Secession and the '30s.

If '29 was a bad year, the 30's were a bad decade.  The Union was hit hard.  After president Andrew McAlister announced the creation of the UCAS on October 15th of 1930, accompanied by his new VP, Harold Frazier, the former Canadian Prime Minister, we thought things were finally looking up - so much so that the McAlister/Frazier ticket was solidly re-elected in '33.  We were wrong.


In '30, we pulled our soldiers out after the Euro Wars began.  DC was overcome with rioting for a good part of the year
In 2034, the South rose again.  They hate that expression, and the links to the old Confederacy.  Still, the Confederate American States withdrew their soldiers from Europe and announced that they were seceding.  After doing a bit of math, and looking at the secessionist navy including the bulk of the nuclear missile subs, McAlister capitulated, leading to the Treaty of Richmond.  The largest sticking point was the possible stationing of enemy troops within firing reach of the capitol and the white house, courtesy of the large cluster of bases in Northern Virginia.  The Treaty split Virginia in two, right at the Rappahannock River, and West Virginia to the west, and Accomack and Northampton counties going with it.  With a rise of confederate sympathy in North Virginia, the Treaty also granted dual citizenship to all residents of Virginia at the time of the treaty -- a one-time deal that's led to some interesting politics in NVA.  Fredericksburg became the capital of the new state.  By '36, we also managed to lose Hawaii and the US territories, and California got the bright idea to follow.  The UCAS was left with the Boswash corridor, the Great Lakes region, a sliver of Denver, and the city of Seattle, an island in the middle of unfriendly territory.
In '32, the Corps figured out a way to save the tanking economy -- they got together and bailed out the Global Financial Services bank, renaming it the Zurich Orbital Gemeinschaft bank.  This would play a role later, in '36, as the Zurich Orbital Bank decided they would only conduct transactions using the Japanese currency -- the Nuyen.  The value of the dollar tanked in comparison, and now a dollar is only worth 1/4 of a Nuyen.
In '36, the new 14th Amendment combined the Canadian Social Identification Number system with the Social Security database, creating a tracking identification number, called the SIN, for everything including births, deaths, purchases, business, credit history, and medical records.  Those with poor credit quickly lost their SIN, and a modern social caste was born -- the SINless.  People that couldn't afford the fees required for maintaining their presence in the registry.  Criminals started catching wise and deliberately becoming SINless, as it allowed for less tracking at the expense of not being able to conduct legitimate transactions -- not their primary concern.
And then there was the Night of Rage.  Some say metahumans were gathered up and butchered.  Others say a fire just happened to wipe out a ton of the metas.  One thing we know for sure -- '39 was as bloody and nasty and horrible as '29, and we in DeeCee got quite a bit of it.  A terrorist group calling themselves Alamos 20,000 blew up the Sears Tower, leading to a gaping hole in Chicago known as the Shattergraves.  Meanwhile, a metahuman-rights group called Sirrug attacked and destroyed EuroAir flight 329.  Extremists on both sides of the meta-rights debate took turns blowing up innocent people, and we got caught in the crossfire.  A bomb hit the then-under-construction Thomas Jefferson International Airport, settled just east of Centreville, setting back construction an estimated year.  What was to be the cornerstone of McAlister's legacy was left a smoldering ruin.