, several border patrol agents came under fire from the Mexican Army as they attempted to stop the smugglers. Three agents were wounded, with one dying two days later. The local Guard commander, his unit aiding the Border Patrol, responded to the attack by wiping out both the drug smugglers and corrupted unit.
The point of no return had been passed as American blood was spilt on American soil. On August 14, Dean stood before Congress, calling for a declaration of war against Mexico. After years of such incidents, though no documented ones involving the Mexican Army, Congress treated this as just another such case. The declaration was not given, and war was not to be. At least, not officially. Despite the defeat of the Declaration, Dean used his powers as Commander-in-Chief to send in forces to root out the Cartel responsible.
What followed was a two year struggle that resulted in tens of thousands dead, only a fraction of which were Americans. The Cartels were little to no match for the United States Army and Marine Corp, nor could they hope to match the Air Force. Mexico did not just stand by while American poured across their border, and went to face the Americans. The Mexican Air Force ceased to exists three days after attempting to stop American jets. When the Cartel attempted to smuggle drugs, or even escape by sea, the United States Navy intercepted them. One of the larger freighters was sunk by the U.S.S. Tarpon. This intervention was not as clean and surgical as the Administration would have liked. As with all wars, mistakes were made; the most costly was when the wrong address was given by informants within the Cartel, and lead to the destruction of an apartment building and the death of most inside.
Some in Congress wanted to move to censure Dean for excessive force, while a few wanted to impeach him. However, the Party bosses of both the Socialists and Democratic Party warned against it. Any move against Dean would play into the Progressives’ hands, for they have been foretelling this sort of border war for years. There was some anger among the legal immigrants from Mexico, but no mass demonstrations. Most of them left Mexico to escape the violence of the Cartels, and suffered when they followed. In American cities of the southwest, the war was waged as Cartel men inside the United States struck out at American authorities. Dean would no unleash any standing army upon an American city, but several Guard units did serve as support for the police forces. In parts of Los Angeles, familiar to Dean as a youth, gang violence was so strong, that the California National Guard was forced to march into a Cartel neighborhood stronghold under the support of armor and helicopters.
By January of 1979, the United States had virtually wiped out the Cartels in northern Mexico to the man, and set up a hundred mile policing zone where the Army would patrol and keep the peace. When confronted with this by his detractors in the media, Dean simply replied "The Mexicans had their chance to police it and failed. Since they can’t do it, we’ll do it for them." Destroying the Cartels was popular among the American people, but occupation was another matter. Protests were held in many northern cities over this matter, causing Dean to lose points in the polls. Rooting out the rest of the Cartels, further south, took well in the September of 1979. By this point, soldiers in the Mexican Army were surrendering just to escape the corruption of their own system.
By the start of 1980, Dean’s little adventure, as the Democrats and their allies in the media called it, came to an end. With its army battered, air force and navy gone, and no outlet for malcontents, Mexico soon plunged into another civil war, which would dragon American forces back into it throughout the 1980s. In one of history’s little ironies, the policing zone that was so protested turned out to be the safest place in Mexico during its civil war.
Dean’s actions in Mexico did not completely cure what ailed American, though it did destroy a considerable amount of the supply side of narcotics, nor did it go by without a response. Not all of the Cartel were killed. On March 1, 1980, James Dean learned this while he attended a Progressive Party rally in San Diego. On Diaz Santos, formerly of the Nuevo Leon Cartel, slipped past security, approached the stage and gunned down Dean with a concealed revolver. The assassin’s true motives were never to be known, for the Secret Service shot him dead on the spot. Dean was rushed out of the convention to the nearest hospital, where he was announced Dead on Arrival.
The Legend
President James Dean was both loved and hated, but despite differing opinions, the nation came together to mourn the murder of its leader. The immediate aftermath to having an American President killed by a Mexican National was swift and beyond the control of law enforcement. A wave of attacks against Mexicans legally residing in the United States, and on their way to become Americans left hundreds dead across the southwest. Even hispanics, whose great-grandparents and beyond came to America long before Dead was even born, were targeted. Not only people but institutions were targeted. In Phoenix, two Mexican restaurants were fire-bombed. The arsonists was eventually found, tried, convicted and finally executed in 1984.
For the first time in its history, the United States experienced a wave of emigration, as hundreds of thousands of Mexican Nationals as well as American citizens left the United States to settled in the policing zone, beyond the reach of angry mobs. Order was restored in the cities, and hundreds of Americans were arrested for the violence. Several of the United States amended their constitutions, removing Spanish as one of its two official languages. All of these involved were formerly part of New Spain. Only Cuba, which was never part of Mexico, did not amend its constitution. However, after generations of American and Confederate rule, nobody there spoke Spanish as a first language any longer. Much of this backlash, and the excesses, cost the Progressives the White House in 1980.
A new president, and another former actor, Ronald Reagan, inherited a mess in Mexico and was forced to send in American forces more than once deep in to Mexico to intervene. Much of the chaos was blamed upon Dean, and rightfully so. However, he was merely an instrument that caused the collapse, not the system that failed itself. Thirty years after Dean’s invasion, the Mexican situation has righted itself and a new republic has risen from the chaos. Not surprisingly, considering interventions in the 1980s, the new government is cordial towards the United States and relations have normalized, though both countries have leveed high tariffs against each other, and Mexico has refused more passport requests than it has granted to Americans.
In the following Decade, numerous high schools across the country, as well as an airport in Los Angeles, changed their names to honor the fallen President, and numerous statutes were erected in his honor. The 37th President of the United States is wrapped in a shroud of controversy. The closing of the borders to immigration has only recently been lifted, though under tight regulation. Following the violence after Dean’s assassination, immigrants are not as eager to flock to the United States as they are to Canada, Australia, the Boer Republics, and South America. Dean has left America with its gaze set inward instead of out across the world. This was exactly the way James Dean believed America should act.