The New Marshal Initiative came out of a friendly dinner in Washington D.C., hosted by Major General Frémont. Dr. Eustace Farnsworth was working on a program designed to help veterans of the Civil War dealing with the aftereffects of Confederate blasphemy: weeping sores, brittle glass bones, unending migraines and hallucinations. Captain Walter Ewing was pushing for a special task force to deal with rogue wizards, frustrated with the overworked US Marshals Service’s attempts at coralling them. Rabbi V. Mendel had been advocating for better support for Jews from the Federal goverment for the past four years.

Over pickerel, they commisserated about their struggles and exchanged contact information, meeting several more times in the future months. On August 14th 1866, after a long night of discussion, a chance mention by Mendel of the golem of Prague led to Farnsworth’s impetuous, consequential outburst: “I’d bet half of my patients would rather be golems than humans if it meant no pain and punching wizards”.

It would be called the New Marshal Initiative, developed in secret by Ewing and Farnsworth until they had results they could show to the Congress. Multiple attempts at creating a human-golem hybrid were made, using proprietary methods based on multiple different lineages of sorcery and divine shaping. Early attempts failed to bind the human to the clay or caused such pain to the human that it had to be reversed. Farnsworth was only able to create a viable prototype by sourcing the original instructions for golem-creation from Prague. This would lead to dissent from Mendel, who had some concerns about the idea from the start and refused to give the government of the United States free reign to create its own bonafide golems. When Ewing threatened to go over his head, Mendel wrote to The Sunday Gazette, willing to ruin all of their reputations if it meant preventing the theft of Jewish secrets.

The news spread quickly and the project and its masterminds were brought under brutal scrutiny. Some Jewish Americans thought Mendel should have stopped the initative from the get-go. Others, living in or near the South and faced with regular threat from leftover wizard clades, were enticed by the idea of any support to protect them, even if it came from a government. Among non-Jews, there was a small but vitriolic faction resenting that the government was delving into Jewish mysticism at all, but most were more concerned that the project hadn’t been officially sanctioned, public distrust about magic in government being high in the wake of the Confederacy’s wizards. All three were dragged in front of the senate to answer for their actions.

In the end, after significant protest from local synagogues and concerned letters from Jewish scholars outside the US, the initiative was allowed to go forward, with certain conditions. No marshal would be in service for more than twenty years and no marshals would be created after 1880. The government would not retain access to any documentation relating exclusively to golem creation. Mendel would be put in charge of the project and would conduct the golem side of development in secret, even obscuring the word written on their foreheads with metal plating. Farnsworth, ousted from primary development for his impudence, refocused on selecting marshal candidates, picking individuals with a high level of moral fiber, significant intelligence, and willingness to serve under the American government out of the various disabled veterans under his jurisdiction. Once human and golem became marshal, Ewing would outfit them with the most recent advancements that the US government had to offer, along with defenses specifically against wizards. Though their personal relationships with each other never recovered, Ewing, Farnsworth and Mendel would eventually succeed; the first marshal was deployed only four years after the idea was first envisioned, in 1970.

Fifty marshals were created; forty made it to active service, the others succumbing to aftereffects of becoming marshals or rejected late in the process by Mendel or Farnsworth. Each marshal was given a small staff of soldiers and researchers, a modest budget, and the goal of rooting out Confederate wizardy wherever it lay. From 1870 to 1875, the marshals resolved 40% of all crimes connected to wizardry, and assisted in an additional 35%. Despite their scandalous origins, they gained a reputation for being even-handed and noble. There’s no record of anybody successfully influencing one through bribery or blackmail or force; they showed an undue amount of compassion for non-wizards; and they would hire new assistants from any and all walks of life, if they proved they could be useful. The marshals accepted only the satisfaction of justice served; even their names would be erased for the duration of their service. For the average American, they became a symbol of safety, of things returning to a new normal after the war of brothers. For politicians, they became a symbol of solidarity and cooperation. When the League of Nations was founded in 1915, President Wilson would take a statue of a marshal to the headquarters in France.

Among Jewish communities across the world, their reputation would continue to be mixed to this day. After the marshals proved to be effective at stopping hate crimes against American Jews, the main concern was whether the government would respect the agreement and cease all marshal operation by 1900. Despite attempts to renew or redirect the project by Congress, the New Marshal Initiative was scuttled on schedule and Mendel oversaw the removal or destruction of all sensitive data, sending what he could to trustworthy Jewish scholars. Post-1900, the main criticism of the NMI was that its success would encourage other attempts by the government to investigate, exploit and weaponize sacred information or tools. The validity of those fears wouldn’t be confirmed until 2002, when unsealed documents revealed attempts to recreate the instructions for making a golem by the organization that replaced the NMI: The Federal Bureau of Esoteric Intelligence.