Jake Featherston - Major Themes

Major Themes

Featherston serves in the series as an analog to Adolf Hitler. One reviewer, however, has pointed out that Featherston is not an exact parallel to Hitler and found his image, rhetoric, and propaganda techniques for the most part credibly adapted to the American South.

Like Hitler, Featherston wrote a book expressing his political and racial views called Over Open Sights, an analog to Mein Kampf. The title of the book is a reference to Featherston’s career as an artillery sergeant. Featherston started writing this book back during the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the Great War of 1914–1917. His embitterment over his lack of promotion coupled with his resentment in the general atmosphere of defeat and his view that the CSA’s Blacks had stabbed his country in the back, is spoken clearly in the novel. It was published right prior of the Second Great War. While most Confederates bought the book, many characters remarked there wasn't anything different than what they had heard already from Featherston's radio broadcasts.

Turtledove himself had this to say about Featherston:

I see people who write characters who are loonies and make them convincing and believable, and I envy them tremendously. I don’t really understand them. It’s funny, because I’ve created my own monster. In the ‘Great War’ and ‘American Empire’ books, I’m writing the person who is the functional equivalent of Adolf Hitler. I’m inside his head — and that’s a very strange place for somebody who thinks of himself as a fairly rational fellow to be. That’s alarming.