We've talked about this before, but that was a while ago and new members might like to join in. Further, we now have a few more details about magical America to give us a framework to build on.

What we know:

- America has a magical school (which is not Salem Witches' Institute).

- American wizarding society is governed by the Magical Congress of the United States of America, which is based in the Woolworth Building in New York City.

- American wizarding society is led by a President of magic, who is (probably) a female in 1926.

- America has Aurors.

- America calls Muggles "No-Maj" (plural unknown).

- Americans use wands and seem to have access to the same spells as British wizards, including legilimency.

- In 1926 there is a movement to bring about a "Second Salem" and thereby eradicate witchcraft and wizardry, presumably led by Muggles.

- In 1926 Americans are much more worried about magical exposure than British wizards are. It's not clear why.

So, what's your canon-compatible take on magical America?

 

interesting to see that there seems to be a very consistent link between the muggle and magical governments across the globe.

 

Well, at least Rowling hasn't gone all "United States: Magical Utopia".

 

I think I remember reading about a Native American influence on magic in the States, too. Of course, there's scope for that to go horribly wrong for various reasons, so wand magic being prominent is definitely a god-send.

Back on subject, anyway... It's probably not going to happen, but the "Second Salem" plotline driven by religious fanatics would be interesting. Sects like Jehovah's Witnesses were infamous for false prophecies in the same time period, give or take. Maybe we'll meet characters from a fictitious cult that are aware of magic and are compelled to spread the word/cleanse the land. Or maybe not... especially considering the likely reaction of Bible-thumpers worldwide.

EDIT: The Auror bit... Not sure how I feel about that - of course the US can have their own Anti-Dark officials, but this was a good opportunity to approach the problem in a novel way.

 

I'm really not looking forward to anything involving American Indians in Beasts. I can't see them not going entirely Dancing With Wolves on the whole thing. It's a shame, because there's a massive wealth of source material to draw on, but whenever someone says "Native American magic" in connection with the movie I cringe. Like it's a monolithic thing. Who says Lakota flute magic would be anything like, say, Navajo sand-painting magic, or Hopi kachina magic? There's no way I can see anyone involved in the film not coming up with something totally bland and trite.

Are there magical reservations, too? Magical forced boarding schools? A magical Bureau of Indian Affairs? I mean, come on.

 

Yeah, it'll probably involve the "deep spiritual connection to the land" that all Native Americans supposedly possess, and elements from a dozen groups spread across two continents randomly mish-mashed together.

 

Native wizards couldn't defend their tribes against wand-wielding agents of Secrecy. They'd have this pouch for summoning the storm and that totem to cleanse the water but they had nothing to combat the repertoire of a wand-wielding hit wizard, nor a cure for the Smallpox their muggle invaders had brought with them.

In other news, about that Woolworth building...

In August 2012, The New York Times reported that an investment group led by Alchemy Properties, a New York developer, bought the top 30 floors of the landmark on July 31.

 

Well, as far as 1920's Magic-America, I'm thinking moralists, spurned on by their success with enacting Prohibition, are now trying to root out the 'evil' of magic. Bonus points to the nomaj for tying wizards in with the growing Bolshevik movement and rising societal unease related with the Red Scare. 'Wizards are obviously behind the bombing/strikes/murders/moral bankruptcy. Without these undesirable elements, our society will return to normal.'

Obviously the highly superstitious US population has all sorts of implications for a magical society.

 

I would hope that wizards in America are just as competent with regard to their Muggle counterparts. For instance, it would be disappointing if they were struggling to hide from/effortlessly manipulate the US gov. as the Ministry was able to manipulate the PM.

I like that they seem more egalitarian than the Muggles of the time. At the same time, if the Salem thing is harmless it's probably still insulting/unsettling, and the prejudice against muggles may be worse. Not sure about muggleborns. It would run counter to what we say we're about, but it's not like that hasn't happened before.

 

I'm sorry, I can't. I cannot accept this as canon. Jo, just give up on HP already instead of trying to zombify it.

 

Part of me wonders if the magic school in America is a boarding school or not...

I can imagine students flying in on broomsticks each morning and leaving for home at 3pm.

Boarding schools seem very European to me.

 

As most of what we know of canon wizarding US is from the roaring 20's, modern America is pretty wide open for interpretation.

I'd expect some of the following:

1. Due to the nature of colonization, Purebloodism would not be as strong of a social issue as in Europe, though perhaps some families might have emigrated enmasse and maintain some belief in their superiority. Instead, wealth or land would be the great divide for culture.

2. In addition to the 1920's witch hunt, there would have been a McCarthy era movement of some kind. Anti-foreign, anti-dark arts, or some such, or perhaps just a second witch hunt.

3. As mentioned previously, Native American traditions would show up somewhere--either as an alternative/traditional practice to modern wizardry or as a superstition. I can imagine a rather epic fanfiction based upon the introduction of wandlore to tribal medicine men along the same lines of guns being sold to them.

4. I would imagine that as the US was founded as as confederation of sovereign states initially, that in addition to having a President for Magic that there would be state governments for magic with similar differences in rules and regulations between states. For example, in New York an underage wizard might be forbidden to use a wand away from school, even at home, but in neighboring New Jersey home casting is allowed so long as there aren't any No-maj present.

5. With more forested areas than the UK, the US is home to a greater number of magical beasts. Keeping the dragons, giants, and wendigo out of No-Maj areas is a much bigger problem and there's a push for wizards and witches to enter that profession.

 

Some assorted thoughts.

1. "Bloodism" is a prejudice which is more analogous to racism than classism, I think. It's completely inherited and set in stone - no behaviour can change it, not even marriage. Fanfic often tries to make bloodism more like classism, reorienting Pure-blood arguments around culture, but that's not canon. In canon it's not about Muggleborns telling wizards how society should be run or not putting effort in to learn wizarding customs. It's a simple biological thing: they have Muggle parents, therefore they are innately inferior.

The magical equivalent of classism in the British wizarding world seems to be... classism. Consider how Malfoy treats Ron for being poor. It's the only Muggle prejudice we see that really carries over to the wizarding world. Which makes sense, as it's a pretty fundamental part of the British psyche.

Given that bloodism = magical racism not magical classism, I don't think it would be reduced in the Americas. If you want magical society to reflect Muggle society in its prejudices (and the magical society tends to reflect the Muggle one: see MACUSA), then I actually imagine that blood prejudice is more prominent in the US than in Europe. What the US would lack is classism.

2. Maintaining the theme that magical society should reflect Muggle society, I feel like America would be highly tolerant of dark magic, to the point that use of dark magic is a legally protected right (the magical equivalent of the second amendment).

3. Now that we know that Muggleborns are not spontaneous but rather descendants of squibs, I don't think there's any reason to think that magical population is proportional to Muggle population - there's no mechanism to connect the two. So wizarding population numbers probably have not changed much over time. This means that the American wizarding population is likely smaller than previous estimates - maybe about the same size as Britain.

This actually makes a lot of sense: it explains how the wizarding world can just have 11 schools (global magical population is much smaller than we had thought, because it hasn't increased alongside the Muggle one), and it also explains why there isn't any "magical superpower" as far as we can see.

It has a lot of knock on effects for the US. If the US wizarding population is about the same size as Britain's, then it will be much more sparsely distributed. The US is a big place. I like the point above that there's a lot of wild magical creatures there. Further, there are a lot more Muggles for the obliviators to cover. This might explain why American Muggles have greater exposure to magic, enough to develop an anti-magic movement: American wizarding society simply doesn't have the numbers to maintain perfect secrecy over the land area or the population. The occasional bit of magic, or magical creature, leaks out.

(The alternative is that the anti-magic movement doesn't actually know that magic exists, but they are religious fanatics. Or the parents of Muggleborns.)

I think the combination of dark magic tolerance and sparsely distributed wizards makes for a compelling image which is reminiscent of the Wild West - lone, self-sufficient wizards in the wilderness, living on the frontiers. Aurors could be pretty epic here, really drawing on Western themes.

4. I imagine magical US has a similar capitalistic ideal as Muggle society, and perhaps a similar immigrant narrative.

 

If I remember correctly, the title is not President of magic. It is President of the Magical Congress of the United States of America. That seems to me to indicate a more parliamentary system of government, rather than the real world USA's presentational system.

 

Another big question that springs to mind for me is whether there'd be the same heavy immigrant influx into the US from the magical populace. The way I see it, there's a couple fun options:

1: Not much magical immigration. After all, a lot of the things that drove immigration to the US probably wouldn't apply to the wizarding world. Which presumably means that, like Taure said, the existing magical community is going to be small relative to the US's population.

It also likely means there'd be a lot more muggleborns (or is it no-majborns now? Ugh, that sounds dumb) in the US's wizarding populace. After all, if the US's waves of immigrants are exclusively Muggle, it's inevitably going to increase the number of Muggleborns. After all, even if Word of JKR says Muggleborns have magical ancestry somewhere back in the family tree, it also seems pretty clear that the vast majority of Muggleborns have completely forgotten about their magical heritage.

A heavier Muggleborn presence might also help explain the tenser muggle/wizard relationship. More Muggleborns inevitably means more Muggles knowing about magic, and the more folks who know a secret, the less secure it is. Especially in a place as big as the US.

2: Wizards are immigrating too. After all, European wizarding society seems every bit as classist and restrictive as their Muggle counterparts, maybe even worse. I could certainly see a 1920's Weasley thinking it might be better to go to the New World to try and strike it rich than stick around in England. Plus, as isolated as the wizarding world seems to be, it's hard to imagine that events as huge as the Russian Civil War or collapse the Austro-Hungarian Empire caused no impact on wizards living in those areas.

This would make the US's magical society a bit more of a melting pot. Plus, if we're reflecting 1920's trends, there'd likely be growing nativism and resentment of all these outsiders who don't fit in with the established norms. Which could again lead to less secrecy, since one would expect that different parts of the world have different ways of handling all the secrecy rules, and other issues like blood purity and muggleborns.

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On a less immigration-focused note, I'm also tempted by the idea of playing with the racial parallels of blood purity and the US's segregation policies. Maybe something like the MACUSA trying to enforce secrecy by passing anti-miscegenation laws banning magic/no-maj relationships. Would be one way to gradually choke off the supply of muggleborns, assuming squibs were accounted for.

 

Is this from Magical Beasts and Where to Find Them, Pottermore, or an interview? I'd like to see the source and hope it's not 100% definitive.

I'm rather disappointed in that revelation. In all honesty, it gives the Purebloods a very strong reason for their discrimination and completely validates their practice of not mixing blood with non-magic.

That makes your point #1 above all the more solid. I was thinking that if the immigration from the Old World was just a fraction of the wizarding population, there wouldn't be enough purebloods to sustain that kind of thinking and the need for magicals to stick together in the face of such smaller numbers would have made Muggleborns a welcome addition. But if Muggleborns only come from squib lines, that wouldn't bear out.

 

I imagine this one would be very hard to enforce given the lack of visual cues in muggle/magical appearances. And given that Modern Wizarding society doesn't have a means of detecting squib lines before they manifest it'd be even more unlikely in the 1920. It'd be expending a police force to spot check people's sex lives. Completely impractical.

What might be easier to spot with more book keeping:

However going on similar themes of eugenic that was going around in that time Wizarding society trying to develop a breeding program/policies to better bolster its numbers, which would be less force marriage and just keeping records and giving incentives to have more children. And make possible 'recommendations' to younger generations. Going against which would lead the government to assume you mingling with muggles thus a threat to society and thinning of already thin bloodlines. If you produce any squibs, the government might also make an effort to see that a reason annul marriages. SO more or less as long as you produce magical children they don't care about dalliances on the side...

 

Nah, we still don't know the how and the why of squibs.
In fact, I'm pretty sure squibs can be born from pure bloodlines as well from non-purebloods.
Muggleborns being born from squibs doesn't really change anything in the long run except validating a longstanding bit of fanon.

I mean, there's still no real reason to cling to ancient bloodlines.

 

It's not like real-world anti-miscegenation laws were especially practical. Still happened.

Granted, I doubt they'd devote much manpower to checking on people's sex lives. They'd probably just rely on gossip/informers to let them know when someone breaks the rules.

 

I headcanon the 2nd option, simply because diversity is a defining characteristic of the US and to not have that in the wizarding world would be practically unbelievable. Consequently, ethnicity plays a bigger part in a wizard's identity than their bloodline, and that's where most conflict occurs...I'm actually imagining that there are wizarding schools divided not by region but by whatever heritage magic is taught in addition to the standardized wand curriculum.