Writing “The Assassination of President Broussard”

Editor’s note: A guest post from Keith West, writer and keeper of the excellent blogs: Adventures Fantastic; Gumshoes, Gats and Gams; and Dispatches From The Lone Star Front . I have a Kindle on the way and I’ll be downloading this one…

An alternate history short story of mine, “The Assassination of President Broussard,” was recently published in the anthology Tales from the Otherverse. I’d like to thank Jim for allowing me the opportunity to discuss how I came to write it. It’s appropriate that this essay appears here, as it was a post of Jim’s that I drew on for inspiration. I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum.

James Reasoner, publisher of Rough Edges Press and an all-around great writer himself, put out a call late last spring for submissions to an alternate history anthology he was planning on bringing out later in the year. I wracked my brain and wracked my brain for a good idea but kept coming up empty.

That’s where Frontier Partisans comes in. In June Jim wrote a post entitled “American Hippopotamus.” It described an attempt by Louisiana Congressman Robert Foligny Broussard to get a bill through Congress that would start a program of importing hippopotami as a food source. The beef industry wasn’t able to keep up with the demand for fresh meat at that time. Broussard’s bill was an attempt to address that problem as well as the water hyacinth problem in Louisiana. The plant, which was foreign, had been introduced at a New Orleans World’s Fair some year previously and was clogging waterways to the point than many were becoming impassable. Hippos loved the stuff.

Assisting Broussard were two men, Frederick Russell Burnham and Fritz Duquesne. Burnham had fought on the side of the British in the Second Boer War: Duquesne was Boer to the core. At one time they had had orders to kill each other if they ever ran into each other in the bush. Now they were working together.

Obviously Broussard’s plan was not a success. Jim included a link in his post to a long article about not only Broussard’s bill but the lives of both Burnham and Duquesne. Fascinated with the whole situation, I read the article, and by the time I was done, I had my story pretty well outlined in my head. So thanks, Jim, for that post. Not only was it interesting and educational, it gave me the solution to the problem of what to write.

I wanted my story to be as realistic as possible, meaning I wanted a clear point of departure from recorded history with everything that followed being a logical consequence of the divergence. I started with a couple of assumptions.

First, suppose the Meat Crisis as it was called was worse than it actually was, and Broussard was able to get his bill through Congress. Now suppose that the program was a greater success than anyone expected, making Broussard something of a national hero. What would the consequences of this be?

Well, Broussard was a politician to the core who ended his career in the U.S. Senate. I wasn’t able to find out much about him in the time I had to research the story, so I had to make some guesses about his character. First, it seemed likely that he would have run for President if his hippo plan had been successful. So I made him President. I intentionally made Woodrow Wilson his Vice-President. Not because I thought Wilson would have been his running mate. This is the one place in the story where I put in something I didn’t think was logical. Wilson and Broussard were both from the South, and two people from the same region of the country wouldn’t be on the same ticket for the top two spots. No, I put Wilson as the VP because I think he was one of our worst Presidents, and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to have him shot, even if only in fiction.

Second, Broussard was a Cajun who spoke French fluently and at times campaigned for Democrats in districts with a high population of voters of French-Canadian descent. He would have been highly sympathetic to France when World War I broke out; I’m not sure America wouldn’t have entered the war sooner if he had been President. This would have not set well with Duquesne, who hated the British with a passion. The flashback in the story where Duquesne killed two British officers outside of a British concentration camp is an event Duquesne claimed happened.

I also considered how the cattle industry would have responded to having hippos as competition. I doubt they would have taken the competition lightly. I thought of some of the range wars and how threats were handled in those. So I introduced two cattle ranchers (by first name only since they were historical figures) and had them come up with a scheme to assassinate Broussard. I realize that I was taking liberties here, but it made for a better story.

Then I brought Broussard, Duquesne, and Burnham together in the swamp to see the hippos, with Duquesne having an agenda. Burnham and Duquesne never actually fought each other in person, so I gave them the opportunity to do so. The opening quote from Burnham about not wanting to have a knife fight with Duquesne is a real quote and is what gave me the ending of the story.

I’ll let you read the story if you’re interested in seeing how it all plays out. I had a blast with this one, not only writing it but doing the research to make sure I didn’t make any major goofs with the historical record. (Thanks to Lou Antonelli for catching a big one.) There’s a lot more of the backstory that exists in my mind, but I’ll not bore you with minutiae of the Democratic National Convention that nominated Broussard for President.

Once again I’d like to thank Jim for his original post as well as the opportunity to write this guest post. I’d also like to thank James Reasoner for including “The Assassination of President Broussard” in Tales from the Otherverse. It was an honor to be included with the other authors. I’d also like to thank Mr. Reasoner for giving me an extension on the deadline when my computer unexpectedly cratered, and I had to start over from scratch.