His sense of political power was scenic and funny (he was intellectual godfather to another, not-so laid-back, certainly not so funny Texas high country cracker, George W. He bemused reporters with his crude language and even cruder ideas of America. Photographs of Garner show him looking strangled by his required white-collar shirt and tie.
Or as Garner dubbed it, "strike a blow for liberty." (This was during the era of Prohibition.) loudly, that being Vice-President was not worth "a bucket of warm piss." He also comes close to being another character that Dick may well have invented.Īs leader of the House of Representatives, Garner and his cronies would meet in what he called the "board of education" - a gathering for his lawmaker friends to gossip and tell dirty jokes and drink whiskey and branch-water. I no care!"īut the death of Roosevelt in The High Castle leads to two terms by Vice-President elect "Cactus Jack" Garner. I no afraid of that chair! You one of capitalists. He showed no remorse, was evidently delighted by the turn of events, and at his hearing, shouted at the judge, "You give me electric chair. For instance, he was sentenced to the electric chair - not for having missed Roosevelt, but for having, in his misbegotten attempt, killed the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak. Zangara turns out to be a regular character that could have been created by an author like Dick. The NRA should sign him up as a Poster Boy. Now since Zangara was only five feet tall, totally bonkers, and, on top of that, a lousy shot - with the crowd in his line of vision, he managed to kill and wound five other people, but missed FDR completely. As the president-to-be was returning from a fishing trip with various moguls, at the back of the crowd one Giuseppe Zangara takes out his pistol, aims and fires. Here, Franklin Roosevelt is assassinated in Miami, in 1933 - a bit of history culled from historical fact. The author cleverly fiddles with the facts as we think we know them to create an outcome that could well have been ours had we been passing through an alternative time warp.
Germany took over the East Coast, Japan took West, leaving a neutral zone in the Mountain states. His conceit works like this: at the end of WWII, the two victors jointly occupied the United States. When I read The Man in the High Castle twenty-five years ago, I recall being baffled by the story's "cosmological text," and the constant references to the I Ching with its divination system, the throwing of the coins or the yarrow sticks, the "hexograms." But I was easily sucked in by Philip Dick's alternate history.
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