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"Part #223: Cookeing the Books

“Mary—any chance of squeezing in a five minute appointment on Thursday so I can talk to Linda B. from Taylor & Taylor about the book deal? Still not sure about titles too. Maybe something like ‘How to Get that Last Preference’? Thanks – DBH.”

—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)​


*

From “Great Lives” by Patricia Daniels (1979)—

Adrian Cooke was born in Stratford, Connecticut Province, in 1828, a tumultuous time for the Empire of North America. His father was a former member of the Yeomanry in Essex who had been one of the few survivors of a one-sided battle with Modigliani’s troops during Le Grand Crabe in 1807 and had fled to Colchester, where he met his future wife. With the state of Great Britain being what it was following the Jacobin Wars, unsurprisingly the couple were among the many who decided to save up and leave for the Empire of North America. They arrived in New England just in time for the bitter winter of 1816 but survived and prospered despite the impact of the resulting famine. Adrian and his identical twin brother Andrew were the youngest of their six children.

While it may something of a cliché when it comes ironic observations of identical twins, it was noted by many that Andrew and Adrian were as different in character as night and day. Andrew was bold, outgoing and martial, joining first the Imperial Navy and then transferring to the First Imperial Aerial Legion (later the Imperial Aeronaut Corps) when it was founded just prior to the Great American War. His military career would prove to be rather more illustrious than his father’s although his record would be dogged by controversy. In February 1849, General Trevor William Jones took the town of Moyton [OTL Greenville, SC] in part with the advantage of artillery spotting data from his small number of steerables. These included the Robin II Class steerable Chickadee, in which the 21-year-old Lieutenant Andrew Cooke was both second-in-command and primary spotter. While the operation was a success, the newspapers in both Ultima and Fredericksburg made much of the fact that an orphanage had been hit by one of Jones’ barrages and some blamed Andrew for a miscalculation. There was strong evidence then and now that the mistake had in fact been caused by an error in the Optel transmission from the steerable, over which Andrew had no control. But the Chickadee’s Optel man was Ensign Roderick Whipple, who just happened to be the nephew of Thomas Whipple, the great Liberal politician and sitting Continental Secretary who in time of civil war ultimately had a veto of what appeared in the papers. Unsurprisingly, the papers in Fredericksburg chose to blame Andrew and he never quite escaped the resulting controversy.

Adrian, by contrast, was far more bookish and retiring, though the two brothers got along well and Adrian was the first to defend his brother over the Moyton controversy. Some have argued it was this affair which led Adrian to take a dislike of the entrenched power which established politicians and parties often enjoyed in the ENA at the time, where family and connections could still mean a great deal more than justice. Adrian’s own aptitude was principally in the field of mathematics. He expressed some interest in engineering, but this was still the period when adepts of that discipline were fighting for mainstream academic recognition. Engineers had become increasingly important as the industrialisation of the nineteenth century continued (barring the occasional move towards politicised Sutcliffist backsliding, as in France with Jules Clément’s supporters) but this did not necessarily translate into actual respect and recognition from the existing academic establishment. The western world was still completing the transition which had arguably begun in the seventeenth century, when the Royal Society was an upstart club and Newton was controversial for bringing mathematics into institutions focused on law and divinity. It was in Great Britain, after the great upheavals of the French invasion which had also brought Adrian’s parents together, where the position of engineers first began to change. With Cambridge damaged by the invasion and reconstructed on more modern lines, Oxford was allowed to remain a fading time capsule of archaic practices while the subjects Britain needed more adepts in were introduced everywhere else. Among others, engineers studied at both the New Universities and the Technical Colleges set up by the Marleburgensian RCTFI (later reconfigured and expanded on German lines as Polytechnics by the Moderate Party). However, reflecting the still very establishmentarian and Tory heart of the Marleburgensian regime, engineers and others studying new subjects were not given the same form of qualifications as those studying more established ones such as classics, divinity and law, and they also did not undertake a formal graduation ceremony. This British solution, born of short-term necessity, was not a model for the wider world due to the inevitable tensions and implied class divide it produced. It would not be overturned in Britain itself until Britain ceased to exist as a single political entity at the start of the twentieth century.

Somewhat predictably, the strongest moves toward full academic recognition for engineers did not begin in countries like Britain, France or Russia where the importance of engineering had long since been noted by governments and engineers had been palmed off with this kind of second-class, half-hearted award. Instead, it was in those countries which had been ruled by Sutcliffist regimes in the Watchful Peace era, with innovations in engineering dismissed as ‘Jacobin ideas’ and suppressed, where engineers fought hardest to be treated equally with older academic disciplines in the aftermath of the Popular Wars. The radical German state of Low Saxony was the first to grant this demand in 1845 with the creation of the degree of Doctor of Engineering (Doktor der Ingenieurwissenschaften). After the process of German unification was completed, liberal Low Saxon conceptions of university degrees generally spread to universities in the rest of Germany, although the University of Leipzig held out for a while due to being wedded to its British-style existing scheme of awarding carefully differentiated engineering qualifications. The Novamundine nations would copy the Low Saxon example even before the rest of Germany, never mind Europe. This reflected the less entrenched university traditions and practices in the New World, although this should not be exaggerated – the ENA had a university founded in 1636, Mexico and Peru both had one founded in 1551, and the UPSA had one founded in 1613.[1] However, to get back to Adrian Cooke, at the time he studied at Harvard, that institution would not award doctorates of engineering for decades, and instead he focused on pure mathematics.

Mathematics was a huge research growth area in the mid-nineteenth century and some of its practical applications were widely recognised: military science such as constructing fortifications and making artillery calculations (as Adrian’s brother Andrew would find to his cost) as well as playing a vital role in architecture and, indeed, engineering. Other topics were treated as more esoteric and pointless by the general public, such as the work of Påhlsson and Pedrosa on counter-Euclidean geometry, or the development of the Mathematics of Logic by Étienne Delfour and Otto Schlechter which would go on to revolutionise the then nascent field of ypologetics. With typical bloody-mindedness, it would be one such area in which Adrian Cooke would choose to specialise: that of statistics.

While statistics had existed in some form since ancient times, with multitudinous examples of basic estimation and averaging in the historical record, it had arguably first been used systematically in the seventeenth century when Sir William Petty and John Graunt studied the demographics of London (soon to be destroyed in the Great Fire) and created the first life expectancy table. As the notion of probability became more refined throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with new theoretical concepts being developed, these approaches became more and more useful to governments. Nonetheless the public were often suspicious, not least due to the idea of the taxman having more detailed information about their earnings and lifestyle. Statistics was also often blackened by association with its use in Jacobin France where Coulomb and Laplace had been responsible for many innovations, often used for rather brutal purposes such as Lisieux measuring how best to extract the maximum amount of labour from his political prisoners before they died of exhaustion.

It was in the ENA where the decennial Imperial Census first used statistical methods to their full, backed up by the innovative use of new graphic presentations in visualising the resulting data such as the pie chart.[2] These methods were often copied elsewhere, especially in the UPSA where the National Census Authority put its own spin on the American ideas. Whereas European countries typically used statistical methods based on the idea that one could at least theoretically map the whole country and count all the people who lived in it, the ENA and the UPSA with their still-debatable frontiers and interiors often needed to make do with better and better estimates for some areas. This necessity drove the further practical development of probability theory in the Novamund and Adrian Cooke published much of his early work on this topic, making him a name reasonably well known to both the Imperial government in Fredericksburg and especially the Confederal one in Boston.

Cooke first courted controversy in 1860 when he published his work Account of American Elections. This was the first systematic use of statistics to analyse election results, creating a science coined ‘psephology’ by Cooke’s contemporary and colleague David Masters—from the Greek psephos ‘pebble’, reflecting the ancient Athenian practice of voting by placing pebbles in urns. Political science, looking at ideology and practice in government, was an ancient idea, from Plato’s Republic to Machiavelli’s The Prince and beyond. However, the idea of examining the practice of elections itself in a systematic way was new, at least when considering a wider city or national level rather than perhaps choosing the members of a committee from a small pool. Cooke’s treatise briefly considered the variations on voting systems and electoral practices throughout all the nations known to use representation of any kind, then dealt with American practices in more detail. He noted the differences present between and even within Confederations and the partisan impact, often deliberate, of innovations—with a particularly unfavourable view of the Carolinian use of a general ticket to favour the Whigs and suppress the effect of the introduction of universal suffrage in 1837.[3]

Cooke also observed the fact that in the Imperial election of 1857, the sum of total votes cast for Liberal candidates across the Empire was greater than the number cast for the Supremacists, yet it was the latter party that had ended up with more seats. Few were especially exercised by that observation at the time, but as ypologetics made it more trivial to calculate such numbers in the immediate aftermath of an election when tempers were still running high rather than months or years afterwards, it would become more significant in years to come. The 1857 analysis was the primary reason why Cooke’s book was discussed in Fredericksburg political society, but Cooke’s own preferred focus had been his criticism of Boston City Council. Prior to 1831,[4] Boston had been governed by the elected Board of Selectmen, which had first been instituted in the 1630s. Innovations in 1831 had reformed the city’s carter and modernised its municipal government to create a council of 24 elected at-large across the city. Initially the council was formally non-partisan, before informal local political parties formed and then by the 1850s this pretense had been abandoned in favour of simply applying the national party labels to city councillors (often still called Selectmen by a populace unwilling to let go of a familiar term).[5] This was, in Cooke’s view a problem. The Liberal Party was the dominant force in Boston, as had its predecessors been. However, the electoral system of the 1850s meant that the Liberals could win almost every seat in Boston based on a plurality of as little as 30%, with too much vote splitting between disparate opposition parties: crusty old traditionalist Taftite Patriots and the fallen Orange Order, Dutch and Jutish immigrant-interest groups (later part of the Mentian Party)[6] and a relatively small number of Supremacists alarmed at the presence of those immigrants.

In 1858, the Liberals unexpectedly lost control of the New England General Court and so reform was imposed on Boston from above by a typically ramshackle ‘Supremacist-Everyone Else’ coalition before it collapsed in turn a few months later. As the General Court was also based in Boston it naturally had a vested interest in the city’s governance. The form of government imposed on Boston got rid of the general ticket and divided the city into 8 wards each electing 3 councillors, as well as creating a directly elected mayor. This reform entirely failed in its intended goal of trying to stop Liberal dominance—as Cooke addressed in his work, the Liberals still won 20 of the 24 seats (over 83%) based on just 38% of the popular vote across the city. “It matters not if a Patriot candidate came a close fourth in three wards; there are no prizes for fourth place,” to quote Cooke.

Cooke’s own proposed solution formed the nucleus of what became known worldwide as American Percentage Representation (APR). With the intention of more closely mapping the number of seats won to the percentage cast for that party, Cooke’s method first totals the number of votes cast for each party’s candidates in a ward or district. For example, take a hypothetical contest in which the three Liberal candidates received 85, 78 and 71 votes while the three Supremacists got 69, 65 and 54, the three Mentians got 31, 30 and 29 and there was one Patriot who got 25 votes. In the existing system, the Liberals would receive all three seats despite receiving only 44% of the total vote compared to the Supremacists’ 35%. Cooke’s system awards the first seat to the Liberals, then divides their vote by two (22%). Now the Supremacists’ 35% is higher so they receive the second seat and their vote is also divided by two (17.5%). For the third seat, the 22% and 17.5% is compared to the Mentians’ 17% and the Patriot’s 5%; it is found that the halved Liberals are higher than the other options, so the Liberals win the third seat as well. Who gets which seat? Cooke innovated by simply suggesting that the Liberal candidate who received the most votes should take first priority and so forth. This differs from the form of percentage representation in which the order of candidates is set beforehand and a voter simply votes for a party (usually called Fixed Priority Percentage Representation or FPPR in the English-speaking world[7]) which is today most famously used in the Russian Soviet and the Chinese Federation.

Cooke’s ideas were largely ignored at the time on the Imperial level but did spark more comment closer to home. Though Andrew Cooke might be controversial elsewhere, his unwarranted condemnation by the Fredericksburg establishment had led to him becoming something of a Persecuted Local War Hero to Bostonians. In 1865 Andrew was persuaded to stand as an independent in the mayoral contest when his old colleague and foe Roderick Whipple became the Liberal candidate (tantamount to election) thanks to his family connections alone. Adrian campaigned hard for his brother and used his statistical innovations to better determine which parts of the city to canvass and in what way. Andrew’s own charisma also connected with voters. When the votes were counted, to the surprise of many (not least himself) Andrew narrowly defeated Whipple and emerged victorious. In power, Andrew pushed for the implementation of the Cooke electoral system with support from a sympathetic General Court which had dreaded having to put up with the dilettante younger Whipple running its base city. The use of APR (not yet called that) was regarded as a huge success by many after its debut in 1867, not least because it forced candidates of the same party to compete with one another for seats rather than a weak candidate cruising to victory based on the name recognition of his running mates.

Dr Cooke continued his work on other areas of statistics, only occasionally publishing further psephological works. In particular, throughout the 1870s and 1880s he worked with the ypologetics pioneer Graham Ulysses Egham (the mentor of Joseph Higgins Remington) on the idea of whether the printed data output of a solution engine could be set up to interface directly with the kinds of paper ‘spread-sheet’ account books used in banks and corporations of the period. While the notion was somewhat ahead of its time, the work had a more immediate impact on the use of Vice calculators in banks to output much simpler calculations in a convenient manner for human manipulation. This did not especially appeal to Cooke’s more utopian vision, but he did live to see him get his way in another matter. In 1890, a few years before his death on the cusp of the Pandoric War, the General Court of New England voted to implement a modified form of Cooke’s ideas for their electoral system. Modified American Percentage Representation (MAPR) as it became known, awarded all the seats in a district or ward to one party if it was able to obtain a majority of votes there (50%+1) thus adding a bonus to favour majoritarian government. Cooke was not too happy about this, preferring a setup that avoided what he regarded as adversarial practices. He could at least content himself with the fact that Britain’s House of Knights adopted the unmodified form of APR in 1888, replacing its own much criticised county general ticket system. But it would be MAPR that the Continental Parliament itself would choose when reformers sought a way back from the disasters of the 1920s...






[1] The universities of Harvard, Mexico City, Lima and Córdoba respectively, some of which now operate under different names in OTL.

[2] The first recorded OTL pie chart is from 1801. The United States Census was similarly responsible for many innovations in data visualisation in OTL.

[3] See Part #172.

[4] 1822 in OTL.

[5] And indeed ‘Selectmen’ is still used in many New England towns in OTL.

[6] Note that one big change from TTL is there was not a huge wave of Irish Catholic immigration to Boston due to the earlier potato famine and New England remaining more hostile to Catholicism at that point. This is not to say there aren’t any people of Catholic Irish background in New England, but ‘the immigrant group’ that everyone thinks of there consists of the Dutchmen and Jutes fleeing their homelands’ rule by Belgium and Germany respectively.

[7] Party-list proportional representation (closed list) in OTL terminology."