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

[KingSweden24]

"...breakthrough on Patrick's left flank at Douglasville, severing the mainline rail connection between Atlanta and Birmingham and threatening the rail junction towards Macon, where some of the largest armories and arsenals in the Confederacy still lay. Two days later on the 26th, Menoher's landship divisions broke through at Gainesville, the bloodiest and most difficult point on the defensive line, sweeping Patrick's right southwestwards towards Atlanta itself and cutting Atlanta's rail route to Upstate South Carolina. The two most straightforward resupply routes into the city were now in American hands and Pershing's forces were beginning their encirclement of Atlanta from the other side of the Chattahoochee.

Patrick was certainly no fool and realized that unlike Buck at Nashville, he had no defensive Highland Rim to use as his proving ground. While Atlanta was on a high ridge above the river with an excellent view of Pershing's approaching forces, the hooking actions eliminated his advantages towards the main force between Marietta and Alpharetta. And while Pershing had been unable to bring much in the way of aeroplanes down to Georgia and Patrick enjoyed aerial superiority thanks to a large airfield due south of the city where Atlanta-Maddox Airport stands today, the considerably larger force of landships available to the United States made fighting in trenches extremely difficult. On the 29th, a breakthrough occurred at Alpharetta and the lines continued to collapse inwards; rigid airships launched from Kentucky and artillery joined to rain fire down on the city the next night, and as many as two thousand civilians still in the city were killed, including five hundred slaves. Patrick ordered two divisions, comprised in large part of raw recruits, some as young as thirteen years old (most of whom had lied on their enlistment forms, but the Confederacy was so hard up for fit men at that point that this was ignored), to remain behind to protect his fighting retreat with more experienced soldiers, and on July 2nd, 1916, the order to abandon Atlanta was given as American forces bombed the airfield and closed in on it from the west.

On the morning of July 4th, 1916, Pershing ordered the American flag be raised on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol, which had been badly damaged in the fighting over the last two days. Much of the city was destroyed and even more of it would burn over the next few days, with who exactly was responsible for the arson of Atlanta remaining a contentious trans-Ohio topic to this day. Pershing denied vehemently to his deathbed that he had "ordered" the burning of the city, though the rules of engagement in the March to the Sea that came soon thereafter opens the question of what exactly he meant by "ordered." It is generally established that Confederate commanders in retreat ordered several arsenals, depots, and barracks destroyed as they evacuated the city so that they could not be used by Pershing; it is also generally thought to be the case that Pershing's men, angry and exhausted after the last year of fighting from Tennessee all the way into the heart of the Confederate rail system, may have engaged in a considerable amount of looting and other mayhem across "the Crossroads of Dixie," especially with the symbolic nature of capturing the city on Independence Day, when both nominating conventions were beginning for the Liberals and Democrats back north.

Regardless of cause and the identity of the perpetrators, by the end of the week little of Atlanta stood, with fires having torched entire residential neighborhoods and the sporadic street fighting having left hundreds dead. But the beating heart of Confederate industry and transport, much more so than Nashville, had fallen, understood at home as the crippling, fatal body blow to Dixie's war machine that it was. In his response to congratulations from both Bliss and Hughes, Pershing responded that he intended to regroup, reconsolidate his now extremely stretched supply lines, and then "finish this war" before the end of the year, and in that response lay the blueprint for his most famous campaign - the March to the Sea..."

- Pershing

 

[KingSweden24]

"...June 1916 may in some ways, despite the bloodshed, have been perhaps the most concentrated dose of positive news in the war yet, with the fall of Richmond and advances around Atlanta that led to that city's final surrender the day the Liberal National Convention of 1916 began in Chicago, its host for the third straight time. The news was met with equal parts jubilation and relief across America, with the collapse of Atlanta taken as an especially providential sign as Independence Day celebrations and picnics began. It was now increasingly clear, in a way it had not been a whole year earlier, that the Confederate ability to wage war was rapidly starting to evaporate in real time and that the war was likely soon to be over; Bliss estimated that the Confederacy would be fully defeated by early October, while Stimson suggested that 1917 would realistically start with a ceasefire, and in the end the reality landed in the middle of these two extrapolations. That meant that the 1916 conventions, supposed just months earlier to be about how the war was to be prosecuted and the Hughes administration's handling thereof, was suddenly about the peace to come, as nearly anybody in America thought that the Confederacy would still be fighting come March 4th.

The Liberal Party had, since the end of the previous year, hung in a strange sort of limbo and stasis as various party figures began to deduce that Hughes was highly ambivalent about serving another four year term, even though only Antoinette was ever privy to these deliberations. The reality, of course, was that Hughes was exhausted. He had never intended to be a war President and thought of his tenure as being providential - to the deeply devout Baptist, he had been tasked by God to see the United States through the war, and no more. The idea that "four and no more" was his destiny was further deepened by the advances of Pershing and the late Lenihan through the spring of 1916, and Hughes saw in the collapse of the Confederacy a divine punishment for their wickedness not only in the institution of slavery but in their warmaking (the publication of his private wartime diaries, in which he expressed such uncharacteristically fire-and-brimstone musings, caused a great deal of uproar in the Confederacy). As such, he was ready to move on from the Presidency, eager to return to the practice of law, write a memoir, and perhaps serve some role in international arbitration, an art in which he was increasingly interested.

In ordinary times, a popular first-term President choosing to retire at the peak of his popularity would be welcomed by the legions of ambitious co-partisans who would eagerly attempt to ride his coattails and run on his legacy while grasping for the brass ring themselves rather than waiting four more long years for their own opportunity at the Presidency. July of 1916 were not normal times, however, as while Hughes was enormously popular with the general public, as attested by songs written about him, his picture adorning citizens' walls, and the thousands of letters of goodwill his overwhelmed staff were inundated with weekly, the Liberal Party in general did not share all of that shine and glow. To be sure, the party as a whole did enjoy its association with the outgoing President, and could credibly run on being the party that had won the war during an era in which politics was more partisan than personalist for the average voter, but Hughes' status as a man greatly exceeded the reputations of anybody else waiting in the wings, and so his pending retirement took 1916 from a race that would likely be over before it begun to a genuine campaign that would need to be waged. This presented another issue for Liberals, that being that the war and Hughes' prestige with the public - and the need for partisan unanimity in public behind him - had papered over the increasingly severe divides within the party. After the conservative old guard had been thought to have been totally discredited after the string of political debacles between 1902 and 1908, the progressive and moderate party bosses and candidates who had surged into power both electorally and in the party machinery in 1910 and 1912 had since lost their own mandate with the thorough state-level drubbings of 1914, in which Liberals had been defeated up and down the ballot in legislative, gubernational and local elections even as they held their own in results for Congress. This had wiped out many of the Young Liberals of the early 1910s, the very cadre that had been so crucial to Hughes' securing of the nomination in 1912, leaving proteges of the Old Guard in charge of many state parties once again; indeed, the prospect of having to deal with these officials had been a major factor in Hughes deciding not to pursue the nomination again as much as his being spent from wartime administration.

This left a daunting conundrum for the party: it needed to present a candidate to not bungle the most decidedly winnable election for the party since the 1890s who could credibly claim to continue the popular Hughes legacy but also win over conservative delegates who saw the opportunity to win back the House and Senate for the first time in the 20th century and actually effect policy from a Liberal direction. Seeing as how the Liberals had held one house of Congress for all of two years since the turn of the century, Hughes was supremely skeptical that even with coattails the party would gain a trifecta, and he was even more skeptical that the right wing of the Liberals would have as positive a working relationship with Congressional Democrats as he had, particularly the pricklier Kern. As such, he took the view that it was important for him, as he left the office, to see to it that he left it in as good of hands as possible..."

- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes

"...figures such as LaFollette or California's Hiram Johnson were of course out of the question, though the conservatives were well aware too that men such as Cabot Lodge, endless as his ambition may have been, or Philander Knox were absolutely unacceptable to the general electorate. The convention thus became a question of whether the Hughes moderates or the more right-wing party bosses would win out, and Root was not particularly eager to see how such a battle unfolded, but agreed to accompany the President to Chicago nonetheless. The convention chair, House Minority Leader James Mann, announced on the first day shortly after being voted chair - a boon to the Hughes faction - that news from Pershing had just arrived that Atlanta had fallen, leading to raucous cheers throughout the convention hall that was so loud the rafters shook. It occurred to Root for a moment then that perhaps the prudent thing to do would be simply cabling Pershing to see if he wanted the nomination, what with his newfound status as a national hero; it was unclear who else exactly could unite the fractious party, and it was likely better to get ahead of the equally divided Democrats before they pondered offering their crown to the native Nebraskan.

The 1916 Liberal Convention essentially boiled down to the core tension of the Hughes Presidency - the public adored the President who had with grace, humility and tenacity guided the country through three terrible years of war and bloodshed, but the party operatives and a small but loud and potent minority of the party faithful thought he was a sellout to Congressional Democrats and had not fought hard enough to undo the Hearstian settlement. Mann wanted to be Speaker again and was thus, despite his personal and political closeness to Hughes, an unlikely choice as a compromise candidate, but as convention chair he had tremendous ability to attempt to sway delegates and upon the announcement on the first day of the convention from Hughes that he would not seek reelection - which was met first with cries of despair and moments later by a thunderous standing ovation as Mann interrupted the President to suggest that the delegates instead thank the President for his sacrifices in office - the game was on by Hughes and Mann to find an acceptable choice to them. This maneuver was not helped by the suspicion, fomented as rumor by Penrose, that Hughes would throw his hat back in the ring were he not permitted to anoint his successor, and the convention became split not by ideology so much as by delegates covetous of their own power to pick the President and those who were inclined to allow Hughes to "point to the man closest to his heart."

Hughes had three names in mind for his preferred successor: Illinois Senator Richard Yates, his closest ally in the upper chamber, and then Stimson and Root, who though of different ideological persuasions were both New Yorkers and regarded as his most loyal and capable Cabinet secretaries. The problem for Hughes, of course, was that there were issues with all three of these choices. The Illinois delegation was dominated by downstate conservatives and had already swallowed their pride in making Mann the convention chair, and factional disputes from the Prairie State kneecapped Yates, and without his home state, he was a dead man walking. Stimson was regarded by many delegates as having all of Hughes' problems without any of his upside; he was not regarded as a talented orator, he was a great deal more progressive than the President, and his talents as an administrator were matched or exceeded by Root. There was no benefit to Stimson that someone else did not already have, and beyond that it was unclear that Stimson was even particularly interested in the job.

That left Root as Hughes' preferred choice, and it is easy in hindsight to see why. Ideologically, Root mollified conservatives while not terrifying moderates and progressives the way House Minority Whip Thomas Butler may well have. Geographically, he represented critical New York, without which the election could not be won (and Liberal suspicions that Democrats sought to nominate a New Yorker for the fourth straight election were proven correct, in the end), and this gave him a considerable leg up over Pennsylvanians Butler or Knox, or Connecticut's Henry Roberts; only William Alden Smith of Michigan presented a more favorable state to appeal to the great middle of American politics once Ohio's Frank Monnett made clear he would not run. But most importantly, beyond these two factors, was Root's temperament and experience. He was seen as the ultimate pragmatist, a level-headed and capable administrator who had served in high offices for close to four decades. Indeed, he was the only man in American history who had served in all of the "Core Four" Cabinet positions; on paper, there was nobody with the kind of executive experience that he brought to the table, before or since. [1]

Root was unpersuaded. He would be seventy-two years old by the time of inauguration, three full years older than William Henry Harrison - the oldest President in American history who had died after forty days in office - had been. His four years as Secretary of State under Hughes, particularly his chairing of the Cabinet on behalf of the President in wartime, had been intended to be his career capstone and the completion of his legacy. His enthusiastic support of an income tax [2] was out of step with much of the Liberal Party even as most realists admitted that the Revenue Act of 1910, especially after Hughes' repeated tax hikes to fund the war, would never be repealed or found unconstitutional.

But it was also clear that few other figures could command the convention floor. Ohio's Garfield was a has-been; Michigan's Smith and Connecticut's Roberts were nobodies. Butler's appeal was frighteningly large but Root remarked to Cabot Lodge at their hotel over cigars that he would be as fatal a candidate to Liberal chances as Pennypacker had been and "make the unloseable race a landslide defeat." Knox inspired few and was viewed even more so than Butler as Penrose's pet. It came down then to appeals from both Cabot Lodge and Hughes, made separately, to get Root to change his mind. Cabot Lodge was unimpressed by Roberts (who he disliked as it was for his progressive inclinations) and informed Root that he could deliver New England's delegations, what with his status as ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee and the titan of the region's Brahmin politics. Root had been around national politics generally, and Cabot Lodge specifically, to know that this offer did not come without a price, and asked him what he would want in return; Cabot Lodge stated that he wanted the job he had believed would be his in 1901 and 1913, that of Secretary of State. Root had to admit that there were few other figures in the Liberal Party as qualified for that job, and Cabot Lodge's reputation as the party's most strident opponent of slavery made him an appealing choice to manage the diplomatic portfolio when it came to suitably punishing the Confederacy for their instigation of the war.

Hughes was next, inviting Root to his room. In his memoirs, Root recalled the President looking almost relieved at the idea of stepping away from the burdens of office, though their conversation was deadly serious. In the course of the last three years, the two men had come to earn a strong and genuine respect for one another; Hughes had always leaned heavily on Root's experience with high office, and Root admired the President's plain-spoken and unassuming style. They were effusive when in agreement and courteous when in disagreement, and the press in Philadelphia had come to describe Root as Hughes' mentor-in-office. It was for that reason that Hughes appealed to Root to reconsider the matter of the Presidency, suggesting in his characteristically soft fashion that there were few figures who could so unite the party as the most obvious "continuity candidate" of the successful Hughes administration. The President seemed clearly to have an eye on his legacy as the commander-in-chief who had steered the republic through war, and Root was loathe to interrupt his wandering but sober musings. Hughes noted that none of the plethora of replacement candidates made much sense to him, and that the second tier of possibilities were little better - Vice President Hadley was too progressive, Treasury Secretary Cortelyou wanted to return to the private sector, and Massachusetts Senator Weeks was too much of a Cabot Lodge man. Hughes implored, again, that Root recognize that few others could unite the party; Root demurred, choosing not to inform the President of the senior Senator from Massachusetts' visit earlier that day.

Hughes' visit coincided with a day of arguing over the party platform on the convention floor and news from St. Louis that Democrats were rapidly consolidating around former New York Senator George McClellan Jr. as their preferred candidate, though there were many ballots to go until he commanded his needed three-fifths majority. McClellan was, rightfully, seen as amongst the most formidable opponents the opposition could muster, as the son of a former War of Secession-era general and Secretary of State who had served two terms in the Senate and had both sufficient distance to Hearst to be his own man while not alienating any key players in the Democratic Party. It was thus urgent that the Liberal delegates pick a man who could indeed face McClellan, and thus many of the delegates began to talk themselves into Root as the obvious choice.

And why wasn't he? He was Hughe's right hand, after all. He encapsulated nearly four decades of Liberal thinking - of technocratic expertise, of proud public service and rigorous self-improvement in office, dating back to his time as a junior official in the Blaine administration who had been mentored throughout the 1880s and 1890s by John Hay and in a twelve-year span served in four Cabinet offices. As July 6th advanced, Root increasingly let himself be persuaded of this line of thinking, too. It seemed providential, that the moment when a profoundly experienced and steady hand needed to emerge that he would be available. He made it known that afternoon that he would avail himself not to the party but rather to the Republic, that he would serve one term "as needed," and then retire. A hundred ambitious Liberals licked their chops, realizing that this was their best opportunity to build on the Hughes legacy without having to indulge the self-righteous, tee-totaling Sunday school teacher at the same time and preserve their own desires for the 1920s. Root would win them the war and the peace to come, and usher in an era of Liberal domination - or at least so the thinking in Chicago went.

Cabot Lodge signaled to delegates in his camp that neither Roberts nor Weeks were options and that it was Root who was the man to choose. Hughes whipped a massive cadre of delegates in his corner to support his trusted lieutenant while also securing the nomination of his friend Garfield from crucial Ohio to the Vice Presidency. The party rapidly consolidated around the Root-Garfield ticket, which earned nomination on the second ballot - the quickest win of an open nomination in Liberal Party history, and a shock considering the wrench Hughes had thrown into the machinery just two days earlier. There was only potential ahead, what with the war coming to its close and the most decorated Presidential candidate in American history topping the ticket..."

- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President [3]

"...the address to introduce Root, making his unofficial farewell speech to the delegates the transition into Root's acceptance address. Hughes spoke of the importance of the maintenance of democratic institutions, opined on the peaceful transition of power, encouraged a speedy end to the war, but closed his remarks with words that would be come to be seen as both prescient and ominous - a rejoinder in which he firmly reminded those gathered, "It is not enough to win the war - we must also thereafter secure the peace." [4]

As the convention concluded, the President and the First Lady made their way with the Manns to the White City, site of the 1893 Columbian Exposition before heading out on a whistle-stop tour of the Midwest over the next two weeks. Hughes marveled at the retained and restored buildings, regretting once again that he had not attended the original World's Fair on this site, and ruminated briefly on how it was at this spot that the first motions towards the Bloc Sud had begun on the sidelines of the concurrent Panamerican Congress. It seemed that things had come full circle in North America, both with the demise of that alliance and that he could see the end of his Presidency and the war almost exactly three years after the failure of the Niagara Conference, when the future had seemed so opaque and terrifying. A sense of relief came over Hughes, with his trust in Root to handle what was to come and his conscience content that he had done his utmost even if he had often not met the moment (by his own assessment as much as those of contemporaries). He and Antoinette strolled down the shores of Lake Michigan holding hands, and he remarked to her that it was not necessarily the beginning of a new chapter or the end of a previous one that day - but it was an ending,..." [5][6]

- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes

[1] If this sounds familiar to a certain disastrous OTL President, it is 100% intended to
[2] This is true, and a major reason why iOTL Elihu Root was denied the GOP nom in 1908
[3] Suffice to say this book has a very different editorial slant than American Charlemagne
[4] Suffice also to say that Hughes' reputation is burnished quite a bit by him having the smarts to get out while the getting is good. It's not his fault shit goes sideways during Root's term, so it's not exactly prescient of him to bounce, but it winds up being very prudent in hindsight
[5] Yes, I did just wrap up The Wheel of Time finally. No, I'm not sorry for cribbing its closing line
[6] This is an unofficial wrap on Hughes' arc. He wound up being a less interesting character than I'd thought he'd be when we first introduced him 20 years earlier, because "decent man does his job relatively competently while learning from his mistakes" is not super intriguing historically or narratively, but he fit what I set out to accomplish and like Hearst, Chamberlian, Boulanger and so many others it'll be weird to see him "drop out" so to speak. Wikibox and AH.com ruminations to come once his term wraps.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...indeed, Smith had never even been as far west as Chicago, so in a sense his arrival at the convention hall in St. Louis was as much a personal journey of seeing these United States for the first time as it was a political one in which he, just as much as traveling companion Robert Wagner, was emerging as a major player in internal Democratic politics for the first time.

It was no secret that, as in all years, the nomination for the Presidency ran through the powerful, experienced New York delegation, chaired for the fourth and final time by Silent Charlie Murphy, the man who had taken Tammany from a felony-producing graft machine to a more respectable, though still demagogued, political operation. The same rules that had applied for decades to Democratic nominees did so here too - any victorious candidate would seize the brass ring only by winning two-thirds of all delegates present, which gave the numerous but less populous agrarian and mining Western states an effective veto on any nominee [1] but also meant that New York's bounty of delegates were necessary, if the state voted as a bloc as it had in the past, to secure the nomination.

At the past three conventions, this state of affairs had largely benefited William Randolph Hearst, the brash young New Yorker who had served two terms as President and come decently close to a third, thanks to his Western-appealing brand of personalist populism intermixed with East Coast cunning. In 1916, however, the odds of a Hearstian restoration were close to nil. While most Democrats admired him as the north star of the party and its most successful single political figure of the last seven decades, many men had set their own ambitions aside in 1912 to allow him to run a third time and more than a few others blamed him for the loss to Charles Evans Hughes, who was now showering the Liberals with his immense personal prestige in having guided the republic through the gauntlet despite his decision to retire after one exhausting term as a wartime President. Hearst's inability to anoint a ticket of his choice in 1914 in New York, whether a cut-out or himself, had also kneecapped his reputation back home, and instead his role as kingmaker-in-chief was seen as the likeliest way for him to flex his influence in St. Louis, a prospect that Murphy and his young proteges were decidedly unenthusiastic about.

The convention floor was exactly the environment for Smith, who had come to love the type of uniquely American wheeling-and-dealing that was conducted in such a space two years prior as he had stunned New York by brokering Gerard's surprise rise to the Governorship. As news arrived in St. Louis of Atlanta's fall on July 4th and hours later Hughes' address to the Liberals in Chicago confirming rumors that he would not run for re-election, the convention buzzed with activity, with political careers rising and falling within a matter of hours, a cacophony of chaos as Smith and Wagner agreed that a wartime election needed a wartime candidate - if a general could not be found who would leave the field for a different kind of grueling campaign, then the next best thing would be settled on, and a favorite son of New York quickly emerged as their favorite..."

- The Happy Warrior

"...Hodges himself snorted at Norris' quip that "elections are simply questions of arithmetic in the end," and remarked that this held true in the general election as well. In the penultimate Democratic convention that required the near-unanimity of two-thirds votes of the delegates, Norris in his role as an increasingly influential voice of Western interests had to find a man who could appeal to the extraordinarily cliqueish New York crew that had delivered Hearst three straight nominations and to Western Wall, who were increasingly disparate between nervous swing state leaders on the coast (where Liberals had advanced dramatically over the last decade), pseudo-socialists from the Mine Belt who only ever faced legitimate electoral threats from actual socialists, and agrarian populists such as himself and Hodges from the Grain Belt who had traditionally been the voice of the West and were loathe to give up that role.

Arithmetic also dictated that despite the favorite son campaigns of Senators Gil Hitchcock of Nebraska or James Phelan of California, a Westerner could not lead a ticket and was unlikely to see success as a running mate; swing states such as New York, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were simply far, far too important and bore too much of an electoral bounty. Phelan seemed crucially aware of this, instead running largely to continue the work of his mentor and role model William Rosecrans - who had held the same Senate seat thirty years earlier - in making Sinophobia a mainstream, explicit plank of the Democratic Party platform. This endeavor failed, but language expressing skepticism about Asiatic migration was included in the party platforms of six states, rather than simply California, in large part thanks to his thunderous address on the first day of the convention regarding "the yellow peril in our time." Hitchcock, for his part, never quite forgave Norris for not whipping delegates in his favor to at least enjoy final leverage; Norris responded icily that Hitchcock was too much of a "Bryan man" to be trusted with more political influence and noted that Hitchcock was perhaps worse than any at playing the "game" back in Philadelphia.

Rather, the convention quickly began consolidating around a name pushed not just by young New York apparatchiks like Al Smith or Jim Farley but also senior figures like former Indiana Governor Tom Marshall: former New York Senator George McClellan. The speed with which McClellan rapidly emerged as the front-runner surprised Norris enough that he asked Fitzgerald what precisely had led to him taking off. The answer from the New Yorker surprised him - that essentially nobody else had wanted to run against Hughes when it was an open question what the President would do, and McClellan had accumulated a murderer's row of supporters over the spring while it seemed like it was a fool's errand to take the plunge. McClellan's calculation, essentially, was that he could run an honorable losing race (and most Democrats agreed that it was unlikely that the Liberals would lose), wait for the inevitable postwar struggles of a second Hughes term (or, in the end, Elihu Root's term), and then run again in 1920 on a platform of essentially asking voters whether they regretted rejecting him four years earlier.

As a candidate, McClellan was attractive. He had been a two-term Senator who gave up an easy re-election to serve in the war on General Farnsworth's staff, eventually promoted to colonel on his own merits, though he had served nowhere near the front lines. His father had been a senior officer in the War of Secession and later on a key figure in Democratic politics both nationally and in New Jersey, serving as governor of his home state as well as Secretary of State under both Seymour and Hoffman. He was thus something of party royalty going back decades, his Presidential ambitions stymied at first only by his deference to Hearst in 1912; the former President had not forgotten, and as such McClellan enjoyed the support of both the pro-and-anti Hearst wings of the Democratic Party. And most importantly, he was game and willing to sacrifice in a run for a job that promised to be so thankless that Hughes, whom Norris resented for his retirement leaving his party in the hands of "lesser men at the most critical hour,"

Norris saw clear limitations in this even as McClellan placed first, with a narrow majority, on the first three ballots and it became obvious that with concessions he would be the nominee. McClellan was a dull personality and was known on policy to be on the right flank of the party; hardly an inspiring choice for anything other than an honorable defeat when others were skeptical, and Norris doubted that in four years anybody would come back for him, either within the party or the general electorate. As such, the move to make, as he described it to Hodges, was to extract every concession possible from McClellan today in the party platform to secure him the West's delegates over figures such as the dogged but clearly declining John Kern, and thus deliver McClellan a united, but more progressive, party. As such, McClellan's people were forced to swallow planks that for the first time announced a Democratic Party decisively in favor of nationwide women's suffrage (thought to have been a factor in McClellan losing some working class votes in otherwise Democratic precincts), a constitutional amendment to end child labor (a longstanding priority of Kern), the expansion of worker's protections beyond the partial-fault compromise Norris had forged with Hughes, the permanent nationalization of the the railroads after the wartime emergency was over, and countless other smaller progressive priorities. Thanks in large part to the efforts of the diminutive Nebraskan, the Democratic platform of 1916, despite a fairly conservative and anodyne candidate at the top, represented a tremendous shift left from even the late Hearst years and the Common Cause. Further cementing this shift was the nomination of Ohio Senator Newton Baker, a protege of late former Vice President Tom Johnson, as McClellan's running mate. The New York-Ohio axis reformed as it had been in 1904, the Democrats had their nominee to face an identical state lineup of Elihu Root and James Garfield from the Liberals, and Norris had cemented himself yet again as the man who could not be counted out when opportunity presented itself..."

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

[1] As with the OTL South under this rule

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Long's contentment at Home Office. Joynson-Hicks was thus in many ways frustrated that his coveted portfolio remained out of his hands and that the matters for which he had developed an interest and passion he now could not influence, but Long remained his most important patron and mentor, and having a ministerial file and sitting in Cabinet meetings was nonetheless a considerable promotion.

The Ministry of Health had been created for the first time under the Haldane government and thus was regarded as a new and curious appointment by most Nats, but Joynson-Hicks saw in it an opportunity for more, and it was even more so at Health than as Long's deputy at Home that he developed his reputation as a tireless worker and ferocious advocate for his tasks. Joynson-Hicks aggressively moved to expand treatment for communicable diseases such as tuberculosis and created the first ever registry of nurses in Britain, with a push towards more centralized and standardized regulation and education of the nursing profession being incomplete by the time the Cecil ministry left office in December 1917.

In his role as Minister of Health, Joynson-Hicks clashed often with many of the Hughligan figures of the Cabinet, first and foremost Cecil himself, who criticized his spending requests as impractical and unconservative, and his instincts as inappropriately statist. Indeed, Malcolm went so far as to quip that "Jixie is a Chamberlainite, simply lathered in reactionary paint." This elided Joynson-Hicks' familiar moralizing social conservatism that set him apart from many of his contemporaries (one of his proposals at Health was to make "immoral behaviour" by nurses a sackable offence") but also missed perhaps the underlying shift in National thinking. While the aristocrats around Cecil were no moderates, their conservatism was trapped by a certain 19th century stuffiness, having become the Gladstonians in economic thinking they had once hated. What Joynson-Hicks represented instead was a more nationalist approach, a continental brand of conservatism that promised the use of the state on behalf of God, King and Country and all that entailed rather than, as the Liberals would argue, the moral and social uplift of the masses according to modernist ideas.

It was for that reason that toiling in relative obscurity to the public at Health, Joynson-Hicks avoided the reputational damage that much of Cecil's generation of colleagues suffered in the economic and political debacles of that term, but also proved himself to a legion of young Nationals that he was one of the true talents in the party as an administrator and governor, a figure who could reasonably use the tools of state before him to enact policy rather than simply opine on matters of the ruling class. He was, in that sense, the hingepoint of when what had once been the Conservative Party became a middle class party, and High Toryism was beginning to be replaced by something new..."

- Jix

 

[KingSweden24]

"...rather than hinder the energy of the United Farmers, the failed push for women's suffrage in the Prairie Provinces of 1916 energized Canadian progressivism, as the blockade of action on the matter in Saskatchewan and Alberta and its narrow defeat in Manitoba revealed not only how close the issue was to getting over the hump but also how critical organization was for the UF, which had limped out of Ottawa in 1912 badly bruised but not defeated after the Farmers' March had ended in violence and ignobility.

Crerar in particular was energized by a life of campaigning, going to churches, trade halls, picnics, farm shows and fraternal lodges to doggedly demand the women's vote be granted "with immediate haste in these provinces." The two-vote margin of defeat in Manitoba particularly irked him and led to his determination to organize the UFM to be "the first and finest force in provincial politics," and indeed the suffrage campaign of 1916, despite its defeat, made him a household name across much of the Prairies as he came to be considered the Canadian answer to Americans such as William Jennings Bryan or William Randolph Hearst.

"It is in defeat," Crerar told a gathering of dismayed UF activists, "that one learns how to win," and as the breakthroughs of the following several years would prove, he was indeed right..."

- The People's Prime Minister: Thomas Crerar's Remarkable Canadian Life

 

[KingSweden24]

"...central to the Morrill Act was the idea that the federal government would financially support, at least to some degree, the interests of the individual states in creating public universities and supporting their mission; the much-delayed Blair Act, passed at the end of its namesake's career, extended that philosophy in part towards primary and in particular secondary education to support the vast expansion of the public school system. [1] But there had never been any explicit federal education program in and of itself other than West Point and the Naval Academy; with the University of the United States Act of 1916, this changed.

The Federal University of the United States - often known as the Federal University System - today is a small part of the broader American higher education system. Across six campuses in six different states, close to a hundred thousand students attend curated and particular degree programs, free of tuition or room and board, that are regarded as of "particular interest to the further development of the United States." The FUS is in some ways regarded as a step below the major public research universities and treated dismissively by some private institutions for its academic standards (despite the competitive application system that requires a Congressional recommendation) [2], but nonetheless serves an important cog in a bigger machine that has made the American university system the envy of the world.

At the time of its founding, however, it was a last-ditch compromise bill signed by outgoing President Hughes in the last stages of the Great American War to secure a long-held Liberal priority while acceding to a number of Democratic demands, such as tuition being entirely subsidized by the government for students and for parochial secondary school graduates being eligible to apply. Initially meant to be built on the grounds of the Smithsonian to help rebuild Washington, D.C. and to integrate with that institution (Hughes had hoped that the University of the United States would be called "Smithsonian University"), it would eventually be located at various sites in Philadelphia before the flagship campus was placed at its current siting near Penn and Drexel in University City in 1966 to create one of the largest concentrations of students in one place in the country. The ambitions for what would eventually become "Federal University at Philadelphia" were also remarkably small - it had indeed been intended to supplement the Smithsonian's work initially, and only allotted funding and slots for a hundred students as part of a broader act meant to inject more funding into universities struggling with low enrollment during the late stages of the war and prevent them from closing. Few, if any, of the bills signers could have imagined the FU System would be what it is today..."

- The Cathedral of Learning: University in the United States

[1] Suffice to say ITTL you will not have one of the two major parties attacking the idea of public education the way we see IOTL United States, not to get too into current politics, though education could and likely will have other fault lines associated with it politically
[2] I'm getting a bit niche with this post but I wanted to explore what kinds of clusterfucks you might still see with this alt-USA

 

[KingSweden24]

"...unfairly poor reputation from landing between two modernizing, enterprising Shahs who transformed Persia (later Iran) both politically as well as socially and economically. Nonetheless, Nosrat al-Din's brief reign deserves its own note for its events. Contrary to expectations of a considerable rollback of the constitutional rights afforded Persians in the Revolution of 1907, Nosrat al-Din consolidated the role of the Majlis, even as the cabinets he appointed were typically dominated by the nobility and gentry (in particular his family members). Due to the important position of Persia between Russia and India and the emphasis the British placed upon their port (and, increasingly, oil plays in Bandar Abbas), the number of railroad kilometers built in Persia between 1910 and 1919 more than doubled, all while military academies, medical clinics, and clean modern prisons were established with the best knowledge of the West adapted to conservative Shiite Persia's traditional culture.

This was the aspect of Nosrat al-Din's rule that was perhaps regretted more than anything by Mossadegh, in that while he did not arrest the reformism of the day, he also seemed content to leave it fully to its own devices when facing down the opposition of the conservative ulema, which often ended new ideas before they were even presented. A campaign to end the veiling of women was stillborn in the Majlis, blocked not only by aristocrats but directly-elected parliamentarians from devout, rural parts of the country. Proposals to introduce Western schooling and literacy programs went nowhere, out of fear that it would interfere with traditional Persian values. That said, it would also be unfair to purely lay the failures of many reformist strands in the 1910s on the clergy - it was not (or not only) the ulema who were the reason why efforts to combat nomadism (and the frequent violent instability that sedentary Iranic peoples, particularly across the west and south of Persia, caused) did not succeed, and regional tribal leaders were fully and openly hostile to any attempts by Tehran to centralize its rule, supported occasionally by sympathetic local British businessmen or envoys who enjoyed having their own fiefdoms free of the view of the Persian government as well as their own Colonial Office. In that sense, that was the largest missed opportunity of Nosrat al-Din, that of ending the fragmented governance of Persia that only served to empower not only enemies of the monarchy but also the British, who while not opposed to him nonetheless were ambivalent about him as a Shah compared to his long-serving father..."

- Mossadegh

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Hughes' first solitary year as Prime Minister remains oft-forgotten and in some ways little more than a historical curiosity. Between Fisher's resignation in November 1915 and Hughes' subsequent election as his long-awaited successor, and the elections in May of 1916, little policy of note passed thanks to the narrow and difficult parliamentary math that confronted Hughes, but it nonetheless was an important if brief episode for Hughes to promote allies to key positions within the party, scope out talent (such as a young Jack Lang in New South Wales, with whom he would form an increasingly important partnership) and begin mapping out a manifesto.

The 1916 elections marked one of the most bizarre occurrences in Australian political history, as the liberal-conservative Liberals and agrarian-populist Reform parties both won 30 seats in Parliament and Labor took 33. Both Joe Cook's Liberals and Bill Massey's Reformers refused to support another Hughes ministry, either via confidence or in coalition, and at the new Parliament's first sitting that July Hughes was defeated on the first motion, denying him a return as Prime Minister. How Cook and Massey were to work together, though, was an open question, considering the wide differences between the two and their own personal ambitions; the longstanding failure of the Australian center and right to unite behind one common party can, in many ways, trace its genesis to Cook and Massey squabbling in the winter of 1916. Eventually, the Governor-General Ronald Munro Ferguson - who was quite close with Hughes - interceded to negotiate Massey's appointment in a minority government with Cook providing supply provided that Massey did not pass certain protectionist policies to which the Liberals were opposed.

Of course, despite Cook being a fairly economically right-wing Liberal (and in some ways Massey's social conservatism giving him more in common with Hughes), this coalition was not built to last, and the Massey government was characterized by its instability, in no small part because of "mainland" opposition to a New Zealander, in particular a staunchly conservative one, being named Prime Minister. It also impressed upon Hughes the importance of an electoral system that could deliver clear majorities, and perhaps holding elections less frequently than every three years and thus in his view exacerbated the fractiousness of the Commonwealth's politics; many of the reforms that would follow the one-year interregnum of the Hughes era can, like the enduring contempt of the Liberal and National (the successor to Reform) parties to one another, be seen in the contours of Australian parliamentary politics in 1916-17..."

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

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the most uneasy and unlikely of allies. Gore himself commented on the matter, noting in a letter written in early June "what curious thing it is, that where but a year ago our sons were off to the hills of Nashville and fields of Virginia to soak their red blood into those soils to arrest the advance to the damned Yankee, now we look at the Yank rifleman and extend our hands so he can pass us the weapon." Politically, it made for an extraordinarily awkward position on both ends. At least officially, the Hughes administration did not entirely support the Republican forces, maintaining its line in communiques that it was an "internal matter" within the "territory of the enemy combatant." This was wholly a diplomatic nicety for foreign consumption, because vessels passing via Nicaragua had a curious way of finding themselves at port in rebel-held Corpus Christi with guns, ammunition, and even explosives on hand.

Full-throated support for Texas was impossible in Philadelphia, however, due to the matter of abolition, an absolute key demand for the Americans and a question that badly split the Republicans in two. Hughes had become a convert to the cause over the past several years and the war had radicalized him; as early as 1914, he had declared that it would be the policy of the United States to end slavery wherever the Army occupied territory. His likely successor Elihu Root and the likely next Secretary of State, Henry Cabot Lodge, were even more dedicated militants, viewing the war as fundamentally a moral crusade against the evils of the "peculiar institution" and the society it supported. As such, the men who most in Philadelphia were certain would design the peace treaty with the Confederacy come 1917 were unwilling to bend until, as Cabot Lodge phrased it in a speech that summer, "every shackle on every wrist and ankle is broken forever and its iron melted."

In practical terms, this meant that the United States - while having made clear it viewed the upstart Republican government in Laredo as the legitimate government in Texas - could not formally support the Texan cause against the Ferguson Loyalists, even if their actions plainly revealed their preference. Furthermore, it placed Garner in a difficult situation. The core of Republican support came from the smallholders of West Texas and the Hill Country, urban laborers in the state's nascent industries, and Tejanos of the vast haciendas of South Texas who while in semi-peonage were nonetheless free men - in other words, the mob-like army marching upon San Antonio was hardly composed of slavery's most dedicated defenders. But abolition was still a deeply unpopular idea to many Republican fighters who took pride in their Texan ancestry and viewed the peculiar institution, and more fundamentally the strict social hierarchy flowing from legal white supremacy, as integral to their identity. It was also the case that Texas' rapid growth over the past several decades had been driven in part by domestic migration from elsewhere in the Confederacy rather than purely from overseas or Mexico and the United States; as such, especially in the balmier, more plantation-driven economy of East Texas, support for slavery remained extremely high, and so regardless of how the campaign advanced, a cleavage of Texas in two remained a grim possibility over the question if Republican leadership came out in favor of the question.

Garner thus pursued a policy of vacillation, remaining steadfast that his cause was simply to restore rightful Texan sovereignty "to all Texan clay" and refused to answer otherwise straightforward questions about whether he would support abolition. "We are Texans," he would huff, "and we do not have a price, at least not one we do not name ourselves." This was a point of view roundly opposed by Gore, who had come around to a strong position of support of abolition on its own merits years ago but had kept such views private in order to have a political career, and to a lesser extent Johnson, who came to believe that Texas would, eventually, be forced to yield on the matter, suggesting in a one-on-one meeting with Garner that both men referenced in their diaries that "Texas may eventually have to choose between the Negro or the Republic remaining in bondage." Gore and Johonson nevertheless never forced Garner to make such a choice in public out of the same pragmatic considerations of avoiding a massive rupture in Republican fortunes just as they seized San Antonio in a stunning shock in early June, a state of affairs that had reverberations across the Confederacy.

Though there is not much contemporaneous documentation that the United States overtly pursued policy in response to the precarious position of Garner and the Republicans on slavery, the actions of the Americans in Texas at least suggest that there was some level of understanding who the real enemy was and that the slave question would have to be saved for later, and that in the meantime the Republicans were an extremely useful internal catspaw. The skies of Texas were filled with American airships and airplanes that shot down Confederate enemies and kept the outgunned rebels from being strafed from the air; while the idea of Dallas being evacuated by the US Army was an absolute nonstarter, they nonetheless did not advance much further south and instead focused on consolidating attacks towards Arkansas via Texarkana and Fort Smith, putting further pressure on Confederate supply lines into Texas as cavalry and later infantry closed in on Little Rock from south, west and north, eventually seizing the city entirely almost bloodlessly in mid-July and effectively ending Arkansas' participation in the war.

This remarkable turnaround in Republican fortunes bolstered Garner's campaign for legitimacy as his forces marched rapidly from San Antonio northwards, and on July 4th, 1916 - the same day that Atlanta was falling far to the east - the Republican Army engaged with the Loyalist militia as well as Confederate forces immediately south of Austin. Despite being outgunned thanks to light artillery and some rudimentary landships, the Republicans with heavy losses eventually pressed their way into the city on July 7th and raised the Bonnie Blue Flag of rebellion over the Texas State Capitol after tearing down the Confederate Southern Cross from its grounds. Ferguson was unfortunately not in the city, having fled towards Galveston days earlier and seeming likely to evacuate Texas entirely as Confederate forces now under threat from both Corpus Christi and Austin by Republican divisions and the United States Army in Dallas and Texarkana regrouped in a line behind the lower Brazos and upper Neches Rivers.

With Austin in hand, the legitimacy to the public of the Republican force was largely consolidated - the course of the war from then on seemed in many ways inevitable, as it had been when Texas threw off Santa Ana in 1835 and Lincoln in 1862. [1] Now in this third revolution, Texas was ready to chart its own course - it only now needed to throw Richmond's forces at last over the Sabine to secure Garner's "every inch of Texan clay" pledge to his people..."

- Republic Reborn

[1] Remember - this book is written from a fairly nationalist Texan point of view

 

[KingSweden24]

"...strained logistics to their breaking point. The Confederacy was already reliant on the rail network that crossed Georgia and its loss through Atlanta's investment and fall in early July was a critical, indeed mortal, wound to the war effort, but other cross-Confederate railroads still ran further south, with a particularly crucial route connecting Charleston and New Orleans via Savannah, Valdosta, and Montgomery now the key artery for Confederate logistics flowing from unmolested Louisiana and Mississippi as well as the foundries and steel mills of central Alabama to battlefields east. As if some form of divine punishment [1], however, the Atlantic hurricane season of 1916 was a particularly brutal one, with nine hurricanes making landfall in mainland North America between the middle of June and September. Tropical storms created rainy and muddy conditions all across the South, but particularly strong storms landing near New Orleans on the Gulf Coast in early July followed by a major storm making landfall over Charleston and causing some of the most severe flooding in North Carolina in decades just as the Confederate government was attempting to consolidate its position in Charlotte as a temporary wartime capital. The worst storm of all struck East Texas, a deluge rivaling the 1900 Galveston hurricane, that wreaked havoc over Confederate attempts to hold rebel forces at bay in a state that had declared independence and enjoyed more than tacit support from both the United States and Mexico.

The hurricane season thus caused severe delays on troop and supply movements at a time when both the soldiery and civilian populations of Dixie had hit their breaking points; some rail spurs were abandoned after being badly damaged in flooding, because there was insufficient iron or manpower to repair them. While most Confederate historians ignore the impact of the storms of June thru late August of 1916 - and in particular the devastating Pensacola hurricane that October, when the end was very clearly nigh - it bears mentioning that the markedly violent weather events of that summer came at perhaps the most inopportune time they could have and surely contributed to the rapid erosion over the next several months of Confederate warmaking capability that coincided with the final collapse of Confederate morale, fighting capability and government in late October and early November..."

- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War

[1] By a vengeful God or a TL author who detests what the CSA stands for? YMMV!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...conditions. Twenty men typically slept to one barrack in tight, small bunk beds, and the days were largely aimless, beyond roll calls at sunup, noon, and sundown. Long in his diaries remarked that prisoners at Camp Six played baseball or rugby regularly, because there was little else to do, though he befriended an Irish-born guard named Thomas O'Flanagan who passed along books.

Camp Six was, generally speaking, regarded as one of the better administered prisoner-of-war camps in the entire conflict, located on the outskirts of Chicago and supplied with sufficient food and clothing for the harsh winter of 1915-16. By the summer of 1916, the practice of limited prisoner exchanges had almost entirely ended as the Yanks elected to instead make the manpower squeeze for the Confederacy hurt even more, and new camps sprung up near the frontlines that were considerably less well-run. Horror stories of desperate sons of Dixie eating mice or the soles of their shoes for food, or being beaten by enthusiastically sadistic Negro camp guards recruited from Philadelphia or Cincinnati specifically for the purpose of breaking the wills of captured soldiers, trickled southwards for years after the war ended, and as he began to dabble in politics upon release Long began to embellish some of the tales of his time at Camp Six in order to more closely align himself with the ordeals of men captured well after the Fall of Nashville. In his recollections on the campaign trail, he had refused three prisoner exchanges so other men could go first, and he had had to protect a number of his fellow inmates from particularly savage guards - in reality, if anybody at Camp Six died, it was not of starvation or disease but of boredom.

What made Long's lengthy eighteen months in Illinois important for his political development, however, was his exposure to men and ideas from across the Confederacy and his realization of what had laid at the heart of the NFLP or Tillmanism or any other rejection of the plantation oligarchy he had always hated. There was so much in common with the men of the high Appalachian hollers of Kentucky or Tennessee, or the difficult Carolina Sandhills, or the fruit fields and cattle runs of central Florida. In long, late night debates inside their barracks, Long and his fellow inmates established a certain beleaguered camaraderie where they grew closer and more understanding of much of what was going on in the Confederacy at that time, and much of Long's political sophistication can be traced to those discussions in the bunks or around a fire at Camp Six..."

- Every Man a Kingfish: The Life and Rise to Power of Huey Long

 

[KingSweden24]

"...for a war often defined in the public consciousness by grim trench warfare, blasted gray battlefields and brutal house-to-house urban fighting under the shadows of artillery sieges, the Great American War nonetheless has several dramatic moments, occurring roughly once per year, that strike a more unique scope, such as the Sack of Washington, the heroic stand upon the Susquehanna and the total annihilation of the Confederate fleet at Hilton Head. But perhaps nothing is in the end associated as mythologically with the conclusion of the war as John Pershing's March to the Sea through Georgia, a campaign that effectively defined the concept of "total war" for decades to come and revealed the capabilities of industrialized warfare..."

- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100

"...preparations. By July of 1916, the wrinkles in training that had plagued the United States for much of the first year were gone and, to his credit, War Secretary Stimson had devised a veritable machine that was cranking out cohorts of roughly thirty thousand fresh recruits every two weeks as regularly as artillery shells were flying off the shelves and integrating them carefully with veteran cadres across both major fronts. Following the seizure of Atlanta, Pershing spent the next several weeks allowing his men rest, bringing in new fresh recruits totaling close to four divisions as well as reserves held back in Tennessee for the previous campaign, and getting every landship, airship and airplane available brought to staging grounds north, east, and south of Atlanta. As mid-August arrived, the preparations were complete, and the moment was nigh - it was time for the March to the Sea to begin.

At its outset, Pershing knew that the campaign he was embarking on would be absolutely critical, for two distinct reasons. The first was purely geographic - the supply lines via Kentucky and Tennessee tied down tens of thousands of troops to maintain and protect even with a noticeable decline in partisan activity by the Confederate Irregular Division, and as part of the final push into the Carolinas, he wanted another port available to him through which to bring in materiel - namely, the excellent deepwater port at Savannah, which while heavily damaged by frequent Naval raids nonetheless could support such seaborne support. That seizing Savannah and everything in between would also have the side effect of cutting the Confederacy in two logistically was purely a bonus. The second reason was something else - Pershing at Long Branch the previous year had declared that the Confederates, whom he knew to view the war in entirely existential terms, would not cease making war until it was impossible for them to do so any longer, and now was the chance to make good on his proposition that the war could only end when the Confederates no longer saw a distinction between a surrender of choice and a surrender of necessity. As such, the Georgia Campaign needed to do more than simply press on from the burnt remnants of Atlanta - it needed to destroy Georgia and her citizens, not just on the battlefield but economically and psychologically as well.

Pershing grouped his forces into three separate cadres, with his main force departing Atlanta on August 15th under cover of light breeze and close to a hundred airplanes in the sky overhead with the support of two full landship divisions and traditional cavalry deployed as scouting pickets on the far flanks. Two smaller groups, totaling about a hundred and fifty thousand men apiece, under Menoher and Wittenmyer, made their way out in other directions, with Menoher's army aimed at Columbus on the Chattahoochee River and Albany and Valdosta beyond it, with the aim to drive all the way to Florida by the end of October, and Wittenmyer's columns curving out eastwards to take Augusta and to screen against any counterattack towards Pershing's larger but more vulnerable force from the Carolinas, as Pershing drew his supply lines down to an absolute minimum in order to move more effectively. In total, close to six hundred thousand men departed Atlanta, facing forces that at best equaled about half that number scattered across Georgia but in defensive positions..."

- Pershing

"...no quarter given; Patrick, a talented general but no match for the manpower and machine disadvantages, made every day a fighting retreat across the entirety of the theater, but there was little he could do other that send his artillery further back and make Pershing's advances increasingly difficult while send irregulars further and further north to harass and disrupt Pershing's movements.

But in the end, Pershing was fighting not just Patrick's men but the Confederate psyche. Women and children fled as landship squadrons rolled over hills felling trees and launching incendiary shells into barns. Horses were confiscated while pigs and cows slaughtered to feed the marching army; as the campaign occurred late in summer well before harvest was to begin, unripe crop were pulled from the earth and fields left fallow behind them. Railroad spurs that were of no use to Pershing's force were torn up, sometimes wrapped around trees in "Pershing ties" and sometimes their steel shipped north to where they could be of more use to the invaders, while depots were burned to the ground, grain silos plundered and houses confiscated for use of Yankee soldiery. As all this occurred, high in the sky planes circled, shooting down everything that the Confederacy had left to send up and using new, rudimentary "bombers" to destroy bridges that Pershing's army had not identified a need for in their crossings. A large, wandering slave mob followed behind Pershing's forces, unsure of what came next but threatened with the same destitution as the White citizenry of my native Georgia if they did not stick close to the marching Yankees.

Pershing took Macon on August 28th and then spent much of September slowly working his way through what is known as the Onion Belt, fanning his forces out in a wide arc of artillery and landships to spread Patrick thin and, one must assume, find more Georgian towns to destroy. The sky glowed red across the state every night as fires burned in groves, towns and farmsteads, and every morning those thrust from their homes looked out at dawns marked black and gray..."

- The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916

"...industrial center and also one of the more diversified agricultural economies of the Confederacy, all of which was destroyed between Pershing setting out from Atlanta on August 15th until his capture of Savannah after an eight-day battle with naval support across flooded rice fields on October 1st, barely a month before the end of the war.

Nothing that was carried out in Georgia compares remotely to the behavior of the Confederate Army in occupied Maryland, but nonetheless it bears saying that were it to occur today, Pershing's treatment of Georgia - and South Carolina the month after - would constitute war crimes. Anywhere between two to three thousand men were summarily executed by Pershing's forces according to Confederate records, a charge that the United States continues to vociferously deny; Confederate records also conclude that a similar number of women and older girls were raped. While such atrocities were not institutional in the way that Company R's terror campaign in Maryland were, and Confederate historiography is hyper-focused on the idea that the war was a campaign of gang rape of pure Dixie white women by Yankee and freedmen, one must nonetheless presume that a frustrated but confident force in the field certainly may have committed depraved behaviors as they burned a massive arc through the Confederacy's heartland.

Towns like Macon, Columbus and Albany were absolutely destroyed; Augusta survived purely thanks to its necessity for crossing into South Carolina, and Valdosta escaped fairly unscathed thanks in part to the paucity of its defenses. Entire villages were wiped clean from the map, their populations scattered across south-central Georgia in refugee trains fleeing south, west, and sometimes north behind Yankee lines where at least there was the possibility of food. Some industrial centers in Georgia still have not recovered to this day; many farming towns did not have full harvests again until the early 1920s, and thanks to the March to the Sea an estimated hundred thousand Georgians starved to death, most of them women and young children, in the winter of 1916-17..."

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

",,,congratulatory telegrams upon Pershing's seizure of Savannah on October 1st and Patrick's surrender along with what remained of his men in the city's ruins before an honor guard of Marines who had seized it from the sea; five days later, Menoher signaled that his men had, after three days of fighting, seized Tallahassee and several cavalry pickets had spied the Gulf of Mexico. Both symbolically and physically, the Confederacy in early October had been slashed in half, its heartland utterly gutted of industry and a crucial harvest for feeding its troops, and American forces now capable of feeding an invasion of the Carolinas from both Atlanta and her long supply tails as well as Savannah's battered but intact docks. The enemy was utterly broken, with telegraph lines cut to prevent communication from Charlotte to western strongholds like Birmingham, Vicksburg and New Orleans - though there was another five weeks of fighting ahead, with his aggressive push and the unstoppable machinery of American industrial war, Pershing had effectively ended the war..."

- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100

 

[KingSweden24]

"...steeped in traditions that to outsiders seemed remarkably opaque and difficult to understand, in some ways similar to the disputes that had driven the Old Believers out of the Russian Church and, in some cases, out of Russia entirely. As it was, Orthodoxy to Western observers seemed almost mystical in its rites (partially just out of familiarity with Catholicism's own hierarchy of mysteries and practices) but within Russia, especially in rural areas, Orthodoxy came with a dash of unique occultism that transcended Christendom and in some cases hearkened back to Slavic paganism itself.

It was in this way that practices that would have been dismissed as outright heretical by Rome found favor not just in the mir but also in major Russian cities. Priests who claimed to be healers and could divine fortunes from the stars were tacitly accepted not just in various parishes but found to be not charlatans or amusing entertainers but rather people who were taken seriously. Otherwise-secular upper-class bourgeoisie who found the rites of Orthodoxy gauche were drawn to cosmology, and books on theosophy were just as popular in the parlors of St. Petersburg as they were increasingly in New York and Philadelphia across the ocean where the movement really found its wings.

The permeation of occultism in Russian culture in the late 1910s was part of a general tradition within the country that nonetheless became more sophisticated and, for the first time, studied by the elite, and emerged as a key point of dispute within Russian conservative circles of whether it was a tradition of culture or a decadent wedge within it..."

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

(Hat tip to @Couperin for the idea of writing on Rasputin-adjacent occultism and its popularity in Tsarist Russia)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...whatever it may have said on paper, the governor in Yunnan did not in fact run the province, and despite the number of French "advisors" (usually Hoa Vietnamese, people of Chinese descent from Hanoi or the hinterlands) quadrupling between 1915 and 1918 to help continue to steer matters in their unofficial semi-colony in far-flung southwestern China, the operations of the Tang cousins were nearly impossible to interdict. Indeed, many of the French officials began either turning a blind eye out of fear for their safety or even participating in the opium operation in Yunnan, and by late 1916 Haiphong had emerged not just as Vietnam's chief port for the import of finished industrial goods but as one of the epicenters of the export of opium around the world, supported by French customs officials on the take and a small and concentrated community of Hoa people loyal to the Tangs.

The strategic placement of Yunnan and its relative isolation had already helped the Tangs cultivate their position, and their loyalty to the Guomindang, while not absolute, was assumed in Canton, especially by Sun Yat-sen, who while vaguely aware of their opium-running activities thought it a necessary evil to finance the export of Tridenist, Asianist revolutionary ideas. Yunnan was far enough away from Nanking, and too dependent on local bosses in villages and farm districts, that President Li's armies were unlikely to ever bother the Tangs, and tax collection was dodgy at best in the Second Republic as it was.

Rather, the proceeds of the Tang's booming business went not just into the GMD's pockets to finance its activities both in China and abroad, but increasingly into the hands of revolutionary cells across northern Vietnam, central Burma, and the northeastern provinces of the Raj. These territories had in common the fact htat they were hilly, forested and remote from major centers of power; the only rail connection into Yunnan ran from Hanoi, and the border between China, French Indochina, and British Burma and India existed only as a line on a map. Yunnan's isolated valleys proved perfect places for gun-runners to connect with Ghadarite rebels in India or transfer opium crops to Vietnamese gangsters; the association of opium with revolutionary activity rapidly began to solidify both in Asia and abroad, where sympathy for the Guomindang decreased considerably in both London and Paris due to the broadly-held view that the Canton-based political movement was directly financing Pan-Asian rebellions.

Support for the Li administration from Europe thus grew considerably, in the form of money and arms, much of which wound up in Guomindang hands anyways. It further served to suggest to Sun and others that the emerging ties between organized crime and their party operations were necessary to counteract European "imperialism" and associated Li as a Western catspaw, further deteriorating relationships between the opposition and the government while papering over the brutality with which the Tangs enforced their rule in Yunnan..."

- The Opium Lords: A History of China's Drug Cartels

 

[KingSweden24]

"...known to both friends and others as the "Very Amiables." That being said, the marriage was by the mid-1910s far from perfect, in part due to the strain of a haemophiliac heir whom Irene frequently encouraged to renounce his rights to the throne on account of his health, and it is here that the "Magyar Mistress," a figure of legend in European historiography, comes into play.

Heinrich himself never admitted to taking a mistress in any of his limited diaries, and Irene's allusions to infidelity on the part of her husband are subjective enough that some doubt exists as to what, precisely, she knew and was referring to. Nonetheless, a fair deal of scholarship suggests that there was indeed a mistress whom Heinrich took sometime between 1914 and 1916 and that the relationship was on-and-off for approximately four or five years, concluding during the Central European War in or around late 1920 or early 1921. The mystery of her identity has led to the moniker "Magyar Mistress" or, alternatively, "the Hungarian Woman," and the fact that it remains a genuine matter of dispute whether she existed is part of the mystique.

It should be noted that the Hungarian Woman has some level of geopolitical implications as well; in Austria, for instance, even to this day it is taken as a given that not only was she real but that she was influential in turning Heinrich's opinion increasingly against Vienna as dangerous negotiations over the renewal of the Ausgleich between the two halves of the Habsburg Empire in 1917 loomed, while Hungarians - who hold Heinrich in very high esteem - enjoy the idea that their nationalism was secured by the efforts of a daughter of the nation in the heart of Berlin. While such a simple story has a certain romantic appeal, it oversimplifies what was really going on in Germany at that time.

While Heinrich, as this book as repeatedly explored, was ambivalent about Prussianism, the German government was not, and in Hungary many of the Prussian elite saw a mirror of their own agrarian, estate-dominated land; parallels were even drawn between the Winged Hussars (despite their Polish origin) and the Teutonic Knights in defending Christendom against barbarian hordes. More generally, the Congress of Budapest and the explosion of Magyarphilic art and literature that had flowed from it had an impact most definitively in Germany, and Magyarphilia crossed ideological lines - for the same reasons that Prussian junkers admired the magnatic rule of Hungary (despite said magnates often being Vienna's most militant supporters), socialists and liberals in Germany empathized with the working and middle classes of Hungary denied suffrage that Germans had enjoyed universally for decades even with the three-class franchise intact in Prussia.

At the risk of oversimplifying, as 1916 turned to 1917 and the Hungarian Crisis developed fully, Germany was perhaps more sympathetic to Hungarian causes, culture and concerns than anywhere else in Europe, at precisely the time when Hungarians themselves were beginning to feel that Vienna's hostility to them was rising dramatically. This sympathy at the top of the German government may indeed have been influenced by a "Magyar Mistress," but it certainly had a solid foundation across German politics and society as well, and this did not go unnoticed in Budapest - or, more crucially, Vienna and Paris..."

- Heinrich: The Life and Legacy of Germany's Goldkaiser [1]

[1] So I've read oblique references to Henirch having a Hungarian mistress in a few places, but have been unable to turn up her identity or if she even existed. So I chose to stick with that mystery in the narrative rather than ditch this due to incomplete research.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...collapsed on September 9th, three years to the day after the Confederacy's declaration of war against the United States, a fact not lost on the commanders on other side. With the defenses at Lynchburg overrun and Petersburg under direct threat now from both north, east and west, Lejeune had little choice but to begin consolidating his forces further south, placing his new node of command near Greensboro and re-routing reserves, including landship divisions, south of the Roanoke River and its tributary the Dan. A token force in Petersburg stayed behind to tie down Yankee forces to prevent a fighting retreat, but under a barrage of artillery, aerial attack and with the rail routes to Raleigh cut on September 20th, the city surrendered to Hall's army two days later. Virginia was, for all intents and purposes, entirely lost.

The retreat to the new Roanoke-Dan Line in mid-September was both a military success, and a political disaster. Lejeune was able to regroup behind his new and excellent defensive line with short supply trains unthreatened by Yankees from either sky or land, a condition he had not enjoyed in the entire time he had been in command of the Army of the East. But as it occurred simultaneously with the advance of Pershing's forces through Georgia, and preceded the Little March to the Sea in Alabama by a few weeks, it happened during the final six weeks of the war, when few in Charlotte were going to commend anybody for an orderly retreat with minimal losses of men or supplies. Lejeune had shown the competency for which he was famed - indeed, many would say that his ability to force the Yankees to fight for every inch of Virginia between the Rappahannock and the Roanoke through all of 1916 despite the rapidly deteriorating Confederate economy proved his talents - but he had done it when it was too late.

The fall of Savannah in early October essentially slashed the Confederacy into three pieces, with sparsely populated Florida cut off from the Carolinas and the western states by Pershing's force blasting its way across Georgia. This meant that, for all Lejeune's efforts, the leadership of the Confederacy was trapped inside the Carolinas, now threatened from both north and southwest. While North Carolina was indeed the most untouched of all the states, that was little comfort as both states were essentially besieged and the US Navy rerouted to flatten what little was left of ports such as Charleston, Wilmington and New Bern. There was little harvest to speak of and estimates suggested as many as half a million souls could starve in the Carolinas alone - it was plain as day, especially to Lejeune, that the war was lost.

Indeed, it was plain to a great many people with the exception of the President. Even Senator Martin was beginning to silently accept the inevitable, stating in a comment on the makeshift Senate floor in Charlotte's Trade Hall, "We are prisoners of these two great states, unable to leave and maneuver, with few souls left to throw at the Yankees." Disillusionment was high amongst the hundreds of thousands of starving, sick and emaciated Confederates left in the field, in the Carolinas or elsewhere; despite the very real threat from marauding Home Guardsmen, desertion tripled in September and further sextupled throughout October as men saw little point in dying in the field for what was increasingly an inevitable end, while pocketed units surrendered to Yankees and were often taken aback by the magnanimity they were shown by their equally exhausted enemies.

But in the executive's residence in Charlotte, Vardaman remained convinced that, if nothing else, a redoubt in the Carolinas could be held, behind the Savannah and Roanoke Rivers, from which the Confederacy could "make resistance so terrible that the Yankee will not dare cross in" and often wandered the halls of the manor late at night muttering to himself, occasionally even wandering Charlotte at night to speak to citizens and soldiers in the increasingly fortified but anxious war capital. "Surrender is for cowards," he declared to a befuddled Kernan and other members of the ASO in an October 1 meeting meant to persuade the President to immediately telegram a request for surrender "at current lines;" that this was the view of the commander-in-chief was disseminated only in the Carolinas, for telegram and telephone cables westwards had been cut, and Confederate forces in Texas, Alabama, and central Mississippi spent the rest of the next month and a half in alternating waves of collapse and mass surrender. Kernan, for his part, elected to head to Raleigh, unbeknownst to the administration forming a small clique of like-minded officers who were planning on crossing to Yankee lines to attempt to negotiate a secret peace behind the President's back.

Whatever Vardaman's motivations, the irony is that the Roanoke-Dan Line did, in fact, hold until the Armistice; if nothing else credits the choice of Lejeune to make Dixie's last stand and frustrate his counterpart Hall in the extreme south of Virginia for seven weeks with dwindling supplies, then that stands on its own..."

- The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916

 

[KingSweden24]

"...anxiety.

It was lost on nobody that Root had never himself run on a general election ticket for any office, and though he was - for a lifelong bureaucrat, at least - a fairly talented orator who had spoken at every Liberal convention since 1888, a great deal of pressure was made to keep him "above the fray" of a general election campaign, both due to his rust as a campaigner and to create a sense of inevitability around his candidacy and lean into the public perception of him as a talented administrator hard at work in Philadelphia to bring the war to a conclusion.

Root did not mind this, and his contribution to the campaign was remaining cloistered in the capital meeting with diplomats and dignitaries while promising "the grand plan for peace" that would follow the conclusion of the presidential campaign and the war, meeting well-wishers at his fairly modest townhouse on Chestnut Street and giving interviews to any journalist, domestic or foreign, who needed a quote, all while a legion of surrogates fanned out across New York and the competitive Midwest where the election would be won or lost to make his case. Hughes was highly reluctant, due to his concerns for decorum while the war was still ongoing, to make many campaign stops, as was Vice President Hadley; instead, Root relied upon figures as diverse as Pennsylvania Senator Boies Penrose and American Bar Association chairman George Wickersham to rally conservatives put off by the Hughes Presidency's statism to the Hiram Johnsons, Bainbridge Colbys and Richard Yateses of the world to speak plainly to progressives about the need to keep the momentum of the Hughes years headed forward and "keep the fingers of Tammany off of the articles of peace."

The campaign of 1916 did not occur in a vacuum, of course, and was subsumed by events in the South but also, increasingly, at home. August and September of 1916 are remembered for Pershing's March to the Sea, and October for the final liberation of Texas and the mass surrenders in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida that placed American landships in spitting distance of New Orleans, and popular history acts in many ways as if nothing of import occurred other than the rapid collapse of the Confederacy in the final four months of the war starting in Atlanta and Richmond. But the first signs of economic trouble revealed itself as early as the late summer of 1916; shipyards in Seattle and Oakland had long since begun shuttering their production lines or converting tonnage to civilian vessels after two years of trying to produce as many naval hulls as they could, and unemployment in both cities more than doubled over the course of late 1916, presaging issues as munitions factories, textile mills producing uniforms, and other industrial production for wartime began gradually slowing down their output in anticipation that the needs of December 1916 would be well below those of September 1916. Stimson did his best at trying to manage this slowdown, using Root's deputies to secure contracts to sell munitions brokered through Drexel & Morgan, but hours being cut was already a discussion being had in local newspapers as the campaign advanced.

The economic minds behind the American war machine were fairly divided on what, if anything, to do about this issue. Much of the labor that swelled American industry in 1913-16 was foreign-born, and many politicians within the Liberal Party ambivalent about immigration suggested that a labor surplus could perhaps persuade unemployed Italians, Poles and Serbs who had made great sums in the war years to return home to start families and live comfortably in Europe. Other figures, such as New York's powerful financier George Baker or the soon-to-be-infamous Andrew Mellon, [1] viewed the coming labor glut and wind down of industrial wartime production as an opportunity to perhaps undo some of the "statist" rationing and economically nationalist policies Hughes had put in place that they believed, incorrectly, would be illusory and temporary.

While the consortium of bankers and investors who had helped finance the war, led by J.P. "Jack" Morgan, Jr. were not the shadowy cabal of puppeteers in the Root era that they were often perceived as or even particularly allied to the administration - Morgan was heavily exposed to massive amounts of French loans and assets and spent little time concerned with domestic American politics after the end of the war, while Baker never forgave Root his full-throated support of a peacetime income tax and made it a point not to associate - the men who had collectively financed the behemoth that crushed the Bloc Sud were in sharp disagreement on what the postwar period would look like, only that a sharp break from the economic trajectory of the Hearst and Hughes years was needed..." [2][3][4]

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

[1] Foreshadowing...
[2] Suffice to say this is not going to end well, for Root or anybody else.
[3] As a further addendum to this, the US finds itself in a very different situation here having Morgan, Baker et al not be the financiers for Britain and France, and thus emerging as a net creditor, but rather having them finance an American war, which means that the balance sheet facing the US in terms of its red ledger is primarily domestic. This is a big part of what makes the USA's economic foundations in the dire 1917-21 period so shaky; it has ballooning debt after the war and will have a deflationary, fiscally tight-fisted government in place during that time right as demobilization occurs and they have to start servicing that debt
[4] The idea for this update, for whatever it is worth, is based on the 1918-19 and 1945 recessions, which began even before the war ended but when it was obvious that peace was at hand and wartime production started to rapidly wind down in anticipation.

 

[KingSweden24]

United States elections, 1916

United States Presidential election, 1916
​

Elihu Root of New York/James R. Garfield of Ohio (Liberal) - 296 Electoral Votes, 49.1% Popular Vote

New York - 63
Pennsylvania - 51
Illinois - 38
California - 24
Massachusetts - 23
Michigan - 21
Indiana - 20
New Jersey - 20
Connecticut - 10
Maine - 8
Rhode Island - 6
New Hampshire - 5
Vermont - 4
Delaware - 3

George B. McClellan, Jr. of New York/Newton D. Baker of Ohio (Democratic) - 203 Electoral Votes, 46.1% Popular Vote

Ohio - 32
Missouri - 23
Wisconsin - 17
Iowa - 16
Minnesota - 16
Kansas - 13
Maryland - 11
Nebraska - 10
Washington - 10
West Virginia - 10
Dakota - 9
Colorado - 8
Oregon - 7
Montana - 5
New Mexico - 5
Idaho - 5
Wyoming - 3
Nevada - 3

Arthur Reimer of Massachusetts/Allan Louis Benson of New York (Socialist) - 0 Electoral Votes, 3.8% Popular Vote

James Franklin Hanly of Indiana/Daniel Sheen of Illinois (Prohibition) - 0 Electoral Votes, 0.9% Popular Vote

United States Senate elections, 1916​

While the Liberals achieved what had eluded them since 1900 - organizing the United States Senate - it was purely by winning in Indiana, where the retiring Ben Shively had died in the spring of 1916 and Representative James Watson narrowly defeated appointed incumbent Thomas Taggart; with the win and a Liberal Vice President in James Garfield, the Liberals had a majority purely by tiebreaker, meaning that any absences, deaths or resignations would have ended their majority on the spot. Indeed, it was a dismaying result for the party, as they had hoped that coattails from Root that never materialized would help them pick off seats in places like Minnesota or Missouri, but this did not transpire. The Senate map of 1916 was narrowy thanks to their gains six years earlier in Class 1, and a precarious majority awaited them. Sons of dead Senators successfully defended their seats in Rhode Island (Sprague) and West Virginia (Davis), while colorful new Western Senators like Hiram Johnson and Henry Ashurst joined the body in what would be the start of long and famous careers.

CA: John D. Works (Liberal) Retired; Hiram Johnson (Liberal) ELECTED (Liberal Hold)
CT: George P. McLean (Liberal) Re-Elected
DE: J. Edward Addicks (Liberal) Re-Elected
IN: Benjamin Shively (Democrat) Died in Office; Thomas Taggart (Democrat) Appointed and DEFEATED; James E. Watson (Liberal) ELECTED (L+1)
ME: Frederick Hale (Liberal) ELECTED [1]
MD: John W. Smith (Democrat) Re-Elected
MA: Henry Cabot Lodge (Liberal) Re-Elected and Resigned to be Secretary of State; Frederick Gillett (Liberal) Appointed [1]
MI: Charles E. Townsend (Liberal) Re-Elected
MN: John Lind (Democrat) Re-Elected
MO: James A. Reed (Democrat) Re-Elected
NE: Richard Lee Metcalfe (Democrat) Re-Elected
NV: Denver Sylvester Dickerson (Democrat) Re-Elected
NJ: Joseph Sherman Frelinghuysen (Liberal) Re-Elected
NM: Bernard Rodey (Democrat) Retired; Henry Ashurst (Democrat) ELECTED (Democratic Hold)
NY: Bainbridge Colby (Liberal) Re-Elected
OH: Frank Monnett (Liberal) Re-Elected
PA: Philander Knox (Liberal) Re-Elected
RI: William Sprague IV (Liberal) Died in Office; William Sprague V (Liberal) Appointed and ELECTED (Liberal Hold)
VT: Carroll S. Page (Liberal) Re-Elected
WV: Thomas S. Riley (Democrat) Re-Elected
WV (special): John J. Davis (Democrat) Died in Office; John W. Davis (Democrat) ELECTED (Democratic Hold)
WI: Francis McGovern (Liberal) Re-Elected
WY: John Eugene Osborne (Democrat) Re-Elected

United States House elections, 1916​

As in the Senate, House Liberals had presumptuously and arrogantly assumed that the victory in the war would carry them to more than 250, perhaps more than 260, seats in the House; these hopes were quickly dashed as dozens of Democrats won reelection more easily than expected and the eventual gains were muted at 21 pickups, heavily concentrated in New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, the three states that had largely cost them their majority two years earlier; in a warning sign, they failed to defeat any of several Democratic freshmen in Massachusetts, and Democrats successfully warded off Socialist challenges even in marginal Mining Belt seats that had been thought vulnerable. Nonetheless, a narrow win is a win, and by returning the gavel to James Mann they now had a narrow but workable trifecta in Philadelphia for the 65th Congress.

United States State elections, 1916​

Liberals had hoped to undo some of the damage of the 1914 midterms in state legislatures and gubernatorial races but found these ambitions flustered even though they made small gains in many states; nonetheless, they flipped the Indiana Governor's mansion with James Goodrich, and held Illinois with Frank O. Lowden, the two biggest prizes on the 1916 map, while flipping Washington state with Roland Hartley, the sole Liberal to hold that office between 1901 and 1949. Democrats, for their part, successfully held the governorships in Missouri, Delaware, West Virginia, and Minnesota.

65th United States Congress​

Senate: 32L/FL-32D

President of the Senate: James Garfield (L-OH)
Senate President pro tempore: William Chandler (L-NH)
Chairman of Senate Liberal Conference: Boies Penrose (L-PA)
Chairman of Senate Democratic Conference: John Kern (D-IN)

California
1. Hiram Johnson (L) (1917)
3. James D. Phelan (D) (1903)

Colorado
2. John Shafroth (D) (1913)
3. John Andrew Martin (D) (1915)

Connecticut
1. George P. McLean (L) (1911)
3. Henry Roberts (L) (1911)

Dakota
2. Fountain Thompson (D) (1901)
3. John Burke (D) (1915)

Delaware
1. J. Edward Addicks (L) (1905)
2. Henry A. du Pont (L) (1907)

Idaho
2. Fred Dubois (D) (1907)
3. Moses Alexander (D) (1905)

Illinois
2. Joseph Medill McCormick (L) (1914)
3. Richard Yates Jr. (L) (1909)

Indiana
1. James E. Waston (L) (1917)
3. John W. Kern (D) (1903)

Iowa
2. William D. Jamieson (D) (1913)
3. Claude R. Porter (D) (1909)

Kansas
2. Dudley Doolittle (D) (1913)
3. George H. Hodges (D) (1909)

Maine
1. Frederick Hale (L) (1911)
2. Frank Guernsey (L) (1911)

Maryland
1. John W. Smith (D) (1908)
3. Blair Lee (D) (1913)

Massachusetts
1. Fred Gillett (L) (1916) [1]
2. John Weeks (L) (1913)

Michigan
1. Charles E. Townsend (L) (1911)
2. William Alden Smith (L) (1907)

Minnesota
1. John Lind (D) (1911)
2. Knute Nelson (D) (1901)

Missouri
1. James A. Reed (D) (1905)
3. James T. Lloyd (D) (1903)

Montana
2. Thomas Walsh (D) (1913)
3. Henry L. Myers (D) (1915)

Nebraska
1. Richard Lee Metcalfe (D) (1905)
2. Gilbert Hitchcock (D) (1913)

Nevada
1. Denver Sylvester Dickerson (1911)
3. Francis Newlands (D) (1903)

New Hampshire
2. William Chandler (L) (1889)
3. Winston Churchill (L) (1909)

New Jersey
1. Joseph Sherman Frelinghuysen (L) (1911)
2. Mahlon Pitney (L) (1913)

New Mexico
1. Henry Ashurst (D) (1917)
2. Octaviano Larrazola (D) (1901)

New York
1. Bainbridge Colby (L) (1911)
3. James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr. (L) (1915)

Ohio
1. Frank Monnett (L) (1911)
3. Newton Baker (D) (1909)

Oregon
2. Jonathan Bourne (L) (1907)
3. Walter Lafferty (FL) (1915)

Pennsylvania
1. Philander Knox (L) (1905)
3. Boies Penrose (L) (1897)

Rhode Island
1. William Sprague V (L) (1915)
2. George Wetmore (L) (1895)

Vermont
1. Carroll S. Page (L) (1908)
3. George H. Prouty (L) (1909)

Washington

2. George Turner (D) (1889)
3. Ole Hanson (FL) (1915)

West Virginia
1. Thomas S. Riley (D) (1905)
2. John W. Davis (D) (1916)

Wisconsin
1. Francis McGovern (L) (1911)
3. Robert La Follette (L) (1903)

Wyoming
1. John Eugene Osborne (D) (1905)
2. Frank Houx (D) (1913)

House: 233L-196D-6S (+21L)

Speaker of the House: James Mann (L-IL)
House Majority Leader: Thomas S. Butler (L-PA)
House Majority Whip: William Greene (L-MA)
House Liberal Caucus Chair: Charles Mann Hamilton (L-NY)

House Minority Leader: Champ Clark (D-MO)
House Minority Whip: John J. Fitzgerald (D-NY)
House Democratic Caucus Chair: Thomas Gallagher (D-IL)

Socialist House Leader: Victor Berger (S-WI)
Socialist House Whip: Ed Boyce (S-ID)

[1] This is perhaps more of a footnote but I wanted to make sure I underlined this. Bear in mind, this means that both Massachusetts Senate seats are up in 1918...

 

[KingSweden24]

"...winning precisely one less electoral vote than Charles Evans Hughes four years prior, thanks to the arithmetic of losing Wisconsin and Oregon but gaining Indiana and Delaware. Underneath the hood, however, Root was dismayed.

Since accepting the nomination in Chicago four months prior he had been assured, repeatedly, that he was walking to a coronation and that not only would he be the first Liberal candidate to earn a popular vote majority since his friend and mentor John Hay twenty years earlier but that he would win a veritable landslide against McClellan and his machine boss cronies, with Liberals picking up Senate seats on Democratic turf such as Minnesota or Iowa while delivering a House majority of as many as 260 members. While Root had majorities in Congress, the "trifecta" in modern parlance that had evaded Hughes and forced his predecessor's need to negotiate directly with Democrats, it was a razor-thin majority dependent on the whims of any one Senator, and the partisan goals of many Liberals would be stymied with the deepening split between the moderates and the conservatives.

The victory was as milquetoast and overshadowed by events as the campaign, what with news of violence erupting in Charlotte the day after polls closed and reports of results strayed in around the country and the ceasefire and armistice being declared but four days later. Thus Root's win was fully suborned to the Republic's triumph, a state of affairs with which Root was utterly satisfied - "I stand only as a servant of the people, but I must first note that whatever trials await me as President pale compared to those faced over the last three years by the soldiery of our Republic," he declared in the first line of his remarks the morning after election day when it was clear he had won - but it left him with little popular mandate of his own in the public consciousness, especially with how close the popular vote margin had been and his relative anonymity as a candidate..."

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

"...sad to see Hughes go, for Norris, unlike much of the broadsheet press, did not hold Root in particularly high regard. The new President was more pragmatic than his dire post-Presidential reputation would suggest, but he was conservative temperamentally and as old-fashioned politically as his advanced age would suggest.

The victory of Root has, in later years, been discussed by historians and political scientists alike as the last gasp of Blainism and the brief attempt to make what would come to be known as "Mellonism" work; the former was a successful project for a brief time, the latter a dismal failure. In terms of the former, Root was in some ways the platonic ideal of the Blainist worldview - he was an immensely talented lawyer who had worked his way through a number of Cabinet offices to build experience and thus, in a particularly elitist sense, he was the "best" or most "natural" choice for President, at least in the fairly sterile view that the best politicians were the best administrators. This streak of elite technocracy has never quite been abandoned by the Liberals, particularly considering some of their later choices for Presidential candidates, but Root was the most clear and disastrous distillation of this idea.

Of course, the idea was already starting to lose some of its wings as early as the 1890s, when John Hay - Root's mentor, friend and political hero - was starting to fade in popularity and effectiveness in the year before his assassination. Both of the Liberal Presidents who followed since then - the conservative Joseph Foraker and the moderate in Hughes - had at least worked their way up the political ladder electorally, as successful and popular swing-state governors, leveraging those records into national notoriety and nominations. Root, like Hay, had never run for public office in any form until his Presidential nomination, and that handicap showed. While one would have expected Democratic publications such as those owned by the Roosevelt family to savage Root, even Liberal-friendly papers in his home city of New York mocked his choice to largely campaign from the comfort of his brownstone in Philadelphia as he made vague, substance-free policy declarations and claimed that he was foregoing a campaign out of "decorum" to remain at the President's side as the war dragged to its conclusion. While his partnership with Hughes was indeed close and he had been something of a proto-President as it was, this assurance was dismissed in many surprising corners as rank laziness on Root's part to avoid the rigors of campaigning, which he detested, or perhaps because he would have felt pressure to resign his current beloved office otherwise. Root's image as an aloof administrator lacking a popular touch was not helped by a campaign drawn straight from the Blaine era [1], in which a disproportionate amount of focus was placed not on Root's vision for peace or the very real sense in the electorate that the Democrats didn't exactly have a firm plan either, but rather accusations of McClellan's ties to Tammany Hall. Whatever one may have thought of the Tammany operation, Liberals had over-learned their victory in 1912 and assumed that dogwhistling about Irish party bosses was a successful campaign maneuver, but with most voters too young to have remembered the scandal-plagued 1870s or 1890s, and with a series of Liberal corruption scandals being much fresher in memory at the height of war, the attacks fell flat, [2] and Root badly underperformed expectations of a ten-point landslide. While the election was relatively close in the popular vote, he improved on Hughes' margins in New York and flipped Indiana, while McClellan failed to make inroads in the crucial Midwest with the exception of Wisconsin.

Norris had suspected that Root would prove a worse candidate than Democrats expected at the outset of the campaign, and was pleasantly surprised by how McClellan acquitted himself considering that he found his party's candidate far too conservative instinctively for his tastes even as he was a fair champion of the Democratic platform. Nonetheless, the 1916 campaign was dogged by voter apathy thanks to three hard years of war; the Liberals were insipid but had successfully prosecuted the campaign to its end mere days after Root's election, and the electorate rewarded them for them, though not to the extent that Liberals had hoped or Democrats had feared. What resulted was thus a closely-divided government in which Democrats would still have a fair deal of influence.

The defeat of McClellan, narrower than first thought as it may have been, served a second purpose - finally kneecapping the dominance of the New Yorkers. It was now two straight elections in which both major-party nominees had hailed from New York, and the fourth straight election in which Democrats had nominated a New Yorker to lead the ticket. Norris suggested that voter apathy about the Root-McClellan contest was in part to blame for low turnout, and that much of that apathy - at least amongst Democrats, for he did not claim to speak for Liberal voters unenthusiastic about the 72-year old bureaucrat their party had nominated - stemmed from the very real sense that national politics had become a contest between New Yorkers to then make decisions for the rest of the country. While Norris eschewed the idea ascendant amongst some in the West that the capital had an almost colonial relationship with states past the Mississippi, he nonetheless did think there was something to the very real problem of the past three Presidents over what would by the end of Root's term be sixteen years having been from New York, and as early as November of 1916 he was already laying the ground to prevent another Empire State coronation in 1920. A major part of that effort was his appointment by Fitzgerald, himself a New York Irishman, as Deputy Minority Whip, with Marion de Vries' decision to retire from House leadership after fourteen years as the Democratic whip both under Sulzer and Clark placing Fitzgerald in that role now in the minority and with his powerful Nebraskan ally at his side..."

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

[1] Sensing a theme here?
[2] The “partially rewarding the patience of @Curtain Jerker” part of our election update

 

[KingSweden24]

"...architecture of much of what would come to be proposed can be seen as early as the 1916 election; despite being regarded as a conservative Democrat, George McClellan, Jr., full-throatedly endorsed amendments to the United States Constitution banning child-labor and guaranteeing women the vote, making him the first Democrat do not just one but both, while in the LaFollette Report that was released in late October, the contours of good government measures could be seen in his investigations of not just his immediate remit of price-fixing and corruption in procurement contracts (though nothing as politically explosive as the affair that took down Naval Secretary Richard Ballinger the year before) but also recommendations drafted by his committee co-chair, "Honest" John Shafroth of Colorado, which went into logistics issues that were related not to graft but to inefficiencies, poor planning, and simple human errors that were thought to be correctable with better redundancies and foresight.

Demobilization overshadowed the Army's efforts to implement some of the report's suggestions - War Secretary Stimson was one of the few Liberal officials sympathetic to LaFollette's aims, with some going so far as to blame his report for their perceived underperformance in the 1916 elections mere weeks after its publication and the full presentation of its findings by newspapers. Nonetheless, it was an important hour, as it was one of the first times in American history that progressive thinking took a look at the structures which had been born in the First Progressive Era and interrogated whether and how well they were doing what they were intended, and also which sought to challenge graft in the military, especially the Army, which had always been ignored for the flashier, more obvious procurement challenges of the Navy. Though long-forgotten today, the LaFollette Committee's work in 1915-16 was hugely important in reinvigorating in particular its Democratic members' interest in the issues at hand and refining Congress' duty of oversight, a key legacy of the years to come..."

- Second Wave: The Progressive Revolution of the 1920s