1908
A historic blizzard strikes much of western Canada and the northern central United States during late February; as much as ten feet of snow falls in some areas of Cheyenne and Assiniboia within just a week. Totals exceeding 12 inches are eventually reported as far east as Owatonna, Minnesota.
While Greece is still on it's guard, a border incident occurs between Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire on April 25th, in which nine Bulgarian soldiers are killed. Two days later, Bulgaria warns Turkey of consequences should the event go further.
The Russian Tsarists suffer a crushing defeat at Kemerovo on June 7th, after their rear flanks are ambushed by an additional group of Marxists they thought had retreated outside the city. Three days later, Vladimir Sergey'evich Kornilov, the Russian general who had responsible for defending the city, is captured after another firefight nearby. And with this, the Violet Army's defensive in Siberia begins to simply just fall apart over the next few months, and Western Russia isn't far behind, either.
[For those wondering about the colors of TTL's Russian Civil War here, the “Whites” here are actually the moderate pro-republican & pro-reform, but anti-Communist Russians who are merely seeking to renovate Russian society. The “Violets”, as it were, are the Tsarist types, many of them reactionaries. They reject “Western” liberalism and seek to return to what they see as a “golden age”. And the Reds are the Marxists as in our world, as well as a few anarchists here and there up to their own thing.]
As Franz Jozef's rule becomes increasingly shaky, and increasingly illiberal, many of the minorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire are becoming more and more restless. The city of Trst[yes, this is, in fact, Trieste, although this is what the Austrian government has called it since 1881 ITTL] is the scene of a major riot on August 12th, following the latest edict from the government of the province in which the city sits, effectively all but totally restricting the free movement of minorities in the area. The unrest only lasts for four days before being put down, but this proves to be the final spark for the rise of a long string of independence movements.....
A major hurricane, with winds exceeding 160 miles an hour and a storm surge of twenty feet strikes the western coast of the Dominican Republic on September 24th, devastating the coastal port town of Puerto Montijo in the Province of Azua[named for a recently deceased former president of the country, and located around what was & still is Puerto Viejo in the real world, now since subsumed into Pto. Montijo here] and killing over four thousand people in the country. Three days later, this same storm begins to ride up the southern half of the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., and kills another two hundred people; Beaufort, South Carolina is almost totally wiped out by flooding thanks to rather torrential rains, and 90 mph winds and an eight foot storm surge also cause havoc throughout many of North Carolina's barrier islands.
(The town of Puerto Montijo eventually rebuilds, and will become a major city by the end of the 1950s; Azua de Compostela, however, never fully recovers. After several years of stagnation, and a more direct hit from another hurricane in 1915, the city refounds itself as just “Compostela”.).
The American Red Shirt terrorist organization engages in their boldest move yet: they attack ethnic neighborhoods in both St. Louis and Chicago, killing over fifty people, on the 3rd and 4th of October, although two other plots in Kansas City, Kansas and Detroit are halted by local authorities. President Holley, upon hearing of this, immediately orders the arrest and detainment of all of the members any known branch of the Red Shirts operating anywhere in the country, under the Subversion Act of 1874. By the end of November, as many as 40,000 Red Shirts have been taken into custody by the Federal government.
p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } Also, later in October, the U.S. Supreme Court hears the case of Alabama v. Petalozzi, regarding the case of Alberto Petalozzi, an Italian immigrant who was evicted from his home in Pellyville, a town about 50 miles north of Mobile, after the state enacted an anti-immigrant law in 1906. Petalozzi, who had moved to Alabama in 1898, sued against the law, which would have gone into full effect in 1909.
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled, 7-2, that no state had any right to just totally eject immigrants from their jurisdiction. Though with no mention of county or city-level statutes, this effectively put the brakes on some of the worst legislated xenophobia in the United States. It also sparked a number of riots in several areas of the country, with the largest protests occurring in central Ohio and in Mississippi and Georgia.
The U.S. Federal Elections, 1908: William Holley, although respected by many in all three parties, had proven to be about as much of a controversial leader as Charles Martin had in the decade prior. Holley, however, was also criticized for not addressing the increasing problems with incompetence in the Republican Party. Regardless, however, both Holley and his Vice-President, Sylvester Pennoyer, were still nominated for their respective positions.
However, though, things weren't going so well for the Democrats, either, as many moderate Northerners and Westerners in the party continued to be put off by the ever-spiraling madness of many of the “Freedomite” Democrats. The mainstream Democrats decided to nominate a popular Delaware Senator by the name of Mark Cooper for the Presidency, and Matthew Pettis, a Kentucky businessman, for the Vice-Presidency. The splinter Southern Democrats ran one of their fiercest candidates yet; George W. Steadham, a wealthy Georgia plantation owner and factory owner. And for the Vice-Presidency slot, none other than the now infamous preacher, the Reverend William Butler Helms, was chosen, from Mississippi.
And despite their own malaise, the Progressives continued to struggle on anyway, nominating Martin Henries of New Mexico for the Presidency; William “Wild Bill” Carson, a popular novelist from the state of Colorado(and a relative of Kit Carson), was chosen as his running mate. Henries, although originally born in Missouri, was a popular figure in New Mexico, mainly thanks to his honest dealings while in the state Senate(and, also, for his highly regarded restaurant just outside of Albuquerque, which he often invited fellow members from both other parties.). Carson was more of a populist, however, and focused primarily on farming & ranching issues, as well as the controversy over precious metals which had been brewing as of late[The U.S., as of 1908, has been on a mixed gold-silver standard since 1875 ITTL, but it's significantly varied from administration to administration since then; whereas, in our world, the gold standard was solely predominant until 1971 in the U.S.].
The Republicans had braced for a possible disaster on their end, but they hadn't realized just how painful it was going to be: the progressive vote had been almost evenly divided nationally, and they lost almost 7 out of 10 voters in the West over all. Although Henries was a virtual unknown, he had managed to outright win a large number of the Western states, including Arizona, a state that the Republicans had lost only once before; and virtually all of the New South as well(excepting only Juarez and Tamaulipas, which went Democratic for the first time ever, though neither by a solid majority). He also won Cheyenne as well, by 54% of the vote.
Holley's home state of Kansas stayed loyal to him, with 48% of the vote going to the Republicans, despite the high popularity of Progressivism in his home state, but Colorado swung just barely into the Henries column, by only 8,000 votes. The Republicans also only barely hung on to Oregon and Cascadia, with 42.1% and 40.7% of the vote, respectively. Amazingly enough, Holley did manage to keep West Texas in the Republican column, despite the best efforts of Cooper and company, but only by a grand total of 4,800 votes. Most other places elsewhere, ended up leading to a disaster for the Republicans.
Mark Cooper, given the Party of Van Buren's nearly endless treasury, already had that advantage on his side; but the progressive split between the Republicans and the Progressive Party only made that more apparent. Outside of Holley's home state of Kansas, Cooper managed to win nearly every single other Midwestern state other than Wyoming(which, like Kansas remained staunchly pro-Republican), and even managed to snatch Illinois, thanks to not a few of the centrist and moderately right-leaning(mainly the former) Irish, Polish, and Hungarian Catholic, and German & Scandinavian[mostly Danes at this point] Lutheran voters in Cook County. And he also won Pennsylvania as well, with nearly 75% of the vote in Lancaster County in particular going his way, as well as with the support of much of the Swedish, German, Jewish, and even Ulster Irish communities in Philadelphia, and even a fair number of black Americans in Pittsburgh[who normally leaned quite Republican, as in many areas up until the end of World War II, IOTL.]. Only the continued disillusionment from a growing number of the people in the Greek, Italian, Irish Catholic, and the various Eastern European communities in New York and New Jersey kept the Republicans safe in those states. Cooper even won the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire[quite a few Lutheran Germans and Jewish folks had settled in both states over the past 20 years, and many of them remained pro-Democratic, even in 1908.....at least, for now], as the Republicans held on only to Vermont and Connecticut in New England(Maine had *just barely* broken for the Democrats, by only 2,000 votes; Rhode Island went to the Progressives, with only 36% of the total vote). And despite losing the Deep South to the ever more nuisancial Freedomites, he still had little trouble locking up the rest of the region, including the state of West Florida, which broke to him by an astonishing 70 percent[well, astonishing ITTL, that is. In our reality, the Democrats actually regularly got at least around that much, if not more, at least when there wasn't a split ticket, anyway; although a good part of that is actually due to both disenfranchisement of primarily African-American, as well as other minority, and, to a lesser extent, poor white voters, as well as the fact that the Republicans were essentially all but totally forced out in many of these states, aided and exacerbated by a rather unbelievable amount of corruption all the while].
All in all, however, this was, by no means, quite a coup de grace for the Democrats....if anything at all, it would actually serve as their last hurrah, as their party continued to be torn apart from within, between the faux-populist, and primarily socially traditionalist and anti-regulation faction, increasingly coming under the strong influence of the Southern Freedomites in particular, and the pro-immigrant, pro-regulatory and mostly socially centrist(leaning slightly rightwards) mainstream Democrats, led primarily by Tammany Hall in New York, and the Italian-American machine in Chicago led by Tony Alberti, originally from Montreal and himself the son of Italian immigrants.
However, though, one particular note of interest in this year's election may have been the first successful election of an openly socialist candidate anywhere in the United States; Patrick Taylor, an Irish-American union manager in Aurora, Illinois, won election to the U.S. House in his district, with 48% of the vote in a four way race between a Republican, a Progressive, and an Independent candidate. Taylor, noted for his sympathy to civil rights and his support for gaining women the vote[women are already able to vote in thirty U.S. states, already, and support is quickly growing for universal suffrage to be made national], quickly becomes a national figure. However, though, eyes were also focused on another new arrival to the political scene, the American Liberty Party, as it's first governor, Deane Cameron, is elected in the state of Colorado this new party positioned itself as the “common man's” party, set apart from the Southern planters, financial barons and the urban machines of the Democrats, and the industrialists, ranchers and railroad tycoons behind the Republican Party.....as well as being more level-headed and pragmatic than the Progressives. Cameron's middle-of-the-road philosophy was so well-received that it genuinely shocked the rest of the country, and by the end of the year, many newspaper pundits from New York to San Francisco and back, began to speculate on just how far this new arrival onto the American political scene could really go.....
Meanwhile, in Russia, the Marxists continue to have a rather impressive amount of success; by the start of December, they now control most of the significant towns in Asiatic Russia save Alma-Ata and Vladivostok, amongst a few others, and are also coming quite close to taking the cities of Moscow and Tsaritsyn(Rostov had already fallen at this point and the Caucasus is itself being besieged by mainly Georgian and Azerbaijani nationalists, many of whom are strongly sympathetic to both of the anti-Tsarist facttions). The Tsarist government, meanwhile, is on the verge of collapsing and many of the Filoletovsi' in particularfear the worst may come to pass if so; instead of sticking around, a number of the bourgeois Russians, Violet or not, simply pack up and leave the country altogether. Many will head to either France, Britain, Germany or Scandinavia depending on their connections, but some travel as far away as America or Canada. Whatever the case, it's now clear that the old Russian Empire is withering away, and about to pass into the history books.....
