The photographs are iconic of the 20th Century, as indelible as the flaming crash of the Hindenburg, and a defiant Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in the ring. The grainy black and white photos on D-Day, June 6th, 1944 show Nazi-Kicker and The Honor protecting U.S., British, and Canadian soldiers from machine gun nests; or the battle between The Union Sentinel and Winterkrieg in the middle of Utah Beach. The Invasion of Normandy also spawned two more metahumans including a British soldier who would die an hour after his trigger event.
Flash forward a little under 20 years later, on a rainy Friday in November of 1963, when another image would come to mark the era: The Union Sentinel racing to shield President John F. Kennedy in his motorcade seconds before both men fall to the assassin’s bullets.
This valiant act would trigger the beginning of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency and the launch of his social reforms that would come include urban renewal, environmental beautification, conservation, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, and perhaps more importantly for metahumans, the abolition of the National Powers Act on the eve of Vietnam War.
The National Powers Act, a reminted version of the War Powers Act, had placed metahumans under governmental control and authority since WWII. At the time, registered metahumans were required to undergo training at the War College to instill them with “proper values” and “responsible power use,” but the War College’s real purpose was to bootcamp metas and prepare them for eventual battles with Russian and Chinese metahumans in theaters of combat.
So what changed that one war would see heroes figure prominently and another would be marked by their near absence? That President Johnson choose the eve of the Vietnam War as the moment to rescind the National Powers Act was due less to flagging support for the policy and The Union Sentinel’s sacrifice, and more to do with the Schumacher Principle.
An Austrian-born Jew, Dr. Ernst Schumacher fled his birth country before Nazi occupation in 1938 and went on to pioneer the field of Meta-genetics. In developing his Schumacher Principle, he noted the sharp rise of metahumans during World War II, including the rare Able-Class heroes, and posited that conflicts and wars that featured metahumans actually became catalysts for the emergence of even more metahumans. On a sufficient scale, superpowered individuals could serve as trigger events, events normally reserved for disasters. Dr. Schumacher went on to prove that any modern war fought on foreign soil would actually benefit the local and often put-upon populace with more metas.
Suddenly, the notion of using metas in regional conflicts like South-East Asia and Africa frightened superpowers and juntas alike, for the very people being killed or subjugated were the ones likeliest to develop Able and Baker-class superhumans. The Schumacher Principle was the inadvertent catalyst behind the liberation of metahumans, but it also created the first generation of heroes who were deliberately kept out of war.
The Schumacher Principle carried the unspoken caveat that most large nations like the United States, China, and Russia would carry fewer trigger events for emerging metas because conflicts were rarely fought on their soil. And the metas who did emerge from natural disasters or massive accidents like Chernobyl and Fukishima were generally rated at Baker and Charlie-class (rumors persist of Able-Class metas who were triggered by events post WWII, but that has yet to be proven; The Honor remains the only Able-Class metahuman still accounted for). This meant that the world had a vested interest in ensuring that natural disasters and wars did not escalate, for fear they might give host nations a new type of weapon of mass destruction.
Over half-a-century later, the Schumacher Principle continues to protect many metahumans in North America and Europe from military service. Unfortunately, rumors persist, telling of genetic research to isolate the factors that trigger the Crisis-gene, to create a new breed of manufactured metahumans. Were this to happen, it might well spell the end of the freedoms and liberties enjoyed by today’s breed of superpowered individuals, freedoms earned all those decades ago when The Union Sentinel raced to save the life of an American President.