The Tragedy of Phillip Gladstone (Part One)
The first in a multi-part series on life and career of former President Phillip Gladstone (43 PM to 126 PM)
This is the first part in a multi-part retrospective on the life and political career of former President Phillip Gladstone (43 PM - 126 PM).
WALLACETOWN, E.H. - UNUO 20, 126 PM
The bells of the Wallacetown Fosterian Church rang five times to announce the funeral service for former President Phillip Gladstone. Gladstone, 83, died peacefully in his sleep on Unuo 10th at his rural East Hegelion cottage. A longtime resident of the region, Gladstone built a reputation as an honest man with integrity; his law practice here was known for taking unwinnable cases without expectation of payment, and in his later years, his name regularly appeared on the list of principal donors to the region’s charities. As the commonwealth’s premier, he championed a program that established a scholarship for East Hegelion’s children, and helped build up its educational system to be among the best in the Federation.
Beyond East Hegelion’s borders – and even beyond Wallacetown’s borders – President Gladstone’s legacy is not defined by his educational efforts or his admirable legal career. It is instead defined by his wartime presidency, and his handling of the conflict that ripped the nation apart.
The pages of the Uniguitan press will be filled with countless memorials to this fascinating and controversial figure, and Dispatches will be no different. This three-part series will document the early life, the rise, and the fall of Uniguita’s troubled eleventh chief executive.
A Wallacetown youth
Born to two teachers in 43 PM, Phillip Gladstone was always known to be a voracious reader. His neighbor and primary school teacher Pauline Carmichael told the Universalo upon his election to the Presidency that she often reprimanded him in class for rushing through his work to read his latest book. “He would burn through his biology, or math, or what else have you,” she said. “And you’d see him five minutes after class started nose deep in whatever new thing he got from the library.”
Neither an exceptionally good nor exceptionally poor student, Gladstone excelled in his reputation for charity and goodwill towards his neighbors and fellow students. One classmate, Erica Salazar, recalls him defending a disabled boy who had been repeatedly bullied by classmates. “He was the only one who would stand up for Donny,” whose legs had been paralyzed by a bout of polio. “When those kids picked on him, Phil would stand in front of them and make them go through him first. He got the crap kicked out of himself a lot, but Donny looked at him like he was a superhero.”
Despite his average academic performance, Phillip gained admission at the University of East Hegelion in 61 PM. The prolific reader first aspired to be a history teacher, following in the footsteps of his favorite instructor from his grade school years, Paul McKay. Years later, McKay told the Wallacetown Courier that he was disappointed that Phil had chosen another life. “I’ll always be proud of him to be sure, he’s a hell of a kid. But politics? C’mon Phil.”
After completing his triennium at UEH, Gladstone married his girlfriend Anna Coates, and enrolled in the University of Nova Espero’s prestigious School of Law in 64 PM. A freshly minted attorney, he first worked for a small criminal defense practice in Nova Espero.
Upon his father’s death in 69 PM, Gladstone returned to Wallacetown to help settle his affairs. Though he initially planned only to stay temporarily, he found that Wallacetown had declined rapidly since he left. Once a thriving mill village, the rural burg had declined rapidly with the closure of its paper mill three years prior. Caught in the throes of unemployment and a parallel drug epidemic, the community lacked effective legal representation for the indigent. When he found out that his childhood friend Robert Bosley had been arrested on charges of stealing from a local pharmacy, Gladstone jumped at the opportunity to defend him.
“He didn’t hesitate, not for a minute,” Robert tells me. Sober for nearly 35 years and now the owner of a general contracting firm in East Hegelion’s capital of Bradford, Robert says he owes his life to the former president. “He helped me get off with probation, on the condition that I go to rehab. I’d probably be dead if it weren’t for Phil.”
A promising legal career and entry into politics
From the late 60s until the mid 70s, Gladstone established himself as a well-respected advocate for Wallacetown’s poor. He served as a public defender for hundreds of clients who could not afford legal representation. He was known for keeping good relations with the local judge, and ensuring that those who were eventually sentenced served as little jail time as necessary, and managed to orchestrate dozens of deals to keep his clients out of prison.
The vast majority of his cases were crimes of despair and deprivation – petty theft, public drunkenness, vagrancy. As the 75 PM East Hegelion election approached, the local chapter of the Conservative Party approached him as a candidate for the town’s Commonwealth Assembly seat. After some demurring, he eventually obliged. Though he handily won the Conservative nomination, he faced stiff competition from the local Populist incumbent.
John J. Wallace was a local luminary, a direct descendant of the town’s namesake and born wealthy from the brisk business of the Wallace Paper Company. A progressive black sheep in an erstwhile conservative family, Wallace entered politics in the aftermath of far-right President Enrico Carmelo’s failed coup in 47 PM. That year, he defeated the Conservative incumbent campaigning on promises of reform in government, work for the unemployed, and restoration of national dignity. For the next three decades, he served as a stalwart progressive in an otherwise conservative region, championing union organizing efforts and increased benefits for workers in the working class town.
By 75 PM, however, times had changed. The paper company that bore Assemblyman Wallace’s name had collapsed, taking with it much of the town’s jobs and any goodwill for the Wallace family. Though most didn’t blame the mill’s collapse on John, conservative propaganda blaming the closure on the ballooning costs of the unionized workforce worked its way into everyday conversation. To those not in the political know, John Wallace was just another member of the family that killed the town’s economy. For others, he was just another progressive Populist whose naive, well-intentioned policy had robbed the town of thousands of good-paying jobs.
Even so, Gladstone faced an uphill battle against the incumbent. Even despite the troubles of the past few years, Wallace managed to handily carry the elections of 67 and 71. His advocacy for unemployment insurance, support for the jobless, and a renewed push for local public works projects earned him support, as did the memory of longtime residents who remembered the deprivation they faced prior to the Populists’ landslide victory in 47 PM.
Wallace pilloried Gladstone for his proposed policy program of deregulation and tax cuts. Gladstone, meanwhile, portrayed Wallace as an out-of-touch, outmoded relic of the past. “Today’s problems call for today’s solutions, and today’s leaders,” one pro-Gladstone poster read. The energetic 32-year-old with his young wife and son offered a startling contrast to Wallace, who would be celebrating his 72nd birthday on the day of the election. While Gladstone navigated the two scheduled debates with ease, Wallace stumbled over his words, frequently lost his train of thought, and was gaffe prone. In the second debate, he referred to the event’s host, the Wallacetown Woman’s Association, as a “fine girls organization,” and on several occasions called his opponent “Peter.”
Despite these setbacks for the incumbent, polls indicated a tight race. On Election Night, other ridings were called within minutes; Wallacetown took hours. Precinct by precinct, the vote totals were counted.
08-01 - 331 Wallace, 320 Gladstone.
08-02 - 299 Wallace, 298 Gladstone.
08-04 - 312 Gladstone, 308 Wallace.
It all came down to Precinct 08-03, a well-to-do but socially progressive clutch of homes on the outskirts of town. At 11:04 at night, four hours after the polls had closed, the results came in.
08-03 - 320 Gladstone, 310 Wallace.
In one of the closest races in the Commonwealth’s history, Gladstone defeated Wallace by four votes out of 2,496 cast – a margin of just 0.2%.
“Phil was as surprised as we were,” says neighbor Peter Lackman. He shows me a photograph of the election night party, complete with green and white streamers, blue rosettes, and the cheering party faithful. While the others look jubilant, Phillip looks bug-eyed.
“No way he thought he was going to win. No way.”
That night, a journalist from the Courier asked Gladstone how he felt about his victory. The typically erudite lawyer, whose reading lists contained works with word counts well into the hundreds of thousands, simply replied: “Shocked. I’ll give you more in a day or two.”
For the next several years, Gladstone served as a moderate in the Assembly’s opposition. He proposed a number of pieces of legislation concerning educational reform, increased funding for public defenders, and reduced sentences for those charged with petty crimes. He developed a reputation as a clean politician, pragmatic legislator, and surprisingly adept political horse-trader.
Former Assemblyman Thomas McElroy, a one-time seatmate of Gladstone’s told me a story about Gladstone’s prowess in persuasion.
He had this bill, his kind of hobby horse, to help fund free trade school for all East Hegelions. A lot of us thought it was a good idea and it kept getting introduced every year, but it never had the votes to cross the finish line. After Phil Gladstone introduces the bill though, he spends the next week and a half on the phones, taking assemblymen out to dinners, and finding which votes and sponsorships he’d be able to trade. Then comes the day of the vote. 173 to 171. He had figured out exactly how many votes to count, giving himself a couple to spare in case someone got sick or cold feet. It was remarkable.
His finesse for vote counting led to his quick ascent to becoming the Conservative’s whip following the 79 PM election. He rose to commonwealth-wide prominence when he helped expose a corruption scandal that ensnared dozens of members of the then-majority People’s Party.
With the death of the Conservative leader ahead of the 83 PM election, Gladstone was quickly elected to replace him. Leading the party as an anti-corruption attack dog and policy moderate, Gladstone offered a cleaner and more technocratic alternative to the ailing People’s Party and the increasingly radical right-wing Security and Justice Party. Gladstone’s Conservatives easily carried the election, establishing a firm hold on the East Hegelion Commonwealth Assembly that would not be broken until 115 PM.
In the economically devastated Wallacetown, Gladstone’s ascent to the premiership of one of the wealthiest commonwealths in the Federation was a source of pride. Douglas Polk, who was 17 at the time of Gladstone’s election and is now a member of the town’s council, remembered people celebrating in a local pub. “Over at Gaston’s, we were all cheering. The bartender wasn’t even checking people’s ages; I had more beer than I’d ever had before that night. We were all just so happy that one of our own got elected to something prominent, to a position of power to make a difference here.”
‘Mr. Make-a-Deal’: Gladstone as East Hegelion premier
As he entered his premiership, Phillip Gladstone aimed first to investigate and eradicate corruption that had been pervasive in the commonwealth’s government for the past decade. East Hegelion cooperated with federal authorities to prosecute dozens of officials for their involvement in the land sale scandal that had roiled the previous Populist administration.
Outside of cleaning up government, Gladstone’s government prioritized educational reform, reducing government regulations, and cutting government spending. Gladstone came under fire for cutting government pension expenditures, and faced a dramatic strike from public employees across the commonwealth. Gladstone used his personal experience in negotiating in the courtroom and his amicable personality to defuse the protests, resulting in a smaller cut of the pension program.
Following the strike negotiations, Gladstone developed a reputation as a skilled dealmaker between the different groups vying for power and resources in an increasingly cash-strapped commonwealth. One of his greatest accomplishments was striking an advantageous hydroelectric power-sharing deal with neighboring Kaplo, ensuring that the commonwealth’s vulnerable industries had access to affordable energy. In 86 PM, Gladstone’s government successfully encouraged a number of local governments to consolidate services in order to cut costs. These deals earned the premier the moniker of “Mr. Make-a-Deal” among the fawning local press.
Meanwhile, the increasing radicalization of the far-right reared its head in the commonwealth. The Security and Justice Party formed a substantial third party in the Assembly, and persistently criticized Gladstone’s government from the right. Analysts believed that the Conservatives were fearful of alienating their own ultraconservative wing, and activists charged Gladstone with oftentimes acquiescing to the far right’s demands.
In 87 PM – an election year in East Hegelion – a case exploded in the rural hamlet of Bellingham where the owner of a hotel refused service to a Lacaise couple, Marianne and Jean-Phillipe Clarendon. Though the Constitution bars discrimination on the basis of “race, sex, ethnicity, or native language,” by the operators of such public-facing businesses, there had been persistent systemic issues of linguistic and ethnic discrimination throughout the rural areas of the commonwealth. Though Gladstone’s administration eventually came down publicly on the side of the Lacaise couple, they wavered – for weeks, the government’s official position had been to let the case play out in the courts.
“I honestly felt betrayed at the time,” says Jean-Pierre Gachet, a member of Wallacetown’s sizable Lacaise community. “The couple even spoke Hegelionic to the hotel owner – they were only speaking Lacaise among themselves. My family came down here to work in the mills. We’ve been down here for generations, and that could have just as easily been my wife and I.”
He continues, with some bitterness in his voice, “we thought Phil was different. That the Conservatives had changed. But with how they handled the Clarendon case, it felt like he was just another Conservative.”
According to later interviews, in addition to his response to the onset of the civil war, this was one of his greatest regrets in politics. He told the Universalo in 112 PM that he, “still thinks about the Clarendons each and every day.”
“I did bad by them. It was political cowardice, I’ll admit to that. And that cowardice haunts me, if I’m being frank.”
Battling for the soul of Conservatism
Like with his earlier movement into local politics, Gladstone was hesitant to make the jump to the national stage. By 88 PM, the 45-year-old former public defender was tired of politics. The Clarendon case had clearly worn on his conscience, and the increasingly bitter tone of national politics was offputting to the generally staid and meek former public defender.
Unfortunately for Gladstone, the Conservatives’ moderate bench had grown increasingly shallow in recent years. Though plenty of moderates existed in the Common Council and as premiers, none had the governing experience and general popularity of Phillip Gladstone. Though he might face some pushback in the Terre de Lac region for his handling of the Clarendon case, Gladstone was still the frontrunner among Conservative moderates in terms of name recognition and preference for the 88 PM Conservative primary.
At the same time, the Conservative Party found itself increasingly divided between the moderates and the ultraconservatives. The latter took a more permissive view of the constitution when it came to issues regarding linguistic and ethnic protections, hoping to capture the votes of far-right citizens of the north, who began casting ballots for the Security and Justice Party in the twenty years prior.
In the Federation’s north, commonwealth governments routinely found themselves in federal courtrooms as a result of discriminatory laws and practices. In Richardsland, for instance, the commonwealth government passed laws making Hegelionic the sole official language and rejecting any paperwork written in another tongue. This effectively made it illegal for non-Hegelions to do business there, and the Constitutional Court eventually ruled against Richardsland, calling the legislation, “not only in gross contravention of the Supreme Law of the Land, but also the core values of the Nation.”
These commonwealths also frequently created policies that directly or indirectly harmed the immigrant Central Mountain People and Crescent Islander communities. To criminalize the Central Mountain People’s extended family structure, the governments of several commonwealths capped the number of bedrooms that could be built as a part of a home. Laws barring public employees – including teachers, physicians, clerks, and anyone else employed by the state – from having tattoos, were meant to box Crescent Islanders out of government positions.
Though not a northerner himself, the ultraconservatives found their avatar in Howard Sanck. Polling at around 44% among Conservatives, Sanck was an ardent far-right member of the party and the only credible Conservative to declare their candidacy. Sanck spoke to audiences of SJP members, promising them a “clean future” with “clean streets, clean government, and clean people.” He pledged to reduce immigration from the Central Mountains and Crescent Islands amid those regions increasing repression from the Ylrikian Empire, and savage cuts to Uniguita’s generous social safety net. “We have people who have never worked a day in their lives mooching on people who are struggling to pay the bills,” Sanck told a largely Hegelionic audience in the immigrant-heavy city of Port Williams. “It’s time to end the gravy train, folks.”
It was a speech Sanck gave in Wallacetown on Duo 17, 88 PM, however, that convinced Gladstone to seek the presidency. Appealing to the town’s unemployed millworkers, Sanck promised to “kick out the freeloaders, kick out the people who can’t even speak our language, and kick out the people who are poisoning our nation’s blood.” Many in the audience cheered wildly, hearing their frustrations and their prejudices outlined so clearly by a prominent figure for the first time.
For others, it elicited the opposite response. Gregory Beck, a local resident who attended the rally but eventually voted for Gladstone, said that the speech was shocking. “I had never heard someone talk about things like that, definitely not a Conservative. I think it woke me up, a little bit.”
The Duo 17 speech struck a particularly raw nerve with another Wallacetown native. “It was the most hateful, vindictive thing I had ever heard,” Gladstone later told a biographer. “It made me sick to my stomach. It was un-Uniguitan. This is a nation built by people from all over, who speak a wide variety of languages, and who believe in a variety of Gods. Sanck didn’t love the Federation. He hated it. He wasn’t a Conservative – he was a radical.”
The Conservative Party, save for the presidency of Fernando Pelar from 60 PM - 68 PM, had been largely locked out of power federally since Conservative President Enrico Carmelo’s ill-fated self-coup attempt in 47 PM forty years earlier. In recent elections, however, the Conservatives had come so tantalizingly close to victory. In 80 PM, the Conservatives won 47% of the vote to the Populists 53% in the second round of voting. In 84 PM, the split had been a maddening 51-49. By 88 PM, the nation found itself fatigued with the incumbent Populists and in the midst of an economic slump heading into its third year. The Conservatives seemed to be on the cusp of a political rout. Most pollsters and analysts believed that whoever won the Conservative nomination would be the next president, even if the nominee was the polarizing Sanck.
It was in this once-in-a-generation context that Gladstone found himself. The idea of an inevitable Sanck presidency was unfathomable. And while there were a number of moderate candidates at this point, none of them had the individual resources, energy, or name recognition to take on a lion of the Conservative right like Howard Sanck.
After a marathon series of phone calls, trial balloon polls, and conversations with Conservative notables, Gladstone announced his candidacy on Trio 17, exactly one month after Sanck’s Wallacetown speech. Over the next five months, Gladstone and Sanck traded places at the top of the polls numerous times. Gladstone chastised Sanck’s closeness with the SJP, while Sanck charged that Gladstone was a false conservative.
After a bitter and heated primary contest, Gladstone emerged victorious – the primary on Okto 4 yielded a 53-47 victory over Sanck. Sanck conceded the election, though he promised to “take [Gladstone] to task in representing the voices of the tens of thousands of red-blooded Uniguitans who voted for change in the Party and the Federation.”
Over the next twelve weeks, Gladstone would serve as the party’s standardbearer in one of the most politically turbulent times in the Federation’s history. What was supposed to be a coronation and a capstone to an impressive political career became a slugfest – laying bare for the final time the deep divisions in Uniguita that would tear it apart less than three years later.
This is the first in a multi-part retrospective series on the life and political career of the late President Phillip Gladstone (43 PM - 126 PM). Subscribe to this column to receive an alert when Part Two is posted.