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

[JustInThePhilippines]

United States elections, 1918

United States Senate elections, 1918​

"Massachusetts Massacre," or "Massachusetts Miracle" as Democrats preferred to call it, as both seats of Liberal bedrock Massachusetts were won not just by Democrats, but two of the most prominent Irish Catholic politicians of that state, in former one-year Governor David Walsh (Massachusetts still elected Governors for one-year terms) and Boston Mayor John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald. That this would occur in one of the party's two firmest Senatorial strongholds, with one of the two seats opened up early due to Henry Cabot Lodge - the very symbol of Brahmin WASPiness - leaving the Senate to serve as Secretary of State, typified the disaster.

If I were Lodge, I would resign out of embarasment.

 

[KingSweden24]

Why do Southern politicians always have the silliest names?

Like, the guy was probably a racist, but come on. That is a cool name right there.

He actually was the Speaker during the period in question but even if he hadn’t been, with a name like Lee Cazort… couldn’t not

These are the protestants who *want* Quebec to leave...

By the 1990s, certainly

Thanks!

I'm turning over a new leaf - went back and reread a lot of this TL and man alive was I on one in some of the earlier posts :/

So I figured save the invective for when it matters and otherwise post memes and dumb stuff like that most of the time.

Keep the memes coming!

I dunno, that might be for the best.

The only way you take Brenner without either destroying Austria as a state or getting 200,000 of your own men killed is by coup de main, basically on the first day of the war. You’d basically need to have several regiments secretly mobilized in advance, sitting in each of Verona and Munich waiting to be entrained and run across the border at speed to seize strongpoints at Innsbruck, Bolzano, and Trento, then hold them while the trains sprint back for more.

Which is arguably just barely doable but won’t actually work in the real world.

Which we know is absolutely not happening so, yeah, lots of dead Italian and German boys it is, then

I guess America is too risky with Confederate refugees flooding in. I'm suprised there is not an effort by the Confederate government in the decades after or in the present day to retrive his casket and bury him in a "Confederate National Cenmetery" or something.

I mean, also, he was very valid non-assassin versions to not want to live in the US, all things considered

There probably was/is one, just beyond the purview of the book

If I were Lodge, I would resign out of embarasment.

same

 

[5000 Cows]

It's a long way off but given your penchent for weird names do you have any plans for this guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_A._Sinner

 

[Darth_Kiryan]

If I were Lodge, I would resign out of embarasment.

He is way to Proud to resign.
....which makes me wonder if he is going to run for Liberal President in 1920, just because he thinks he can win. LOL

Why do Southern politicians always have the silliest names?

Like, the guy was probably a racist, but come on. That is a cool name right there.

Like in the first thread, I mentioned this guy.
I shall mention him again:

States Rights Gist - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Yes, that is a real person, and yes, that is his real name.

 

[Mayukh]

- Bengal Tiger: Subhas Chandra Bose and India

Bengal Volunteers - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Hmm...any plans for them?

 

[Gman]

Socialists have 16 seats, the Proletarian Revolution is coming!!

 

[Devoid]

"...that in many ways, the Tories were victims of their own success. The Canadian economy had, after all, boomed on their watch, and ethnic and sectarian tensions had quieted markedly even despite brief dustups such as the Ishii Maru affair in Vancouver in 1914 and the anti-Prohibition riot in Vancouver in 1917; immigration from Britain, Scotland and increasingly Ulster was continuing at a strong clip and many other Europeans, especially with the unemployment crisis gripping the great neighbor to the south, were choosing to find work in Canada's burgeoning, and tariff-protected, industries instead.

So why did the Tories elect to enter into what can best be described as internecine bloodletting in the autumn of 1918, all the way into the following spring? There were a variety of reasons, beginning and ending largely with increasing discontent among the rank-and-file with McCarthy's closely-held, personalist control of the Cabinet, and the ambitions of a cadre of rising figures who found the perfect catspaw for their hopes to topple McCarthy - Howard Ferguson, the former Minister of Finance who had resurrected his career in the relatively minor Cabinet post of the Minister of Mines, brought back into the fold by McCarthy in an effort to counterbalance the various factions in the party, and who in May of 1918 was appointed the Minister of Customs and Inland Revenue when those ministries were merged together for the first time in a wide-ranging Cabinet reshuffle.

The reshuffle had been necessary, in part due to a number of sudden retirements as several officials - nearly Ferguson among them until McCarthy, again in a stroke of irony, persuaded him not to - resigned from "His Majesty's Loyal Government" in protest of the looming passage of the New Year's Day Agreement, the compromise hashed out at the Irish Convention in Dublin to settle the question of government in Ireland once and for all and which would leave Ireland as a constituent Kingdom, but with powers more akin to a Dominion, such as Canada, Australia, or South Africa. In theory, Ireland was co-equal with the other Dominions; symbolically, however, its retention of the name "Kingdom of Ireland" suggested an order of precedence that ranked Dublin ahead of Ottawa, and while the Government of Ireland Act had not been passed yet, the symbolic resignations of a third of Canada's Cabinet was meant to send a message to conservative lawmakers at Westminster precisely what they thought of the looming vote that was regarded as a fait accompli.

As this book has mentioned frequently, it was a joke that Canada was "more British than Britain, and more Orange than Ulster" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and this manifested itself in several ways. Canada went to great lengths to resist American economic and, later, cultural influence; [1] they were also enormously proud of their identity, influenced in great part by American proximity, as the outpost of Britishness on the North American continent in a way that South Africans and Australians were not in their part of the world. Through the dominant political position of the Orange Lodges, this meant that Canada also paid a great deal more attention to the question of Ireland, and the passage of the Government of Ireland Act was of grievous offense to the Order as it went down. "Ulster has been betrayed," Ferguson thundered from the floor of the Commons, "and Canada with it!"

This opened up a question in the Tory ranks, one that McCarthy had kept the lid since taking over for Whitney five years earlier: what, exactly, was the aim of the Order - a defense of Protestantism, a defense of Canada's Britishness, or both? And was there a difference, or were they one and the same? For McCarthy, the answer had been rather simple - the Order's primary mission was to maintain an English Canada that enjoyed economic and cultural primacy over the backwards and Catholic French Canada, and that by defending the English language in Ontario, the Maritimes, and critically in the virgin West, Canada's Britishness was thus guaranteed. Though he was no student of Dutch politics, the Canada he envisioned was similar to the concept of pillarization in that country; English and French Canadians would enjoy their own institutions, newspapers, schools, even organs of government when one took the provinces into account, and in return for French Canadian acceptance of these terms outside of Quebec, English Canada would keep its interference in the culturally unique and sensitive Quebec to a minimum. The flaws in this line of thinking were apparent, as they disregarded Quebec as little more than an internal colony beyond the Island of Montreal, but this policy of co-noninterference had basically been accepted for the previous decade by figures such as Bourassa and was essentially an extension of Whitney's stance.

To make this work, of course, McCarthy needed more than merely Orangemen, and that was where his problems arose - his focus had been on siloing Canada into English and French segments, and forcing immigrants to choose between the two. Considering the cultural peculiarities of Quebecois insularity and suspicion of outsiders that typify her even today, it was an easy bet which way many of them would go, especially Irishmen who chafed at the control of Catholic parishes and other diocesal organs by the French, and thus served McCarthy as a useful wedge and a key pillar for his English chauvinism. It was in this context that many Irish in Quebec leaned Tory, whereas they generally leaned Liberal (and, soon, Progressive) in Ontario or Nova Scotia.

The question had a different answer if one asked many rank-and-file Orangemen, however, who saw little distinction between a defense of Protestant faith and a defense of the British Empire. The Anglican Church to them was Britain, and thus was Canada, and steeping for decades in a potent stew of anti-Irish contempt that considered British history essentially a long story of war against an evil, autocratic Roman Catholicism hellbent on world domination, the nuanced triangulation and anti-French polarization that McCarthy pursued was not just nonsense, but a betrayal. This boiling sense of frustration finally tipped over with the Irish Convention and its conclusion, which was the result that the Orange Order had feared for decades on both sides of the Atlantic and had even staged a soft putsch in Ireland to head off - the subornation of Ulster under an Irish government in Dublin dominated by Catholics, and the policy of Home Rule being a precursor to 'Rome Rule.'

The extent to which this belief was held to the point of being near religious dogma as the 1920s approached is hard to emphasize in a modern context, especially once the Order started its rapid secular decline in the 1950s and afterwards. It mattered little that Ireland quickly, though often fractiously and with unstable governments, established a working though imperfect democracy that quickly pillarized into separate but largely peaceful sectarian communities living side-by-side with little issue; the most vehement of Orangemen from Ulster decamped to Britain and Canada with lurid tales of oppression that only reinforced the views of Toronto's powerful Old Lodge political machine. As such, the Conservative Party in Canada was not merely a political party but an extension of a social movement, a movement that saw Catholic conspiracies behind every corner, and adopted a siege mentality within months, convinced that if London would betray her own subjects in Ireland, then Canada was truly the last line of defense of democratic self-government against Rome. [2]

As such, the first enemy that the "Ultras," as they came to be called, identified were Catholic Tories, demanding with no evidence and no reason other than their resentment over the Government of Ireland Act that they be purged from the halls of power, especially the Cabinet. Several former Cabinet ministers who had resigned in May began circulating in September an open letter, published in the Mail and Empire - the preeminent Tory paper, with the triple the circulation of the more liberal Globe and Star combined and thus regarded as the public mouthpiece of the Old Lodge - targeting in particular the Minister of Justice, Charles Doherty, and demanding his resignation. His crime? Being born to Irish parents, having attended a Jesuit college in Montreal, and most crucially, having fifteen years earlier served a yearlong term as the president of the St. Patrick's Society, a fraternal organization for Montreal's Irishmen.

Doherty was a strange target for a variety of reasons; he was as true blue a Tory as any, being firmly in favor of the National Policy, having criticized the United States' overzealous destruction in several Confederate States during the Great American War, and as Minister of Justice giving a speech in Winnipeg just a year earlier where he praised the end of official bilingualism in Manitoba schools, citing the "schools compromise" of the late 1890s that had brought about a Liberal government as "the twenty-year mistake foisted upon us by Laurier and his ilk." Doherty had even once gone so far as to refer to the provincial language policies as being a "preemptive campaign of containment against the Frenchification of Canada" and he had said at the annual St. Patrick's Luncheon in 1916 that the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society - French Canada's answer to the Orange Order, at least in theory - was a greater enemy to Irishmen in Montreal than the Orange Order, defending this fairly extreme point of view by suggesting that the Order, "for its faults, and they are many" did not deny Irishmen "advancement and enhancement within their own faith, and seek to dominate the institutions upon which Irishmen rely." It is plain to see why the more populist McCarthy, eager to find ways to appeal to a broader audience, would find a man like Doherty an outstanding ally.

Alas, to the Old Lodge, Doherty had to go, because he was a Catholic, and to them Catholics - regardless of tongue or ethnic origin - were part of a greater mob that threatened world Englishness and had infected, like a virus, even the liberal and once-Anglophone Protestant United States. Doherty was also an enemy of powerful Anglo-Quebecker interests who saw the Irish Convention as being the first step in a likely attempt by French Canada to flex its muscles, and afraid of the looming predicted oppression that was to occur in Ireland, wanted an all-hands-on-deck effort in Quebec, too.

McCarthy defended Doherty, publicly and before the Cabinet, which Doherty never ceased to thank him for, but the gauntlet was thrown down when a second letter was circulated, this one attacking Doherty in the Montreal press for his lenient stance on immigration to Canada and "undesirables streaming to our shores" (even though the Immigration portfolio was not his); this time, Ferguson added his name to the letter, as did a number of riding association chairs in Montreal, firing an even bigger shot across the bow. If McCarthy was to defend Doherty, it was to come at considerable political cost - and McCarthy's enemies not only had time and patience, they also had amongst them men who had no qualms of doing what they could to topple the Prime Minister and seize the ring for themselves..."

-Faultlines: The Complicated History of Canada's Ethnic Tensions

[1] In my head canon, Canadians are thus much more serious "aboot" trying to maintain a more distinctive accent from Americans and other various Anglophilic tics to make themselves distinctive. (I couldn't throw an "eh" in there anywhere, "so-aw-rry").
[2] If this sounds batshit to you, well, this is what the Orange Order in Ulster genuinely (and as far as I'm aware to this day) believes.

It perhaps speaks to my general non-understanding of US/Canadian Protestantism (and Protestantism in general, to be fair) how absolutely bizarre I find so many of the anti-Catholic conspiracies. Like, seriously. How do they believe such weird things about Catholics?

Liberals lost, in total, 62 seats, the majority to Democrats, while their chief opposition gained 52, picking up fifty-nine Liberal seats but losing seven in turn to Socialists in the Mine Belt where most Liberal candidates struggled to break out of single digits.
House: 248D-171L-16S (+52D)

Based on these numbers, the Socialists gained seven seats from the Democrats and three from the Liberals; we know there's several Democratic-Socialist marginal seats in the western Mine Belt and a few in NYC and maybe California and/or Chicago? As for the Liberal-Socialist marginals, I'm assuming those are primarily in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and Wisconsin?

 

[C. McKay]

just curious. When could women vote in the US, especially Massachusetts? I know my grandma was too young to vote, but I’m curious whether my great grandmothers could have helped the Massachusetts Miracle along.

 

[Curtain Jerker]

The 1918 midterm elections were, for the Liberal Party, an unusually fierce disaster, a generational wipeout rivalling the 1902 debacle...

The House elections of 1918 were an unmitigated disaster for the Liberals as well, while falling a bit short of the shock of 1902 (in which Democrats benefitted from the expansion of the House in a census cycle.

The 1918 elections saw Democrats largely hold and expand upon their gains of 1914 and 1916, building up larger majorities in state legislatures...

Democrats being portrayed as something other than hapless buffoons - what timeline am I reading? Did I click the wrong link or something on the homepage?

 

[Gman]

The next 10-12 years are gonna be 😩 in the USA. I can't wait to read about whatever progressive policies get enacted (incl high marginal tax rates).

 

[TheRockofChickamauga]

defeating Lieutenant Governor Calvin Coolidge

No Silent Cal?

 

[DanMcCollum]

I for one cannot wait for the update wherein Bob LaFollette finally sees the writing on the wall and brings his machine organization over from the Liberal side to the Democrats. That is going to cause a whole helluva lot of political chaos in Wisconsin and though as detailed an article as the one we saw on New York machinations is probably not in the cards, its still going to be fun for the Liberals to see their chicken come home to roost (again)

Also, I'm kinda going to be game the near inevitable Quinten Roosevelt/Phil LaFollette bromance (especially considering its going to be the opposite relationship of their fathers in OTL)

 

[KingSweden24]

It's a long way off but given your penchent for weird names do you have any plans for this guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_A._Sinner

I mean i gotta, right? With a name like that…

He is way to Proud to resign.
....which makes me wonder if he is going to run for Liberal President in 1920, just because he thinks he can win. LOL


Like in the first thread, I mentioned this guy.
I shall mention him again:

States Rights Gist - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Yes, that is a real person, and yes, that is his real name.

I could see Lodge making a gallant attempt at the 1920 Convention, but the party will likely balk at the idea of anybody that closely connected to an administration that if polling was a thing, would poll about as well as chlamydia (yes, I used that joke in BCM; no, I don’t care haha)

Bengal Volunteers - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Hmm...any plans for them?

Hadn’t had any but considering this is a Bose-wank I may have to

Socialists have 16 seats, the Proletarian Revolution is coming!!

Baby steps, comrade!

It perhaps speaks to my general non-understanding of US/Canadian Protestantism (and Protestantism in general, to be fair) how absolutely bizarre I find so many of the anti-Catholic conspiracies. Like, seriously. How do they believe such weird things about Catholics?

I won’t speak for American Protestantism since I grew up A) initially Lutheran, seeing as I have Swedish parents, and even in the Us Lutheranism is… not how most Prots operate and B) Greek Orthodox after my dad was attracted to that and converted.

A lot of it I think has to do with its “foreign-ness” (this applies to Orthodoxy to a lesser extent too), the ritualism of it, and the centralization of authority under the Pope, which of course is one of the major theological disagreements Luther had in the first place.

I will say, though, that personally my sympathies lie more in the Catholic/Orthodox direction; I can see why the rituals turn some people off, but having attended both Catholic mass with an ex-girlfriend and a “rock band church” with a fraternity brother, I can tell you only one of them made me feel deeply weirded out and uncomfortable, and it def wasn’t the Catholics.

Based on these numbers, the Socialists gained seven seats from the Democrats and three from the Liberals; we know there's several Democratic-Socialist marginal seats in the western Mine Belt and a few in NYC and maybe California and/or Chicago? As for the Liberal-Socialist marginals, I'm assuming those are primarily in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and Wisconsin?

That sounds about right. I’d say maybe picking off a Dem marginal in Wisconsin and then the bulk being New York and Mine Belt seats, the former aided by Hillquit.

And yes the Lib-Socialist marginals are probably areas where Democrats are unpopular in the West and those are basically your two options there.

just curious. When could women vote in the US, especially Massachusetts? I know my grandma was too young to vote, but I’m curious whether my great grandmothers could have helped the Massachusetts Miracle along.

That’s a great question. I honestly don’t know in OTL, but here, there’s almost certainly no women’s suffrage in Mass in 1918.

Democrats being portrayed as something other than hapless buffoons - what timeline am I reading? Did I click the wrong link or something on the homepage?

Lol

The next 10-12 years are gonna be 😩 in the USA. I can't wait to read about whatever progressive policies get enacted (incl high marginal tax rates).

Gird your loins

No Silent Cal?

Nope! Another career nipped in the bud. Harding probably never advances past the State Senate, either.

Speaking of, every OTL President up to now here…

Lincoln: Didn’t run for re-election
Grant: Career army officer, retired relatively obscure
Hayes: Who?
Garfield: Successful Speaker and Senator, founded OH political dynasty
Cleveland: local WNY Politico, nothing more
Harrison: Failed Presidential nominee
McKinley: Failed Congressional candidate
Roosevelt: A Democratic media baron
Taft: Supreme Court
Wilson: Confederate historian
Harding: Obscure State Senator in OH
Cal: Lieutenant Gov of Mass, failed gubernatorial candidate
Hoover: Dead, killed by Boxers in China
FDR: War hero, but trouble looming as implied a few updates ago…

I for one cannot wait for the update wherein Bob LaFollette finally sees the writing on the wall and brings his machine organization over from the Liberal side to the Democrats. That is going to cause a whole helluva lot of political chaos in Wisconsin and though as detailed an article as the one we saw on New York machinations is probably not in the cards, its still going to be fun for the Liberals to see their chicken come home to roost (again)

It’ll come after 1920, but yes, it’s coming!

Also, I'm kinda going to be game the near inevitable Quinten Roosevelt/Phil LaFollette bromance (especially considering its going to be the opposite relationship of their fathers in OTL)

Ah that’s a good point! Hasn’t even thought of that

 

[Curtain Jerker]

Lol

It has just been so long since you portrayed Democrats as anything other than greedy, short-sighted idiots that I was completely taken aback this morning when I opened up Chrome on my phone.

 

[KingSweden24]

It has just been so long since you portrayed Democrats as anything other than greedy, short-sighted idiots that I was completely taken aback this morning when I opened up Chrome on my phone.

I think you’re going to really enjoy the Dems of the 1920s, in that case!

 

[Curtain Jerker]

I think you’re going to really enjoy the Dems of the 1920s, in that case!

Just imagine how much more they'd get done if the Dems in New York and Minnesota didn't shit the bed and botch completely winnable elections against Wadsworth and Michelsen in 1920.

 

[DanMcCollum]

It’ll come after 1920, but yes, it’s coming!

But I'm impatient!!!!!

Ah that’s a good point! Hasn’t even thought of that

Nah, it was an idea that came to me. I figue they're both young scions of established political familes, both fought in the war (the only reason Phil didn't enlist in the marines in OTL was because his Father put as much pressure on him as he possibly could to dissuade him from joining in WWI; a scenerio that is not going to play out in the ATL where the US is fighting after having been sneak attacked. And even in OTL, Phil joined the army and served in MacArthur's staff during WW2), and are largely going to be the face of the next generation of Progressive Democrats. So, I just have this weird sense of the two of them actually getting along quite well and developing a strong friendship: which is all the more ironic because the two were also noted as being the most like their respective fathers of all their siblings (well, Alice was maybe even more like her Dad than Quinton was, come to think of it. So lets say: brothers)

 

[Fleurs de Merde]

It perhaps speaks to my general non-understanding of US/Canadian Protestantism (and Protestantism in general, to be fair) how absolutely bizarre I find so many of the anti-Catholic conspiracies. Like, seriously. How do they believe such weird things about Catholics?

Some of it is odd Protestant shit, but the source is more banal.

For Canada, at least, a lot of our Prot settlers were Ulster Scots and extremely Tory United Empire Loyalists. Settler populations sitting on hostile majorities are always going to be paranoid, and that always comes out weird if you keep it up for long enough. They naturally import those prejudices and attitudes and, through the Orange Order, magnify them.

On top of that, Canada has a huge, culturally alien, and fairly organized Catholic population right there. Canada was won through conquest and - on the East Coast - ethnic cleansing of French populations and the theft of their land. The population split was 50-50 through the 19th century, often leaning in favor of Lower Canada - Anglos were sometimes a minority until the absorption of the Maritimes, which had their own far worse patterns of French dispossession and ultra-Loyalism. It basically comes down to a ruthless struggle to maintain social supremacy and control access to land and resources against an opponent with a higher fertility rate and deep social organization of its own. And if you're holding people down, you sort of know that they resent you for it, and you're conspiring against them, of course you assume they're conspiring against you. Because you're neurotic about them already, your paranoia increasingly gets out of hand.

Probably didn't help for Canada that you actually did have Louis Riel (a hero who WILL NOT BE BESMIRCHED) calling for the establishment of a visionary Catholic republic, Irish nationalist brigades repeatedly invading from America with the connivance of the New York Democratic Party, and the world's most reactionary ultramontaine clergy in Quebec constantly quoting de Maistre and exhorting their flock to breed as much as possible so that there are 100 million Canadiens by 2000, ready to demographically overwhelm the Anglos, establish a Cattraditionalist regime, and redeem the decadence of old world Catholicism with the faith of the new. Quebec also hasn't had its Liberal turn, with its Laurier Liberal promise of "hey what if we all just leave each other alone to do our own things, which is praying, farming, and going to law school for the French and exploiting cheap Catholic labour for Anglos".

So yeah, you need some mechanism to ideologically justify your holding of power that isn't just "they'll take our shit like we took theirs", as well as to sublimate really grotty personal and communal self-interest into a grand narrative, so you start mythologizing and end up with "Al Smith wants to use Fenian shock troops to make Canada into a new Ireland and move the Vatican to the Delaware."

 

[DanMcCollum]

Some of it is odd Protestant shit, but the source is more banal.

For Canada, at least, a lot of our Prot settlers were Ulster Scots and extremely Tory United Empire Loyalists. Settler populations sitting on hostile majorities are always going to be paranoid, and that always comes out weird if you keep it up for long enough. They naturally import those prejudices and attitudes and, through the Orange Order, magnify them.

On top of that, Canada has a huge, culturally alien, and fairly organized Catholic population right there. Canada was won through conquest and - on the East Coast - ethnic cleansing of French populations and the theft of their land. The population split was 50-50 through the 19th century, often leaning in favor of Lower Canada - Anglos were sometimes a minority until the absorption of the Maritimes, which had their own far worse patterns of French dispossession and ultra-Loyalism. It basically comes down to a ruthless struggle to maintain social supremacy and control access to land and resources against an opponent with a higher fertility rate and deep social organization of its own. And if you're holding people down, you sort of know that they resent you for it, and you're conspiring against them, of course you assume they're conspiring against you. Because you're neurotic about them already, your paranoia increasingly gets out of hand.

Probably didn't help for Canada that you actually did have Louis Riel (a hero who WILL NOT BE BESMIRCHED) calling for the establishment of a visionary Catholic republic, Irish nationalist brigades repeatedly invading from America with the connivance of the New York Democratic Party, and the world's most reactionary ultramontaine clergy in Quebec constantly quoting de Maistre and exhorting their flock to breed as much as possible so that there are 100 million Canadiens by 2000, ready to demographically overwhelm the Anglos, establish a Cattraditionalist regime, and redeem the decadence of old world Catholicism with the faith of the new. Quebec also hasn't had its Liberal turn, with its Laurier Liberal promise of "hey what if we all just leave each other alone to do our own things, which is praying, farming, and going to law school for the French and exploiting cheap Catholic labour for Anglos".

This is a really good description of what's going on, I think. As someone who comes at things more from the Catholic side (both because I Am Catholic and also because Catholic History is what I'm ding me degree in) I too am a bit reluctant to speak on behalf of the Protestant worldviews, but this all strikes right for me. I'd also add in the long history of British culture viewing Catholics are subversive and lacking in true loyalty or Patrotism - a view which Protestant Canadians and Americans also inherited from their forefathers (I've been running into enough of the latter in the course of my research)

So yeah, you need some mechanism to ideologically justify your holding of power that isn't just "they'll take our shit like we took theirs", as well as to sublimate really grotty personal and communal self-interest into a grand narrative, so you start mythologizing and end up with "Al Smith wants to use Fenian shock troops to make Canada into a new Ireland and move the Vatican to the Delaware."

To be fair - conspiracy theory or not, that sounds badass and I suddenly want to wish Governor Al Smith the best in his efforts

 

[naraht]

Some of it is odd Protestant shit, but the source is more banal.

For Canada, at least, a lot of our Prot settlers were Ulster Scots and extremely Tory United Empire Loyalists. Settler populations sitting on hostile majorities are always going to be paranoid, and that always comes out weird if you keep it up for long enough. They naturally import those prejudices and attitudes and, through the Orange Order, magnify them.

On top of that, Canada has a huge, culturally alien, and fairly organized Catholic population right there. Canada was won through conquest and - on the East Coast - ethnic cleansing of French populations and the theft of their land. The population split was 50-50 through the 19th century, often leaning in favor of Lower Canada - Anglos were sometimes a minority until the absorption of the Maritimes, which had their own far worse patterns of French dispossession and ultra-Loyalism. It basically comes down to a ruthless struggle to maintain social supremacy and control access to land and resources against an opponent with a higher fertility rate and deep social organization of its own. And if you're holding people down, you sort of know that they resent you for it, and you're conspiring against them, of course you assume they're conspiring against you. Because you're neurotic about them already, your paranoia increasingly gets out of hand.

Probably didn't help for Canada that you actually did have Louis Riel (a hero who WILL NOT BE BESMIRCHED) calling for the establishment of a visionary Catholic republic, Irish nationalist brigades repeatedly invading from America with the connivance of the New York Democratic Party, and the world's most reactionary ultramontaine clergy in Quebec constantly quoting de Maistre and exhorting their flock to breed as much as possible so that there are 100 million Canadiens by 2000, ready to demographically overwhelm the Anglos, establish a Cattraditionalist regime, and redeem the decadence of old world Catholicism with the faith of the new. Quebec also hasn't had its Liberal turn, with its Laurier Liberal promise of "hey what if we all just leave each other alone to do our own things, which is praying, farming, and going to law school for the French and exploiting cheap Catholic labour for Anglos".

So yeah, you need some mechanism to ideologically justify your holding of power that isn't just "they'll take our shit like we took theirs", as well as to sublimate really grotty personal and communal self-interest into a grand narrative, so you start mythologizing and end up with "Al Smith wants to use Fenian shock troops to make Canada into a new Ireland and move the Vatican to the Delaware."

OK, now I want to read *any* timeline with the Vatican moved to the Delaware.