The following is a list of real or historical people who have been portrayed as President of the United States in fiction, although they did not hold the office in real life. This is done either as an alternate history scenario, or occasionally for humorous purposes. Also included are actual US presidents with a fictional presidency at a different time and/or under different circumstances than the one in actual history.
President Patton, presumably George S., is mentioned in The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein. In reading an almanac from our universe, it is noted that Dwight D. Eisenhower served two terms but only one of them corresponded with his terms in the parallel universe, meaning that he either served from 1949–1957 or 1957–1965.
He is also mentioned to have been president in an episode of SeaQuest 2032.
Powell was also mentioned as having been president in the 2000 movie Deterrence set in the then future year 2008. An aircraft carrier had been named after him, and he was mentioned to have taken heroic action in a crisis involving Venezuela.
In the short story That'll Be the Day by Jack C. Haldeman and Barbara Delaplace in the alternate history novel Alternate Tyrants by Mike Resnick, an amendment to the US constitution lowers the voting age and America's youth elects Elvis Presley for president. As president, he establishes an ageist dictatorship, bans all types of music except for rock 'n roll, and fosters an unstable political system violently dominated by musicians.
In the short story "Ike at the Mike" by Howard Waldrop, jazz singer Dwight D. Eisenhower is jamming with president Elvis Presley, who used to dabble in music when he was young.
Nancy Reagan was President of the United States in 1986 in one of alternate realities depicted in The Coming of the Quantum Cats by Frederik Pohl. She was considered a strong and assertive president, who successfully guided her version of the US through the major crisis of an invasion from a different reality. Her husband Ronald, known as the First Gentleman, was mostly disregarded. In this reality, John F. Kennedy was a Senator from Massachusetts who was married to a woman named Marilyn.
In a parallel universe designated Earth-81426 featured in the comic book What If? Volume 1 No. 26 (April 1981), Ronald Reagan ran against the incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, and the New Populist Party candidate Captain America in 1980. While he stated that Captain America was one of the United States' greatest heroes, Reagan questioned whether the American people should elect a man whose face they had never seen. Captain America eventually won the election and revealed that Steven Rogers was his secret identity after being inaugurated as the 40th president on January 20, 1981.
In a parallel universe designated Earth-267 featured in the comic book The Avengers No. 267 (May 1986), Ronald Reagan was president in 1986. In that year, he presided over a ceremony welcoming two new members, Storm and Colossus, to the Avengers in the Avengers Mansion in Manhattan, New York City. He and everyone else in attendance at the ceremony was killed by a bomb planted by Kang the Conqueror.
In the alternate history Dark Future novel series by Kim Newman, Ronald Reagan never entered politics and was best known for playing Maxwell Smart in Get Smart.
A deleted scene from the pilot episode of Sliders featured a reference to Ronald Reagan. In the first parallel universe seen on the series, Reagan had never been elected president and was serving as the Mayor of San Francisco in 1994. He vowed to bring law and order back to the streets of the city and, to that end, allowed private citizens to own handguns. This was regarded as a radical and ill-advised step, indicating that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution which protects the right to keep and bear arms had never been passed in this universe. This version of Reagan likewise had an acting career before entering politics, though he left acting considerably later than his counterpart on Earth Prime. His best known acting role was as the first Howard "Mr. C" Cunningham in the hugely popular sitcom Happy Days during the 1970s. After he left the series, he was replaced in the role by Tom Bosley. However, Reagan was widely considered to be the definitive "Mr. C".
In a parallel universe featured in the Sliders Season Two episode "Greatfellas" in which Prohibition was never repealed, Ronald Reagan served as president during the 1980s, though it is not made clear if he served two terms as he did in real life. At some point during his presidency, Reagan removed much of the power from the federal government in an attempt to return autonomy to the states. This attempt failed as the Mafia, which had grown rich on selling alcohol illicitly to the American public since 1920, vested said autonomy in their own organisation. Consequently, the US was severely weakened. In 1996, the Greenfields and the DeBellos, the two crime families which controlled California and Nevada respectively, attempted to merge their families together in a play for missile command of the nuclear arsenal west of the Rocky Mountains. Their plan was for those two states as well as Oregon and Washington to secede from the Union. With the help of Rembrandt Brown, the Deputy Director of the FBI, and his task force, the Incorruptibles, the merger was stopped. District Attorney (and gubernatorial candidate) Joe Biacchi was subsequently revealed to be one of the families' co-conspirators. Reagan was running against Biacchi for the position of Governor of California and won the election in a landslide. This version of Reagan did not suffer from Alzheimer's disease and governed the state until his death in 1998.
In the alternate history novel Russian Amerika by Stoney Compton, Ronald Reagan was the president of the Republic of California in 1987. However, this is a possible incongruity, as he was born in Tampico, Illinois, which it and most of the state of Illinois remains part of the United States.
At the end of the comic Watchmen by Alan Moore, Robert Redford is rumored to be considering running against the Republican incumbent Richard Nixon, who will be seeking a fifth term, in the 1988 election.
In the alternate novel The Great War: American Front as part of the Southern Victory Series by Harry Turtledove, it was mentioned that Thomas Brackett Reed was elected president as a Democrat during the late 19th century. The timeframe of his term(s) is never disclosed. However, evidence in the book supports that Reed served from 1897 to 1902, which would make one of the four presidents in the timeline to die in office. The first and second presidents to die in office were William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor (who both died the same way they did in real life) and Al Smith was killed during a Confederate bombing raid on Philadelphia in 1942. He was lionized as a hero of the Remembrance culture that controlled the country in the period between the Second Mexican War (1881–1882) and the Great War (1914–1917). President Reed pledged to support Haiti's continued independence, refusing to allow the Confederate States of America to invade the island by entering into a treaty to protect Haiti from any Confederate attack. In the 20th century, Reed's profile appeared on the United States half dollar coin.
Keanu Reeves is mentioned as president in the Only Fools and Horses episode Heroes and Villains, although it turns out only to be a part of Rodney Trotter's nightmare. In real life, Reeves is ineligible to run for the Presidency as he was born in Lebanon.
In the parallel universe featured in the 2006 BBC Four adaptation of the short story Random Quest by John Wyndham, Condoleezza Rice was the President in 2006. At the time, the United States and Japan are on the verge of war due to Japan's threatening behaviour towards Indonesia and the Philippines over the course of the previous year. The South East Asian Crisis began when Japan discovered large oil deposits in the South Pacific in 2005. In this universe, the Soviet Union never pursued the policies of glasnost and perestroika and, as such, the Cold War intensified and the superpowers' influence on the world stage dwindled. The power vacuum was filled by the People's Republic of China, which was the most powerful country in the world by the mid 2000s. NASA and the China National Space Administration engaged in joint missions. One of these is the Juno mission, which involved the launch of an unmanned Jupiter polar explorer from Cape Canaveral in 2005. It took 15 months to reach Jupiter.
Nelson Rockefeller is mentioned as the sitting president's immediate predecessor in Michael P. Kube-McDowell's novel Alternities. He is described as having had a difficult term in office.
Margaret H. Harrison's short story, "Love and Politics" begins in 1918, when Eleanor Roosevelt found love letters revealing a long-lasting affair between her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt and her social secretary Lucy Mercer. This led to the Roosevelts divorcing, Franklin marrying Lucy a year later. Though some found Franklin Roosevelt's conduct romantic and praised him for sticking to his love, more conservative parts of the public condemned him as "immoral". He was unable to get elected to public office and withdrew to private business. Conversely, his ex-wife Eleanor - who never remarried - went into politics and was elected to the House of Representatives and later to the Senate. In 1932 she tried to contest the Democratic Party Presidential nomination and failed, but in 1936 she won both the Democratic Primaries and the general elections and became the first woman President of the US. She was very successful, being elected to three consecutive terms and being President from 1936 to 1948, guiding the US through economic recovery and later through war with Germany and Japan. In 1940 she was reconciled with her ex-husband Franklin and appointed him US Ambassador to Britain, a position he fulfilled with great success until being killed in a German bombing in May 1943. At his funeral the grieving President embraced Franklin's widow, Lucy, and said "In all these years I never stopped loving him".
In H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come (published 1934), Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, valiantly but hopelessly tried to end the Great Depression. Roosevelt's New Deal proved a total failure and the country's depression steadily increased. In foreign policy, Rossevelt granted independence to the Philippines, accompanied by guarantees against aggression by other countries. This led the US to a short and inconclusive naval war with Japan; the US Navy broke through a Japanese blockade and got to Manila. Later on, both the US and Japan broke off fighting due to their increasing economic disintegration, no longer able to wage external war and hardly able to keep control over their own national territories. Roosevelt, in charge of a country disintegrating into chaos, was in no condition to involve the US in the European War between Germany and Poland which broke in January 1940. He was the last US president to hold any real power over the entire territory between the Atlantic and the Pacific, with later presidents having real authority only in the environs of Washington, D.C.
In The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 but, before he could take office, he was assassinated by Giuseppe Zangara on February 15, 1933. Consequently, the vice president-elect, John Nance Garner, took office as the 32nd president on March 4, 1933. President Garner was re-elected in 1936, but failed to combat the Great Depression and the US remained strongly isolationist. He was succeeded in by John W. Bricker as the 33rd president in the 1940 election, a Republican who also failed to confront the economic and foreign policy issues. As a result of their combined presidencies, the Axis powers won World War II and proceeded to invade and conquer the United States in 1948. In the alternate historynovel-within-a-novelThe Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorne Abendsen, Roosevelt was not assassinated and went on to serve two terms. When he declined to run for a third term in 1940, his fellow Democrat Rexford Tugwell was elected as the 33rd president.
In The Trinity Paradox by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, the well-intentioned interference of a time traveller caused the boosting of Nazi Germany's nuclear program, and New York City was devastated in June 1944 by a radioactive dust missile fired from a German U-boat – with the result that voters lost confidence in Franklin Roosevelt, who lost the 1944 election to Thomas E. Dewey. In his term, President Dewey instituted the policy of regularly using nuclear arms in whatever war the US was involved in, first against Germany and later against the Soviet Union and North Korea.
In Robert Heinlein's "For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs" - written in the direct aftermath of the Democrats' heavy losses in the 1938 mid-term elections — by 1938–39 Franklin Roosevelt'sNew Deal is hopelessly derailed, with his own party failing to defend the president's economic policies against the constant attacks by his opponents. By the 1940 election Roosevelt proves unelectable, and his downfall drags the Democratic Party to ruin; Roosevelt is then killed in an accident in 1944. In politics, there is a sharp drift to the Right, culminating in an extreme-right dictatorship in the late 1940s — which, however, proves short-lived and after which the pendulum would swings sharply to the Left again, with Fiorello H. La Guardia — at the time of writing a reformer Mayor of New York City and outspoken supporter of Roosevelt, despite being nominally a Republican — picking up FDR's torch. Several decades later, a John Delano Roosevelt is mentioned among the six highly regarded reformers who revise the US Constitution and institute a new Libertarian regime.
In the short story "A Fireside Chat" by Jack Nimersheim contained in the anthology Alternate Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt was elected as vice president on a ticket with James M. Cox in 1920 after his Republican opponent Warren G. Harding died of a stroke. Five weeks after the election, however, President-elect Cox was assassinated by an anti-League of Nations activist, meaning that Roosevelt took office as the 29th president on March 4, 1921. At only 38 years old, he was the youngest man to ever serve as president. Shortly after the Nazi Party rose to power as a result of the Burgerbrau Putsch in 1922, Roosevelt and the Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, established an alliance in order to maintain the balance of power.
In the short story "Kingfish" by Barry N. Malzberg contained in Alternate Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt was defeated in 1936 by his fellow Democrat Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, who ran as an independent with Roosevelt's vice president, John Nance Garner, as his running mate. In 1938, President Long invited Adolf Hitler to visit Washington, D.C. and allowed for him to be assassinated via a bomb, triggering war with Nazi Germany.
In "No Other Choice" by Barbara Delaplace contained in the anthology Alternate Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt died prior to the 1944 election and the Democratic candidate lost the election the Governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, who became the 33rd president. In 1945, President Dewey eventually decided to drop the atomic bomb on Tokyo rather than Hiroshima, leading to the deaths of eight million Japanese civilians.
In the Worldwaralternate history series by Harry Turtledove, Franklin Roosevelt led the United States into World War II, declaring war on the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. However, the war was disrupted by the invasion of Earth by the Race on June 5, 1942. Roosevelt escaped the destruction of Washington, D.C. by one of the Race's atomic bombs and provided his country with strong and inspiring leadership as it desperately battled the Race. While his location was kept secret, he was able to broadcast speeches via radio and film. He was also able to visit the crucial explosive-metal bomb project located in Denver, Colorado, where he discussed fighting the Race with General Leslie Groves at length. However, the grueling conditions which he endured while the United States fought off the invading Race and the stress of leading his country at such a desperate time took a great toll on his health and he died in 1944. As Vice President Henry A. Wallace had been killed when the Race destroyed Seattle earlier that year, Roosevelt was succeeded as the 33rd president by Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State.
In the alternate history short story "Joe Steele" by Harry Turtledove, Franklin Roosevelt, the Governor of New York, was one of the two front runners for the Democratic presidential candidate in 1932. The other was Congressman Joe Steele of California. After two days of voting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, neither candidate had the necessary two-thirds majority to secure the nomination. Steele arranged for the Governor's Mansion in Albany, New York to be set on fire. Governor Roosevelt was killed in the blaze. Nothing tied the fire to Steele, who secured his party's nomination. Steele defeated the extremely unpopular Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover with John Nance Garner as his running mate. He was inaugurated as the 32nd president on March 4, 1933 and went on to create a brutal dictatorship in the United States. He was elected to an unprecedented six terms from 1932 to 1952 before dying in office on March 5, 1953. The 84-year-old Garner briefly succeeded him as the 34th president but was soon overthrown and executed at the order of J. Edgar Hoover, whose reign proved to be even more tyrannical than Steele's.
In the alternate history short story "News from the Front" by Harry Turtledove, Franklin Roosevelt faced harsh criticism from and strict scrutiny by the American press following the United States' entry into World War II on December 11, 1941. The press attacked the Roosevelt administration for not being prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 as well as bringing on the attack by ignorantly imposing an oil embargo on the Empire of Japan. As the war progressed, the press began to constantly second-guess the Roosevelt administration and to ponder the value of the war. Furthermore, the press revealed important American military secrets, questioning the morality of spying on the Axis powers, decrying the poor state of American technology and giving away planned attacks days before there were to take place, leading to their failures. More importantly, the Battle of Midway (June 4–7, 1942) proved to be a complete disaster. During the first half of 1942, protests against the war began to appear throughout the country and a group of celebrities took it upon themselves to sale to Japan and Nazi Germany to offer peace. The British Prime MinisterWinston Churchill faced similar problems in his own country. Matters came to a head when Vice President Henry A. Wallace broke with the administration and publicly attacked Roosevelt's honesty and competence. Calls for impeachment grew louder throughout the United States and, finally, Congress began the impeachment process in June 1942. Although the story ends while Roosevelt is still president, it is heavily implied that he will be impeached and removed from office and that Wallace will succeed him as the 33rd president.
In the Days of Infamyalternate history series by Harry Turtledove, Franklin Roosevelt received a declaration of war against the Empire of Japan after Japanese forces attacked and conquered the territory of Hawaii from December 1941 to February 1942. Roosevelt also received such a declaration against Nazi Germany. Although Roosevelt saw Germany as a greater threat, Japan was the more immediate one and so he was forced to abandon his "Germany first" policy, instead directing the military to retake Hawaii. The Japanese occupation of Hawaii was harsh particularly for American prisoners of war who were imprisoned in camps, where they were worked to death. The citizenry was subject to the whims of the occupiers. Curfews were imposed, rationing was at a bare minimum, and civilians and POWs alike were expected to bow to Japanese soldiers as they passed on the street. The Japanese created a puppet government, ruling through a member of the Hawaiian Royal Family installed as King in the ?Iolani Palace. The United States eventually retook Hawaii in 1943. Consequently, Roosevelt was widely expected to win a fourth term in 1944 in spite of his declining health.
In the alternative timeline featured in the Star Trek: The Original Series novel Provence of Shadows by David R. George III, a sequel to the television episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", in which the 23rd century Starfleet officer Dr. Leonard McCoy saved the social worker Edith Keeler from being killed in a traffic accident in 1930, Keeler went on to found the American Pacifist Movement, a large and influential peace organisation. On February 23, 1936, Franklin Roosevelt met with Keeler during a visit to New York City, where they discussed both the social issues of the day, as well as importance of maintaining the United States' neutrality toward the military conflicts then spreading through Europe. The growth of Keeler's organization in the following years managed to influence Roosevelt's foreign and military policies, forcing him to assume a less aggressive stance against the Axis powers in the early years of World War II. Because of these changes, the Empire of Japan did not attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 as in the original timeline, and the United States' entry into the war was delayed by several years. On December 29, 1941, Roosevelt paid an official visit to Atlanta, Georgia. In response, the Republican Governor of Georgia invited the American Pacifist Movement to hold a rally at the state capitol on the same day. Resigned to the fact that his crewmates from the USS Enterprise, McCoy had planned to settle in his native Georgia in 1932 but was accosted by two other vagabonds on the train and found himself in Hayden, South Carolina. After performing an emergency tracheotomy later that year, he revealed himself to be a physician and was offered a partnership in the practice of Dr. William Lyles. He became Hayden's sole physician following Lyle's death in 1934. By 1944, the United Kingdom had been invaded and conquered by Nazi Germany whereas Australia and New Zealand were conquered by Japan. The Axis powers subsequently attacked the Territory of Hawaii and other territories in the Pacific, finally drawing the United States into the war. The war continued until well into the 1950s. The Nazi dropped an atomic bomb in Atlanta in 1954. After a Nazi fighter plane was shot down over Hayden and crashed on the edge of town, McCoy was stabbed and killed by the pilot, to whom he had been attempting to render medical aid. Roosevelt was eventually succeeded by Harry S. Truman, presumably under the circumstances as in reality. As Spock told Captain James T. Kirk in "The City on the Edge of Forever", Nazi Germany would eventually defeat the United States, securing the Axis' ultimate victory in the war. Consequently, the United Federation of Planets was never founded, as it was in 2161 in the original timeline.
In the alternate history novels Settling Accounts: Drive to the East, Settling Accounts: The Grapple and Settling Accounts: In at the Death, all part of the Southern Victory Series by Harry Turtledove, Franklin Roosevelt was a lifelong Socialist politician in spite of being a relative of the staunch Democratic president, Theodore Roosevelt. He lost the use of his legs when he contracted poliomyelitis in the 1920s. If not for this, some speculated, Roosevelt might have become president himself. Nonetheless, he served as Secretary of War from 1933 to 1937 and as Assistant Secretary of War from 1937 to 1945. He oversaw the project to build a superbomb as well as intelligence on other countries' own superbomb projects during the Second Great War (1941–1944). Roosevelt first rose to prominence, ironically, as Secretary of War in Democrat President Herbert Hoover's cabinet. His Socialist views on domestic policy were out of step with Hoover's laissez-faire approach to government. However, Roosevelt's views on foreign policy were perfectly aligned with the Democrats, particularly as it applied to the Confederate States of America. Upon the election of Socialist Al Smith as the 32nd President in 1936, Roosevelt was, to all appearances, demoted to Assistant Secretary of War. In fact, however, he willingly embraced relative obscurity as a kind of disguise, hiding from the Confederate States the importance of what he was engaged on. As Jake Featherston, the President of the Confederate States of America began sabre-rattling and war seemed imminent, Roosevelt was given the responsibility of overseeing the United States superbomb project in Hanford, Washington. Roosevelt maintained that position throughout the Second Great War, even after Smith was killed and Charles W. La Follette succeeded him as president. Although the CS was the first country in North America to use a superbomb, detonating it on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Roosevelt's programme produced two such bombs for the US, accelerating the victory of the United States and the German Empire on July 14, 1944.
In the alternate history novel Dominion by C. J. Sansom, World War II ended in June 1940 when the British government, under the leadership of the Prime MinisterLord Halifax, signed the Treaty of Berlin with Nazi Germany. Franklin Roosevelt was steadfast in his opposition to the Nazis and the Treaty, which resulted in him losing the 1940 to his Republican opponent Robert A. Taft, who became the 33rd president. Taft pursued a policy of non-intervention, signing a peace treaty with the Empire of Japan in 1941. He was re-elected in 1944 and 1948 but was defeated by his Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson in 1952. Shortly after his election in November 1952, The Times, which was owned by the pro-Nazi British Prime Minister Lord Beaverbrook, speculated that Stevenson would follow in Roosevelt's footsteps and pursue an interventionist foreign policy when it came to European affairs.
In Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I (2014) by Richard Ned Lebow in which neither World War I nor World War II took place, Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1936 and served two unremarkable terms. He was succeeded by Thomas E. Dewey.
Clash of Eagles by Leo Rutman, in December, 1941. Nazi Germany has vanquished the United Kingdom and launches a major invasion across the Atlantic. German forces under Erwin Rommel land in Quebec and sweep down Canada, New England, and the Ohio Valley to New York City and declared the eastern United States an occupied territory. The rest of the United States remains unoccupied but perilously exposed to further attacks. President Franklin Roosevelt and the government administration evacuate the endangered Washington, D.C. and flee westward to California. Eventually, he would be able to return victoriously after a courageous rebellion in New York has driven the Nazis out.
In David Mason's The Shores of Tomorrow, the slave-holding South dominated a technologically backward US from its foundation until the 1940s, when a series of Northern rebellions broke out. Admiral Franklin Roosevelt, leading a Northern Rebel naval force, was killed in the Battle of Long Island Sound. His sacrifice was not in vain, eventually the Northern secessionists won and established three Free Republics.
In another timeline featured in the same David Mason book, the United States in the early 20th century went through turbulent upheavals, civil strife and coups with various Presidents rapidly rising and soon being overthrown and executed. Franklin Roosevelt, nicknamed "The Quiet Dutchman", was a major power broker and kingmaker who made and broke Presidents and did not seek or need the formal title himself.
Given the high number of World War II-centered alternate history fiction, Franklin Roosevelt appears in many stories as president and his presidency is usually altered accordingly.
In And Having Writ... by Donald R. Bensen, Theodore Roosevelt was re-elected in 1912 and 1916, succeeding the 27th president, Thomas Edison, who served one term. As with Grover Cleveland, he was counted twice in the numbering of the presidents: as the 26th president from 1901 to 1909 and the 28th president from 1913 to 1921. In 1909, he helps the four aliens Raf, Ari, Valmis, and Dark to escape house arrest in New York, all four which were placed under house arrest under the orders of President Thomas Edison earlier that year. While attending the demonstration of an experimental moon rocket in 1925, Roosevelt was killed when the device's engines exploded.
In the alternate history short story "The Bull Moose at Bay" by Mike Resnick contained in the anthology Alternate Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt was the subject of an assassination attempt carried out by John Flammang Schrank in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on October 14, 1912 as he was in reality. Whereas he was shot in the chest on that occasion in real life, Schrank's bullet missed him in the story. Running as the Progressive Party candidate, Roosevelt went on to defeat both the extremely unpopular incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft, and their Democratic opponent, Woodrow Wilson, in the 1912 election. He therefore became the 28th president, having previously served as the 26th president from 1901 to 1909. He entered office as the most popular president since Abraham Lincoln or perhaps even Thomas Jefferson. During his second presidency, Roosevelt was a strong supporter of the African-American civil rights movement and women's suffrage, arguing that he could not be the president of all the people when six out of ten adults in the United States could not vote either for him or his opponent as they saw fit. Shortly after the sinking of the passenger liner RMS Lusitania by the German U-boatU-20 on May 7, 1915, Roosevelt brought the United States into the Great War, resulting in the defeat of Germany by the US and its allies within less than a year. This made the United States a world power. In spite of this and the fact that the economy was experiencing a boom, Roosevelt was widely expected to lose the 1916 election to Wilson. At his 58th birthday party on October 27, 1916, Roosevelt attributed his consistently poor performance in the polls to the fact that his erstwhile colleagues in the Republican Party were bitter that he had run as a Progressive Party candidate in 1912 and defeated Taft. He claimed that the Republicans owned three-quarters of the newspapers in the United States whereas the Democrats owned the remaining quarter, meaning that the vast majority of the press coverage was hostile. He expressed regret that his vice president, Charles Evans Hughes, would be voted out of office along with him as he believed that Hughes would have otherwise been elected president in 1920 and would have done an excellent job.
In the short story "Ten Days That Shook the World" by Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne contained in the anthology Back in the USSA, Theodore Roosevelt was re-elected in 1912 as the Progressive Party candidate. He became the last democratically elected President of the United States. Before he could take office, he was assassinated in Chicago, Illinois on December 19, 1912 by the sharpshooter and exhibition shooterAnnie Oakley. Consequently, Vice President-elect Charles Foster Kane, an extremely wealthy newspaper mogul, was inaugurated as the 28th president on March 4, 1913. Although Kane was a Progressive, his vice president, William Jennings Bryan, was a Democrat whereas his Secretary of War, Warren G. Harding, was a Republican. During his presidency, Kane led the United States into greater levels of oppression, class division and bureaucratic incompetence and corruption. President Kane brought the United States into the Great War following the sinking of the passenger liner RMS Titanic on October 9, 1914, an extremely unpopular decision among the American public. Kane rigged the 1916, defeating the Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson and the Republican candidate former president William Howard Taft as Roosevelt had done in 1912. By February 1917, Wilson had been assassinated and many believed that Kane's agents were responsible. Wilson came to be regarded as a martyr by those opposed to Kane's regime. Within months of his re-election, the United States had become politically and socially unstable with overwhelming civil unrest, stemming from the massive and seemingly pointless loss of American lives in the mud of the Western Front and the increasingly gap between the "robber barons" and the workers as well as the massive corruption and the resulting exploitation of ordinary people. The Socialist Party of America, led by Eugene V. Debs, gained considerable report among the disenfranchised populace and soon the unrest led to outright civil war. After the storming of the White House by the Socialist faction on July 4, 1917, Kane was shot and killed by Oakley, as Roosevelt had been four and a half years earlier. This resulted in the establishment of the United Socialist States of America (USSA) with Debs as its first president. Washington, D.C. was renamed "Debs, D.C." in his honour. After Debs' death in 1926, he was succeeded by Al Capone, who proceeded to turn the USSA into a brutal dictatorship, creating a cult of personality around himself and executing his rivals.
In the Southern Victory alternate history series by Harry Turtledove, Theodore Roosevelt was the 28th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1913 to March 4, 1921. He is best remembered as being the president during the Great War (1914–1917), and is one of the most highly esteemed presidents in US history. Not long after his 20th birthday in 1878, Roosevelt headed west, reinventing himself as a rancher in the Montana Territory. He was engaged to Alice Hathaway Lee at the time. In time, Roosevelt acquired a substantial ranch. When the Second Mexican War (1881–1882) began, Roosevelt attempted to join a volunteer regiment, only to learn the territory was not raising any. He raised a cavalry regiment of his own, Roosevelt's Unauthorized Regiment, which he equipped and fed his own expense until they were provisionally accepted into the US Regular Army as the First Montana Volunteer Cavalry. He patrolled the border with the Dominion of Canada until British General Charles George Gordon invaded Montana. Roosevelt took part in the Battle of the Teton River, which saw Gordon's defeat. He and Colonel George Armstrong Custer competed for coverage of their respective heroics in the newspapers, touching off a lifelong rivalry between the two. During the ceasefire, Roosevelt had a one-night stand with a widow near Fort Benton. Roosevelt was elected president in 1912, defeating the Socialist candidate Senator Eugene V. Debs. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to Austria-Hungary, was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Roosevelt vowed to support his Central Powers allies, leading to a declaration of war against the Confederate States of America. During the war, Roosevelt made frequent visits to military positions. On the Roanoke Front, he once narrowly had his life saved by Chester Martin. He was re-elected by a huge margin in the wartime election of 1916, once again defeating Debs. Roosevelt led the United States to its first wartime victory since the First Mexican War (The Mexican-American War) (1846–1848) and altered the balance of power on the North American continent by expelling the British from Canada, creating the Republic of Quebec, and placing severe arms and economic restrictions on the Confederate States. After the war, labor unrest broke out across the country, and Roosevelt's Democratic Party was seen as a part of the problem rather than of the solution. In 1918, control of Congress passed to the Socialists for the first time. In 1920, Socialist candidate Upton Sinclair defeated Roosevelt's unprecedented bid for a third presidential term. Sinclair became the 29th president as well as the first member of his party to hold the office. Roosevelt quietly left the political stage while his successor rolled back many of his policies and pursued a wide variety of personal interests, including aviation and big game hunting. He died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage while golfing in 1924. Upon his request, he was buried in Arlington County, West Virginia, the former estate of Robert E. Lee. Arlington had been in Confederate territory until Roosevelt avenged the United States' defeat in the War of Secession (1861–1862), making the interment site a fitting one. Roosevelt is considered the greatest, most beloved, and most memorable president in US history. In the last category, he is approached by only George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Of the four, he is the only one remembered in an entirely positive light as Washington and Jefferson were from Virginia and Lincoln lost the War of Succession. In the Confederacy, Roosevelt was remembered as a fearsome enemy, but the memory was wreathed in a healthy respect. Roosevelt's burial in Lee's onetime home offended many Confederates, especially in the Freedom Party. Confederate States PresidentJake Featherston frequently reflected on how "another Theodore Roosevelt" would make "a dangerous enemy," and was relieved that such presidents as Hosea Blackford, Herbert Hoover, Al Smith and Charles W. La Follette were considerably less formidable. In the 1930s, a film based on the exploits of Roosevelt's famous Unauthorized Regiment during the Second Mexican War was released to critical acclaim. Roosevelt was played by Marion Morrison. Despite being a staunch Democrat, he was a relative of the lifelong Socialist politician Franklin D. Roosevelt, who served as Secretary of War from 1933 to 1937 and Assistant Secretary of War from 1937 to 1945.
