Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)

[KingSweden24]

"...arguably the weakest minority government in decades, under threat at any moment to be toppled by socialists and with a ticking clock as the handshake agreement with George Barnes was for only six months; it was not, exactly, a long lease on life for a government appointed specifically to solve the riddle of Ireland that had vexed every Cabinet since the Famine while also taking on the minor task of mapping out a post-Mutiny future for India, where tempers still ran hot and memories were anything but short.

After the three hideously long years of embarrassment and failure by Cecil, however, Britain was willing to give Chamberlain a chance. Joynson-Hicks was as quick as anyone to note what Austen Chamberlain's greatest problem was, however - his last name, arguably his great strength. "One struggles," he wrote in a letter to Long in early August 1917, shortly after the Clarence Crisis ended with the Liberals being returned to government at the edict of the King, "to think of any trait of Sir Austen's that suggests a talented Prime Minister other than his surname and the fact that no other man in his faction wants to govern Britain at this critical hour." History had chosen Austen Chamberlain long ago, by being born to the People's Joe; it was cruel irony that this was the moment fate had selected to thrust him into the position.

Unlike Cecil, however, who genuinely was just a product of his aristocratic lineage and family benefit, Chamberlain had acquitted himself well in Parliament and Cabinet before, and as Prime Minister was eager to step out from the shadow of his father's legacy and the heavy expectations placed upon him as a likely future Prime Minister from the moment he had entered Parliament thirty years earlier. Much like Joseph loomed over the Liberal Party for a quarter century, Austen had essentially been the designated dynastic Prime Minister-in-waiting since the stroke that felled his father in 1906, and this state of affairs had badly destabilized both the Trevelyan and Haldane governments and caused a great deal of consternation as to what kind of role, if any, Chamberlain could be given in either of their Cabinets without threatening to bring the whole thing down. This had not necessarily been a negative; Chamberlain had been canny enough to gradually persuade himself of the necessity of Home Rule after at first being a militant against it who would not have been out of place amongst the Nationals [1], and had carefully avoided taking a firm position during the internecine warfare between Asquith and Lloyd George that had torpedoed both men's careers and left his two most potentially formidable rivals for power on the outside looking in.

Chamberlain moved quickly to make clear that he could form a capable, talented and experienced government in short order. A close Haldane hand in Walter Runciman was given the crucial job of the Exchequer at a time when Britain's economy looked creakier than the rest of Europe, and the stodgy old conservative Reg McKenna was brought back to the Bank of England in tandem with him; socialist-minded Liberals like John Burns, David Lloyd George and Austen's younger brother Neville were given roles such as President of the Board of Trade, Minister of Labour or President of the Local Government Board (an excellent landing spot for Neville, a talented and transformative Lord Mayor of Birmingham). Many of these appointments were made, Joynson-Hicks would wryly note, to "stave off Barnes until the Crown can be sufficiently betrayed;" Burns and Neville Chamberlain in particular were serious departures even from the radical impulses of the 1890s. Chamberlain's other choices were more cautious, however; Asquith, now ennobled as Baron Asquith, was dispatched as Viceroy of India with the Marquess of Reading, the Cabinet's only Jew, made Colonial Secretary; the firmly conservative Sir John Simon, a close personal friend of both Cecil and Chamberlain, took over the Home Office while the Marquess of Crewe returned to 11 Downing Street for a second stint as Foreign Secretary, a role he had previously excelled at. Haldane, purely as a sinecure, was made Lord Privy Seal, while Beauchamp was tapped as Lord President of the Council, the Viscount Morley was handed the new Ministry of Education, and Charles Hobhouse was granted the position of Secretary of Defense.

It was a thoroughly diverse Cabinet comprised of all the leading lights of British liberalism, all save one - Sir Edward Grey, conspicuously not invited to return as Chief Secretary of Ireland, the role he had held in the Haldane years, and who indeed found himself outside of Cabinet looking in and eventually dispatched as Governor-General of Australia. The reasoning was that Grey was denounced, even in radical Liberal circles, for having instigated much of the chaos ahead of the Government of Ireland Act and boxing in Haldane, to the point that a great many men privately informed Chamberlain that a Cabinet with Grey in it would see them refuse to serve. However, that left Dublin Castle unattended, as it was plain that Midleton himself would be unlikely to serve under a Liberal government considering his Unionist sympathies; indeed, Midleton began making arrangements to move to a private accommodation in South Dublin upon hearing the news of Cecil's resignation. Out of respect for the gravely wounded Duke of Clarence, however, a new Lord Lieutenant could not be appointed without the incumbent's resignation, as such would have disrespected the King, which placed even more importance than usual on the role of the Chief Secretary.

Chamberlain's first thought was Sydney Buxton, a core member of the group of left-wing Liberals including Runciman, Morley and Hobhouse that had formed a clique of anti-Lloyd George but radical members of Parliament in the latter half of the Haldane years. Buxton was well into his sixties, however, and sought not a difficult role like Chief Secretary but rather a late-career capstone, and thus was made First Lord of the Admiralty despite the reservations many had about him in the role. Instead, Chamberlain looked to the bright and diplomatic Herbert Samuel, the former Home Secretary who had stood behind the protestors during the Great Unrest of 1912 and threatened to resign rather than send a naval vessel to the Mersey to put down a particularly violent episode in Liverpool. Samuel was in many ways a curious choice for the role, not least of which being that he was Jewish; indeed, even Chamberlain quipped that in dispatching Samuel to Dublin Castle, "we give our Irish brothers and sisters the gift of the first Jew to set foot on their shores." The "Loneliest Jew in Ireland," as his nickname came to be in the press, was taken unseriously at first in Dublin and was met with dismissiveness if not contempt in London, all at a hugely important moment in British history, but Samuel would in time rise to the occasion even if those like Joynson-Hicks were loathe to see it.

The arrival of this new Cabinet of old hands appeared to Joynson-Hicks as a largely recycled group of has-beens leftover from the original Chamberlain's time or partisans of the fractious post-1906 Liberal Party; other than Samuel, whose talent even Joynson-Hicks was quick to spot, he was left unimpressed by the new government. The opposition benches would have to be a comfortable landing position for him, however, as he emerged from the debacle of the Cecil years as one of the few protagonists of the National Party government to have "clean hands" of both Ireland and India. As it turned out, the Ministry of Health had been a terrific landing spot for him, well out of the path of the flames of the burning Hughligans and standing with only his reputation for administrative ability associated with his name..."

- Jix

[1] Little in-joke based on OTL there

 

[KingSweden24]

CONTENT WARNING

[Seriously, this is the ugly one]​

"...the Red Summer of 1917 encompassed a great many things. It referred to the increasingly radical labor strikes in the United States, most famously in Minnesota's great cities of Minneapolis and Duluth, where the National Guard had to be federalized and brought in to break the strikes for the first time since the 1890s. It encompassed also unemployment riots and nativist actions against immigrants, especially Chinese and Negro, across the country from the Chinatowns of California to the shanties and lean-tos of "Blackburg" encampments outside of places like Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, Missouri. It was the moment when the bottom essentially fell out from under the hapless, inept and often cruelly indifferent Root administration and put paid to the lie that once the war ended, there would be a 'return to normalcy' as men came home to the lives they had put aside to defend their country against the Dixie menace.

While "Red Summer" means all those things in the United States, it means something much more apocalyptic south of the Ohio, and the term encompassed that for those infantrymen still on rotation in occupied Dixie. The Red Summer was the red of an orgy of bloodshed, of communal violence sprawling from the hollers of Kentucky to the Florida Everglades, from the urban ruins of Richmond, Atlanta and the eastern industrial belt to the swampy hinterland shared with secessionist Texas. The Red Summer was, as March would put it in a memorandum shortly before his retirement in 1921, "the moment in which Dixie simply devoured herself," and Pershing would note that for all his considerable differences with March, it was hard to think of a more succinct summation of the time..."

- Pershing

"...not an uncommon view amongst both officers and the enlisted that the NRO and its semi-affiliated "hillboy" militias were not the Confederate Army and thus not a legitimate enemy combatant. While atrocities had occurred, especially towards the back end of the war as tempers and frustration ran high, the US Army had genuinely made an effort to limit reprisal murders or other extrajudicial killings outside of the color of law and war, and soldiers found engaging in such war crimes according to the Army Field Manual (which had been personally drafted, edited and revised multiple times by General Peyton March, now the Army Chief of Staff after the conclusion of the conflict) were court martialed fairly expeditiously considering the context of the Great American War and manpower needs, often not without controversy. [1]

With memories of the occupation of Maryland still fresh for many, there was no official policy to use scorched-earth tactics against the Confederate insurgency, but it was tacitly accepted. A common refrain that spread like wildfire through American ranks was that the Confederate Army had surrendered properly under "rules of war" and thus that the NRO and its affiliates were operating outside of those rules, and that insurgency was entirely ungentlemanly conduct. It was under this mindset that the escalation of atrocities against both captured insurgents and the civilian population of Dixie began - the war was over, and thus the fighting was not the action of noble resistance but of cruel criminals whose barbarism seemed unlimited. American soldiers were routinely ambushed and summarily executed; the Army had to (unofficially) import its own prostitutes and burlesque performers from north of the Ohio because so many GIs were being murdered in Confederate brothels. Many hillboy gangs crucified American soldiers and suspected collaborators, nailing them to fences along well-used rural roads and occasionally beheading or disemboweling them to send a further message (and, allegedly, save bullets). It cannot be said that the American occupiers were not responding to considerable provocation by a populace they regarded as having already submitted under the generally accepted terms of war at that time, and in sharp contrast to how Chileans and Mexicans had behaved during the brief occupations of territories in those countries during the course of the war.

Retribution was thus seen as necessary for survival, and many of the most infamous butchers of the war, still down south for the Red Summer, stood at its leading edge. Future US Senator Harland Sanders wrote wryly to a friend in a letter posthumously published to great controversy "one does not search the forest for brigands hiding within it - when they are captured, new brigands will use the forest again, and again. Rather, one should burn the forest down - then no brigand will ever use it, and they will be much easier to find, provided they survive the flames."..."

- A Time of Atrocity: An Accounting of Crimes Committed in the Great American War

"...efforts meant entirely to push the terms of the Mount Vernon through, including the formal abolition of chattel slavery, though Patton was entirely open to loopholes such as peonage, prison labor, and what came to be known as "sharecropping" to support the Confederate cotton economy and racial hierarchy even once slavery was, on paper, abolished. While this would in time, in practice, come to be embraced, the Confederate mindset in 1917 was not one of logic but entirely an emotive one, and had polling been an art at the time, measles or syphilis may well have scored higher than George S. Patton. Having not just begrudgingly accepted but negotiated the "Gunbarrel Amendments" with the despised Hughes and Lodge, Patton was the traitor of traitors, the Dixie Judas or Confederate Benedict Arnold, a collaborator of the first order. The complete and total collapse of federal authority across the Confederacy in 1917 was not entirely due solely to his illegitimacy to most of the country (and especially to local elites, who were typically even more emotionally married to the cause of slavery as "Dixie's pillar" than the cloistered men in Congress), but that certainly did not help.

It is hard to put in modern terms what had occurred to the Confederacy in the spring of 1917 and how the escalation that summer essentially broke its society. It was in part a civil war between not only whites and Negroes, but also an internal conflict between local hillboys, the decentralized but coordinated resistance network of Nathan Forrest, state constabularies, and what little remained of authority emanating from Charlotte, all intermixed with a brewing insurgency against the Yankee occupation. There was a reason why North Carolina emerged in the early 1920s as the Confederacy's most stable and affluent state, and that was not only because it was mostly untouched by the worst of the war but also its state government becoming essentially an extension of the Bourbon hierarchy in Charlotte that was able to keep the peace.

That the Confederacy did not collapse into a dozen republics during this time is, on its own, a minor miracle. There was no way to enforce federal authority upon Louisiana, or upon Arkansas, or even really in much of nearby Georgia. County sheriffs and constables quickly became regional warlords, arming themselves and their large extended families (or what remained of them after the war) to the teeth to defend their small insular fiefdoms, especially as it became clear that there was not going to be much of any harvest come autumn and that food imports from the United States, Russia and Canada would essentially have to sustain the country as it teetered on the edge of famine. Across much of central Alabama and the Mississippi Delta, freed slaves concentrated in "Negro colonies," armed with surplus Yankee weaponry, and cases of ethnic cleansing spiraled starting in late May as it became clear to the formerly bonded that they would have to defend their newfound liberty with blood, often murdering white families who did not flee out of fear that such brutality awaited them. Not just cows and pigs were food but horses, dogs, cats and even sparrows and rats; it was estimated that one in three Confederate women older than thirteen engaged in some form of prostitution, often just to feed themselves or their children.

It is also important to note that much of what was said to be occurring in the Confederacy during this time is often exaggerated to put the Yankee occupiers in a remarkably negative, almost cartoonishly evil light. Atrocities were widespread, yes, but entire villages were not massacred on the orders of the ur-villain John Pershing, who by this point was ensconced in Philadelphia at a desk job on the General Staff. Rape was so common as to be blase, but it was not an official policy and Yankee soldiers did not encourage roving gangs of freedmen to gangrape white women as a form of punitive damages against Dixie's honor. And while Mount Vernon did extract huge economic concessions upon the Confederacy, stories of American soldiers gleefully ripping up train tracks and tearing down factories to the point of melting down the nails keeping wood panels together so Dixie would have no use of them are so outlandish as to be absurd.

Nonetheless, this was the environment in which Patton operated, the types of rumors and innuendo swirling the smoking ruins of his country that had collapsed into un-policeable anarchy and where hundreds, sometimes thousands, were dying by the day from starvation or murder. How could he lead the Confederacy through his gauntlet, when there was barely anything left to lead...?"

- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33

"...news of the situation in Kentucky was alarming. In the space of six months, the occupied state's population had swelled to nearly three million, and efforts to curtail the passage of freedmen across the Ohio were badly failing. A race riot in Evansville, Indiana - the first of many over the next ten years - gave the administration pause, and Root ordered General Farnsworth to submit a report.

What he revealed was horrifying. Refugee camps were squalid and, without the war effort to occupy them, now centers of criminal activity. The "Free Commonwealth" had several competing nodes of power from its civilian infrastructure, often staffed by Yankee Negroes with university educations and sterling Liberal credentials, along with various "camper" figures who were quickly building substantial political machines in the camps with the omnipresent threat of mass protests or riots if they did not receive their due respect or supplies, and the military administration was woefully overwhelmed. Making matters worse were efforts to penetrate the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, the epicenter of hillboy activity in occupied Kentucky, which saw the enemy vanish into the trees and hollers of that rugged country and turned the territory into a bleeding ulcer for Farnsworth's men. Things were clearly out of control, and the best path forward was not apparent, especially as the unemployment crisis in the industrial Midwest in particular mounted.

The steady stream of refugees into Kentucky and, to a lesser extent, Tennessee, and their attempts to cross into the United States, was the genesis of discussions in Philadelphia of how to curtail their immigration to a controllable level, with a great deal of fear also of white Confederates fleeing north as potential sleepers. As the Red Summer progressed and the news of atrocities and outrages across Dixie hung over Philadelphia like a dark cloud, and it became clear that Root most certainly did not have the situation under control, the need for drastic action on the refugee crisis became apparent. The blank cheque the Liberal Party had handed abolitionism and Negro advocacy was about to meet its political limit..."

- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President

"...women's jails for those suspected of harboring hillboys or NRO operatives, both of which the Yankee military administration quickly labelled as seditionist. The conditions in the prison camps were medieval; mothers and sisters separated from their families squeezed together in tents or cramped bunks, refused shoes or anything other than a single shirt and trousers to wear, denied baths and given only two meals a day unless they confessed to their crimes and pointed Yankee soldiers in the right direction. Stories of torture and rape were common, especially in later years when the "tales of the camp" became a popular genre in Dixie, but in many ways, those arbitrarily jailed by the occupation had it better.

Suspected collaborators, or even just those who gave any comfort to the Yankees no matter how small, were made public examples of. Men had it worst, for not only were they helping the enemy materially they were compounding that sin by not volunteering to be a hillboy, but their wives and daughters were targets, too. For the first time in Confederate history, white women were lynched, though usually under over of night. Heads were left on fenceposts as a warning, bodies displayed in all manners of barbaric fashion, with signs of brutal torture including scourging and branding.

Women were, in most cases, left to essentially fend against his horror on their own. The Confederacy had sustained close to nine hundred thousand combat deaths, effectively a tenth of its white male population, heavily concentrated in a now-lost generation of young men to the point that Yankee soldiers had encountered schoolboys and, in some infamous cases, septuagenarian veterans of the War of Secession when they marched through South Carolina and Alabama in the closing weeks of the war. This meant there were no husbands, fathers and brothers coming home for a wide swath of the Confederate population, or if those men did come home, it was as broken, mangled shells of humans who were often more burden and help. With the evaporation of chattel slavery in many communities once dependent on it, and Negro freedmen fleeing their old farms if they had the means, the support of the Confederate society as it stared down the barrel of famine and demographic collapse fell upon its women and girls.

This was not just through backbreaking manual labor they had to sustain their crumbling world. The story of the University of Mississippi only surviving as an institution because the women of Kappa Delta and Chi Omega made so much money converting their houses into brothels is apocryphal and likely exaggerated to the point of urban legend, but every woman in the Confederacy who did not turn to the world's oldest profession to feed herself and her family knew one or several peers who did. Further compounding the acute, crippling economic and social depression across Dixie in 1917 were the instances of war brides, the tens of thousands of women who went north with Yankee soldiers, often in admittedly murky circumstances, a phenomenon that peaked in late 1919 and quickly diminished as the occupation headed towards is inevitable conclusion..." [2]

- A Republic of Widows and Orphans

"...food security as September came around became a major issue, and simply killing their way out of the crisis was clearly not an option. But the paths north were no longer safe, either, and even upon arrival in Kentucky, what was now the Free Commonwealth was not the promised land it had been at the start of American occupation. By the end of the Red Summer, even though the violence was still heightened, the Root administration's stance on trans-Ohio refugees had hardened, and routes into Missouri through the bitter Ozarks were instead the only way for freedmen to make it into the United States less they wanted to brave the harsh Appalachian border of West Virginia, which required trudging through the epicenter of hillboy and National Resistance territory.

The late summer of 1917 saw a hard shift amongst many freedmen, who essentially elected at that point not to brave the path out, with it abundantly clear that it was a fool's errand and entrenching themselves in their territories was the best option, as the Yazoo League determined by popular vote. The roads across Mississippi, Alabama and West Tennessee were littered with corpses both black and white, often left to rot in the hot Dixie sun and be picked over by crows and, curiously, vultures. ONE did not venture out of Kentucky, and the promise of a new life for freedmen underwritten by American power seemed ever distant, with Yankee soldiers often holding abhorrent views about the Black population that ventured perilously close to what their Confederate counterparts thought. There was nowhere safe on either side of the Ohio, it turned out, and despite auxiliary activities being encouraged by the upper brass, many freedmen found quickly that they couldn't trust Yankee infantrymen to protect them even if they were ordered to do so.

Whatever the next stage after the Red Summer looked like, Dixie's freedmen would have to write it on their own..."

- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy

[1] In other words, not WW2 on the Pacific front where teeth, skulls, ears etc were cheerfully collected as mementos to be sent back home.
[2] Congrats to whoever guessed that a big part of the 1920 election is both parties running on pulling out of Dixie

 

[KingSweden24]

"...of which the chief partisan was Maryland's John W. Smith, an affable septuagenarian Democrat who along with George Turner and a number of Westerners would in due time form the core of the "Grand Synod" of Senate elders who steered the body for close to a decade after the death of John Kern left the Democratic caucus without a singular force at its center and instead governed largely - and successfully - by committee. This enormous level of influence for Smith was nowhere to be seen in 1917, however. A former member of the "Committee of the District of Columbia" which made important governance decisions for the "Federal City," Smith had been a good-government reformer as Governor of Maryland credited with dramatically reforming the state for the better, and had brought that zeal to the capital's administration for the six months before its evacuation. As such, it was a matter of emotional importance to him to return Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency back to D.C., going so far as to sponsor a photographic expose of its remains in The Nation out of his own pocket and mentioning the matter every time he was interviewed anywhere in Philadelphia.

The institutional forces arrayed against Smith were formidable, however. Most of Washington had been leveled in 1913 or destroyed by retreating Confederates, including the Hay-era expanded White House, the baroque Smithsonian Castle, and most importantly the United States Capitol, of which only parts of the Senate chamber remained. The Washington Monument had, miraculously, survived, standing as a solemn pillar of white in the middle of all that carnage, which many took to be an almost providential sign, but beyond that, little remained. Neighborhoods were gone, Georgetown had been the site of one of the worst slaughters of civilians of the war, and the place felt haunted and tainted in person that Baltimore or York, Pennsylvania, did not.

The arguments in favor of returning the government to Washington were strong: that a federal district was a Constitutional provision, that it was named after the first President and held symbolic importance, and that the United States would not relinquish its capital in retreat due to the Confederates when they had just won the war. Indeed, on that last matter, anticipation by President Hughes, then-Secretary of State Root and incoming Secretary of State Lodge that the government would return to Washington had been a major factor in the decision to extend Maryland's borders south to the Rappahannock in the Treaty of Mount Vernon. Smith had a compelling case to make as the debate on the matter ratcheted up in the summer of 1917, and he had formidable cross-partisan allies.

What defeated the push was that many of his allies didn't feel as strongly about it as he did, and that his chief enemies were not only extremely passionate about not returning to Washington D.C. but also three of the most powerful Liberals in Congress: Philander Knox, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and thus an effective veto on any spending provisions out of the House of which he did not approve; Thomas Butler, the House Majority Leader who was always lurking as a threat to Mann's flimsy Speakership; and most importantly Boies Penrose, the Senate Majority Leader. All three of these men were Pennsylvanians, and Penrose in particular was the epitome of the Episcopalian Old Philadelphian aristocracy and the effective boss of the powerful Pennsylvania Liberal Party as well as the leader of the Liberal Party's ascendant conservative faction reinvigorated by the departure of Hughes and the hard shift to the right that Root's Cabinet represented, characterized in particular by Treasury Secretary Mellon, a Pittsburgh native personally close to Knox and a longtime political patron of all three of the Keystone State conservatives.

Further challenging Smith's dogged campaign was that most Liberals and Democrats from west of the Appalachians didn't particularly care where the capital was sited, and indeed Norris was at the head of his own push, alongside with Senators Hodges and Hitchcock, to move the capital to St. Louis or Chicago, an endeavor supported wholeheartedly by Illinois' influential senior Senator, Richard Yates. The "New Republic" ethos that had arisen in the wake of the war and was coined in Hughes' farewell address suggested that America could start anew in all manner of ways, that a return to Washington represented the old country of the 19th century that had not expanded coast to coast and that a capital in the heartland could better represent this new country.

The arguments in favor of this fell on deaf ears as the summer advanced. Mann, a Chicagoan, declared his support for a "permanent placement of the Federal District in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia" and that "the national capitol should shift from the banks of the Potomac to the banks of the Schuylkill." Had Mann come out in support of the Chicago move, it probably could have carried the day; as it was, he feared Butler more than the cared about his home city. Political inertia towards Philadelphia was starting to consolidate; the federal government was already there, after all, so what was the harm in keeping it there? Behind the scenes, Penrose cajoled and threatened Liberals into starting to form a phalanx around the position despite its relatively minor importance in the grand and immediate scheme; a decision didn't have to be made this soon after the war, did it?

The Federal District Relocation Act of 1917 was passed in late September, upon return from summer recess, with almost all Liberals in support and slightly more Democrats opposed than in favor. Norris, like many, voted largely out of distaste for the autocratic maneuvering by Penrose, Knox and Butler to secure their goal - Knox had gone so far as to publicly announce he would block all budget acts formulated in the House until the act was not just voted on but passed - and in later years acknowledged that on the merits, keeping the capital in Philadelphia was likely the right move. The Hearst years had after all kickstarted a dramatic rise in the growth of influence and sophistication in the federal government, and the war had supercharged that; the Democratic restoration of the 1920s brought with it a considerable compounding of this administrative, progressive revolution, and Philadelphia as a major city made considerably more sense logistically than a reconstructed capital with all the infrastructure from 1913-17 already placed there. It was also persuasive, Norris noted, that Washington had been chosen as capital in the first place only as a compromise between North and South in the early 19th century; the New Republic had in the war years taken as its ideological north star not Thomas Jefferson but rather Benjamin Franklin, and Philadelphia symbolically represented more of what was important to the post-GAW America than Washington did.

Still, the efforts of Penrose to bully his precious Act over the line was one of those subtle ironies of politics - a decision that was more or less correct, but done in such an unappealing and unscrupulous way as to damage its chief advocate. That Penrose was an Old Philadelphian baron tied deeply to the city's arch-Liberal establishment made the whole affair seem to have been done for the benefit of his machine, and the Roosevelt network of Journal papers went so far as to denounce the "corrupt bargain of 1917" and in an editorial penned by Roosevelt personally sarcastically asked how Liberal papers would have covered the Act had, say, Tammany Hall worked to bring the national capital to Manhattan. There was little doubt amongst a great many Democrats that the way the choice was handled helped cement public perceptions over the next year of the Root-era Liberals as shady, uncaring stooges of big business who cared little for the opinion of the public or even dissenting voices within their own party, and that the Federal District Relocation Act was one factor in the massive bloodshed Liberals faced at the polls in 1918.

What was done was done, however. The Federal District was heretofore defined by legislation as a long, skinny square kilometer (indeed, the "Square Kilometer" has become a metonym in Philadelphia for the federal government in general and the District specifically) running along the Schuylkill River just northwest of Center City, defined by boundaries at Girard Avenue on the north, Pennsylvania Avenue and 20th Street on the east, and Race Street on the south, with the river to the west hemming it in. An executive residence would be expanded upon at the Lemon Hill House where Hughes and now Root had resided (Hughes had taken up residence there in late 1914 after living in a rented townhome near Independence Hall previously), while a grand parkway lined with federal offices and buildings, including the Supreme Court chambers, would be extended from Logan Square at its bottom corner to Fairmount Hill, where a new capital building would be built over the next several years. Unsurprisingly, firms with connections to Penrose and Knox were chosen in late 1918, just before the midterm elections and to great controversy, to be responsible for much of this construction work.

Smith's odyssey to rebuild Washington as the national capital may have been dead, but his advocacy and the push itself endeared him to Marylanders and also many Democrats who had voted against "the corrupt bargain," and built a great deal of support for his backup plan after the old federal district was reworked into "Columbia County," Maryland - the National War Memorial, which established a section of the old National Mall and the site of the White House and Capitol Hill as a protected battlefield managed by the National Park Service, with tens of thousands of graves placed there in concentric circles around the Washington Monument, and the Smithsonian Castle rebuilt into the National Museum of the Great American War, a complex dedicated and expanded over the next decades to commemorate America's deadliest and most substantial peer conflict. The chief sponsor of the National War Memorial Act in the House? George Norris."

- The Gentle Knight: The Life and Ideals of George W. Norris

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the months between the 1916 election, when it became clear that Liberals would control the Senate, and Kern's death on August 17, 1917 during the Senate's summer recess while in convalescence at a small home he had bought in New Mexico at the urging of his friend, Colonel Bronson Cutting. [1] He had been in poor health since well before the election and more than a few Democrats had urged him to stand aside for new blood in the 65th Congress, but ironically enough Kern's decision to remain the Senate Minority Leader on paper while distributing influence and day-to-day power in the minority to other senior Democrats wound up being the sounder move in the long term.

Kern's death left not a gaping hole of influence at the top of the caucus but rather a committee of experienced, talented Senators who when Democrats retook the Senate just over a year later in the 1918 midterm bloodbath could work well together and established an informal program of leading by consensus; George Turner, [2] the titanic figure of Senate Democrats of this era even more so than Kern, cheekily nicknamed his leadership clique the "Grand Synod" and while the term originally just referred to him and his small coterie that essentially took over the Senate Democratic Caucus from Kern as a committee of equals, the name has since stuck through the decades to be an internal caucus nickname for any circle of powerful senior and tenured Democrats, particularly committee chairmen, who wield influence in the Senate equal to or perhaps even greater than the Majority or Minority leader (Liberals have occasionally made a corollary "Council of Elders," but it is much rarer to hear this term used within the Liberal Senate caucus or in the media).

The Synod of the late 1910s and early 1920s was a tight-knit group of Democrats primarily from the West, with Turner at the center, which included the infamous Sinophobe James D. Phelan of California, "Honest John" Shafroth of Colorado, the well-tenured Fountain Thompson of Dakota, Moses Alexander of Idaho, the famed rerformer Knute Nelson of Minnesota, Frank Newlands of Nevada and Bryan's protege in Richard Metcalfe of Nebraska. With the exception of Shafroth, all had close to a decade or more of experience in the body, most if not all were ranking members of their respective committees, and all were committed Western populists and progressives who nonetheless were wary of the mercurialism of personality politics as practiced by Hearst, Sulzer, Bryan and Kern. It was a newer generation of quieter, more dogged high priests of legislative art, and the core of this group, which would change with retirements, deaths and election results deep into the 1920s until Turner's retirement in 1924 formally disbanded the first Synod, made it their mission to press ahead with the work of the progressive movement in the twilight of their careers and saw their role as being that of depending less on personalism and charisma and more on building coalitions to enact the broadest reform agenda possible.

This stood in marked contrast to the Liberal caucus of the time. While the West was finally given their place at the head table as John E. Osborne of Wyoming [3] was formally made Senate Minority Leader (he was not a member of the Synod, though he was close to many of them personally and in his views), real power flowed up from the committees; Boies Penrose, by contrast, further concentrated control of his caucus in his own hands, especially as his sparring partner Kern was replaced by Liberal Harry New, an appointment of the new Liberal Governor James Goodrich. Drunk on seeing his foil gone, Penrose spent much of late 1917 and most of 1918 ignoring members of his caucus, most infamously Robert La Follette, and antagonizing the opposition openly in what came to be a Senate infamous for its perceived corruption and bossism. The Democrats had pivoted seamlessly from Kern's consolidated leadership to one of broad input and consensus, while the Liberal caucus looked increasingly like Penrose's plaything. With the loss of the Senate by a landslide in 1918 - in which Indiana Democrats effortlessly recaptured Kern's seat via special election thanks to Samuel Ralston - and Penrose's death in 1921, Liberals were left with exactly the gaping leadership vacuum at the top that Kern could have represented without the creative thinking of men like Turner, Shafroth and Metcalfe.

As for Kern, he was buried at home in Alto, Indiana, and commemorated as one of his state's great orators, advocates and sons, with a number of public facilities named in his honor; and Democrats would not soon forget his importance, with legislation to name one of the three Senate office buildings in Philadelphia after him, and his name often affixed to the 1924 constitutional amendment that banned child labor, the great cause of his life that he would not live to see come to fruition..." [4]

- Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31

[1] Shout out for @BattlePig101 here!
[2] This may be my personal home state bias here, but yes CdM has gone from "the John Hay Fan Fiction thread" to "Epochal President William Randolph Hearst" to "Random-historical-footnote-from-Washington-state-wank" in no time
[3] Google him, you won't regret it
[4] Obviously a bit of foreshadowing around the coming "Second Wave" in this update, where I debated how to make Kern's foreshadowed death more interesting than just a footnote and continue the previous update's efforts to explore the fractious complicated politics of the Root era from a perspective other than Root's.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...hopes for a Russian renewal had, unfortunately, not yet revealed themselves at the end of Michael's first decade on the throne, despite all his efforts or Stolypin's. While the 1920s are, rightfully, seen as a golden age of Russian economic development and modernization, the 1910s still did not see the type of transformation many businessmen inside and outside of the Empire had hoped for.

The Stolypin Reform had not made agriculture any more efficient; indeed, all it had done was irritate the traditional obschinskiy, the exact opposite of its intent. Five million persons had moved to Siberia in the previous decade, but that was far below the vision of men like Kokovtsov, who had dreamed of a Russian East that loomed in the public imagination the same way as the Wild West once had for Americans, whom St. Petersburg begrudgingly admired economically even if they were increasingly appalled by its progressivism politically, though many conservatives viewed it as a convenient "external exile" for Russia's Jews. Statistically, Russia was further less impressive; many parts of the Empire had fewer factories than there had been in 1880 and it had just under forty thousand kilometers of rail [1], a pittance for such a vast, sprawling country, which limited not only its ability to deploy the military to distant frontiers when needed but severely hampered the ability of goods both raw and agricultural to reach cities and, more importantly, ports for export. Compounding this issue was the atrocious condition on Russia's roads, which were the responsibility of local governorates and oblasts. Uneven, pockmarked with potholes and inconsistently connected, they were so bad that it was sometimes difficult to traverse them by horse and buggy, let alone automobile, leaving Russia well behind her European peers in the deployment of the most exciting new technology of the decade, the car. Similar stories existed for the atrocious Russian hospital system, especially in rural regions where country doctors practiced medicine in ways ten or twenty years out of date, and for Russian orphanages, prisons and asylums.

This all said, Michael was not incompetent, naive in some ways as he may have been, and genuine strides were made in Russia between 1908 and 1917, and not just on constitutional questions for which he is famed. The Russian school system flourished, becoming an obvious place of employment for many of those wandering off the reformed mir, and focuses on secondary and vocational education helped create a population that was primed for the boomtimes looming on the horizon, as well as dramatically improving literacy rates - particularly those for women - at a pace unseen anywhere else in the world, even Mexico which saw a similar drop in illiteracy at the same time. Russian tariffs helped engender a thriving light and, on the margins, heavy industrial base that while in many ways siloing many parts of the Russian economy off from European trade protected other parts of her economy from being overwhelmed by British, French or German finished goods, and the sectors of Russian industry that were geared towards European exports, such as the Swedish-financed oil concern Branobel, thrived.

As the 1910s started to draw towards a close and war clouds loomed on the European horizon, Russia was thus at peace and starting to take small steps towards improvement even if it was still furlongs behind her neighbors and peers, and financing for Russian industry started to slowly rise, especially from Germany, as its position as an attractive new frontier of growth and investment rather than a strange, reactionary land alien to Western European mores cemented itself amongst European financiers..." [2]

- A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia

[1] About 10k less than OTL Russia as of 1917
[2] My loose shorthand has always been that Russia is about 12-15 years behind its OTL pace economically thanks to losing the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and not getting all that sweet, sweet French money in the 1890s and British funding starting post-1907. So in other words, Russia in 1917 is somewhere around where the OTL Tsarist Russia was in around 1902-05ish. That "time gap" will start to narrow a bit in the 1920s as its economy supplies Europe during the CEW and, of course, the destruction of WWI and the RCW don't gut Russia entirely.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...that a mining and agriculture economy like Chile's would be the first to genuinely install a revolutionary proletarian socialism when the time came in late 1924 would have shocked European Marxists, but perhaps it should not have; for all the many issues that the Socialist Party of Chile faced, it had a clear charismatic and intellectual leader in Luis Emilio Recabarren, created internal space for disagreements to be aired out respectfully and settled democratically, and by the standards of left-wing parties the world over a remarkable level of cohesion and ability to avoid both mission creep and niche ideological disputes or personalist feuds that led to circular firing squads and factionalism.

By contrast, European Marxism had plenty in the offing of charismatic personalities but also a fair share of schismatic personalities, and the "Red Schisms" of 1916-17 proved to be a near-fatal blow to the cause of European socialism that would require the Central European War's turbulent aftermath to recover from, and even then republican socialism in Belgium and France would need to wait close to a decade to truly synthesize and supplant staid social democracy and progressive liberalism as counter-reactionary forces. Central to the upheavals that occurred almost uniformly across Europe during this narrow window of time - with the curious exception of France, where the left of the SFIO and the moderate social democrats of the URS were able to cooperate against the increasingly erratic monarchist regime - was the aftershocks of two of the most important events in early 20th century Europe - the Revolutions of 1912, which had been more of a social rather than political or economic revolution, and the failure of the 1915 Belgian general strike. After a brief lull in radical politics after the 1870s and 1890s waves of anarchist violence, 1912 had seen a considerably more sophisticated and popular labor movement explode across the European political spectrum, successfully winning elections (with particular triumphs in Spain) and through mass action bringing countries to a standstill, as was the case in the major strike waves that roiled Britian in the "Great Unrest." The failure of the general strike in Belgium in 1915, meanwhile, had built upon this modernizing laborist politics both by making the cause of labor rights one of pan-European interest once again, and by re-injecting syndicalism as a formal ideology back into the mainstream of the European left, synthesizing the passe anarchism of the last decades of the 19th century with the complex organization of modern labor unions and pressing past ideas such as socialist reform or communitarian "vanguardism" towards the new leading edge of revolutionary thought. [1]

Ironically, syndicalism was a thought process that had been born in anarchism but had needed to germinate overseas before being properly brought back to Europe. The International Workers of the World had staked out a position of total industrial unionism and not only survived but, for a moment, thrived; even as it was eclipsed by more conservative, traditional unionism by the time the Great American War had broken out, ideas like sectoral bargaining and the end of craft unions remained its legacy for decades to come and dramatically reshaped the landscape of American labor even as less revolutionary middle-class voices won out. Syndicalism had found its most intensive home in Mexico, where the IWW-affiliated Casa de Obrera Mundial had organized an anarcho-syndicalist paramilitary into an outright revolt at the height of the war, branding itself the Sindicato General de Mexico and announcing that all members of all unions were automatically members in this "single union" that discriminated not by industry, creed, class, gender or race. The SGM had been the direct inspiration for the Sindicat-Generale Belgique, and all "General Syndicates" to come.

What the most radical socialists in Europe found attractive about revolutionary syndicalism was that it promised one of the most alluring prospects of anarchism - the replacement of the state - without opening the door to what they by 1916-17 considered one of the most dangerous through-currents in democratic socialism, that being the potential absorption of the socialist cause by the establishment and thus the subornation of the worker to the state. To the arch-radicals of mid-1910s Europe, the French experience was Exhibit A of this phenomenon; the ultra-Catholic monarchy had instituted a robust welfare state and strong worker's protections and directly associated such ideals with nationalist patriotism and presented them as godly and noble causes, thrusts which undercut the material appeal of socialism and had, for decades, left left-wing politics in France the terrain of progressive laicistes in Paris more focused on secularism and vague ideals of republicanism than they were on the need for a revolution of the world working class.

Syndicalism thus spoke directly to this current. The State, which was in their view in the end the ultimate arbiter and purveyor of capitalist violence through its policing powers, would be abolished and replaced by "one big union" that represented all workers equally under the law, and this new form of governance was the final form of the proletarian world Marx had envisioned. The great enemy of syndicalism thus became not necessarily the bourgeoisie as a class but the concept of nationalism itself, and the self-devouring orgy of the Red Schism followed promptly as ideological opponents were denounced not as reactionaries, or revisionists, or tools of capitalism, but as nationalists. (The irony that General Syndicates identified themselves by their country of origin was certainly lost on them).

The syndicalists who could not seize power of their own parties elected to decamp from them. Alceste de Ambris, perhaps Italy's most doggedly famous figure of the hard left, announced his resignation from the PSI, in part because of the dominance of moderate "collaborationist" figures such as Filippo Turati and Giacomo Matteoti over its governing organs, and in part because he could not wrest control of the PSI's vitriolic newspaper Avanti! from the bullheaded young left-nationalist Benito Mussolini (who, nonetheless, remained close friends with Filippo Corridoni, who would come to head the Unione Sindacale Italiana, the chief syndicalist organization which de Ambris came to join). The German left, possibly the most well-organized in continental Europe, saw a smaller-scale version of such a breach, as socialists disillusioned with the "accommodative" electoralism of the SDP under Friedrich Ebert in the years since August Bebel's death began to organize into new "working groups" inside the Reichstag, led by the affable Hugo Haasse, as well as left-wing paramilitaries led by figures such as Karl Liebknecht which in time came to identify pointedly with syndicalism and anointed themselves the Generalsindikat-Deutschland in February of 1918, a mere thirteen months before the Central European War's outbreak, with Liebknecht as their chief propagandist. Similar stories played out across Europe - the MSZDP in Hungary was denounced as bourgeoise and revisionist by its secessionsit syndicalist members who, ironically, also viewed anti-Habsburg nationalists as their greatest ally against Vienna; the RSDLP in Russia, already swimming against the tide in Europe's most autocratic state, were crippled by internal disagreements between socialist, syndicalist and communitarian factions that all debated who, exactly was the vanguard of the revolution,

Possibly the most acute division, however, occurred in Sweden, where the tensions between the parliamentary Social Democratic Worker's Party and its youth league finally erupted in the party congress of June 1917 and saw party leader Hjalmar Branting, already in declining health, clubbed to death by Karl Kilbom, who quickly fled into exile in the United States for the rest of his life. The Youth League's resentments were numerous - the SDAP had shifted from revolutionary socialism to reformist social democracy under Branting even after the rejection of bills for universal suffrage and the increasingly autocratic behavior of the government since the Courtyard Speech in 1914, and the SDAP had not, as men such as Zeth Hoglund and Kilbom had demanded, triggered a general strike to prevent the Swedish-Norwegian War of 1905, at that time the most recent general war on European soil. The Socialist Youth Party - Ungdomssocialistiska Parti - may not have borne the title "general syndicate," but it was for all intents and purposes an explicitly syndicalist party, and it rejected political organizing and instead promoted armed revolutionary struggle as its outlet at a level unseen elsewhere in industrial Europe, helping condemn the diminished SDAP, and Swedish left-liberalism more generally, to minority status for decades to come under not just repression from the right-wing majority but also its own internal feuds that took half a century to heal the rage over the "Branting Affair."

Curiously, it was Spain that saw little such activity in the heady, prewar days of the late 1910s, and that was for a few reasons. Spain had been the epicenter of European anarchism since its initial evolution in the 1870s, inspired by the writings of Bukharin and carefully encouraged first my figures such as Francisco Pi y Margall and then built upon in the subsequent decades either through tacit acceptance by radicals such as Manuel Ruiz Zorilla or directly encouraged by men such as Alejandro Lerroux or Francisco Ferrer. Thus, the foundation of the PSOE had never included the genuine hard-left in Spain, which had always marched to the beat of its own drum and whose revolutionary zeal was intermixed with feuds stemming from the republican debates of the 1870s in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1868 as well as a healthy dose of Catalan nationalism.

It could thus be argued that it was in other countries that the era of the Red Schisms helped neuter socialism at the hour that perhaps Europe needed a push against rampant nationalism the most, and that the spectacular infighting and splintering of mainstream leftist parties that had achieved parliamentary acceptance only recently augured the eruption of one of the continent's most destructive wars just a few short years later..." [2][3]

- Socialism and Europe

[1] Essentially what is happening here is the OTL Bolshevik brand of communism never gets to take off, so industrial syndicalism quickly replaces it as the main line of thinking on the hard left. I realize that this has been done before in other timelines, but I think it suits CdM quite well.
[2] Of course this is a bit contradictory, as the "mainstream" European social democrats and socialists include arch-nationalists like Mussolini, but it's worth the foreshadowing
[3] This thing rambled on a bit and I'm not entirely happy with how it turned out but hopefully it sort of captures the landscape/excuses some of my decision-making long-term in Europe, particularly ahead of the war's outbreak

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Young Korea was not, always, particularly young; nobody would confuse Seo Jai-pil (known in the West by his Christian name, Philip Jaisohn) or Park Eun-sik as "young." Nonetheless, the movement was an important flashpoint in Northeast Asia in the turbulent wake left behind by Kim Hong-jip's death, if for no other reason than Jaisohn in particular was regarded with a huge amount of suspicion by Young Korea's more conservative factions, due to both his participation in the Gapsin Incident in 1884 and his lengthy time in exile until the broad amnesties of the late Gojong Era allowed him to return from self-imposed American exile.

This was perhaps unfair to Jaisohn. He was, unlike the pro-Japanese "Wonsan Faction," not a revisionist regarding the events of 1884, which he tried to explain away in his later years as Sinophobic rather than Japanophile. His commitment to Korea was to build on the improvements made by Kim Hong-jip over the long term, devising an internally stronger polity with a focus on liberty, equality, and constitutionalism, which for all the marked improvements of the Gojong era were far away and the rotating cast of ministers best known for their arbitrariness suggested that Kim's strong hand had been needed. Rather, Jaisohn was a staunch Amerophile, a point of view that aligned him increasingly with Queen Min, whom he had in his younger days tried to overthrow.

The trend in Korea, after Kim's death, was increasingly polarized between two camps of modernizers - the pan-Asianists who largely supported Japan's line, which by this point included Gojong himself even if Min remained resistant; and the "progressives" who looked to the United States and, increasingly, Republican China, and thus were often tarred as enemies of the monarchy. One of the few men who was able to thread this needle, it turned out, was Ahn Chang-ho.

Ahn, unlike Jaisohn or other Young Korea figures such as Rhee Syng-man or Kim Gu, was a republican, but so enormously popular with the Korean street that to arrest him would have triggered a huge backlash that could have destabilized the monarchy as Gojong's health faltered. Ahn had been an early immigrant to the United States and despite remarkably anti-Asian discrimination experienced in California, he had pressed ahead in his desire to develop a constitutional republic on the Korean peninsula in the fashion of the United States, with a strong Presidency and strict separation of powers. He was regarded as the peninsula's premier nationalist, a figure who was not just desirous of a strong Korea but a dominant Korea, and who eschewed the factionalism that ran through Young Korea like the Han River.

Most importantly, Ahn was vehemently anti-Japanese but also staunchly anti-French and not particularly fond of the Russians, meaning that he provided a clear outlet in terms of political support for those in Young Korea who disliked leaders subservient to Tokyo (like Jaisohn, even if he had become increasingly skeptical of Tokyo's brand of pan-Asianism), St. Petersburg (Rhee) or Paris (the royal family and, to a lesser extent, Park and Kim Gu). The events of 1917 in East Asia further spurred this; the horrific reaction of France to the May Rebellion in Indochina, and the relative success of the liberal-nationalist Kuomintang Party in China, inspired the emerging Korean middle class and literati who had attended Catholic and Methodist schools and now could read not only Hangul but often foreign languages and had developed a keen, almost zealous, belief that Korea's "hermit kingdom" status had left it in the crosshairs between multiple competing powers.

It was also thus the case that the May Rebellion, and the negative reaction to reports of spectacular French brutality across Tonkin and parts of central Annam in response to it, was another blow to French prestige in Seoul, in decline progressively since the early 1890s and falling rapidly as France increasingly had conceded that it could not maintain a protectorate over the Kingdom with Japan and Russia in agreement to exercise influence over the peninsula and box out French and, to a lesser extent, American and Chinese progressive thinking. That this Francophobic sentiment was now increasingly widespread in not just the peninsula's hinterland but increasingly in Busan shocked French sensibilities, and after Paris' paranoia about its oriental position increased after the revolt of May 1917, the rising tide of Kuomintang-inspired anti-imperialist agitation and what appeared to be explicit American support for it in Korea led to a number of miscalculations in the Orient by Paris that served to alienate Russia and Japan, and particularly persuaded the latter of French weakness rather than strength in the region..."

- Land of the Morning Calm: Korea's 20th Century

(This update is a bit word-salady since its hard to extrapolate how these various Korean independence figures of the 1910s would map to CdM (and I'll be honest, the Gapsin Coup and Imo Incident still sort of confuse me a bit), but hopefully it captures A) internal Korean dynamics with the various powers circling the peninsula like sharks and B) starts to imply that France's position in the East is deteriorating very fast)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...core conceits of Blainism, proven wrong multiple times previously but especially so in the Root era, was that the Liberals would eschew personalist patronage and instead hire "wise and sober statesmen," invariably university educated and often from wealthy families, as a form of noblesse oblige of the American variety to find smart and capable bureaucrats with which to staff the administration. One can already see in the choices of Presidents Hay and Foraker that this wasn't true, and despite his reputation for managing the war, Hughes churned through two mediocre War Secretaries, by far the most important position in the Cabinet, before finding a competent man in Stimson. By the time the 1916 elections rolled around, it wasn't even apparent that the electorate believed it anymore - but Elihu Root, possibly the most ardent disciple of the school of James G. Blaine, most certainly did, and it destroyed his Presidency.

For a man who was not President, Andrew Mellon has nonetheless retained an outsized position in the annals of American history, looming above the period of 1917-21 like a dark shadow, a specter behind every corner and decision taken during those years. His influence was not just pernicious, but avoidable; unlike Lodge or Stimson, Mellon was not friends with Root and had been placed in his Cabinet at the behest of Penrose and Knox, which to many observers - chief amongst them Hughes, whose advice to sack Mellon was ignored several times - suggested that Root either tacitly agreed with Mellon's economic program in its entirety, or that he was lazy and craven when it came to enforcing Presidential power in the Cabinet. As tensions advanced between the various protagonists of the Root administration, culminating with Stimson's resignation in February 1918 when he saw it was clear that Mellon was the ascendant figure, the President seemed almost incapable, if not unwilling, to manage their strident personalities, leaving the impression of a government that was not just a failure on policy grounds, but so inept as to be unable to even govern itself.

Mellon was, surprisingly enough, not a controversial figure upon entering Cabinet. He was a wealthy and respected Pittsburgh banker, his family's bank a major factor in financing concerns such as Carnegie (later US) Steel, [1] Alcoa, Westinghouse, Gulf Oil, and a generous benefactor to the new College of Industrial Science at the prestigious University of Pittsburgh - a college know known as Mellon College. [2] Mellon had even been a critical figure in the war effort, leading war bond drives and financing the government's war operations at generous, below-market rates of interest. He had thus ingratiated himself with Liberal movers and shakers both in the Pennsylvania machine and generally in Pennsylvania as he was perceived as being less imperious than the Wall Street bankers such as George Baker; it was also the case that he was, at first, reluctant to enter public life, for outside of banking circles he had been a highly obscure figure.

He was also perhaps one of the Liberal Party's most dogmatically conservative men, and had indeed privately opposed Hughes' potential renomination "for fear of what collectivist programs he may invent in a second term." Even a conservative figure like Root engendered some skepticism in him, what with Root's support for an income tax, and as such Mellon partly saw his role in the Root administration as serving as its "moral spine," particularly in opposition to Stimson. As demobilization plans were drafted in early 1917, for instance, Mellon pushed back at Stimson's proposal for reducing war contracts gradually over the course of six months and selling spare kit to China and Korea at market value, insisting instead that no contracts be renewed at expiry and that more men be demobilized more rapidly due to "the strain upon the Treasury." Mellon's obsession, indeed, was with balancing the national budget and reducing the government's war debts, efforts in which he was successful, but at the cost of the functional economy.

This was not to say that Mellon was entirely inflexible; Cabinet notes from as early as May of 1917 revealed his concession that the conservative dream of entirely repealing the income tax from the Revenue Act of 1910 was not just "immediately impractical, but financially irresponsible and politically suicidal" in the face of major debts, and there were enough progressive Liberal Senators opposed to a massive reduction in the tax. He also was, unsurprisingly for a figure from industrial Pittsburgh, considerably more favorable of tariffs than his average co-partisan, and advocated for a "scientific tax" using new tariffs to not only raise revenue to offset the income tax reduction and pay off war debts, but also protect American industries as they repositioned from wartime to peacetime. This "Mellon Plan," which he first outlined as early as April of 1917, intended to accomplish a number of things - it was meant to balance the budget, increase the disposable income of average Americans while protecting the viability of their industrial work, and encourage the wealthy to transfer their investments from tax-free municipal bonds to higher-yielding and taxable corporate bonds by improving industrial revenues. [3]

On paper, and according to the economic orthodoxies of the time, it was a perfectly fine, though uncreative, plan. But an economy is not on paper, and includes real people and real inputs, and from the viewpoint of modern day, the issues with it look apparent. Millions of people, primarily men, had immigrated to the United States during the 1910s, with a small increase in those figures in tandem with the Great American War itself as factories needed more bodies; as the war economy came to a sudden halt - thanks to Mellon's insistence on not staggering out contracts - factories had to close to retool, laying off hundreds of thousands in the space of weeks across the country, and by late summer, unemployment was perhaps so high that one in ten men, and over one in five working women, were without a job. The return of tens of thousands of foreigners, especially Italians, after the war years alleviated this a little, but the mounting employment crisis would only advance deep into 1918, generally regarded as the peak of the postwar depression, when as many as one in five men were without work for well over a year, many if not most of them veterans. Minneapolis thus looked to be the beginning rather than the end; mining strikes erupted in Wyoming's coalfields in November 1917, socialist railroad workers walked off the job in northern Idaho weeks later, and shipyard and longshoremen strikes rippled across the West Coast in waves from Seattle to Oakland to San Pedro deep into early 1918.

Part of Mellon's assumption in not getting instantly involved in the demand-side equation of the American economy as unemployment ballooned and class tensions spiked - most clearly evidenced in the Minneapolis general strike of June 1917 - was that factories would quickly pivot back to peacetime and that pent-up demand for "normalcy" would lead to a boom of consumer spending as relieved war veterans returned. To say that this assumption was wrong would be an understatement. War rationing had been coordinated between the Department of War and local Supply Boards, and thus was not necessarily an entirely federal endeavor. States were, individually, caught between a rock and a hard place; rationing had been seen as a point of pride and sacrifice on the home front during the war, but many veterans who returned home and their families harbored similar assumptions as their reactionary Treasury Secretary, that the world would start to return to normal once they came back. Some Supply Boards had slowly eased up on rationing as early as the March to the Sea with phased, scientific suspensions; these were typically the most successful ones, with the Denver Supply Board being viewed as having stuck the landing perhaps the best anywhere in the country. Most counties and localities, however, either simply ended rationing all at once, particularly in March and April of 1917 after Root's inauguration and the euphoria that came with the Treaty of Mount Vernon being signed, or in the opposite direction maintained their strict rationing deep into late 1917.

There was no good answer, because both warped the consumer economy that Mellon and Root were banking on to carry the Republic back to some sense of normalcy, and the spectacular unemployment crisis was thus immediately paired with a remarkable inflation crisis as well, not unlike the one gripping Brazil and Argentina but this one at the heart of the world's largest industrial economy. The swell of unemployed persons, which was coupled with a commensurate slump or freeze in wages, occurred at a time when scarce goods were available for the first time unrationed in years and thus demand spiked through the roof. Automobiles, which had been gradually rising in popularity immediately before the war despite a severe crisis in the automotive sector in 1911 that saw dozens of manufacturers shutter, were as much as eleven times as expensive as they had been in 1913, when they certainly were not cheap; certain foodstuffs cost three or four times more, and clothes were often twice as expensive, all at a time when people had less money, if they had any, than in recent memory. A particularly acute crisis emerged in housing; many workers had been housed in temporary wartime barracks at factories that were torn down shortly after the war ended, and about a third as many new homes had been constructed per annum during the period 1913-16 as had been built between 1910-12. With the swell of foreign workers and now returning veterans, which brought with it the start of the postwar "baby boom," the lack of housing was an acute crisis that forced thousands in already-cramped tenement dwellings into even worse squalor, while thousands more began living in shantytowns on the peripheries of cities, often in or near abandoned industrial lots, that quickly earned the monikers "Mellonvilles" or "Rootburgs" in mockery of the distant men in Philadelphia they pointedly blamed for their troubles.

By the autumn of 1917 it was clear that there would be no "return to normalcy," and that between the industrial strikes, ethnic riots against Negroes and European immigrants in many cities, and spiraling cycle of poverty that was exacerbated by bank failures as industrial production declined sharply, the Root administration had a bonafide crisis on its hands. But economic orthodoxy of the time dictated that the government not intervene; even in the Hearst era, coming out of the Panic of 1904, that historically progressive administration had not considered counter-cyclical stimulus of the kind that would eventually become economic consensus, rather instead proposing new bureaus and agencies to regulate economic activity to prevent such a crisis again, which they partially succeeded at in seeing to it that the events of 1910-11 were a mere recession, rather than another economic depression. Proposals to deepen the United States' debt load and deploy stimulatory spending were, even then, still relatively fringe, and Mellon was hesitant to even spend money to replenish state unemployment benefits or workers' compensation plans, which in late 1918 looked about to bankrupt several states including Michigan and New Jersey. Relief would have to come from "these matters shaking themselves out," as Mellon haughtily said it.

It is important to state that the structural issues of the 1917-19 postwar depression - a calamity which no economic shock, not even the severe early 1980s credit crisis, the late 1980s oil crisis, or the early 2000s global financial contagion have come close to matching within the United States - would have flummoxed any President and ruined their Presidency. But one has to wonder if Hughes would not have listened to his close confidant Stimson and kept the standing army larger for longer, and continued demand-side spending through government contracts, and while historians have debated what a McClellan Presidency could have looked like, a figure like Mellon did not exist within the Democratic Party. It is also important to note that much of what sank Root was a matter of publicity - he was the oldest President ever elected, and acted as if his ideas were as old as himself, and Mellon was a figure so publicly callous towards the issues effecting the American worker and veteran that he became almost a caricature of a heartless banker and capitalist, a stance that made the general perception of his conservative policies even worse.

The eruption of the Central European War in the spring of 1919 would help lift American factories out of their doldrums and substantially reduced unemployment while filling government tax coffers again to retire war bonds and other debts; this narrowing of the national debt was also what allowed the more ambitious progressive programs of the 1920s to be deployed under a fiscal regime that was much more conservative than its reputation would suggest. Said circumstances would, briefly, lead some conservative Liberals in the 1970s and 1980s to claim that Mellon was proven correct and that the postwar depression was simply a period of unavoidable "hard medicine" coming out of the war economy; but, as late as the 2008 Presidential election, Liberal candidate Roger Goodell was accused in his reelection campaign of "neo-Mellonism," proving the shadow of Mellon's unpopularity was long and enduring many decades after his death..."

- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President

[1] Much smaller trust than OTL thanks to antitrust/not absorbing Tennessee Coal and Iron, though still a major conglomerate
[2] Essentially Pitt stays private, and Carnegie Mellon University is a sub-college of it, making it an even more elite campus.
[3] I didn't find a good way to weave this into the narrative, but Mellon was also anti-Prohibition and thought teetotalers were lame, so he's probably not super gung-ho about enforcing the interstate liquor ban coming down the pike, either.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...perception of scrappy, working-class players. The 1917 baseball season was the first in which a full slate was played since 1912, and it was the first in which the prohibition on Confederate or Texan players was lifted, a prohibition which only really benefitted Shoeless Joe, who had refused to raise arms against the United States and had "twiddled his thumbs" through 1916, bitter and resentful that he was denied a chance to play ball.

The 1917 White Sox came out with a vengeance and returned the center of baseball gravity to Chicago, this time to the South Side, with Jackson returning from hiatus in dominant form. Many of the men who played for the White Sox were veterans of the war, whose thousand-yard stares at bat or in the outfield matched those of the beleaguered spectators in the stands. The White Sox dynasty - which would win, behind Jackson's dominant batting, titles in 1917, 1919, and 1920 - became almost synonymous with the depressed economy and grim social tensions of the time, and their place as one of baseball's great clubs owes just as much to their deep connection to the people of the South Side as it does to their excellent play on the field, punctuated by a defeat of hated crosstown National League rival and recent dynasts, the Cubs, 4-1 in the 1920 World Series..."

- America's Pastime: Baseball and Why We Love it

 

[KingSweden24]

"...longstanding position of influence, but would before long have to come to compete with two newcomers, all of which inspired a huge burst of public interest and, ideally for intellectual discourse, competition in the marketplace for more elevated publications geared towards debate around policy.

A major part of this was Roosevelt's frustration that he was unable to simply buy The Nation outright; Oswald Garrison Villard considered himself a nonpartisan above reproach and, despite his increasing sympathy for Democratic policies domestically (he remained until his death in 1949 a committed isolationist who even opposed the bipartisan consensus on interventionism in the "near abroad" of Latin America and the Caribbean), dismissed Roosevelt as a partisan hack who would turn The Nation away from a left-wing periodical aimed at elevating national debate into a "pompous rag" similar to his Journal family of papers. Embittered and insulted, Roosevelt decided to take on "that bastard" and in January 1918 founded American Progress, a progressive publication that was emphatically a Democratic outlet but aimed at a different type of discourse from the Nation, instead becoming a platform for Democratic politicians to reach voters through editorials introducing themselves to a national readership, and providing a forum for policy proposals to be worked through. It was American Progress that spoke to a more emergent middle class rather than working class reader base, and provided a considerably more sophisticated point of view than what was common in partisan dailies or morning papers of that time.

The third leg of the explosion of "publication progressivism" was The New Republic, which had been founded in 1914 with a donation from the Whitney family and had come about in large part to reconcile the progressive zeitgeist of the day with the liberal traditions of middle-class readers who were curious about the massive changes ongoing in the United States, but perhaps uncomfortable or unsure what they meant. The New Republic saw a burst of readership in the immediate postwar years, in part thanks to President Charles Evans Hughes describing the postwar United States as "this new republic" in his famous farewell address in Philadelphia in February of that same year. The name fit; there was a general sense with the American people that there was an America of the past, an "old republic," that had been destroyed in the national gauntlet of the Great American War, and that a new country had been forged in those fires. The publishers of the magazine certainly saw it that way, and took the belief that their publication could perhaps help explain this new paradigm to their readers and become an outlet for them to debate it, understand it, and shape it. Inevitably, this meant that the New Republic eventually became the leading publication of the progressive and moderate wing of the Liberal Party; indeed, John J. Pershing shaped his political views in guest editorials in the paper in the late 1920s, and he made his arguments in favor of his legacy Interstate Transport Act that proposed a network of modern railroads, airports and highways tying together the country as a strategic and economic necessity through the pages of the New Republic to a readership initially skeptical of government interventionism before he ever took to the radio or challenged Congress to pass the act.

The late 1910s thus saw the contest of three very different ideological segments of the second progressive wave; in The Nation, a paper that was explicitly left-wing socially and economically but perhaps naively nonpartisan; an explicitly partisan policy paper for innovative Democrats in American Progress; and New Republic, the voice of a faction of the Liberals. All three of them would elevate debate, in part in an effort to stymie each others' readership, and in that debate, all three of them would create the space for public acceptance of progressive reform as the late 1910s depression ended..."

- Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31

 

[KingSweden24]

"...identifying that "ails the Brazilian polity is not merely the despondency of defeat, but the despondency of godlessness, the despondency of a culture of greed, the horrors of the modern world imposed upon them from outside." By late 1917, Padre Cicero's sermons as he traveled the Northeast drew thousands every time he spoke, and despite the trappings of Catholicism attached to them, they felt like carnivals or Texan revivalist movements more so than staid masses. It began to be said that Padre Cicero could perform miracles - that his touch healed the blind, that men crippled along the trenches of the Parana could suddenly walk once more, that those whose lungs had been ravaged by Argentina's liberal use of chlorine gas could suddenly breathe fully again.

Padre Cicero was also an interesting, potentially dangerous new wrinkle in Brazilian society specifically because he spoke to neither right nor left. He was an opponent of socialism, a fierce one, in fact, but yet he spoke of a communitarian God, of a Catholicism that needed to "tend to its flock" and promised Church leaders that if they could not combat materialism and capitalist excesses, they would "be destroyed on the altar of the false gods of revolution as the flock finds nowhere else to turn." In his language he decried the massive latifundia, denounced the concentration of political power amongst southern oligarchs of the cafe com leite establishment, and excoriated the overwhelming arrogance of the Fonseca years. At the same time, he explicitly drew the line between political and social modernization and Brazil's defeat in the war; it was by turning from God "in heart and soul" that Brazilians had become weak enough to be held at bay by their numerically inferior enemy, which Cicero identified as having won due to carrying "the ideological cause of radicalism which they believed in as fervently as we once believed in God," while Brazil had lost, unmotivated by "a cause of nothing." In essence, the contours of Brazilian integralism were being sketched out in the poverty-stricken villages of the Northeast, one fiery sermon at a time.

Cicero's crusade was colored very much by the peculiarities of the poor, isolated corner of the country where it was occurring - his crowds were often overwhelmingly black freedmen or children of slaves, as tied to the latifundia by economic need as their parents and grandparents had been by bondage - but the years after the war were fertile ground for an explosion of introspection and, in darker moments, recriminations seeking to find some scapegoat for what was being called the Vitoria Mutilada - the "mutilated victory." There was a sense, a very broad one, that while Brazilian territory had never gone touched, and the goal of installing a friendly government in Montevideo had been met in the first weeks of the war, the war had not in fact been anything approximating a favorable strategic outcome by the time it ended. Brazil had quit the war before the United States could further sink any of its navy and in doing so swallowed a provision that demilitarized the Uruguayan coast, perpetually forbidding Brazilian warships from the River Plate, which erased many of the advantages of a Uruguayan satrapy. While the whole of Argentina's Mesopotamia was demilitarized, too, in Rio de Janeiro this was seen as a total surrender of strategic advantage, and for as much as many Argentines had wanted to press ahead with harsher terms, it was in Brazil that the provisions of Asuncion were seen as a humiliation, with them the only member of the Bloc Sud never conceded ground in the field and forced into retreat.

The political situation in Brazil was thus highly volatile, and Hermes Fonseca's scalp had not been enough to sate the "braying mobs," as Prime Minister Pessoa referred to the industrial strikers in major cities or the roving bands of demobilized veterans who had within months of the ink on the treaties being dry formed violent gangs that extorted business owners, traded in contraband in the inflationary postwar economy, and were looking for an outlet of their rage other than each other. The language of bitterness appealed to this polity, and the type of appeal to a renewal of faith typified by Cicero was not unique to him, but mirrored in similar language by the devout Luis I, who privately shared more than a few of Cicero's less bombastic beliefs about the importance of the Church as the foundation of the Brazilian state, at least in terms of promoting a sense of shared nationhood and political unity..."

- For Thine is the Glory: Brazil and Integralism

 

[KingSweden24]

"...historiography portrays the Reyes years as the stable interregnum between the Maderato and war years, and the revolving door of Prime Ministers before the epochal elections of 1928, despite the long-simmering Zapatista insurgency, the crisis of the Imperial Regency, and the economic malaise that plagued the country for most of his time in power and heightened social and class tensions already sharpened by Mexican exhaustion coming out of the Great American War. Reyismo's portrayal by present-day scholarship is in part of a broader, more pernicious trend, which traffics in a stereotype of Mexican voters as apathetic and tacitly open to semi-autocratic political parties such as Reyes' Convergencia or, later, the long-ruling and paternalist POM of Morones or the gruff conservatism of the Partido Popular that ruled the country in the first decade of the 20th century, a stereotype that accuses the excesses of political machines as meeting the approval of Mexican citizens unattached to democracy provided that they are not inconvenienced - the "soft autocracy" of establishment politics.

This insidious scholarly trend both inside of Mexico and outside of it miss the fact that 20th century Mexican politics has been defined by placidity borne of dull establishmentarian consensus, [1] but also miss out on some of the more fascinating stories within such political parties, and at the height of Reyes' political powers he had a remarkably credible rival in Pedro Lascurain - a rivalry that most history of the period has, incredibly, somehow missed. Lascurain had served in the previous cabinets, cabinets Reyes had denounced as having utterly failed Mexico, and in the crucial position of Foreign Minister, where he was, curiously then, retained by Reyes. This was for a number of reasons - Lascurain was a diplomat first and a politician second (part of the reason why he was a disastrous and short-lived Prime Minister after Reyes' death), and he was, quite genuinely, good in that role. He had worked well with his Bloc Sud counterparts during the war, and then managed to single-handedly negotiate the ceasefire and peace agreement with the United States behind the cabinet's back and lead Mexico out of the unpopular conflict, all without damaging his own personal standing.

Reyes did not like Lascurain but also did not consider him a domestic political threat. He mocked him as a "scholar" (in contrast to a number of ex-military men in the Cabinet, whom he approvingly cited as "soldiers"), and openly questioned Lascurain's awareness of economic or social issues in Mexico, implying that his Foreign Minister was elitist and disconnected from the concerns of Convergencia's political base. But Lascurain was enormously valuable on foreign concerns, where Reyes felt uncomfortable, and the 1910s was a time across the world where in Parliamentary systems, Prime Ministers were formally a first among equals, and head diplomats had a wide ability to do as they pleased and in some cases shape foreign policy decisions entirely on their own.

Lascurain was one such man, and his impact was deep and wide; indeed, Mexican foreign policy to this day retains many of his fingerprints. Lascurain was among the first men to admit that the war had been a grievous error (despite supporting it in 1913 and his reputation at that time as a dove) and thus, perhaps as a form of penance for the nearly two hundred thousand dead Mexicans his vote had condemned, threw himself most aggressively into the twin-pronged project of rebuilding Mexico's ties with her Hemispheric neighbors as well as reestablishing strong commitments in Europe.

The autumn of 1917 and early 1918 saw his "grand tour," in which Lascurain departed to Europe, the United States, and Venezuela for six months, hobnobbing with foreign dignitaries and diplomats. Lascurain was, unlike many Mexican nobles of the day, not educated in Europe or elite American universities such as Harvard or Yale, but his English and French were both excellent, and his ultra-aristocratic background and deep Catholic faith impressed many of his counterparts, who had for years privately dismissed Mexico as a browner, poorer version of the reactionary Habsburg Empire in terms of economic and social development. Lascurain maintained a strong understanding of the dynamics of European politics (indeed, he correctly and ominously predicted to German diplomats that the internal tensions erupting in Hungary in 1917 would "within two years have pulled much of Central Europe into general war") and was personally charming; the grand tour's European leg was, undoubtedly, a huge success, particularly as Emperor Ferdinand II of Austria-Hungary spoke fondly late into the night with Lascurain about his many times spent visiting his ailing uncle in Mexico and his sadness that now, as Emperor, it would be profoundly difficult for him to go on such a visit again, unaware that within a few short years he would be living out his days there.

The grand tour in Europe ended with European businesses largely committed to returning to Mexico two years after its withdrawal from the war and as its economic instability started to quiet down, at least a little; Lascurain was quick to allay concerns that any return of revolutionary Maderismo was in the offing, and despite his personal distaste for Reyes, promoted the new man in Mexico City as a talented general and statesman who had agreed to take the reins of state rather than retire on behalf of his people, and not as just some two-bit Latin caudillo, which was most certainly the impression the vast majority of European diplomacy had drawn of him. Much of Mexico's recovery in prestige internationally can be tied to Lascurain's dogged efforts over those six months and the years to come, and by late 1918, a great amount of money, particularly British money, was flowing back in to Mexico to counter American influence in investments, only for that money to be rudely interrupted by the Central European War's outbreak.

Lascurain's stopover in Philadelphia on the way home in early 1918 was much less successful, though it set the stage for a rapprochement once former Secretary of State Lindley Garrison was back as chief diplomat in January 1921. The American President Root - his counterpart at Coronado - was amiable enough and discussed over cigars with Lascurain his deeply-held desire to resurrect the Pan-American Congress, lamenting that the Great American War in part failed due to the failure of that initiative dating back to the 1880s; 1918 was the wrong moment for such a resurrection, however, with feelings still too raw on all sides, and Lascurain pointing out to Root that it had failed because it had been seen by the powers that would become the Bloc Sud as a vehicle for American hegemony, not a forum for equality and cooperation, and that after the slanted treaties of Lima, Coronado, and particularly Mount Vernon, this impression had only been strengthened. [2]

Nonetheless, Lascurain did leave Philadelphia convinced that the United States bore no animus any longer towards Mexico what with its hands full in managing a full-blown insurgency on Confederate soil, and left equally convinced that provided that a reformed Guatemalan state was amicable towards the interests of the Boston Fruit Company, that Root or any successor was open to Mexican domination of Central America north of Nicaragua provided that Philadelphia could "wet her beak." This was a misunderstanding of the American position, to be sure, but one that committed Reyes to pushing even harder after Zapata into the jungles of the Isthmus and seeking to renew the domination of Mexico over land regarded as her proper sphere of influence since early in Maximilian's reign..."

El Jefe de Jefes: Luis Napoleon Morones' Mexico

[1] If all these descriptions of 20th century Mexico are starting to remind you of places like Japan or, to a lesser extent, Malaysia, well, that's by design. More LDP, less PRI/KMT
[2] I may do a separate update on this, because it's important to the long-term trajectory on Western Hemisphere diplomacy

 

[KingSweden24]

"...advantages that a centrally-located base of power in Hue provided in combating the French also created a strategic conundrum for the rebel forces - did it make more sense to thrust north, towards Hanoi, or south, towards Saigon, from their captured port at Da Nang? It was a fateful decision on which the history of Vietnam would revolve to go for the latter, as Tran Cao Van advocated and Emperor Duy Tan eventually acceded to, overruling the advice of Cuong De to press their advantage in Tonkin, which was less sympathetic to the French than increasingly Catholic Cochinchina and which the French were less emotionally attached to than Saigon, their beloved "Paris of the Orient." Cuong De was under no illusion that in one stroke the French could be entirely driven from Indochina, but his strategy was to link up with Chau's Quang Phuc revolutionary paramilitaries in the western hills of Tonkin and then hope that Chinese paramilitaries of the Kuomintang would cross the border as mercenaries or fellow travelers, thus making a retaking of the whole of Vietnam a hugely arduous undertaking.

Tran Cao Van opposed this as he did not trust Chau, the Quang Phuc, or indeed a great many of the Tonkinese, viewing them as too favorable towards the Chinese and too republican; he was a mandarin through and through. In fairness to Van, however, his position also did have a strategic component to it - Rollet's forces were rapidly advancing up the coast towards Quang Nam Province, a particularly restive province which the rebels had just secured (and, not coincidentally, Van's place of birth), and he argued that the rebels could depend on the Quang Phuc to keep French forces in Tonkin occupied long enough for Duy Tan's army to meet Rollet in the field and either via tactical draw or defeat in the field, force a strategic retreat by the Foreign Legion back towards Saigon. There was a certain sense to it - a two-front war would be difficult enough, and Rollet was the immediate threat.

Two major events occurred in June 1917 that crippled the rebel efforts. The first was a declaration by France of a total blockade of all Indochinese ports with the exception of French military vessels or French-flagged merchants, and the entirety of the French Oriental Fleet was deployed to the waters of the South China Sea to enforce it. Smuggling vessels from China or Japan had thus only a few weeks of window to bring supplies into Vietnam; rifles, bullets and bombs would now have to stream in overland, far from where Duy Tan's forces needed them, and contrary to what the French largely believed at the time, the Germans enforced a strict effort to prevent contraband from moving over the Cambodia borders as best they could, trying to avoid setting a precedent of one European power fomenting a colonial rebellion against another.

The second was the defeat by the Indochinese forces under French command of Quang Phuc battalions at Vinh Yen on June 10, 1917, northwest of Hanoi, which saw nearly ten thousand rebels killed in the battle itself and an additional four thousand captured who were executed shortly thereafter. While both Chau and Hien escaped the slaughter north towards the Chinese frontier, a second battle days later at Son Tay saw rebels pushed further back into the hills, ending the immediate threat to Hanoi. Had Cuong De's position won the day, there could have perhaps been enough pressure on French forces in Tonkin to watch their southern flank to avoid such routs, though modern historians have laid doubt on the idea that Duy Tan's faction could have marched sufficiently close to Tonkin to be a strategic consideration for the French.

As such, it all came down then to the faceoff with Rollet, with Tonkin for the time being pacified. Rollet's army was a motley mix of Foreign Legionnaires augmented by colonial troops almost exclusively drawn from Formosa and Hainan who had little to no reason to feel loyalty to Vietnam, as well as a division of Algerian zouaves known as some of the most ferocious fighters in the French Army. Van was a wily political operator but not particularly talented at tactics, and sought to maneuver his men through the Central Highlands as much as possible to enjoy good high ground, delaying his confrontation with Rollet repeatedly while the French commander camped his men in Quang Ngai and secured the mountains, and mountain passes, immediately to its west and southwest. Van eventually cracked and elected to attack Rollet, ceding the decision to fight on ground of his choosing and pushing ahead towards the enemy.

Rollet had picked his place of battle carefully. He had arrived there from Cam Ranh aware that it was easily resupplied from Quy Nhon, and that by staying south of the Tra Kuc River he had an excellent defensive position despite the city's flat geography; the Tra Kuc was not nearly the same kind of marshy delta found at Da Nang, and during the dry season he had little to concern himself about vis a vis flooding. Mobile light artillery had been moved up into the mountains on his flank, and Rollet became the first Foreign Legionary to incorporate air support into his arsenal after reading reports on its effectiveness in the Great American War, with eight CASD two-seater strafing planes and three bomber-fighters based out of a makeshift airfield in a drained rice paddy to his south. Van's stalling had given Rollet time to prepare, and the result was a bloodbath. The Battle of Quang Ngai saw the bulk of Duy Tan's army defeated as it tried to cross the river, and while the limits of air superiority in colonial conflicts would become apparent in future European operations in places like Africa in the decades to come, in 1917 it was an almost decisive advantage over an army of Vietnamese peasants. Five thousand died, another ten thousand surrendered (and unlike commanders in the north, the famously brutal Rollet elected to throw them in prison camps rather than carry out mass executions, though considering the squalor of said camps it was perhaps a distinction without a difference), and thousands more were scattered into the hills. The May Rebellion did not end on July 1st, 1917, but it might well have.

Van was captured days later by Rollet's scouts and summarily executed as one of the chief leaders of the rebellion, essentially breaking the forces in the center of Vietnam, and Rollet steadily marched northwards towards Da Nang throughout July. Duy Tan here made one of the most difficult decisions of his life - seeing that the rebellion had, almost certainly, failed, he elected to instead call upon the Vietnamese to throw down their arms, and made arrangements to surrender to Rollet in Da Nang and with that formally end the conflict. Formally is the key word, here - Duy Tan fell on his sword in large part to give many of the rebellion's other leaders a chance to flee west, in this case into northern Cambodia and eventually to Phnom Penh or, in the case of Cuong De, to Bangkok, where he became the leader of a prominent exile community that continued to aggressively advocate the overthrow of the French.

Rollet and Sarraut together accepted Duy Tan's surrender on the deck of the aging battleship Charles Martel, a ship which would whisk him and several courtiers away immediately into exile with his father on Reunion. Not long thereafter, a cousin, Khai Dinh, was proclaimed the new Emperor of Vietnam, a choice that could not have been more obviously a unilateral decision by Paris to appoint a stooge to the throne had it been telegraphed as such in Vietnamese on every street corner. The Vietnamese intelligentsia was appalled, as were the average commoners, and Khai Dinh rapidly became among the most unpopular figures in Vietnamese history. He lived opulently in luxury financed by the French while most of his subjects lived in acute poverty and had their taxes raised repeatedly for his vanity projects; he was allegedly a homosexual, and he signed a raft of death warrants for nationalist leaders such as Chau, Tien and others that kept them in exile for years.

The May Rebellion's failures nonetheless proved ominous for the French; they had successfully put down a full-fledged colonial rebellion within the space of months, but they had done so in a fashion that left the polity embittered, and there were now sophisticated revolutionary and anti-colonial cells in Canton and Bangkok, respectively, who could organize and regroup, and a national hero in Duy Tan that Rollet had been keen enough to see would be a permanent martyr had he been killed. The battle was over, but for the cause of Vietnamese independence, the war was far from lost..."

- The French Orient

 

[KingSweden24]

Italian general election, 1917

508 seats in the Italian Parliament; 255 seats required for majority

Liberal Union (UL) 223 (-52)
Italian Socialist Party (PSI) 98 (+48)
Italian Radical Party (PRI) 66 (+4)
Constitutional Democratic Party (PDCI) 21 (-5)
Catholic Electoral Union (UEC) 61 (+31)
Italian Reformist Socialist Party (PSRI) 5 (-12)
Democratic Party (PD) 10 (-3)
Italian Republican Party (PRI) 4 (-4)
Conservative Catholics (CC) 8 (-)
Dissident Republics (-) 0 (-8)
Independent Socialists (-) 2 (-6)
Dissident Radicals (-) 3 (-10)

"...epochal first death knell of the Unione Liberale, even if it would limp on some more years until after the Central European War. The UL, as a figment of the establishment with entirely 19th-century politics and motivations meant to control Parliament and make the Italian people "malleable," had little to no genuine popular support, and it had been dependent on machinations to maintain its absolute majority. Minor parties were also walloped, but the UL shedding over a fifth of its parliamentary group and losing its absolute majority - and unable, with its numbers, to depend exclusively on one other party, such as perhaps the Constitutional Democrats, to maintain control - was the story of 1917.

This happened despite "the old man" in Giolitti resigning eight months earlier to prove to the expanded electorate that his party was more than just a personalist machine, and despite a remarkable period of strong economic growth in Italy that had seen parts of the North - especially Milan and Genoa - achieve standards of living not far off of some middle-class parts of Germany and France, contrary to the prevailing stereotypes of Italians elsewhere. The elections of 1917 were thus not a backlash over economic decline, or scandal, but simply the emergence of a more sophisticated electorate, one which was increasingly polarized into camps of socialism, radicalism, and populist Catholicism, and which the UL, even as the largest party, could not entirely control.

The elections proved to be the mortal wound for UL, but an absolute fatality for Salandra, for whom the knives were out within hours of the results becoming clear, especially the surge of the PSI and the sharp decline of more moderate and independent social democratic and progressive groups. The Patto Gentiloni was utterly dead, Giolittism was in terminal decline, and a new paradigm was needed. Boselli was still too old, Facta too obscure; it was Vittorio Orlando who emerged from the bloodletting to be appointed Prime Minister by the King, who personally dismissed Salandra two days after the election results and charged Orlando with forming a government. This stamp of approval of the King was enough to give Orlando room to work, and he quickly moved to form a coalition government with the Democrats, Reformist Socialists, and Constitutional Democrats, a grouping nonetheless with an extremely narrow and fractious majority that would likely require external support on a number of key votes.

The obvious candidate for that support would be the Catholics, with their agreeable and pragmatic leader in Sturzo, who was increasingly out of favor with the conservative curia in Rome but enormously popular with the Italian laity. It helped that Orlando had been perhaps the most Church-friendly figure in Giolitti's government and had often interacted ably with Church officials in a variety of roles, making him the perfect figure to bridge that gap. An outright alliance with the UEC was, still, a bridge too far for the classical liberals and anti-clericalists who made up the backbone of the UL and their constellation of support parties, but the results of 1917 were clear; the UL could either partner with the UEC informally to head off the surge of support for a PSI that had nearly double its representation, or it could continue to pretend that it was still the 1880s, when classical liberalism was the cutting edge of progressive politics, rather than a force for the status quo as it increasingly appeared to be..."

- In Rome's Image: Italy and the 20th Century

(I want to thank @lukedalton for his thoughts and assistance on Italian political dynamics in this time period)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...born Christmas Day 1845; with his death at the age of 71, he had ruled Greece continuously for nearly fifty-five years. Indeed, George had, just a few years earlier as he celebrated his golden jubilee in Athens, openly mused about abdicating and retiring for the pleasures and comfort on Mon Repos on Corfu, his beloved summer retreat while letting his successor remain at the royal residence at Tatoi. He had eventually been dissuaded from such a move by not only his son and heir but other sovereigns, who were as early as his deliberations on the matter in 1913 uncomfortable with the rising tide of anti-monarchism across Europe and the fears of a precedence of popular monarchs abdicating was strongly opposed by those who were considerably less well-liked by their subjects; the crisis in Monaco, followed by the Portuguese debacle involving King Carlos II, had put paid to such ideas.

As such, George died a well-regarded figure by the Greek people, who in his half-century had become Europe's dean of royalty and had helped guide Greece somewhat closer to some sense of modernity and "European-ness" rather than the unstable Balkan backwater it had been upon his accession. Nonetheless, the Greece inherited by his son Constantine I was not without its problems. The nationalist cause of the Megali Idea - the Great Idea, that of unifying all Greek people under the Hellenic flag - had never quite died even after the fizzling conclusion of the Cretan Crisis in 1903 had nearly seen Greece attacked by a resurgent Ottoman Empire, avoided only by Great Power intervention and Cretan agitator Eleftherios Venizelos backing down. [1] As much as half of the population (particularly women) were functionally or actually illiterate, an improvement from the three-fourths half a century earlier but hardly the massive gains in literacy seen elsewhere in Europe and the world, and its army was small and underpaid, even as the Hellenic Navy was buffeted by ship purchases from overseas. The country was still largely rural, highly poor, and experienced a rate of outmigration - particularly to the United States, Canada, and increasingly Argentina and Australia - on par or higher than countries like Italy, Serbia, and Poland.

Constantine thus took the throne under an enormous amount of pressure, in no small part due to his historically significant and auspicious name, to continue pressing Greece ahead into the 20th century and in the soft afterglow of his popular father's death, and public excitement over the delivery of long-delayed naval vessels starting in April of 1918, used his honeymoon period as best he could. Unlike his constitutionalist father, Constantine was fairly dismissive of the Hellenic Parliament and viewed the growing popularity of men like Venizelos; indeed, one of his first moves was to call for snap elections that his friend and ally, Prime Minister Dimitrios Gounaris, would win an even larger majority in. This suited Constantine's purposes well; Gounaris had abandoned the modernizing reformism of his mentor Theotokis, dead the January before, for a more robust, national conservative ideology that supported a strong monarchy, strong military, and strong Orthodox Church, three things he was unconvinced Venizelist liberal nationalism could deliver. Between Gounaris and the ambitious young Chief of the Army Staff, Ioannis Metaxas, Constantine had two crucial supporters in his project to realign Greek politics around the monarchy and in time a more corporatist economic policy.

This was, in and of itself, something of a foreign policy decision - the new stance by Constantine essentially abandoned Anglophile free trade in favor of protectionism and a "strong Greece," with the country by late 1918 firmly Italophile in particular while mimicking German military reforms. Ironically, the only reason that Greece would not join the Central European War was the sense that neither Germany nor Italy would commit to supporting Greek actions against the Ottomans whilst otherwise occupied with France and Austria, and thus Greek neutrality was the best position to continue strengthening the state for what Constantine and, especially Metaxas saw as an inevitable conflagration in the Balkans. The drift of the Greek government towards Rome would, in a few short years, go from subtle to overt - but not in time for Greece to be dragged in against the Iron Triangle, at least not formally..."

- Path of Darkness: Europe's Illiberal Hour

[1] The Etnarki may be a national hero to many Greeks, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that during the 1910s he was the cause of a whole host of problems in Greece that would come back to bite them decades later.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...sharp drop in international wool prices in 1917 alarmed Massey in particular, due to the importance of sheep to not just Australia generally, but his own New Zealand specifically. The tensions within the Reform-Liberal coalition were by then utterly untenable, and the "station fellas" being in charge began to badly grate at the more mercantile Liberal chieftains who depended enormously on foreign trade through the harbors of Sydney and Melbourne. The final straw was Cook's remarks at a gala hosted by the Bank of Sydney on September 12, 1917: "We cannot crucify the whole of Australia upon a cross of wool, nor stab her in the stomach with a spear made of sheep's bone." Little wonder, then, that Liberals remain an afterthought in New Zealand even today.

The hugely devout Massey was appalled, and let Cook know as much; he immediately put to the floor the Protection Act, which would raise tariffs on a number of goods to protect nascent Australian industries as the wool industry hit a deep trough and unemployment spiked. Massey assumed that Hughes would support this endeavor, and not without reason; Hughes had a protectionist streak, and indeed just over a year later would craft his own protectionist policy which would come to shape Australian economics for the next decade. As such, he scheduled for September 28 a vote on the Protection Act, crucially without privately feeling out Hughes first, though Massey would maintain even on his deathbed in 1925 that he had vague "assurances" on a vote.

Hughes had other ideas. It was of course the "rapacious bankers" whom Cook represented that he really reserved much of his ire for, but Hughes did not particularly care for Massey, either, in part because he was a Kiwi and in part because he viewed Australia's laborers and smallholder farmers as naturally partnered constituencies against the oligarchy; as such, he thought that Massey's contempt for organized labor was a betrayal of Reform's natural base in favor of huge landowners who owned the sprawling stations [1] and were responsible for the horrid labor conditions on many of them. Massey was better than Cook, perhaps, but only barely, and Hughes would never rescue a political rival for free. Consequently, he publicly demurred on his thoughts on the Protection Act; when there was no deal on the offing behind the scenes, on September 28 he voted against it, along with all but two Labor MPs and every Liberal. Reform was defeated and Massey tendered his resignation to the Governor-General immediately.

Ferguson called Hughes to Government House as he was having afternoon tea looking out over the Tasman Sea to offer him the Premiership once again, asking if he could reasonably form a government - Labor, just as it had in May 1916, still had the most MPs, though far short of a majority. Hughes accepted the offer but also advised that a dissolution of Parliament would be necessary for him to properly form a government after the fractious sixteen-month Massey ministry, and he expressed concerns further to Ferguson about what could come after an election where Labor once again fell short of a majority. A confidence vote was not a constitutional crisis, after all, but a Westminster system was not designed to have three blocs of roughly equal representation at one another's throats, and New Zealand - where Massey even to this day is revered as one of the state's greatest men - had taken grievous offense, to the point that there were some very quiet and isolated murmurs about exiting the Commonwealth to become its own Dominion, threatening Federation less than two decades in. Hughes wanted a mandate to confidently attack the political issues engulfing Australia of the day and also address the deepening economic crisis late in 1917.

He would get it. Ferguson, much as he often disagreed with Hughes and found him grating and bombastic, agreed with the Little Welshman's assessment and called for elections due in mid-November. Australia delivered Labor a landslide, picking up seventeen seats to earn 50 seats in the lower House while Reform slid back to 25 seats and the Liberals collapsed to 18, prompting Cook's immediate retirement from federal politics in embarrassment. It would be the first of three consecutive Labor majorities won by Hughes, and as such 1917 is often viewed just as crucially as 1910 for the road to Labor dominance - and this time, Hughes had done all on his own..."

- The Little Welshman: Billy Hughes and the Founding of Australia's Labor Dynasty

[1] For those unfamiliar, "station" is an Australian term for a massive farm or ranch, usually one for sheep

 

[KingSweden24]

"...poorly remembered in the United States for the disastrous economic conditions of his term and his perceived flippancy towards the struggles of the working class in this period; Root is also not particularly well liked across much of the Americas, either, viewed as one of the architects of yanquismo chauvinism over the next five decades, particularly in the Caribbean Basin and Isthmian republics.

It is ironic, then, that Root's belief in the Panamerican Congress was genuinely held, as evidenced by his contemporary correspondence and public proncouncements. "A grand congress of this hemisphere and her two continents," Root argued in an open letter published in early October 1917 in the New York Times, "well-regulated and cabined in its powers and purviews, comprised of the best men of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races in harmony, would be the chief guarantor against any such conflagration on Western soil ever repeating." The Panamerican Congress had first begun in 1881 at the behest of James Blaine, and while a failure in accomplishing its more grandiose goals of permanent intra-hemispheric cooperation, it had been generally well-received by its participants; they had continued every four years until the start of the war beginning in 1893, which was held on the sidelines of the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago, arranged by Blaine's political protege John Hay, who had in many ways been a mentor to Root. Root's attachment to the Panamerican Congress was as much personal as ideological, and it would be fair to say that well-intentioned as it may have been, his dogged belief that the Congress could have avoided the GAW had it been convened in 1913 as planned and that it would prevent future conflicts in the Americas was naive utopianism. It was also a position where he found himself unusually isolated, even within his own party.

One of his few American supporters was, perhaps unsurprisingly, his immediate predecessor as Secretary of State, Lindley Garrison, who had served the Democrat William Hearst in that role 1909 to 1913 and would return to the State Department in 1921 for a further seven years in the job. Garrison was the early 20th century's most important Democratic diplomat, an important thinker on how to synthesize the party's domestic worldview into a coherent set of principles for conducting foreign policy that did not reject Blainism but rather enhanced and progressed it rather than simply simmer in glories gone by, as it was thought Liberals were fond of. Garrison was thus of the internationalist wing of his party, opposed to an isolationist wing gaining force in the Midwest and Prairie States that was deeply skeptical of international treaties and involvement "outside the lines," as it was stated once by Senator John Eugene Osborne of Wyoming. He agreed in the value of a Panamerican Congress, having represented the United States in 1909, but even though he regarded Root a peer and friend, he found Root's staunch belief in its almost divine value misguided.

Rather, Garrison - who was himself the first champion of the American-Argentine Treaty and "special relationship" - saw a Panamerican Congress as a way to cement the new, American-led order coming out of the Great American War. Continentalism, arbitration, common international law - all these were things that the United States had always pressed for, and a single forum for disputes rather than bilateralism appealed to him. (In this mode he ironically sounds more like the Liberal Party of present day). Garrison saw the postwar settlements as a smattering of treaties that failed to chart any kind of architecture for what the postwar Americas would actually look like, drawn up to either end a war expediently (Kansas City with the Native chiefs of what would become Sequoyah, Coronado with the Mexicans) or to hash out punishment towards enemies that the United States did not like (Lima with Chile, Mount Vernon with the Confederacy). Garrison viewed a new Panamerican Congress, ideally convened every other year, as a permanent court of hemispheric arbitration and perhaps a venue for settling matters of trade (invariably in yanqui favor), navigation, and free movement of peoples; the contours of modern debates over the Free Travel Area or the proposed Common Market can be seen in this vision. This was not some grand forum for peace - it was a method of explicitly enforcing a new American hegemony that had already been formed through peaceful and commercial means.

Garrison was typically assisted in his internationalist instincts by George Turner, the most tenured Senate Democrat, its longtime chair on the Foreign Relations Committee, one of the drafters of the Treaty of Mount Vernon and the potentate of a small clique of senior Western Democrats known colloquially as the "Synod." Turner, representing the state of Washington and keenly aware of the interests of Seattle's ports, was usually a reliable ally on such measures, but by late 1917 he had begun growing increasingly skeptical of the value of the Panamerican Congress. The Americas had been cowed, in his view, and the future of the United States lay across the Pacific - in enhancing its position in Chusan (an island concession off the eastern coast of China), expanding its ties to Asian ports, and becoming the guarantor of a "belt of democracies" around the Pacific Rim that included not just South American states but also Australia, the Philippines, China, and perhaps Korea, where American business and missionary interests held great sway. Turner was not vehemently opposed to Garrison's ideas of a permanent Congress, but he was not interested enough to advocate for his friend, and without Turner, Garrison - in private life at the time, still - saw little interest across the Democratic Party as a whole for a push. It was also the case that Root's standing with Democrats had collapsed by the time 1917 turned to 1918 - the economy was in tatters, his administration had shown itself hostile to organized labor and outside ideas, and the occupation of the Confederacy was increasingly an incompetent, inept bloodbath. There was no trust that Root's vaunted "wise men" who had proven themselves anything but could deliver such a delicate diplomatic program.

Root was unhelped, too, by his own party - Lodge, his Secretary of State, indeed saw the permanent Rootian Panamerican Congress as insufficiently hegemonic, as a way in which the "conquered can now dispute the conqueror." While this kind of language was unusually extreme, most Liberals were extremely reluctant to extend olive branches, especially to smaller Latin states. Relations with strong and important Mexico were improving, Brazil was held in check by the alliance with Argentina, and wartime allies Peru and Bolivia looked increasingly unreliable, while all others were "minnows," as Lodge put it, or politically dominated by European states, such as Colombia's relationship with France or Venezuela and Costa Rica with Germany. The appetite for actually trying to chart out a postwar "order" was not there - the order already existed de facto to most of Philadelphia, and it was the order of American businesses now unhindered across the hemisphere by protectionist or nationalist governments, supported by American guns whether in the hands of a Marine or the decks of a battlecruiser.

The push of 1917-18 to create a league or permanent congress for the Americas was thus a dismal failure before it even passed an idea charted out in Philadelphia drawing rooms; and, to be sure, it would likely have run aground against strong opposition around the Hemisphere, where sufficient governments still regarded the idea as very clearly a vehicle for further American hegemonic domination of her smaller "sisters and cousins," as the popular parlance at the time was. A Panamerican Congress would be held, poorly attended, in 1921, a far cry from Root's vision; the permanent annual sitting of the Panamerican Congress would not come about until decades later. Root, one of the most famous foreign policy minds of his generation, saw the chief diplomatic endeavor of his Presidency fizzle and die with a whimper; it was, perhaps, emblematic of his unloved Presidency as a whole, and a failure despite best intentions that augured ominously the clientelism that would come to define pan-American relations for the next fifty years..."

- The Firm Hand of Freedom: Soft Imperialism by the United States in Latin America 1917-69

 

[KingSweden24]

"...of considerable ambition and scope. Chief Secretary Samuel had arrived at Dublin Castle brimming with ambition and an eagerness to pursue what was rapidly emerging as the chief priority of the Chamberlain government - the Irish Convention. He was assisted greatly by Midleton's advice and extensive notes on Ireland's various players and personalities to better help him understand the hornet's nest he was wandering into, and Samuel was so impressed that he asked Midleton to stay on for the Convention as a sort of unofficial ambassador of the British Liberals to Southern Unionists, generally regarded as the key piece to solving the puzzle. Midleton agreed, reluctantly, and in the end was glad he did, dismissing Samuel as in over his head, overly sympathetic to Irish nationalists, and dismissing Protestant concerns [1] based on his own stereotypes of Ulstermen.

Due to security concerns in Belfast, the Irish Convention was decided to be held entirely in Dublin, mediated by the Lord Lieutenant in absentia, passing thus the role of interloper on to Samuel. The Convention's first five sittings were held in the Four Courts, and later on moved to Dublin Castle itself. It was a motley group of representatives, with the nationalists dominated by Redmond, Devlin and O'Brien (Dillon's absence was curious and later critical), while Carson and Craig boycotted the proceedings entirely, leaving the representation of Ulster to the Lord Londonderry, Sir Hugh Pollock, Sir Alexander McDowell and the Reverend John Irvin. Southern Unionists were on the contrary well-represented in their views, with Midleton and Lord MacDonnell, as well as the Church of Ireland's Archbishop of Dublin John Bernard speaking on their behalf - as Redmond would put it, "Ulster sent their seconds, Leinster her eminences." In time, this too would become a critical issue, as though Londonderry was a fair and honest broker on behalf of Ulster Orangeman though he was, the populist leaders of the Ulster resistance sat not at the table of their own volition, and men like Craig would for decades claim that Ulster had been betrayed at the Irish Convention. [2]

Samuel, in his copious notes, wrote that several things quickly became apparent to him. The first was that Ulster's intransigence was perhaps not as firm as he had initially thought, and he observed that, "Having sat in Westminster and heard tale of this reactionary apes from Belfast, I instead saw for the first time a traditional but instinctively liberal people firm in their belief that a United Ireland would force them into Catholicism that they believed they had rejected in the Enlightenment." If the question of schooling in Ireland could be solved, he thought, then a huge obstacle could perhaps be lifted. It was here that Samuel also began to notice that the Catholic bishops of Ireland - a group to whom he, as a staunch British Liberal and a Jew to boot, was wholly unsympathetic towards - were displaying a level of stubbornness he had not expected, and that Devlin in particular seemed utterly in thrall to them, refusing to take any position which disaligned him from the Catholic hierarchy. [3]

The three dominant figures of the Convention, however, came to be Redmond for the nationalists in the swan song of his life, Midleton for the moderate Southern Unionists, and McDowell for Ulster, quickly replacing Londonderry as the chief potentate of that delegation as he rapidly established himself as a man Redmond could trust but who also got on well with the Ulster Council. Redmond was deeply skeptical of a carveout for Ulster specifically but was generally open to using the local boards as the architecture for provincial and county autonomy, which McDowell surprised him by largely adhering to. [4] This was about as far as structural agreement early in the Convention went; Redmond advocated a unicameral Irish Assembly with full powers of governance, essentially making Ireland a Dominion, while both McDowell and even Midleton preferred reserving customs, excise and defense in the hands of Parliament, and wanted a bicameral body - ideally with an Irish House of Lords, to protect the interests of the Ascendancy, but a Senate based on Ireland's counties would do fine - as a check on what they anticipated would be a lower house dominated by the nationalists, especially as Midleton could sense that Redmond's health was fragile and that "within years, it shall be Devlin we treat with."

Indeed, as autumn advanced, Redmond's declining physical stamina was apparent for all to see, even as he remained mentally astute as ever and spoke with a vigor his body did not share whenever he addressed the Convention. For Midleton and, a lesser extent, McDowell and Londonderry, the moment was critical - they needed a deal with Redmond and O'Brien while there was a deal to be had, otherwise there may never be another chance to get a favorable settlement for Ulster. It was increasingly apparent that for whatever Samuel had learned of the Catholic hierarchy's foot-dragging and that Ulstermen could be bargained with, in their view he had been sent to Dublin to "free Ireland from British shackles," as Londonderry but it derisively, and he would not waver from that task.

This was a misreading of Samuel's intentions - and even decades later, now, Herbert Samuel is held in contempt in much of Ulster for allegedly putting his "thumb on the scale" in favor of Irish nationalists - but there was nonetheless some truth to the idea that there was enormous pressure from London via the Chief Secretary to "knock heads together" and find "a Constitution on the quick." Chamberlain had by October of 1917 settled on late January as the date to drop the writ for all of the United Kingdom and he had no illusions about George Barnes or Hugh Cecil allowing him to pass that date by very long. Chamberlain was in most important ways very much not his father, but he had observed from Joseph's time as Prime Minister the importance of an electoral theme; 1894 had been waged as the "People vs. the Peers," and 1903 had been the Tariff Election (one which did not go quite as well for Chamberlain pere). Accordingly, Chamberlain was eager if not desperate to make a poll in late January or early February a referendum on the settlement to emerge from the Irish Convention; a Liberal majority coming out of such a poll would be essential to passing an Irish settlement through the Commons, where one had to hope that the Liberal peers in the Lords and enough Tories, under pressure from an irate King George V, would acquiesce to it..."

- Ireland Unfree

[1] This is an Irish nationalist book, not a Catholic book
[2] To which I would say "Yeah, but you could have, you know, gone to the Convention that would settle the matter."
[3] This was indeed the biggest sticking point of the OTL Irish Convention - Ulster wanted a guarantee of non-clerical control of schools, the Irish Catholic hierarchy refused, and an effort to find a settlement on provincial autonomy and internal fiscal compromises flamed out over disagreements between Belfast and Dublin quickly thereafter. Its interesting reading about the Convention, though, just how close Redmond and Midleton were to cutting a deal.
[4] A carveout for Ulster was one of the major sticking points iOTL - here, without an Easter Rising to badly poison the well across Ireland, and more local authority from the first Chamberlain years, this is perhaps not as live of an issue.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the backlash against immigration into the United States had been brewing for years, arrested briefly by the war, but finally burst free in the postwar depression (sometimes called the "Root Recession" for the alliterative messaging the administration's opponents could use to firmly place blame where it belonged, on the economic policies of President Root - but it was indeed a depression). What set the explosion of nativism in the postwar years apart from what preceded it, however, was how broad these sentiments were, the way they cut across partisan lines and extended to all manner of ethnic and religious groups, and how they were successful in coalescing into the Immigration Act of 1918, which placed the first country-of-origin restrictions and limitations into American immigration policy, limitations that would persist in some form (though with revisions and relaxations) for decades.

Immigration to the United States, as this book has argued in previous chapters, is inexorably linked with American identity, but so is nativism - every generation of Americans have found a new group that arrives that is thought to somehow threaten the extant native-borns' physical or economic security, often phrased in racial of cultural terms. Prominently, the first wave of such persons were the Irish who arrived in the great migrations after the Famine of the 1840s; the discrimination suffered by these Irishmen was fundamental to fostering an Irish community that, in time, would come to form a bedrock of the Democratic Party, particularly in New York, Chicago, and increasingly in Liberal strongholds like Boston or Philadelphia. Ironically, it was then the Irish in California who were the first adamant opponents of Chinese and, later, Korean and Japanese immigration to the West Coast, and back East, before long the Italians, the Poles, Serbs, Greeks, and Jews were the new scapegoats looked down upon as a great wave of new arrivals began to build steam in the early 1890s and crested right as the Great American War broke out. The end of the war also saw a massive refugee wave of freedmen from the Confederacy beginning in 1915; between that year and 1920, as many as one and a half million Negro men, women and children are thought to have fled across the Ohio, more than doubling the Negro population of the United States in the space of a few years, and over a million more concentrated themselves in western and central Kentucky, under American military administration.

American soldiers thus returned from the battlefield, having been rotated in and out of combat for two or three long years depending on their cohort, to often find their cities irrevocably changed. In the words of one famous anonymous soldier publishing an essay in the New York World, neighborhoods once "lily white with an Episcopalian Church at its center" were now "crawling" with Italians and Greeks, "stinking of the incense of their rituals." One "hears not a lick of English on the streets," and "these new townships, invariably overwhelmingly male, are inevitably dens of vice, drinking, gambling and lust for American women, who have had to defend their honor for years alone as their cities were overrun." These were certainly not uncommon sentiments.

The massive labor strikes of the Red Summer of 1917, which continued at a smaller scale well into autumn, further terrified the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, which suddenly saw its position at the top of the American social hierarchy irrevocably threatened. Even as tens of thousands of temporary laborers from the war years took their earnings from shuttered factories and went home - especially prevalent amongst Italians and French-Canadians - it seemed that a tipping point was close to being reached. The labor movement in 1917 was dependent on immigrants, and thus immigration quickly came for conservatives to be synonymous with political radicalism, with the end of Protestant majorities suddenly being equated to the abolition of the English language and mass nationalizations of American industries under socialist administration.

This was not a commonly held view, to be clear, but that this fringe paranoia was mainstreamed spoke to the upheavals of the time, and it was against this backdrop that the American Defense League, or ADL, was founded in October 1917 in Indianapolis. The most prominent anti-immigration organization previously had been the Immigration Restriction League, chaired and encouraged by none other than Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful Massachusetts Senator who was now the Secretary of State. The issue for the IRL had been that it was too fundamentally a project of upper-class WASPism; Lodge was a "Brahmin's Brahmin," referring to the Boston aristocracy from which he hailed, too wealthy and obsessed with his Mayflower heritage to ever press his project to a wider audience. Attempts to form an American subchapter to the powerful, well-organized and fiercely anti-Catholic Orange Order of Canada had always struggled due to the Order's association with the British Crown and specific fixations, but the ADL came close. The American Defense League viewed its mission as broader than simply attacking immigration - it was also intended to be an organization that would defend American interests at home against labor radicalism, against political corruption, and against "public vice," strongly supporting the banning of alcohol entirely rather than simply its sale across state lines as bills before Congress proposed [1], opposing the women's vote, and generally acting as a reactionary bulwark for middle and working class voters alarmed by rapidly changing cultural mores.

It was also hard to separate the ADL's activities from the place of its founding, Indianapolis. It was the city with the proportionately largest Negro population in the United States, narrowly ahead of Cincinnati (though numerically smaller), in a state which unlike other parts of the Midwest had been largely populated and settled by smallholder farmers from the pre-1861 American South, particularly Kentuckians and Tennesseans, and which had in the late 19th century attracted huge numbers of so-called "Southern Tories" who had opposed secession and migrated from the Appalachian hill country of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northern Alabama. These "Tories" had settled in large numbers in the Ohio Valley and its hinterland; they had been the men and women who had powered the mills, factories and depots of places like Columbus, Vincennes, Terre Haute, Lafayette, Kokomo, and Muncie, and formed the bedrock of Indianapolis' commercial and professional classes now in later generations. They had brought with them from the Appalachian Uplands a distinctive suspicion of outsiders, a set of racial views that were considerably harsher than even the prevailing attitudes of most Americans at the time, and though they had little affinity for the Confederacy as a whole, they had powered a certain populist cultural conservatism that was unique to Indiana and set it largely apart from most else of the Midwest save for swaths of western and southwestern Ohio, parts of southern Illinois, and southern Missouri.

Indiana was also, along with Ohio, the epicenter of the freedmen refugee crisis, with places like Evansville in 1917 representing large encampments of those who had been approved by the Army's rigorous strictures to cross the river. Indianapolis was thus set hard on edge, and a massive race riot engulfed the city's south side, home to not only a large Negro population but also its Italian community, on November 17, 1917, spurred on by the ADL and seeing six people left dead and dozens of encampments, businesses, and homes destroyed.

Within weeks of the ADL's revelation as an organization and its coordinated attacks on racial, ethnic and religious minorities - one of Indianapolis' oldest synagogues was destroyed just prior to the Christmas holiday - new chapters were springing up around the country, and very pointedly the Chinese Exclusion League of California, with the support of its patron Senator Phelan, voted to invite San Francisco's ADL chapter to join them as an observer. The nativist impulses in California were now finding new allies, and a sophisticated web of restrictionist organizations spread out across the country..." [2]

- The Yellow Peril

[1] More to come
[2] The ADL and its other ugly ilk will become more important in the 1920s, this is meant to record its starting point

 

[KingSweden24]

"...temptation. The fact was that the newly installed Andrassy government was a temporary solution, and one in which it was widely understood that power was held not by the aging count or Janos Hadik but rather by "irreconcilables" such as Khuen-Hedervary or, really, Tisza, the central figure of the White faction whose exclusion from formal power was becoming increasingly difficult if Ferdinand wanted a Hungarian government of anything other than civil servants not responsible to the House of Representatives - which, quite frankly, he did not, and thus the Andrassy Cabinet would have to do. Nonetheless, the Milan Magyars and L'affaire Bethlen had left the Emperor badly damaged, and in the aftermath he made a gamble that in the end left him even weaker than before - the brief "Charm Offensive," as it came to be known, towards Berlin.

Ferdinand's contempt for the Magyar people, politically and racially, was well-known, but he was also not the Slavophile whom many historians have come to portray him as; he liked Czech culture thanks to his extensive time in Prague but was ambivalent at best about the Poles and most certainly did not care for Croats or Serbs beyond his opportunistic sense that they were useful in his struggle with Magyarism. Ferdinand was not a believer in Pan-Germanism, viewing Prussia as an alien culture who shared only a common language with Austrians, but he nonetheless saw "Alpinism," an ideology beginning to form out of the remnants of Karl Lueger's worldview, as potentially complementary to Prussianism. And why not? Strategically, Berlin and Vienna had no overlapping disputes - the Germans were increasingly looking to Asia and were interested in the Balkans only to satisfy the demands of their Italian allies. Ferdinand considered Austria's exclusion from the German Empire a settled matter, as did his counterpart Kaiser Heinrich, who held the Habsburg name in high esteem (though Pan-Germanists disagreed fundamentally with this position); there was a sense emergent at the Schonbrunn, encouraged by many of the Prague Circle, that Austria's alliance with France was borne out of the immediate frustrations of the late 1860s and the Unification Wars, and had been signed by the Alte Herr Franz Josef and the Petit-Aigle Napoleon IV forty years ago and thus no longer reflected the strategic needs of Austria-Hungary as the 1920s beckoned. Ferdinand was the new era of the Habsburgs, and a rethinking of not just constitutional governance but strategic alignments was just as much a modernizing tact.

Ferdinand's thinking was governed by two general ideas. The first was that it seemed apparent to him, as well as Austrian war planners, that in a general war Germany would defend in the west and attack to the east, aiming to seize western Galicia quickly to cut Carpathian mountain passes while pressing towards Ostrau and Linz as quickly as possible to seize Austria's industrial heartlands. The reinforced Bohemian mountain passes would be tied down with artillery to prevent a counterattack, and Italy could put immediate pressure on Trento and the Istrian Plateau beyond the Isonzo River to attempt to capture crucial Trieste. These war plans had always favored the Dual Monarchy thanks to the defensibility of their frontiers with both of the "Central Powers," but now Ferdinand was concerned about the extent to which he could rely on Hungarian soldiers in such a conflict, or whether there would be a revolt from some or even many brigades and divisions of the Honved that would tie down the Common Army. The weakness of the Dual Monarchy had never been more apparent, either, and rising Italian influence in Belgrade opened the question if Serbia - no longer ruled by the Austrophilic Obrenovic family - would make a play for parts of the Banat simultaneously, and that left another uncomfortable question about Romanian intentions. Austria was, perhaps, more surrounded than she had ever been before.

The second thought that occurred to Ferdinand was that he was not entirely sure if he could depend on France. Napoleon V was very much not his father, a polite and pious but deeply strange young man pressed firmly under his nonagenarian grandmother's thumb who was easily influenced by vapid courtiers, conservative priests, and his smattering of "cousins" from Belgium who shuttled between Brussels and Paris as if they ruled both. France was typically on the cutting edge technologically with their military kit, especially in terms of air power where they were regarded as second to none, and had just showed their ruthlessness off in Vietnam, but with their massive colonial empire had other goals not aligned with those of Austria, first and foremost in North Africa, where undermining rather than supporting the Ottomans was increasingly in vogue in Paris. Ferdinand did not know if Paris would in fact be there should war at some point arise, what with his distinct inability to trust anybody there.

An alliance with Germany, on the other hand, held all kinds of benefits. It immediately eliminated Austria's largest enemy along its longest borders, allowing Austria to concentrate her energies on the Italian frontier; it brought two German-speaking monarchies back in alignment with each other, along with continental Europe's largest and second-largest populations (excluding Russia, of course), its largest and third-largest economies, and would control a wide swath of the continent from the Danube to the North Sea. Italian and French rivalry in Africa and claims of irredenta over Corsica and Nice would preclude an alignment between the Houses of Savoy and Bonaparte, even before one considered France's opposition to Italian occupation of the Leonine City and the Church's fierce opposition to the government in Rome; this would, in all likelihood, leave Italy forced to either stand alone or begrudgingly accept an alliance with Vienna. With this new "Triple Alliance" formed temporarily, France would be isolated politically and militarily, essentially ending any threat of war in Europe for decades. The Iron Triangle had served its purpose - now it was time for a new alignment by a new generation.

Ferdinand's visit to Berlin to secretly discuss these matters in October 1917 could not have gone worse, even if at first glance it was a cordial visit. Heinrich had earned a reputation in his younger years as aloof from European politics, rarely reading newspapers and waving through the desires of his various ministers, in particular the powerful Chancellor Furstenburg who had now been in power for thirteen years. The Heinrich of 1917, however, could sense the unease beginning to creep across the continent and as he approached his sixtieth birthday had developed not an encyclopedic understanding of current affairs like many of his peers and predecessors had, but was nonetheless savvier than met the eye. Heinrich admired the House of Habsburg - its traditions, its longevity, its prestige - and had been excited by the accession of Ferdinand as a fresh new influence, but an outright alliance was out of the question. For one, Heinrich had little confidence in the Hungarian Crisis being solved anytime soon; having taken at least one Magyar woman as a mistress in his reign, he was unusually well-read on the grievances of the Hungarian street and understood Ferdinand's lack of interest in actually addressing said grievances. Further, the ongoing constitutional crisis suggested that Ferdinand's feelers were not ones coming from a place of strength but rather desperation - Furstenburg, in particular, surmised privately to the Kaiser that what Ferdinand perhaps really wanted was for Berlin to "solve" his problem for him. While Furstenburg was intrigued by the idea of an "unequal" alliance with Vienna that would see them as the clearly junior partner in a relationship, Heinrich demurred, not wanting to make any commitments until the matters in the Dual Monarchy were fully solved.

It was also further the case that Heinrich was nervous about Russia's reaction to a realignment on her borders; a huge part of Russia's "turn from Europe" since 1878 had been that Germany and Austria were at each other's throats, and thus the Bear did not have to worry about a potential threat on her immediate western frontiers. When combined with her cordial relations with Romania (underwritten in part by German reassurances in treaty form), Russia's European borders had never been more secure, which had allowed for her ambitions in Central Asia and the Orient to be successful and restore her imperial prestige. A German-Austrian alliance would immediately change all that, and while Heinrich was confident that Russia would not see it as a preemptive move towards a war of choice in the east - he had, after all, done well to keep the most ardent of Prussian chauvinists obsessed with Drang nach Osten ideas out of his immediate inner circle for more clear-eyed realists such as Furstenburg - he nonetheless was concerned enough about Romanov nervousness to want to avoid arousing a potential enemy he did not need to have. Longstanding dynastic enmity between the Romanovs and the Bonapartes was not sufficient as a guarantor that France and Russia would never align, and the risk of a Russo-French alliance sandwiching Germany was far too high, especially as Russia began more rapidly modernizing and industrializing in the late 1910s.

And so Ferdinand charmed his German hosts, regaling them with hunting stories, and in particular bonded with Heinrich over their shared love of yachting and navies, but it was to no avail. Heinrich politely but bluntly declined a "formalizing a change" in "German strategic thinking," which was a coded diplomatic way of stating that Germany was disinterested in alignment, though he left the door open to "revisions in the European order as circumstances evolve." Ferdinand was embarrassed and angry, having spent weeks away from Vienna as the stalemate in Hungary persisted for nothing. Indeed, the "Charm Offensive" gave him worse than nothing, for French spies caught wind of the meetings there, and soon Austrian officialdom was angrily accosted by their French counterparts, who demanded answers, and Ferdinand was forced to dispatch Tisza, brought to Vienna as his personal foreign minister and envoy to keep him out of Budapest, to Paris to smooth the ruffled feathers of the Raymond Poincare government.

This trial balloon with Germany wound up being more damaging than Ferdinand could have realized - France was now deeply suspicious of its ally and strategic thinking in Paris shifted quickly towards a more provocative manner, for two reasons. One, it was now assumed that Ferdinand was willing to walk away from France, and French politicians took this to mean they had to be more nakedly favorable towards Austria in public to keep Vienna "on-side;" and two, it meant that there may be a limited period of time in which the Franco-Austrian alliance under which two or three generations of staff officers had planned France's strategic operational plans had come up was able to actually fight a war, and that if France was to have a war with Germany, it needed to have it soon while that window was still open before Ferdinand got any new ideas..."

- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor