Jack of Harts

Various Indian Tribes all over America became functionally independent during the Second Great Depression. They had long inhabited an odd grey area in the law where they were considered sovereign nations while being controlled by the Federal government. The loss of Federal cohesion resulted in the better run Indian Tribes stepping outside that grey area and taking effective control of their destiny. Most of these had successful casinos or other Indian-owned businesses that allowed them to hire tribal police forces and exert order in their sphere’s of influence. Those sphere’s often went outside their official borders, and resulted in some interesting political quandaries when the various States reformed the Federal government. Most of them were solved without bloodshed.

The Second Great Depression and the reformed Federal government saw many States making official what circumstances on the ground had already made clear. It took very little time for Minnesota to eject the Twin Cities from the State entirely. Most Minnesotans outside the Metro area disliked that hive of scum and villainy, and were perfectly happy to see it go away. New York did the same with what is known as Old New York City in Jack’s time. They did not eject the rest of Long Island, but the Long Islanders chose to join Old New York City in forming the new Empire State. Chicago. San Francisco. Detroit. Numerous big cities surrounded by rural regions suddenly found themselves utterly ignored by the counties they used to order around. But make no mistake. They were still major population centers, with high concentrations of industrial and economic power. A nation cannot survive without rural areas. It also cannot survive without cities. There will always be friction between them. In most cases, the cities were almost immediately accepted as States of their own, with their own Senators that they didn’t have to share with the local yokels. There were protestw and court cases that went on for years over the issue of State divorces like that, but most of them ended without too many firearms used against the other side.

Old California was particularly rife with Sanctuaries before the Second Great Depression hit, and they had spread throughout every State in the decades since their inception. They were places people could go to in order to find relief from a law they didn’t like, usually due to political, economic, or religious issues. They actually had much in common with the Mormon, Amish, and Indian communities that we have right now, a place where life was different than elsewhere. Sometimes better. Sometimes worse. It depended on the Sanctuary in question. They represented a major dividing line or crack in American politics and culture, and they formalized the split between many of the cultures that had once seen America as a single melting pot. The Second Great Depression saw the long simmering mutual distrust enflamed by decades of political rhetoric finally boil over. The distinctly American red and blue line left them unwilling to live with each other, and many States simply split up along county, city, or individual farm lines. The Sanctuaries proved central to many of these splits. Some of them died. Others thrived, and it was their representatives that went to the States and the Feds in time to reform the government under more…rational rules.