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

[KingSweden24]

"...affected young people more so than the elderly, a rare turn for an influenza. This was a particularly grim circumstance for war-torn Dixie, where despite mass famine being mostly avoided in 1917 and the start of 1918 - indeed, the second year of occupation saw something approximating a relatively normal planting season for food staple crops, at least at a local level - protein intake was dangerously low, and starvation was still hugely common and surviving veterans and civilians alike were gaunt, hungry, and often sick already due to poor sanitation and hygiene.

The "Dixie flu" that erupted perhaps as early as December of 1917 in central Arkansas but peaked in its deadly, horrific first wave in March and April of 1918 thus ran rampant through the depleted country. By the end of April, bodies had to be burned in fields because not only was there widespread fear of catching "the bug" from dead bodies, but there was also insufficient room in Dixie's already-stuffed mortuaries. Hillboy violence decreased markedly for the span of a few months, not because the Army was getting any better at interceding against them, but because many of them were too sick to fight and in their backwoods strongholds and hideouts, they lacked proper medicine. General Harbord, in his occupation district covering Alabama, Georgia and Florida, wrote back to Philadelphia about a particularly spectacular case in which a patrol had found a hillboy compound tucked in the Appalachian foothills with light artillery acting as a cannonade and a sophisticated arms depot - and near everyone inside of it dead, or too ill to fight.

Tamed as the insurgency might have briefly been by the devastation of the Great Influenza of 1918, it posed a number of problems for the occupation, most notably that viral strains do not recognize borders, and by the time the severity of the outbreak was clear in early April, it had already entered the United States several times over. The Army closed guarded border crossings with the CSA, Texas and Sequoyah on April 8th, and ended the ability of soldiers to go on leave in Cincinnati, St. Louis or Baltimore; on April 20th, an even stricter quarantine policy was imposed, mandating thirty days of isolation in specially-built medical facilities on the borders for soldiers being discharged and returned from duty permanently. This had the grimly ironic effect of simply exposing even more men to the virus than potentially otherwise could have happened, and did little to stop its spread through American cities for much of the spring.

The death toll of the spring 1918 wave was fairly small, though the number of sick people, especially children, was noticeable enough that many schools and universities shuttered their doors, and many factories had to run on reduced shifts to prevent their entire workforce from catching the flu, fully killing whatever recovery from the depression of 1917 may have been showing green shoots by then. The fall 1918 wave was indeed bigger and deadlier in the United States (it was about as bad in Dixie as it had been in the spring) and by then had spread to Canada and Europe, where the 1918-19 influenza season was regarded as remarkably and unusually severe, though still well short of the apocalyptic 1890-92 pandemic. [1] Island countries in the Pacific such as Fiji, Hawaii and Australia and Japan closed their borders for much of 1918, preventing the flu from having much impact there; across Asia, tens of millions died. What impact this "Great Influenza" had on the outbreak of war in 1919 between Germany, France, Austria and Italy is unclear, but an irritated, angry European population after a deadly pandemic certainly may have been a factor.

Local authorities largely did what they could to combat the flu, restricting public gatherings throughout the fall and even sometimes going so far as to close churches and other public businesses (saloons in particular were a popular target for prohibitionists angry they had not gotten everything they sought in the Liquor Control Act). These endeavors were, for a war-weary populace that had already been denied "normalcy" promised to them by the Root campaign in 1916, hugely unpopular and frequently flouted even despite the high-social trust culture of the times, and compounded all of Root's political problems more severely.

Still, the United States may not have gotten off as easy as Europe, but despite crammed factories and immigrant tenements becoming a breeding ground of airborne death, it did not further gut the country in the way it did in Dixie - and as socially divisive as the influenza's knock-on effects were in the moment, nothing like the conspiratorial rhetoric about the curiously and measurably lower incidence of infection and death amongst Dixie's Negro population ever took root north of the Ohio to poison public discourse further..."

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

[1] Essentially, the Spanish flu is way less devastating in Europe by not coming on the heels of four years of war, famine, and other diseases.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...few would have expected that Portugal, of all places, would be where a socialist party would enter government for the first time, but this misunderstands a number of factors, first among them the moderate influences on Portuguese socialism, and Iberian socialism more generally, due to the Proudhonist tradition of Spanish (and, by proxy, Portuguese), radicalism.

With the exception of Russia, Spain and Portugal had spent much of the 19th century regarded (if not outright dismissed, as in Napoleon's huffy comment that "Africa begins at the Pyrenees") [1] as Europe's impoverished, autocratic backwaters, countries that had peaked at the height of the Age of Discovery and, particularly in the wake of the collapse of their colonial empires, broken polities running on fumes economically and fueled by nostalgia, kept gripped tight by the firm hand of the Church and landed aristocracy. Both had been gripped by violent wars between political liberals and conservatives, with Spain's dance with personalism and instability concluding with the Glorious Revolution of 1868 led by moderate and progressive nobles and military officers who imposed a constitutional democracy with clearly delineated powers and invited in a new royal family, the German Hohenzollerns, to sustain it. While this experiment in Spanish democracy had been highly imperfect and indeed faced many of the same institutional problems that the Bourbons before had, particularly in rural areas, it nonetheless had delivered an internal stability that Spain had not experienced in decades.

Portugal, conversely, had never suffered from quite the decadal debacles of Spain and reformed more gradually under the Braganzas, but by the end of the 19th century was regarded as one of Europe's financial basket cases, frequently suffering defaults on her British-held debt and unable to maintain her vast and expensive African empire, and with the country increasingly run by two tired, revolving parties of the liberal and traditionalist right, resembling a closed oligarchy which became associated with not just the Church and nobility but the entire concept of monarchy itself. As such, the 1912 revolutions had nearly struck in Portugal, and the 1916 debt default had led to the King's abdication and the seizure of her African territories by Britain and Germany, an act that served to destabilize European politics and helped lead to the Central European War.

What both countries shared was a relatively small industrial base (much more so an issue in Portugal than in Spain) and a radical tradition that had been fundamentally anarchist as early as the 1870s and had always associated republicanism as an end to itself, particularly the appeal of anticlerical opposition to the Church's foundational role in a monarchical system. As such, bourgeoise radicalism for educated, urban middle classes sustained itself much more so than working class agitation, which was far more limited, and often steered by these bourgeoise radical progressives, who themselves rejected socialism as gauche. The revolution would not come from the labor movement in a place like Portugal, in other words, but rather from the literati. This posed a problem for middle class figures who found all these ideas fine in theory but started to balk once the extent to which their fellow republicans sought to reorder an already-fragile state became apparent, and also for the Socialist Party of Portugal, a relatively small though quickly growing outfit which was already badly split between its moderate faction and its syndicalist faction, particularly after the 1907 death of its longtime leader and co-founder, Azedo Gneco. [2]

Luis II, the Portuguese King, was determined to make significant changes to Portugal, and not just in light of his narrow personal interests of the survival of the monarchy. [3] Luis had been educated in Portugal, but he was thoroughly Anglophile in a way others in his family were not, in part out of genuine personal affinity for the country and in part thanks to his British wife, herself a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Though the marriage had been initially negotiated, it had been sealed out of true affection, and Luis was an honest, loyal husband to his wife, whom he doted on especially with the knowledge that formal, conservative Lisbon was not always to her liking. Queen Patricia's influence was clear - she encouraged him to pursue his interests in painting, geography and writing - but she had become unpopular with the Portuguese street after the "British betrayal" in which Austral-Africa was lost.

Luis was thus on a mission to restore the prestige of the monarchy, and also undo the tremendous cultural, economic and political stagnation of Portugal that had begun under his grandfather and namesake and continued under his father. As Britain was a country of great stability and wealth, and a successful constitutional monarchy, Luis looked to London as an example, and even though he knew that he would fall well shy of the United Kingdom, if he merely arrived at something approximating Hohenzollern Spain, he would have a successful reign. As such, when he called elections for June of 1918, they were the first elections called of his reign and thought to potentially be the first genuinely open elections in Portugal's history, with the Renovator and Progressist parties having all but collapsed.

In many ways, this was a dangerous gamble on the part of Luis, for the largest party in the country, by far, was the Republican. The "Crime of 1916," as Portuguese referred to the Malcolm-Jagow Agreement to split up Austral-Africa, had reenergized what had before 1912 been a flagging group losing popular support (or at least not gaining any). [4] Republican paramilitaries operated largely undeterred across much of the Lisbon area, in particular the Carbonaria, led by the secretive Manuel Buica and which had nearly successfully assassinated the king two years earlier in the wake of Malcolm-Jagow. Figures of the radical anticlerical left such as Afonso Costa gave long, stemwinding speeches across the country where they advocated for the abdication of the King and the imposition of a Republic; even fairly conservative figures such as Antonio Jose de Almeida had joined the call, as had opportunist figures such as the retired general Sidonio Pais, whose ideological orientation was often hard to entirely deduce. The Republicans were, crucially, not an illegal party - in his efforts to pursue a genuine settlement on the questions facing Portugal and give the 1918 elections a legitimacy that the old duopolistic oligarchy had not and could never, Luis would leave no group banned from the polls, a decision that suggested, at least to Republican leaders, that Luis would abdicate in the event they were to triumph. The stakes, in other words, could not have been higher for Portugal, and only brewing crises in the Belgian Congo and Hungary distracted Europe from the potential of the first successful republican revolution - this one by way of democratic elections rather than popular armed revolt - since the French Second Republic in 1848.

The problem for the Portuguese Republicans, however, was that their support was a kilometer wide, but only a meter deep. Their leaders were intellectuals and academics, composed of disillusioned career politicians, journalists, lawyers and artists, people clearly more comfortable in Lisbon's tony cafes near the Praca do Comercio than in the small, close-knit villages of rural Portugal. It was a party of literati in the Western European country with the lowest literacy rate, a party that relied on lodges of freemasonry to organize rather than the town square or the Church parish. In its near-total rejection of traditional Portuguese culture in a highly conservative and traditionalist country, the Republican Party - especially figures such as Costa - essentially declared to much of the population that they intended to rule them as they saw fit, not govern with the consent of the masses.

In contrast, the small Portuguese Socialist Party did anything but. As outlined in previous chapters, one of the central questions of socialism in the 1910s was a simple one with a deceptively complex answer: "Who is socialism for?" For Portugal's socialist leader Manuel Luis Figueiredo, that answer was simple: it was for the material benefit of the working class. For many of Europe's particularly radical socialists and syndicalists, revolution was the end itself; for the more moderate brand of democratic socialism that emerged in the Iberian Peninsula, the revolution was one means, perhaps a necessary one, but the end result of tangible material impact for organized labor was always to retain her primacy. Costa, Pais, and others campaigned largely in boroughs where they were already likely to do well, preaching to the masses in promising the intoxicating rush of revolution and reorder; Figueiredo, by contrast, kept his focus on Lisbon's canneries, Porto's port distilling houses, and textile mills, organizing workers of small but dedicated labor unions into "electoral cadres" and doing the hard work of electoralism with an eye towards influencing the final result.

The 1918 elections were thus muddled, returning no decisive result other than a fundamental shift in Portugal's electoral landscape and heralding, at least for a moment, a Portugal that could actually function as a true democracy. The Republicans were the largest party, winning over a third of the seats in the Parliament, but the Costa faction was notably weaker than the Pais faction. The second-largest party was, in a surprise, the Catholic Center, a party of lay organizations and moderate-to-conservative voters in the north, especially Porto, as well as the rural interior, led by the reformist law professor Antonio Lino Neto, and after those two groups followed Figueiredo's Socialists and the rumps of the Progressists and Renovators. The old oligarchic parties pledged to support Lino Neto, and so it was he who looked likeliest to form a government, but even then he lacked the full support of the Parliament; it was then that Figueiredo was surprised to receive a summons to the Lisbon Palace, where he was called into an audience with the King.

Luis was alarmed by the relative success of the Republicans, though heartened they had shot themselves in the feet and that the syndicalists of Manuel Ribeiro had rejected electoral democracy entirely and thus made themselves for the time being irrelevant. The meeting was thus part of his efforts to extrapolate exactly how tolerant of monarchy Figueiredo was, and if he was somebody who could support a Lino Neto government. [5] The choice for Figueiredo here was monumental: if he collaborated with Lino Neto, he endorsed the perpetuation of the monarchy rather than supporting a Republican regime that would quickly seek to abolish it, but with Pais and his nationalist, positivist conservative ethos ascendant amongst Republicans alongside the anticlerical zeal of Costa, he was unsure that the material benefits he hoped to deliver his constituents who had just fought to give their small trade unions a seat at the table would be realized.

"Who is socialism for?" In that moment, Figueiredo came to the conclusion that it was as much for the subjects of a monarchy as it was for the citizens of a republic, and more confident that Lino Neto would pursue a course similar to paternalist Catholic statist regimes like France or Austria, he told Luis that for a price, such as Cabinet ministries, a veto on policy and political nominations, and the further legalization of trade unionism and their incorporation into the daily life of Portugal, he would not just support but "participate with enthusiasm" a Lino Neto government. Luis thought the demand high, but he was not willing to test Figueiredo's openness to joining a government led by Pais or, worse, Costa.

With that, in June of 1918, Europe's first "Blue-Red" government (or "purple regime") was formed, a transactional bond between conservatives and social democrats in opposition to liberals and radicals. Like most Blue-Red governments, it would not be harmonious, and it would not last long, but Portugal was the first innovator in such a Cabinet, and the success of a targeted, disciplined and cabined social democratic campaign that could co-exist with monarchy did not go unnoticed elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Germany and Spain..."

- Socialism and Europe

[1] Or Naples, if you ask certain people in Northern Italy
[2] You can see shades of this dynamic iOTL - it was not the largely irrelevant socialists who drove Portuguese Revolution or who ran the First Republic, and in Spain, the PSOE (as well as Ferrer's anarchists!) were usually more moderate than many of the bourgeois figures and factions in the Second Republic.
[3] Or himself, considering how things ended for him in OTL 1908!
[4] Joao Franco never getting into power and a successful Pink Map buys the Braganzas way more time and prestige, basically.
[5] Lino Neto was himself ambivalent about monarchy, iOTL arousing some controversy with conservatives when he declined to advocate or agitate explicitly for his return, though it was the anticlerical Republicans who really detested him.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...announcing to the rest of the royal family that the rumors were, indeed, true - Sultan Mehmed V had indeed drawn his last breaths in the Yildiz, dying after just over four years to the day on the Ottoman throne, at the age of seventy-three.

The changes Mehmed V had brought about had been, in any sense of the term, momentous. Unlike his brother Abdulhamid who had done everything in his power to subvert the constitution that he had nonetheless maintained, Mehmed had embraced it, allowing not just the political program of the Ahraris to continue unmolested as a matter of policy but allowed the spirit of the Ottoman cultural revolution to continue. He had become a public figure as much as a constitutional one, enormously popular as a grandfatherly symbol of national unity and personal piousness, an affable old Muslim who enjoyed reading and a strong cup of coffee. He had also, critically, reformed many of the more archaic dynastic practices of the House of Osman, ending the sequestration of princes both major and minor, ending the rules forbidding princes to have children before their ascent to positions of prominence, and making a number of appointments of family members to temporal offices that granted them genuine power rather than viewing the House of Osman as an institution to fear. The differences in Istanbul [1] between 1914 when Abdulhamid was slain and 1918 when Mehmed V were stark and plain.

The heir as appointed under the rules of the House, which did not conform to the primogeniture common elsewhere in Europe, was Sehzade Yusuf Izzeddin, a very different character. His relationship with Mehmed V had been uneven, sometimes cordial and collaborative, sometimes sharply distant. They were neither rivals nor allies, Izzeddin aware from a very early age where he stood in the line of succession, and now Sultan at the age of sixty-one, he did not anticipate ruling for particularly long, in part due to his oft-fragile mental and physical health, and his conclusion that he was surrounded by people who aimed to assassinate him. The new Sultan Yusuf I, even before taking the throne, never ate or drank anything that had not been tasted first by one of his army of retainers, and he frequently trembled either out of some curious tic or paralyzing levels of anxious paranoia. As befit a man with such an untrusting nature, Yusuf was cold and withdrawn when meeting others, a far cry from the compassionate Mehmed, and found solace mostly in writing and reading poetry and his prayers, being probably one of the most genuinely devout Sultans of his time.

Indeed, of all his characteristics, it was his piousness that alarmed Sabahaddin - who in many ways was Muslim only in theory and seldom attended Friday prayers - the most. Nationality and faith were impossible to separate out from one another in the Ottoman Empire and Sabahaddin's push to shift the Sultan to a less temporal, more symbolic figure had in part rested on the prestige of the Sultan as Caliph; a benevolent and holy figure who nonetheless did little to irritate or antagonize the sensibilities and privileges of the vast Christian minorities of the Empire. In Mehmed he had had a figure in whom he could fully trust that this would be the case; in Yusuf, he worried, he did not.

And there was indeed reason to worry. Yusuf was skeptical of the Ittihadists for a variety of reasons but found their more muscular program that was less tolerant of Greek nationalism in particular appealing; the Patriarch of Constantinople felt snubbed and disrespected in his first opportunity to meet personally with the new Sultan, and the relationship never recovered thereafter. In early August, Yusuf criticized Sabahaddin by name, and not simply as "the Vizier," but his full royal title, in a meeting of himself and several princes who were known to be hostile to the Ahraris. Days later, he spoke against men who did not wear the fez or women who did not adorn themselves with headscarves, describing it as "an affront to God." When the Caliph said as much, especially after only a month on the throne, it mattered.

It mattered in particular because Yusuf I succeeded Mehmed V at a time when Sabahaddin needed the opposite of what he was; it had already not been enough that the popular, doting old grandfather was loathe to make political or negative comments. Much as the constitutional revolution of the 1870s had needed a fully engaged Sultan to fully promulgate rather than the half-baked, illiberal pseudo-democracy that had instead arrived, the cultural revolution of "national modernism," a pluralistic, democratic and above all secular project of progressive radicalism growing increasingly esoteric and disconnected from the day-to-day concerns of the Ottoman populace, needed a fully engaged Sultan. At an hour when the backlash outside of cosmopolitan, diverse urban areas was already starting to brew, as intensely amongst devout Orthodox Christians as among rural Muslims [2], the defense of national modernism needed to come as much from inside the Yildiz as from inside the Ottoman Parliament.

Alas, that was not the Sultan who had just taken the throne, and that was not the defense from a Caliph eager to exercise temporal authority, as much out of his paranoia and fear of assassination as any religious or political agenda, that Sabahaddin was going to get."

- The House of Osman

[1] Istanbul in the Ottoman context referred to a central part of the city of Constantinople, rather than the city as a whole. Here, I'm using it as a metonym, a bit like the Porte
[2] Not sure how realistic it is, but one thing I'm game to explore here in a more decentralized OE is more collaboration between conservatives of both faiths against secular elements in Constantinople and other cities similar to it across sectarian lines. Then again, knowing how the Balkans and the Levant are even within groups of the same faith, fat chance of that...

 

[KingSweden24]

"...described the wedding almost in terms reserved for European dynasts; a caricature in the Sun even had Quentin decked out in the ceremonial uniform of the German Kaiser.

This was, perhaps, not far off the mark, for the nuptials joined together two of the most powerful families in the United States in a way that was perhaps unexpected. The Whitneys were about as much of genuine New York aristocracy as one could find; Flora's mother was, herself, an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune, and though the Whitneys were thought to lean Democratic, Flora's uncle William had married Helen Hay, daughter of the former President John Hay and bete noire of the young Roosevelt, and her aunt Pauline had married a British Tory peer and industrialist. It was thus a family with many fingers in many pies, their political allegiances much more fluid and pragmatic than that of the rock-ribbed Democratic clan of Oyster Bay, and also a family that could credibly look at a marriage to a Roosevelt and think it perhaps beneath Flora's station.

Theodore was under no illusions that Harry Payne Whitney approved of his daughter's choice in a beau, because Whitney had told him as much, to his face, at the Knickerbocker Club when Quentin had come to him shortly after the end of the war to ask his daughter's hand. Whitney was not heartless, though; an avid sportsman like Theodore with a particular interest in thoroughbred racing, he had been relieved that his son, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, had not gone off to war and was currently spending a year as a desk clerk in the Army before attending Harvard, and he was moved by Theodore's loss of his two eldest sons and the wounds suffered by the two younger. Whitney clarified after this for Theodore, whom he respected personally even if he found his boundless energy and bullheaded nature quite tiring, that while he did not particularly approve of the match and wanted his daughter to take a yearslong grand tour of Europe before her engagement, he had told Quentin that he would not intervene to block a marriage, and that was good enough for the Roosevelts. The engagement had gone on, and so one of the grandest weddings in the history of New York was planned.

The political implications of the match were well understood, and not just because former President Hearst was on the invite list (former President Hughes, a close friend of the Whitney family despite political disagreements, was pointedly not). Theodore had, after all, not long ago been New York's hard-charging, disruptive Mayor, and one not particularly popular with many of the masters of the universe who nonetheless attended as a courtesy to the Whitneys; Helen Hay Whitney herself complimented the handsome groom and his gallantry in the war, but huffed "it is a shame he's the son of that horrible man!" Theodore, as was his wont, cared not a wit - his family had picked itself up from middle-class respectability [1] through his media empire to the upper echelons of American power, and now they were sealing their place within it as the Whitney and Vanderbilt fortunes were now as much part of the Roosevelt name as what he had made for himself with newspapers. The comparisons to a dynastic wedding in Europe was thus not unfounded, because newspapers reported it as much at the time - with the wedding, it suddenly became considered almost inevitable that Quentin would have a career in New York, and perhaps national, politics, an enormous amount of pressure to foist upon an affable young man of only twenty-one years of age.

The grand wedding at Oyster Bay had other effects, too; Roosevelt, a man for whom there was nothing quite like a good grudge, elected to further inflame his enemies within the New York Democratic Party by making Hearst an attendee whom he honored with a seat near the front, while declining to invite important figures like Al Smith, Bill Sulzer, or even Charlie Murphy, all three of whom Whitney did not care for but had felt pressured to invite to avoid a dust-up that would diminish his influence in Albany or at Gracie Mansion. The snub was understood as such and the factional rift amongst New York Democrats that had more to do with personality and generation than ideology deepened; Roosevelt did not know it yet, but he had earned powerful enemies for the remaining years of his life, and his influence was about to enter a very long period of decline as that of Smith in particular grew.

The reemergence of a glad-handing Hearst from two years of political semi-exile also served to open up a new wrinkle in the ex-President's personal life, one which quickly came to be a political liability just a month later as he attempted to launch his long-expected political comeback at the New York State Democratic Convention in Schenectady. For reasons that are still unclear, Hearst informed Roosevelt that well-liked former First Lady Millicent Hearst was unable to attend, creating a dubious excuse, and then privately made arrangements for his mistress Marion Davies - an actress in the employ of Roosevelt's Cosmopolitan Studios, a small outfit still at that time - to attend "as a guest of the Roosevelt family." Hearst's dalliances since leaving the Presidency with young Broadway starlets was something of an open secret in New York high society, but his intense personal privacy and a good deal of fear of the famously vindictive former President had kept such things quiet. Bringing Davies to the Roosevelt-Whitney wedding, on the other hand, put things almost entirely out in the open: Hearst and Millie were barely on speaking terms any more, and he was starting to live openly with his mistress. The Hearst-Davies relationship is a strange though oddly affectionate concluding chapter to the 27th President's life, especially once they absconded to California to live in a state of quiet opulence once he inherited the rest of his father's mining empire the following year, and it began in large part in late June 1918, when Davies had her "debut," if that was the term for it.

The wedding itself, of course, was just as much a spectacle as the press had hoped. Roosevelt arranged for a Navy boat to give a salute in view of Sagamore Hill (arranged by "cousin Franklin," startling the neighbors; doves and peacocks wandered galore, and there were bears and lions on site as well. Oriental performers brought from Chusan were the main entertainment of the evening, and Quentin and Flora left the grounds for their honeymoon in Europe under a sword salute of Quentin's fellow veterans, all of whom were men whom he had served with personally. Memories of that black Christmas two years earlier had entirely faded; the young couple, madly and deeply in love and with all the promise of the future ahead of them both romantically and professionally, stirred something in Theodore's heart he had almost forgotten was there. There were battles to come, in the tumultuous years after the war, a great many that he yearned to fight - but for one night, the Lion of Sagamore Hill could rest and look proudly upon the addition to his pride..." [2]

- American Royalty: The Roosevelt Dynasty's Enduring Legacy

[1] This may admittedly be underselling the earlier generations of Roosevelts a bit
[2] Lot going on in this chapter as we of course build towards the conclusion of the 1910s NY Dem contest between the Hearst-Roosevelt old guard and Smith's rising faction, as well as something of a generational transition as we finally get to one of the more wild features of Hearst's OTL life and Roosevelt nearing the end of the road (he won't die at the same time as OTL, but Teddy was a man who I think was destined to burn hot, bright, and fast). It's been interesting going back and re-reading content from the 1880s and 1890s and seeing how prominent the setup of the flipped-around Roosevelt and Hearst were even then, and it'll be weird when we eventually say goodbye to one and then both of them.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...commitment to new outlets of organization and representation unrestricted by establishmentarian organizations; part and parcel of this, for instance, was the founding of the American Jewish Committee on July 1, 1918, in New York City. While inauspicious to most outside of the Jewish faith, it was in fact a major occasion, for it represented a sharp break with the group that shared its identical acronym, the American Jewish Congress.

What separated this new "AJC" from the old? Well, politics and identity, rather than even theology. For most of the 19th century, American Jewry had been heavily dominated by German-Jewish figures, often with backgrounds in European mercantilism and other professional trades; these German Jews were difficult to distinguish as Jewish had they not disclosed their faith, well-assimilated in their home countries and assimilating even faster in the United States. Though often theologically moderate, they were politically conservative and well-represented within the legal and banking profession, not exactly strongholds of progressive radicalism.

Starting in the 1880s and accelerating in the first two decades of the 20th century, however, American Jewishness shifted sharply and profoundly to be overwhelmingly Ashkenazi Jewish, from the Pale of Settlement in Russia or Austrian Galicia, both regarded as two of the poorest places in Europe and with the former in particular ravaged by frequent pogroms and other forms of aggressive state-encouraged violence and discrimination against Jews. These Yiddish-speaking immigrants arrived in massive numbers from Europe, settling primarily in New York and northern New Jersey, and both ethnically and economically they had virtually nothing in common with the extant organs of American Jewry, whether it be synagogues in quiet middle-class neighborhoods or the American Jewish Congress. Politically, they became the backbone of labor radicalism and showed more propensity for the Socialist Party than any other ethnicity in America, and so naturally, the Old AJC had no particular value to them.

While this example is specific to American Jews, and perhaps extreme in the sharp divergence between the old guard and restive newcomers, this was a process repeated in some form across much of the country. Freedmen refugees from the Confederacy found little appeal in many of abolitionist organizations once dominated by Booker T. Washington and flocked instead to the more radical NAACP; the AFL's stodgy craft unionism and coziness with business repelled many who instead sought out larger trade unions. As exemplified in the parlance of the time of the postwar America representing a "New Republic" and the prewar establishment being an "Old Republic," the institutions that had defined late 19th century America were fraying or being forced to realign and reform, as the energy of a generation that had just emerged from hell on earth grew in ways that nobody, anywhere, could entirely foresee..."

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

 

[KingSweden24]

TRIGGER WARNING​

"...the news that his good friend Charles Menoher had been assassinated in Memphis struck Pershing like a sack of bricks slamming into his chest; the two had been extremely close through campaign after campaign, with Pershing in time coming to call Menoher, "My mind in the field as much as my hand at campaign." There was no loss, personally, that affected him as much through the whole of the war, and that it came a whole year after the war "ended" just added to the cruelty of it.

The date of death - July 2, 1918 - left Pershing nonetheless with a queasy sense of foreboding. Menoher was regarded both by the Army occupation command as well as Confederate intermediaries as one of the more capable officials left behind by Pershing in Dixie; unlike the more instinctively retaliatory Harbord, Menoher was cool-headed and got on well with Confederate officialdom, and had even begun coordinating aid to towns hit hard by the unusually potent flu outbreak that had torn through the Confederacy for much of the spring. He was a good man, amongst the worst that could have been cut down, and Pershing couldn't help feel an uneasy sense that Menoher had specifically been targeted for a reason.

Two days later, his suspicions were proven correct."

- Pershing

"...exaggerated the extent to which the "July Offensive" was a coordinated plan; holed up at his stronghold in the east-central Tennessee hill country near the tripoint with Alabama and Georgia, it was in Forrest's personal interest that everybody in the Confederacy see the National Resistance Organization's fingerprints over the spectacular attacks. Nonetheless, there was a fair deal of collaboration between the NRO and the various Hillboy groups. It was well-known that the Yankees were worried about a repeat of the arbitrary savagery of the Red Summer, and that they had spent all spring preparing. It was also well-known that the Army Military District commanders were feeding reports of how well these preparations were going back to Philadelphia as well as friendly journalists across the Union. By late June, the War Department was putting out a steady stream of overly-optimistic assurances that the ferocious insurgency of 1917 had been largely quelled, assisted in part by the lull in fighting caused by the spring wave of the "Dixie flu" and also intentional restraint in operations by the guerillas, who through word-of-mouth and backchannel communications elected to lull the Yankee occupiers into a false sense of security before they would strike.

The debacle that was later called the "Independence Day Massacres" or "Fourt of July Offensive" had, like many failures, many fathers. With four of the quietest months of the occupation having concluded, the Army command had relaxed, as had junior officers and field sergeants. Discipline was less rigorous; corners were cut. Despite one of the commanding generals in Dixie, Charlie Menoher, being shot and killed by a sniper in Memphis on July 2, other Military Districts did not go on alert, assuming it was a lucky one-off or planned assassination. The Fourth of July holidays loomed, after all.

So suffice to say that attacks in all eleven occupied states, all throughout the day, on the quintessential American national holiday caught the Army entirely off guard. Hillboys materialized out of woods, hollers and farmhouses like a biblical swarm of locusts, opening fire on soldiers as they raised flags in town squares, as they prepared barbecues, and as they went out on patrol. Sheriffs, mayors, judges, those who had collaborated with or given aid to local occupiers were attacked and gunned down, stabbed or lynched from trees. Courthouses and schoolhouses were burned, rail depots seized, and telegram and telephone wires cut or poles chopped down. As the violence spread, and it became clear that every corner of the Confederacy was affected, it began to dawn on the Military District commanders that this was all entirely coordinated..."

- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33

"...Joplin, Missouri's dangerous proximity to the Arkansas state line. A reporter for the local newspaper later described the scene to an Army lieutenant in particularly graphic terms, describing how the Fourth of July picnic, which featured a number of veterans of the war there in honor, was suddenly beset upon in the town square by masked men with rifles, pistols, and grenades, and that two trucks with two Maxim guns apiece came careening into town, opening fire with abandon at the picnicgoers. He described children as young as five who were barely recognizable as human after being struck so many times, of women who lay dead on top of their screaming babes they had given their lives to save, of bodies mutilated by posthumous abuse by pistol or knife, and of several freedmen who lived in the city hung from what remained of a grand oak in the center of town. A similar attack against nearby Carthage was avoided thanks to alerts of what had occurred in Joplin; smaller-scale raids into West Virginia and Maryland were carried out, too, albeit with much smaller impacts.

The bloodshed in Joplin which left nearly a hundred dead, was on its own enough to trigger a massive groundswell of rage and, afterwards, confusion in the United States. The wanton slaughter of civilians including young children after the war was over was to the public utterly unacceptable, but also put paid to the idea that the insurgency was increasingly under control and that all things were moving smoothly towards the anticipated passage of the Confederate Third Amendment; it seemed, rather, that maybe things were actually worse than ever, if the Hillboys and NRO could raid American towns at will and mar a national holiday..."

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

"...particular contempt was reserved for women; several brothels were firebombed in the "July Days," with any "collaborator" branded not just a traitor to their country but to the Confederate way of life. Their hair cut and with the word "whore" painted in red on their bare chests, women accused of prostitution were paraded naked down streets by hillboy gangs after Yankee soldiers and male collaborators had been massacred, to terrify the townspeople of what might happen if they cooperated even an iota with the occupation. Businesses that allowed so much as a single Yankee dime to be spent on their premises were burned; those who "associated" with freedmen were forced to cover themselves with tar and sing minstrel songs while hollering hillboys fired pistol rounds at their feet. The depravity on display in the first week of July 1918 was unmatched even by what went on during the extended Red Summer; it seemed to be part military operation, part vengeance campaign to crush dissent, and part gleeful barbarism for its own sake. What was clear, by the end, was that most Confederate civilians had gotten the message..."

- A Republic of Widows and Orphans

"...public relations disaster. What had unfolded between July 4-10 was a debacle of massive proportions, making the Root administration look not just inept but deceitful; the idea that the war was increasingly under control, and all that remained was for the Confederate state legislatures to swallow their pride and wave through the Third Amendment, now looked to be an outright lie. The Hillboys had not only risen up to attack the Army and civilians en masse across the Confederacy when they were thought to be in gradual, terminal decline, they had done so initially nearly with impunity, attacking wherever and whoever they wanted.

Two things about July 4th, 1918 were true and favorable to the American occupation, but nonetheless entirely irrelevant. The first was that tactically and in many ways strategically, the attacks were a military failure. Once soldiers came off their surprised back heels, the more hardened American occupation forces counterattacked with gusto. More Hillboys died in the first week of July than had died in the previous six months, and the violence exacted upon them and suspected supporters by individual soldiers was nearly as horrifying as the events of July 4th. The attacks had, ironically, exposed to the increasingly sophisticated Army intelligence network and aligned freedmen paramilitaries across the Military Districts the logistical networks including, critically, arms caches, that the Hillboys relied upon; in being able to secure these, and slaughtering hundreds of insurgents during the July Days and immediately after, the threat was genuinely culled at an operational level. The second was that despite the attacks, the American occupation did not relent - and in fact intensified - their pressure on legislators to wrap up the passage of the Third Amendment. If the NRO and the Hillboy militias had hoped to somehow salvage de jure slavery through their barbarism, such hopes were quickly dashed as occupation procedures in state capitals were quickly intensified.

These two things were true but also irrelevant because the American public ceased to care. It did not matter that the Hillboys had, military, essentially been defeated in many of the rural areas in which they operated, or that the Third Amendment would finally pass in September; what mattered is that the Root administration looked even more adrift than they had a year earlier, in the midst of the Red Summer, and now the economic conditions were worse, with the virulent flu pandemic on top of it. A brigade of Army soldiers massacring most of the town of Springdale, Arkansas as they attempted to pursue the instigators of the Joplin Massacre did not help; the situation was clearly out of control, and nothing was likely to bring it back under control.

Insofar as engendering this opinion amongst the American populace was an explicit goal of the Independence Day Massacres - and for guerilla commander Nathan Forrest II, it most certainly was - then the loosely-coordinated operation was a smashing success..." [1]

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

[1] So, yes, this is basically just "Deep Fried Tet," which was also a tactical disaster for the Viet Cong that essentially ended them as a military force, but which would up being a massive moral and long-term strategic victory for them as it essentially killed public support for the war stateside.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...straightforward fact that Michael was, personally, quite hostile to the Black Hundreds movement. As detailed in several previous chapters, Michael's liberalism was overstated frequently by contemporaries, especially those abroad, and the perception of him to this day as a man who desired to be a constitutional monarch in the British fashion is by all accounts entirely wrong, placing the blame for the perpetuation of Russian autocracy on "the machinations of men," rather than on Russian institutionalism and inertia instead. That being said, he was put off by "organized pogroms," and by the late 1910s he was personally quite alarmed at the rapid growth of the Black Hundreds and their principal political vehicle, the Union of the Russian People, or SRN (Soyuz Russkogo Narodna).

The symbology of the SRN was tied deeply to Russian traditions; the "Black" came from the "black lands" of the taxpaying peasantry, and the "Hundreds" came from a unit of feudal land measurement. The SRN's footsoldiers viewed themselves as the traditional vanguard of Russia, the conservative, strongly devout peasantry who enjoyed a symbiotic, father-son relationship with Tsarism. To them, any deviation from the traditional position of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality" was a grievous crime not just tantamount to treason but, in many ways, heresy; perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the more charismatic itinerant Orthodox hieromonks and preachers were closely associated with this movement, chief among them the famed John of Kronstadt or the more infamous Hieromonk Iliodor. Nikolai Maklakov quietly tolerated their meetings and marches, which usually inevitably came to blows with socialist or anarchist counter-marchers; the Durnovo family was thought to support them tacitly through their financial empire.

What really worried Michael and eventually both Stolypin and Sazonov, though, was that SRN was just a more extreme, demagogic version of a more staid and establishmentarian outfit, the Russian Assembly. SRN had been formed from Assembly dissidents who wanted a more muscular approach to nationalism and traditionalism, and attracted figures like Alexander Dubrovin or the fiery, cartoonish demagogue Vladimir Purishkevich, a colorful speaker in the State Duma (when he bothered to grace it with his presence) best known for directing more than a few pogroms personally or in articles in the polemic newspaper Russkoe Znamya. At its heart, the SRN was an organ of right-wing street violence, a grassroots organization with the tacit support of government officials to harass those seen as opponents of the regime to create both a popular vehicle of support for the harshest forms of Tsarism, target scapegoated social minorities like Jews and trade unionists, and give the government a shield from having to do these things themself.

The Russian Assembly was no less a creature of the Black Hundred impulse but was considerably more sophisticated; it had preceded the SRN, and considered its practices gauche and uncultured. Rather than a militant right-wing peasant paramilitary, the Russian Assembly was itself a conservative party within the Duma that was no less hostile to democracy and constitutionalism but flowed out from the bureaucracy and the establishment; its leaders were Army generals and Navy admirals, members of the nobility, statesmen such as the Minister of Agriculture Alexander Krivoshein, peripheral junior ministers such as Boris Sturmer or Alexander Trepov, and most importantly the canny and cunning parliamentarians, Alexei Khvostov and Vladimir Gurko.

It was Khvostov who, in the late 1910s, found his surest footing in the emerging shift of the Tsarist establishment from a traditionally rightist position that had taken an almost defensive posture since 1908, to a more aggressive, reactionary and proactive sense, aiming not just to slow reforms but to arrest and, in many ways, perhaps reverse them. Khvostov, almost as soon as he had been elected in 1912, had begun plotting his maneuvers carefully, seeking to use the SRN as a catspaw for his more cautious attempts to ingratiate himself with new patrons in the Council of Ministers, ignoring men like Guchkov or the other Maklakov to train his attention on leveraging his relationship with Krivoshein and the decline of Kokovstov's authority into, perhaps, a ministry such as that of Justice (he was a talented lawyer, after all) or maybe even Interior, if Maklakov could be nudged away.

Thus the foxes were inside the henhouse, foxes who found even the staunchly conservative Stolypin to be too reformist, too moderate, too accommodating to modernism, and the Duarchy increasingly came to the view, one shared by the Tsar, that the destabilizing SRN and the insidiously entryist Russian Assembly that was well-supported within the Council itself were just as much a danger to the project of gradual reform in the Tsardom as the SRs and Chernov were..." [1]

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

[1] Mostly just seeding future Russian stuff here, introducing the next generation of Tsarist officials as Stolypin and Sazonov get ever-older

 

[KingSweden24]

"...as angry Nationals and Unionists tried to shout him down from the opposition benches, Chamberlain nonetheless stood his ground - rigid and awkward, his posture perhaps a bit too stiff, but upright nonetheless - and denounced, "the enemies of peace." He held aloft the document that contained the renegotiated Government of Ireland Act that had emerged from the Irish Convention and boomed, "This is the governing document of the Kingdom of Ireland; it is a compromise, imperfect but fair and crafted in a spirit of good intention towards all that island's citizens. It is our duty to deliver for the Irish people the democracy their anointed representatives have themselves negotiated; it is our task to secure peace in our time [1] for the whole of Ireland." Missing from his speech were words like "proposed" or "tentative," and this was no accident; Chamberlain had been the latest convert to the cause of Home Rule of them all, but it was the last convert who was the most zealous, and this was the hour in which the debate on the bill was to come.

It helped his cause that the Liberal Party was, finally, almost uniformly united behind the Government of Ireland Act 1918, with the March election having been unequivocally fought on the question, and the party enjoyed the confidence of both the IPP and the SDLP in passing the Act. The opposition Nationals were badly split; Carson had come around to the New Year's Day Agreement, but in a stroke of irony, many British conservatives were more opposed to it than Ulstermen themselves. Nonetheless, when the Government of Ireland Act came up for a vote on June 22nd, 1918, it passed on its first reading; three days later, it passed its second reading. With that, it was off to the House of Lords, where its passage was favorable but more of a question - the Liberal advantage in government over the previous few decades had left the peerage with a much more yellow hue than before 1878 (or 1890 especially), but there were nonetheless a great many Anglo-Irish Lords who were aggressively opposed to the New Year's Day Agreement and such a massive constitutional revision bothered even a good number of Liberals. Lord Crewe, the Liberal Leader in the Lords and the well-respected Foreign Secretary, began the process of whipping the Lords in favor of the Act, but was unsure that passage would be feasible until sometime in early September; as it was, the final vote was held on September 20, 1918, and it passed by a narrow margin.

But it had still passed, and was quickly granted royal assent - and with that, the Government of Ireland Act was completed, setting the stage for a roughly four-month transitional commission as provided for by the Act that would include representatives of both the future Irish government as well as Dublin Castle as the auspices of transitioning Irish law enforcement, the Irish judiciary, and other functions of state to the new Irish Assembly - which had yet to be convened, what with the IPP having returned to Westminster after the March elections - before the Union Jack was no longer the flag, or at least sole flag, of Ireland. [2]

The spirit of the Transition, a brief moment in Irish history which is generally capitalized and is considered as having begun with the New Year's Day Agreement in most Irish scholarship, was one of remarkable optimism everywhere save Antrim and Down. Songs about the major players of the Irish Convention, both nationalist and loyalist, were written in both Gaelic and English, and it was suggested that an opera depicting the Convention be composed and put on to celebrate the arrival at last of Home Rule. Celebrations were held throughout the summer, and it was the first July Twelfth in Ulster or Dublin to avoid sectarian violence; indeed, the tremendous bloodshed of the past four years seemed almost to have been forgotten, included by those who had just recently been organizing to kill their neighbors. The Transition was a time of healing and rapprochement, of bygones being bygones, of Irishmen being merely Irishmen with little attention paid to their faiths or politics.

That was, at least, how the common folk experienced the ebullience of the hour. Behind the scenes, especially once elections were called for an Irish Assembly in early December once royal assent was granted, this was most certainly not the case. The most immediate question even before Chamberlain had taken up debate on the Government of Ireland Act and passed the Redmond-Midleton Agreement into law was what was to become of the IPP. The party had been formed, after all, during the Plan of Campaign and land wars by Charles Parnell to be a catch-all vehicle for Irish nationalist agitation of all stripes, welcoming to all comers; Parnell, after all, had himself been a Protestant from a wealthy and influential family of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The first order mission being Home Rule in some capacity had continued on from Parnell to Redmond, and now that the mission was accomplished the question was asked: what was the Irish Parliamentary Party going to become, what was it going to be for, and who was it to represent?

In some ways, the IPP - organizationally, at least - had become a bloated, fat and content vehicle for Redmond's personal ambition, held together by little more than the broad admiration most Irishmen had for the man (indeed, one of the first orders of the Irish Assembly when it convened as the legislature of a free Ireland for the first time in February 1919 was to commission a grand statue of the man as the "Irish George Washington.") [3] Ideologically, it had been committed almost exclusively to the "first mission" of Home Rule, bringing under its umbrella a variety of figures who in a normal political system would have been scattered from right to left. This ideological incoherence can even be evidenced in the final Westminster elections in which it participated, in which it in fact did not perform particularly well despite its epochal, existential triumph at the Irish Convention and saw significant erosion to abstentionist Sinn Fein nationalists, Irish republicans organized in their own party, and the nascent Irish Labour. As such, it included at the end conciliatory figures such as William O'Brien with irreconcilable sticks-in-the-mud like John Dillon, and it included liberal radicals like Timothy Healy as well as clerical arch-conservatives like Joseph Devlin.

At Redmond's passing, and some weeks before the Westminster debate and vote on the Agreement, Dillon had predicted with some resignation that "Ireland shall be Devlin's from now on." It was not difficult to see why he deduced such. Redmond had never made much effort to cultivate a successor, in part due to his considerable personal disagreements with Dillon and political discomfort with Devlin's thuggishness, and this left the IPP enormously top-heavy. The Irish nationalist movement had triumphed, but it had also triumphed at the conclusion of the careers of its leading lights (quite literally in Redmond's case), and none of those lights were the types of men one could organize a movement, especially a movement of governance, around. O'Brien was too old, and had burned far, far too many bridges; Healy was too utopian and unfriendly with the Catholic establishment. For Irish nationalism, that then left some combination of Griffith, who had always eschewed the IPP and was thus a nonstarter, and one of Dillon or Devlin. But Dillon was famed not as much for his intelligence but rather for his reputation as the irreconcilable of irreconcilables, the man who eagerly allowed the perfect be the enemy of the good, the man who had tried at every instance to cut off Redmond at the knees because he could not swallow some small concession or deign negotiate some otherwise minor point in a grander compromise. He had been a parliamentarian found lacking when Irish nationalism was a populist cause of opposition; such a personality and instincts would be a nightmare now that it needed to become an establishment cause of governance.

That left, in other words, Devlin. There were so many factors that made him the natural choice to seize Redmond's mantle, and he did not even really need to seize it. He was a nationalist beyond reproach, but an Ulster native who understood the peculiarities of that province even if he did not always fully grasp the anxieties of the Protestant base within it. As the IPP had grown increasingly to be the tired party of the native Irish elite and high clergy, he had excelled in sliding into that role, what with his position within the Ancient Order of Hibernians and transformation of that organization into "Green Lodges" that could compete and indeed outdo the Orangemen at their own game. And he had proven himself an adept, canny and ruthless operator, who had become widely viewed as Redmond's natural successor not only for generational reasons but because he was, quite simply, the island's most talented politician and its best orator behind perhaps only the late Redmond himself and Carson. [4]

That the entire IPP organization essentially folded into Devlin's vehicle came as little surprise, but the speed at which it occurred did; no leadership ballot was even held as it became increasingly clear that a provisional election would be in the offing, and soon. Devlin quietly conceded to the lack of a provisional council for Ireland and to keep Samuel at Dublin Castle through the end of the Transition provided that the process was as rapid as possible; in the meantime, he declared a new "People's Party," which handily for voters had the same acronym as the old Parliamentary Party of Parnell and Redmond. The lineage was clear, but the result was something new - a clericalist, conservative party of Irish nationalism that was fully loyal to the British Empire in return for Home Rule, and which temporarily deemphasized the agrarian causes which Parnell, Healy and Dillon had invested such a great deal in. This new party did not have the AOH as its organizational arm; rather, Devlin's AOH would before long come to view the rebranded IPP as the political arm of the Hibs.

This political transformation in the background of staid debates in Westminster and bureaucratic procedure to prepare the Royal Irish Constabulary and other institutions of British rule for Irish governance reached its crescendo with the elections of December 6, 1918, in which Devlin triumphed by a decisive margin, able to form a majority government on his own with the People's Party winning nearly two-thirds of the seats. In opposition were a scattered assortment of parties; disagreements between Craig and Carson over the Agreement had led to the latter eschewing participation in the campaign to remain in London for the time being and thus saw "Unionism," or what was left of it, cleave in two, with a moderate Southern Unionist-dominated Irish Unionist Alliance campaigning on a separate ticket from the Ulster Unionist Party of Craig; failing to stand together meant they would proverbially hang separately, and both parties underperformed their own inflated expectations. Joining them in the opposition benches was the Farm League of Ireland, founded by dissident followers of Healy (with Dillon's quiet support) as well as a robust performance by Irish Labour, particularly in Catholic wards of Belfast.

It was clear who would take the reigns of Ireland once the finalization of Home Rule arrived; what that would look like, of course, was anybody's guess..."

- Ireland Unleashed [5]

[1] Couldn't resist
[2] More to come on this
[3] Suffice to say Redmond has a much more hagiographic reputation in Ireland ITTL
[4] Also, I have to say, after Redmond and (maybe) O'Brien he was one of the few non-Sinn Fein Irish nationalist leaders of this time IOTL who showed any kind of integrity, pragmatism and common sense (looking at you, Dillon), and after reading about what a bloated, lazy circular firing squad for Catholic bishops the IPP often was, it becomes increasingly obvious how Dev, Michael Collins and the gang were able to totally usurp the cause of Irish independence within the space of just over a year. Having Ireland's own-dick-shooting brigade manage to pull off Home Rule successfully might actually be one of the less realistic things I've written (with the obvious exception of "Successful Joe Clark" over in Bicentennial Man)
[5] Option B was "Ireland Unshackled" but I liked this title better. Consider it your formal Ireland Unfree sequel!

 

[KingSweden24]

German elections, 1918​

397 seats in the German Reichstag; 199 seats needed for the majority

Social Democrat (SPD): 110 (+4)
Centre (Z): 108 (+3)
National Liberal (NLP): 54 (+8)
German Conservative Party (DKP): 27 (-4)
Pan-German League (ADV): 24 (-3)
German Agrarian League (BdL): 24 (+16)
German Progress Party (DFP): 23 (-8)
German Reich Party (DRP): 10 (-2)
Polish People's Party (PSL): 5 (-2)
Christian Social Party (CSP): 5 (-2)
Bavarian Peasants' League (BBB): 2 (-)
German-Hanoverian Party (DHP): 2 (-3)
German Social Party (DSP): 2 (-1)
Danish Party (DP): 1 (-)
Independent Polish (/): 0 (-2)
Independent Conservatives (/): 0 (-2)

-

The German elections of 1918 were held August 9-10, 1918, to elect members of the Reichstag. All 397 seats as drawn in 1868 were up for election. The Social Democratic Party, as it had in every election since 1893, won the most votes, and for the second consecutive election won the most seats, though their gains were small compared to the massive gain in seat share earned in 1913. Parties ambivalent towards the ruling elite of the German Empire - the SDP, the lay Catholic Centre Party (Z) and the radical-progressive German Progress Party (DFP) - once agian won a decisive majority of seats, but the Centre elected once again to continue participating in the Drehung, or "Rotation," of the Reichstag Presidency and thus Vice-Chancellorship of Germany with the Drehungskartel of the classically liberal National Liberal Party (NL), the right-wing German Conservatives (DKP) and the center-right minor German Reich Party (DRP). Minor parties intending to represent ethnic minorities and regions, as well as some minor parties of the far right, decline in vote share once again; the election reflected a remarkable breakthrough for the German Agrarian League (BdL), which tripled its seat count as the concerns of farmers reached a crescendo during a protectionist farm crisis in much of Germany and the inefficiency of Germany's massive landed estates began to become a critical concern ahead of rising food prices.

The Drehung formed in 1908 was challenged directly in this election, however, in that the seat count of its four member parties added up to the necessary 199 exactly, meaning that any defection was fatal and it was still dependent on outside support from parties like the far-right Pan-German League. The Centre Party, with exactly double the number of seats that the NLP, the second largest party in the establishmentarian coalition, was also emboldened to increasingly make demands favorable to Catholic regions of Prussia in the Rhineland and begin pushing aggressively for better patronage appointments in both the Imperial and Prussian cabinets and civil services, revealing many of the cracks in the system. As such, the strong performance by the SDP, the emergence of the BdL as a political force, and the eroding popular support for the Drehung's conservative flank that was unable to portray itself as much else other than a party of Junker interests saw the Imperial party system start to sag, and the 1918 elections and their aftermath are regarded as a factor in Germany's decision to go to war in March 1919.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...converted the massive, hangar-sized building where armor plating had been put on railcars during the war into Schenectady's new convention hall, in part an effort to attract the 1920 Democratic National Convention to the small but densely industrial city northwest of Albany. The idea that such an event would every go to "sleepy little Sch'nady," as it was put, was ludicrous, but the new building - called Hudson Hall by its promoters - nonetheless served as a new, large venue for the 1918 Democratic convention for New York the first weekend of August, as the party gathered to choose and nominate a full slate of candidates for statewide offices. It wound up being one of the most momentous conventions in New York history, its impact echoing deep into the present day, even if few suspected that would be the case, then - or if they did, it was for other reasons entirely.

The 1918 New York state Democratic convention in Schnectady was, in many ways, about the Shakespearean play [1] that was William Randolph Hearst's personal and political life; Robert Wagner would remark at Hearst's 1951 funeral that Hearst's life was in some ways "an opera, in five acts:" his first decades of life culminating with his graduation from Harvard and his layabout years in San Francisco and managing his father's mining empire; his rise to power in New York as one of the most talked-about eligible young bachelors of the time in the mid-1890s and then his populist campaign for Governor in 1898 and meteoric rise to national pre-eminence; his Presidency as the climactic action of the third act; and then the 1910s as something of a falling action, in which the Democratic Party both nationally but especially in New York lived in his long shadow, followed by the time after 1918, in which he absconded into a semi-exile of denouement in Beverly Hills and his lavish coastal estate in California with his mistress and true love, Marion Davies. It is critical to think of 1918 as the time between those fourth and fifth acts of a man who defined the first two decades of American politics in the 20th century, and very much the endpoint of his influence.

Hearst had in many ways been impossible for Democrats to escape, especially in his adoptive home state, and for good reason. He was the first President since Andrew Jackson, who ranked among his many idols, to have served two full, consecutive terms. After two decades of haplessness in the face of an organized, well-funded Liberal machine, the Democrats had roared back after the turn of the century and governed under Hearst with supermajorities in both Houses of Congress, passing the ambitious Fair Deal agenda that dramatically expanded the role of the state and ushered in a progressive revolution in national, state and local governance whose echoes were growing louder in the postwar economic calamity of 1917-20. For an entire generation of Americans, he was in many was the definitive President, one who defined a decade as Jackson had the 1830s and ushered in a time of prosperity and national confidence. He was, honestly, truly and for good reason, still popular with the American people, particularly in the postwar, when his administration came to be seen as a time of peace and stability, even as it had ended in recession and deteriorating relations with the Confederacy in its final year. This wave of soft-glow Hearst nostalgia was strongly apparent by the summer of 1918, and had of course not gone unnoticed by the man himself, who had never quite gotten over his defeat in 1912 and had worked diligently to maintain his relevancy in New York Democratic circles and carefully plotted a way back to prominence, with this year being identified as the likeliest time to make his move. 1914 had been too soon to come back after the Presidency, and Hearst had deduced correctly that 1916 was likely the poisoned chalice even as the war was wrapping up and the popular Hughes chose to stand down [2]. 1918 was the time of promise, the first step in his grand comeback, first to Albany, then on to Philadelphia.

On paper, Hearst's plan was sound, and indeed as the New York Democratic county and precinct chairmen, ward bosses, and other delegates arrived at Hudson Hall, the general sentiment was that while Hearst's vision of a glorious coronation was probably over-optimistic, it was still his race to lose purely thanks to the prestige of his name and his cachet in the party as the winningest Democrat of the last eight decades, who had only lost one election and that was by virtue of a "curse" in 1912 via breaking the Washington precedent. But elections are not won by paper, they are won by people, and here Hearst had significant limitations.

The first was that the New York Democrats were hungry for a win. Since 1915 the state party had been starved of the federal patronage it had grown fat on with Hearst and Bill Sulzer in charge in Washington, with both Senators being Liberals, and the loss of the New York mayoralty in 1917 had stung, badly. Through that lens, there was a great deal of recency bias; Hearst had lost the Presidency in 1912, factional party infighting had contributed to losing a Senate seat in 1914 to what was then considered a weak Liberal opponent in James Wadsworth, his close ally George B. McClellan, Jr. had lost the election in 1916 (though made it closer than another perhaps may have, considering the context of the race), and then in indulging his vindictiveness had denied Al Smith the mayoral nomination the next year and led to a Socialist sitting in Gracie Mansion dissembling the patronage machine Tammany Hall had spent two decades building, oiling, and fine-tuning. Seen from such a perspective, Hearst seemed less like a sure thing, and more like a liability, and the man had done little to nothing to combat this perception amongst his co-partisans. This further compounded Hearst's second problem, which was his pitch of a triumphant return emphasized that he was very much a figure of the past, that the 1918 election in New York - which Democrats were supremely confident they would win due to the unprecedented unpopularity of Elihu Root in his home state - would be an exercise in nostalgia rather than one about the future.

The problems for the former President that he had not thought through continued from there. Some thought that the whole run was a vanity project spearheaded from a man declining in relevance and credibility, with several Assemblymembers themselves (privately, of course) stating that the Hearst campaign was about Hearst and not about New York Democrats or New York state. Others were chagrined at the thought that Hearst would be nominated, very likely win over whatever sacrificial lamb the Liberals tapped the next weekend in Rochester, and then proceed to invest all his time and energy elevating his dwindling list of personal allies and a handful of cronies into positions of influence across New York in an effort to secure the nomination for President in 1920. Still more were put off by the salacious tabloid columns about him living almost openly with Davies, suspected of being his mistress, with the well-liked former First Lady nowhere in sight for months at a time. The ambition and hubris on display, after having been unable to escape Hearst's shadow for nearly ten years, rankled, and it would come back to bite Hearst in Schenectady that weekend, hard.

The biggest issue, however, was Hearst's relative lack of institutional investment. He had assumed, perhaps not without reason, that he would waltz into Hudson Hall, the assembled delegates who were opposed to him would slowly fall in line after a ballot or two, and that his personality and oratory was a sufficient whip operation in a pre-primary era when grassroots organizing mattered very little, especially in machine-run New York politics. Especially after the debacle of 1917, this was most certainly not the case; Charlie Murphy's cachet had entirely collapsed even within Tammany Hall after that, and "Silent Charlie" swore off any unilateral decisions, instead electing to "go with the wind." Hearst had, again reasonably, understood this to mean that when the wind blew in his direction, Murphy would follow.

The wind however was about to blow in a new direction, in large part due to the efforts of two younger, fresher figures in New York politics - Robert Wagner, of course, but also James Farley, who made his presence and impact felt immediately upon New York Democratic circles as he would for the next half-century. [3] Wagner had emerged as the star of New York City working class politics ever since his commitment to the workers affected by the Triangle fire, and he had a crucial advantage in being German-born but Lutheran in being able to straddle a number of ethnic and religious divides in the city. By 1918, he was the Majority Leader of the New York Senate and a key (if unofficial) figure in Tammany Hall's rising generation, helping continue the effort of Murphy to detach it from corruption and instead be a vehicle for the organizing of progressive endeavors. Wagner would never be Tammany's "boss" by being a state politician, but he was amongst the most powerful men in Albany, and in some ways as the lone gubernatorial term of James Gerard drew to a close, he was the "governor in the shadows." He was also Smith's closest friend, personally and politically.

Farley for his part was just coming up, having only a few months earlier been elected the chairman of the Rockland County Democrats - thus making him an "up-stater," as it were, even if proximity via railroad would soon make Rockland a region of commuter-based bedroom communities. Even before the growth of the suburbs, Rockland was already a Liberal stronghold, especially in gubernatorial races where no Democrat since Horatio Seymour had carried it, not even Hearst in 1898; but it was outside of the city, and thus Farley was seen as speaking for the thousands of Democrats who resided north of the city, either in the Hudson Valley or stretching west to Buffalo. While he was often caricatured as a New York Irishman, Farley had an astute understanding of rural voters, what made them tick, and most importantly, how to get them to the polls.

Wagner and Farley often disagreed, sometimes pointedly, but they shared one thing in common: a genuine belief that Al Smith was the better candidate than Hearst, and a sense that in 1920, after New Yorkers had headed the Democratic ticket four straight times, that the delegates who gathered somewhere other than Schenectady would not nominate a New Yorker again, at least not so soon. With this in mind, they wanted instead to look ahead to 1924 or 1928, when the war generation and those after would be even older and less attached to memories of Hearst, and for that they needed a new figure, a figure of the future, not a man of the past.

The final showdown between Hearst and Smith had been predicted for years, going back to 1914; assumptions that Hearst would slap away the new generation and reimpose the old guard was based on fault assumptions, grounded in inertia. Farley's whip operation as Schenectady opened up revealed dozens of county chairmen who were uncommitted and, critically, a Buffalo delegation that had already internally voted to support Smith. Wagner spent all morning of Saturday, August 3rd at the Mohawk Hotel, confusing many delegates; it turned out that he had been called into a meeting by Bill Sulzer, who was already known to support Smith against Hearst, and when Wagner arrived at the meeting it was Theodore Roosevelt, the famed newspaperman whose son's wedding had just been the event of the season, ready to jockey. Wagner told him plainly that his ask was taking out Hearst by the third ballot, and if Roosevelt committed his faction of the party to that, then Roosevelt could have whatever he wanted. Roosevelt already had a considerable list waiting, quickly and without hesitating elaborating that he wanted former Hearst attorney and current state judge Clarence Shearn out of the running for Attorney General, a factional candidate of his choosing for Lieutenant Governor, and then the big - and fateful - price: the Senate nomination in 1920 for his cousin, the Naval war hero Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a former state Senator who had quit the Legislature just as his career grew promising to go off and fight the war, and who had been considered a dark horse nominee for Governor were it not for Hearst.

Wagner was hesitant, even though he knew "Cousin Frank" decently well, and Farley had even helped organize voters for him in one of his campaigns. Ill memories of the jockeying for slots on the 1914 tickets were fresh and indeed part of Smith's handicap now; to promise the nomination against the bete noire in James Wadsworth in two years was a very, very steep ask. He took a lunch privately with Smith and Farley a few blocks away soon thereafter to explain to him what Roosevelt had proposed, and Smith asked Farley for his thoughts. Farley remarked that "Commander Roosevelt" was a talented politician who had been able to turn his reputation as a rich dilettante on its head in his first campaigns, especially in years that were not favorable for Democratic candidates nationwide, and that he would be a formidable Senate nominee, particularly after his conduct at Hilton Head which had left one his legs permanently crippled. He was not opposed to it as a political matter, and noted further that Theodore Roosevelt had already tipped his hand somewhat by not inviting any of Smith, Wagner or Sulzer to his son's gala wedding, while Hearst was a guest of honor and family friend, and pointed out that Roosevelt's vengeful personality and clashes with state leaders during his brief Mayoralty of New York had proven what he was capable of if insulted or snubbed. Wagner concurred, remarking that just the fact that Roosevelt - friends with Hearst for decades and whose newspapers were the backbone of Democratic messaging in the state - took the meeting at all was fairly incredible, having assumed that Roosevelt was in the Hearst camp until the end, and Smith then added that of course Roosevelt's price was so high: he was not going to betray his good friend for nothing. With that realization reached, Smith told Wagner to accept the deal while it was still in the offing. As they did, Farley took Smith aside and noted to him that Commander Roosevelt had something of a reputation in the Hudson Valley political scene of being a philanderer, and while that was not uncommon at all amongst politicians in an age where the media considered such matters strictly private, the fact that that Franklin was already known as such early in his career was worth raising eyebrows. Smith expressed confidence that the Roosevelt empire of Journal papers could effectively paper that over in the rare case it became an issue, but Farley in later years would admit that he felt the conversation darkly and ironically tempting fate, even then.

The trap was thus largely set - on the second ballot, Hearst and Smith were suddenly tied, and James Gerard came on stage for the third ballot to put Smith's name into nomination personally; on the fourth ballot, Smith prevailed, narrowly clearing the fifty-percent mark needed to clinch by just two votes. It was, by any objective measure, a shocking result. Hearst described it is a "bloody betrayal, a plot by the Brutuses and Judases of our time!" [4] President Root, stunned by the news while at the Presidential coastal retreat in Long Branch, referred to it more succinctly as a "putsch." Hearst was not beaten in a floor fight between delegates, or on dozens of ballots as his enemies gradually built up strength; he was decapitated, clean and simple, his defeat arranged well in advance and executed. The spectacular showdown, the battle of Hearst vs. Smith in Hudson Hall, never materialized, nor did the coronation that Hearst had dreamt of.

Al Smith was, thus, the Democratic nominee for Governor of New York, concluding his meteoric rise from the ashes of the Triangle factory fire; come November, he would dispatch Liberal nominee Charles Whitman, the former Attorney General of New York who had narrowly lost to Gerard four years earlier, in a landslide, winning well over sixty percent of the vote in what was usually a closely-divided state. The election made Smith a national figure, the first Democrat who had ever faced off with Hearst and defeated him, even though the list of men who had chosen to turn on Hearst in an act of collective, surprising defiance stretched from Schenectady to Tammany Hall. The events of August 1918 also marked the definitive closing chapter of Hearst's political career; the furtherance of his affair with Davies and the embarrassment of his spoiled coronation foreclosed on any potential return to the Presidency, even as he offered his name as a compromise unity candidate at the multi-ballot 1920 Democratic National Convention. The fourth act had transition for him to the fifth, a well-earned retirement for one of America's most mercurial and Jupiterian statesmen; for Al Smith, the path ahead was only just now truly beginning..." [5]

- The Happy Warrior

[1] Which play I know not, for he is no Hamlet, but he is also no Macbeth
[2] Don't read this footnote until you've read the whole entry, but keep in mind that a big reason Hughes stood aside was machinations by party bosses against him that he just didn't want to deal with, and here Hearst's return is deep-sixed by similar figures. A parallel outcome, for two New Yorkers, in different circumstances.
[3] Apropos of nothing, but when I saw I have an aesthetic appreciation for ethnic urban machine Democrats, its people like Jim Farley I'm thinking of. Honestly one of the most interesting figures in American political history, and an extremely important one.
[4] I guess we have our Shakespeare play!
[5] This was a monster update, but closing the door on Hearst and setting up Smith's machinations required such - these New York political updates always get a bit out of hand!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...found a small basement room for let at Fourth Street, in Faubourg Livaudais; when it rained, and in those years it seemed to rain more often than before in some kind of divine judgement upon the city of New Orleans, the basement flooded, and so Huey and Rose had to learn, through experience and great care, to keep their valuables elevated in expectation that before long they'd be walking through their quarters with cloth boots wrapped over their shoes again.

Huey was not a New Orleans man, much as he came to like many of his neighbors on Fourth Street, though from the time of his amnesty from Yankee hands in September 1917 until his return to Winnfield in early 1919 he was living in the city during probably its most tense and uncertain hour. The Fourth Street room was perfect for a young couple recently reunited after all the years of war with no children, in part because it was immediately adjacent to St. Charles Boulevard, the main southern thoroughfare that marked the faubourg's boundary and also the arterial on which New Orleans' oldest streetcar line ran down the center. The St. Charles line took Huey to the Tulane School of Law every day, where he studied diligently deep into the early night, and Rose to her odd jobs as a seamstress across much of uptown; but their home also placed them close to a new boundary, one imposed upon New Orleans the year before - that of the new "American Concession," also coming to be known as Yankeetown or simply the Cession.

The Cession, which in the Creole dialect of New Orleans French rolled off the tongue as Say-shon, was a roughly square mile segment of New Orleans just upriver from Canal Street; its boundaries had been picked by nobody in the city but rather by cartographers at Mount Vernon, in what would soon cease to be Virginia, in the late winter of 1917. Faubourg Livoudais ran right up to its eastern boundary of Jackson Street, and from there it stretched to the river as its lower boundary, and Dryades and Rampart as the upper limit. It ended downriver at Julia Street, mere blocks from grand, bustling Poydras and beyond it Canal Street, the beating heart of the Confederate banking and commercial world; cleaving the city in two, the Cession placed Yankee soldiers not just at the edge of river docks but also within steps of the great cotton brokerages, auction houses, and hotels of Dixie's last great city, and quite crucially, the St. Charles Line passed through the Cession, usually unmolested but often subject to inspections, en route to its terminus at Canal.

And inspections were, not to put too fine a point on it, just the tip of an iceberg of humiliation. The occupation of Dixie from 1917 to 1921 - a momentous subject far beyond the scope of this book, but which colored and colors the lives of every Confederate man and women then and now, both white and black - wore only a facade of the rule of law, but even a facade was better than nothing at all. In theory, across the "Military Districts" that the Confederacy had been separated into with Kentucky's administration a civilian-military hybrid, Yankee soldiers were purely peacekeepers, intended to make sure food distribution went through, violence was low, and society began some modicum of function once again. While this occurred in fits and starts - the Red Summer of 1917, July massacres of 1918, and the spread of the Dixie flu far and wide were notable interruptions - by late 1918 the Military Districts had created pillarized, delineated parallel societies of whites and freedmen that strictly segregated themselves, armed to the teeth, and self-sustaining. The Cession, on the other hand, was to be a continuous source of American power in Louisiana. Within its boundaries the administration of the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana did not apply; it was governed by a military commander, and Yankee soldiers enjoyed extraterritoriality, and it quickly became a hub of freed Negroes flocking to its boundaries for safety within the city, particularly after the violent race riots across the city that coincided with the passage of the Third Amendment in September. Yankee soldiers were also, at least in practice, expected to be tried by military courts inside the Cession if they got into trouble outside of its borders, which they frequently took advantage of when they wandered to the madams of Storyville late at night.

In all, New Orleans was a stewing pot of resentment even though it had escaped any physical damage from the war, and with the Mississippi reopened to American freight unhindered by tariff or river tolls it sometimes seemed as if the war had never happened, were one to simply walk around the city and take in a surface-level view. Hundreds of American businessmen, merchants, bankers, adventurers and prostitutes flooded in to the city every month, at the same time that refugees from the rural combat of the same years streamed to the city, swelling its population to close to half a million. While the swamps and forests of Louisiana were teeming with well-armed hillboys, in New Orleans the more genteel Knights of the White Camellia was reestablished and reinvigorated, with men in Mardi Gras masques carrying out hit-and-run slayings almost every night; as many as three thousand people, a third of them women, were murdered in New Orleans from both criminal disputes and the urban insurgency, including in a Cession that increasingly resembled a fortress, in 1918 alone.

This experience in New Orleans tried Huey and Rose's marriage, and them personally; Rose was nearly assaulted several times, and Huey was robbed at knifepoint twice returning from Tulane late at night during one of his lonely sessions reading over the copious volumes he needed to study law. The time was formative for him, though; having come from one of Louisiana's most poverty-stricken parishes in Winnfield, he was no stranger to seeing destitution and desperation, but even what he encountered in many of the city's faubourgs and outer wards shocked him. The Dixie flu hit New Orleans perhaps harder than anywhere else due to its malarial climate and the close quarters in its sprawling shantytowns in the east and west of the city; Huey observed one family of Negroes, with eight children, all living out of a single lean-to, with them taking turns sleeping inside in shifts. At the same time, on Canal Street, many of the men who materially benefitted directly from trade with the United States and the outside world via the reopened Gulf of Mexico routes were acting as if the war had been but a hiccup, breaking bread with their Yankee counterparts who were increasingly streaming into the city as if it were their Chinese colony of Chusan while they financed the hooded kill squads that rained terror on the city at night.

Huey was a man of Winnfield Parish, a lifelong admirer of the NFLP and an avowed enemy of the planter and banker class, even if they did not know it yet; he had come to respect Yankee soldiers as individuals but reserved a similar resentment for the callous occupation authorities and the foreign capitalists from New York, Philadelphia and Chicago whom he was convinced were coming to plunder and economically rape Louisiana, particularly the oilmen. But here his faith interceded; there was evil in the hearts of every man, but also weakness before such greed, and thus the true fault lay with the men who lied through their teeth to the people of Dixie about the Yankee threat while they made peace with their new economic overlords. It was not enough to simply drive the Yankee from the country, as so many claimed; Huey was convinced utterly that what needed to follow was the upending of the whole economic order that had led to the war, profited from it as Dixie bled near to death, and now pretended to be offended by Yankee imperialism that would before long come to inevitably view the whole of the Confederacy as little more than a resource colony that had to be put in her place. [1]

And New Orleans was, at least in 1918, unlikely to be the place from where he could do that. As the year drew to a close, he petitioned - having studied so copiously the whole year - to sit for the bar exam without finishing his degree, and with the state bar association's younger generation having been emptied out across the fields of Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia, his request was granted. Huey passed the bar in January 1919, earning exemplary marks, and was with that formally an attorney, mostly self-taught. Wasting little time, just a week later he and Rose were packing up there fairly meager belongings - he had been sworn wearing the only suit he owned, which was covered in patches - to leave the city behind, for Winnfield beckoned."

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

[1] Yes, Huey, let the Latin American strongman flow through you...

 

[KingSweden24]

"...sharp contrast between how Americans treated the Chinese in the United States, vs. how they interacted with the Chinese in China. The politics of the Yellow Peril, while rooted deeply in longstanding European dismissiveness of "the Oriental race," little more than demographic anxiety in the American West. In Asia, on the other hand, American missionaries found themselves in a strange land where they quickly had to adapt to local customs, and despite the legacy of the Boxer War nearly twenty years earlier, found the Chinese people to be largely welcoming and not nearly the pliant half-barbarians they had expected to encounter coming off the ships in San Francisco or Seattle.

Nowhere was this dichotomy more plain than the Territory of the Chusan Islands, an archipelago located at a strategic point near the major port of Ningpo and just south of Shanghai and the Yangtze River's mouth into the East China Sea, and with possession of its outlying islands whoever held it controlled the approaches from east and south to both. That the Chusans were American at all was thus both a major geopolitical coup and also something of an accident of history; the islands had been the most prized goal of Britain to attain in the First Opium War for its proximity to Shanghai, and indeed that London wound up with Hongkong instead in the final peace treaty was a matter of great controversy. It was only once Hongkong, thanks to its position near the open treaty port of Canton and short sail to Singapore, became the Empire's chief entrepot in the East that Chusan declined in its potential value and became an afterthought until its 1901 transfer to American possession under a 99-year lease, all while other European states were earning permanent concessions.

The 99-year lease had been an American insistence, rather than a Chinese one; the United States had an uncomfortable relationship with imperialism, indulging it freely in its policy of unilateral intervention in the Western Hemisphere while being highly reluctant to pursue massive direct colonies overseas. The idea of permanently seizing a group of islands home to tens of thousands of Chinese thus opened up questions that many Americans were loathe to answer, but they were also not going to turn down the chance to establish a foothold so close to the burgeoning Oriental pearl of Shanghai. And so Chusan became an overseas territory of the United States just as the United States was enforcing its Ingalls Act and then, in 1918, banned Chinese immigration to the United States entirely - meaning that Chusan was not, and would not be, considered entirely American.

A visitor to Chusan in late 1918 described it thus: "One does not think of authentically Chinese metropolises like Canton here, for it is no metropolis. Nor does it have that unique aura of where East and West meet, such as Shanghai or Hongkong. Rather one sees in Chusan two harbors, one filled with junks and fishing boats lined by shacks and lean-tos, with bent-over old women pulling rickshaws about, and adjacent to it another, this one lined by a high wall, populated by military barracks and filled with American destroyers." The island was small, but it was very cleanly two worlds.

This was by design, and intended initially to be benevolent towards the Chinese. Though the Liberal Party was of course somewhat more amenable to economic expansionism by force overseas than the more empire-skeptical Democrats, even the muscular foreign policy instincts of then-President Joseph Foraker in 1901 was unwilling to invest the time, energy and considerable expense to forge a "Yankee Hongkong" off the coast of Chekiang. Purely by its size and location, Chusan was a much better harbor than Port Hamilton near Korea was, and so it would be built up over the next decade to become the main port of the United States Navy Far East Squadron with Port Hamilton relegated to a secondary status by 1914, but that was all it was intended initially to be. Chusan Naval Station was built in the excellent harbor on the main island of Chusan itself, designed to allow two dreadnoughts and their destroyer complements to moor there simultaneously, and the station was given the flag command of not a squadron but rather the new "Far East Fleet," which would come fully into effect with the close of the war.

The Americans and Chinese of Chusan lived separate lives in part because the Navy did not want to be responsible for the civilian governance of Chusan, thus creating a bizarre hybrid administration; a Chusan Police Service was established and staffed almost exclusively with locals but given American Naval policemen as their superiors, and the flag admiral of the Far East Fleet was simultaneously, by statute, the Military Governor of Chusan, whose remit extended to the whole archipelago but who rarely left the sprawling grounds of Chusan Station and relied on a local bureaucracy of Chinese who quickly learned English to enforce day-to-day control.

As such, Chusan was both a Western concession stripped from Chinese hands in the unequal treaties of 1901 but also a place that enjoyed a level of self-governance, even if purely by accident, that no other European concession did and many parts of China also lacked. But because no formal civilian administration would be established in Chusan until a damning report of conditions there in 1924, and it was neglected as anything other than a military port, it meant that a local rule had to be conjured on the fly by the Chinese and more enterprising American businessmen, which quickly turned into an alliance between local Chinese enforcers tied deeply to local familial networks similar to the West Coast's tongs, and the entrepreneurs who began using Chusan as their chief base of importing goods from China, including the trafficking of people after the Immigration Act of 1918 passed and Chinese who could pay a hefty price bought passage as stowaways on cargo vessels and, by the early 1930s, on Naval boats as officers and enlisted alike became amenable to looking the other way for a fee..." [1]

- The Yellow Peril [2]

[1] Now I know what you're all thinking, and that's "hey isn't this basically the plot of American Gangster and uh oh is Chusan going to be a huge drug and people smuggling hub under the Navy's tacit nose" and, yes, 100%
[2] I think "Scramble for Asia" is probably too focused on the 19th century to really use here, and "Our New Asia" wasn't quite the vibe I was going for here.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...retirement of Beseler in early 1917 and his replacement with Falkenhayn was considered even at the time an excellent set of circumstances; Beseler, like his compatriots Karl von Bulow and Alexander von Kluck, were all in their late 60s (or older) and many of them had served in the Unification Wars, which made them heroes of Germany, but also much to old to sufficiently understand the vagaries of modern war.

Falkenhayn was young - only 55 at the time, thus the youngest man ever to earn the appointment - and was a favorite of the Kaiser and other retired luminaries like Hindenburg specifically because he had direct combat experience in the field in China. He had also served as the department head of the Supply Bureau on the General Staff before his appointment as Prussian Minister of War in 1913; between the two and his "freshness" in the eyes of the Kaiser and Chancellor Furstenburg, he was the ideal choice for a role that was by the late 1910s seen as needing something of an overhaul after Hindenburg's late reign and Beseler being long in the tooth along with his inner cadre.

The timing to overhaul the General Staff wound up being opportune as well, even if some worried that the men surrounding Falkenhayn lacked experience and the perspective that comes with age. As 1917 marched on, tensions in Europe reached their highest point, and it also marked the conclusion of the Great American War, from which European general staffs were gobbling up as much information as they could on the use of modern tools of death such as airplanes, landships, landmines, grenades, and concentrated artillery fire. The tighter, denser fronts of a potential European war meant that the incorporation of these stratagems into German war planning was essential; the experiences of American soldiers in the tight confines of, say, northern Virginia's woods and riverbeds would be more relevant to German operations in eastern France than cavalry battles on the wide open plains of Texas.

As it were, major overhauls of the War Plan I, as Hindenburg and Beseler had titled it, were going to be necessary anyways, and not necessarily in terms of doctrine. Hurried messages from Brussels in July of 1918 suggested, with good reason, that coming out of the Congo Crisis in Africa the month before Belgium had elected to forego its longstanding policy of neutrality and was sealing an alliance with France and Austria. This told the Generalstab in Berlin two things: one, that the Iron Triangle was still active, an open question after Austrian Emperor-King Ferdinand II&IV had made his famed "charm offensive" in Berlin the previous year, and two, that War Plan I now needed to be revised to account for Belgian participation in the war.

Such a revision was no small thing. War Plan I had been devised by Hindenburg in the early 1900s based on his work with Caprivi the previous decade and incorporating lessons learned from the Boxer War (and later reinforced by the brief, failed Norwegian War of Independence in 1905), where less numerous, less well-armed defenders had kept superior attackers at bay for days and weeks on end through the careful use of hardened defensive positions, especially reserve trenches to fall back upon, and had inflicted disproportionate casualties at will. Though Hindenburg, like most Prussian officers of his generation, had been reared on the "cult of the offensive," he was no fool, and the lessons of these two wars had made a tremendous impression on him and other planners such as Eric Ludendorff, who had helped him develop War Plan I. A future conflict, Hindenburg surmised, would pit Germany against France and Austria, and it was an open question whether Italy would make good on their treaty obligations depending on the contours of how the war broke out. In both cases (where Italy joined, and where they did not), Austria was still the more important target to take out first. One, the cohesiveness of its state and the quality of its Army were both thought to be lesser than that of France, and secondly, if Italy were to join in the war, then the terrain suggested a better pathway for Italy to participate, both in the Isonzo Valley and in pushing towards Trento and Tyrol to physically link up with Germany rather than rely on Swiss transport.

War Plan I, then, had always allocated the vast majority of German divisions, across four Armies, towards Austria, with one Army attacking across the Inn towards Salzburg and Linz, and two Armies attacking across the Sudetes aimed at Ostrau and the Moravian highlands, the backbone of the Austrian iron and coal industries and which would thereafter cut off much of central Austria from its oilfields in Galicia, which the additional fourth Army would then sweep up to secure the petroleum supplies and, critically, deny them to Austria and limit potential supply routes from neutral Russia. These axes of advance - from Munich, Breslau and two from Kattowitz - were aimed to interdict Austrian transport networks and put more pressure on Vienna initially, while screening forces would defend passes in the Bohemian Mountains while they waited for Prague to be cut off from the east.

This left four more Armies, one which was to be deployed towards Denmark - for which a force of that size was unlikely to be required - with a schedule to seize the entirety of Jutland within a week while the Kaiserliche Marine cleared the capable but plainly outgunned Danish Navy from the Kattegat, and the Sixth Army and Seventh Armies, which were to reinforce Luxemburg and the Saarland while the Eighth was held in reserve for a planned counteroffensive, as the French were expected to attempt to punch into the "Hindenburg lattice" of fortresses in the central and eastern Moselland, a region dubbed the Trier Triangle for the city in its center. This enormous defensive advantage enjoyed by Germany in this area would bleed the French offensive dry and then attack it with an offensive on the right wing with the Eighth, breaking it from the side and allowing a German march on Metz, Nancy and, beyond that, Verdun and Paris in due time. This immediate push of four primary armies into Austria and a fifth into Denmark depended on the French offensive being aimed exactly where Germany expected it would be, and Hindenburg had correctly noted that France's avenues of offensive into Germany were limited, especially due to the possession of Luxemburg. Belgium potentially entering the Iron Triangle dramatically changed that equation.

For one, while Belgium was a small country, it was a densely industrialized one with considerable government revenues, and though the obscene debts to patch together the Congo Free State were held primarily by the King personally, the state of Belgium was spendthrift and no stranger to taking on debt when it came to arming its military. Belgium, guarded long by its Treaty of London with France and Britain, the world's preeminent naval powers, had never constructed anything naval and thus was able to commit all its spending to the Belgian Army and building up a considerable fortress network inside the country as part of its policy, a la Sweden, of armed neutrality being the best guarantor of safety. There was an excellent professional core of eight divisions and then all Belgian men served as conscripts for a period of one year upon their seventeenth birthday; the Garde Civique, Belgium's national gendarmerie, was also trained and equipped at a level well above most such forces and would serve as an excellent auxiliary paramilitary force in any conflict. Belgians took a dozen military trainings annually, and men as old as fifty-five were obligated to such reservist duties. With the ample support of neighboring France, the Belgian Army and the Garde enjoyed cutting-edge equipment, especially in defensive artillery, and was able to mobilize a massive force within months if necessary.

Whether they would have months, then, was the open question to Falkenhayn. The inclusion of Belgium as a potential combatant opened up a number of problems, most prominently providing France a new axis of advance in the north rather than through the center of the Franco-German frontier. A Belgian alliance provided the high grounds of the densely-forested Ardennes, in particular the strategic crossroads of Bastogne, from which to thrust south, southeast, or east at will, and while the Eifel in northern Germany was poor grounds for an offensive, its early seizure could provide screening for enemy forces moving on Aachen and its railhead. This also meant that Luxemburg's immediate value would be somewhat neutralized with enemies on two directions, and fighting would be contained not to the rural areas around the critical Saar, but much closer to Cologne and the existentially important Ruhrgebiet to its north; all that limited such an offensive was the Aachen railhead, which was where the rail system of Belgium came together at the border rather than fanning out. [1]

Falkenhayn was also leery of an alternative presented to him by Ludendorff, one of the original War Plan I's drafters. The best way to eliminate the threat of a Belgian attack opening up a new flank of the front in the Ardennes and Meuse Valley was to attack Belgium first, punching through defenses near Aachen and Eupen to march on Liege and Antwerp thereafter, fanning across the Belgian rail network and forcing France to detach from Luxemburg to prevent a push towards the industrial heartland of the Nord-Est and the Somme River beyond it. While spreading the enemy thin through this method was strategically sound, provided that strategic goals in Austria were delayed to pursue it, it also meant that Germany would be violating Belgian neutrality directly, thus handing a geopolitical and diplomatic coup to the enemy and potentially inviting British intervention, which otherwise was extremely unlikely. Germany had an enormous trump card in being vaguely aware, albeit without hard evidence, that Belgium had foregone its own neutrality; this would be utterly wasted in such a preemptive strike.

As such, Falkenhayn reluctantly reported to the Kaiser, Furstenburg and War Cabinet the revisions to War Plan I he had made, now retitled as Fall Ost and Fall West - Case East and Case West. The Fourth Army would be pulled from attacking into Galicia and instead moved to the much-less fortified proximity of Aachen to hold against a Franco-Belgian attack in that sector, while the rest of War Plan I would proceed as otherwise planned. Nobody was particularly happy with this, even when war-gamed and suggesting a successful hold at Aachen and the Trier fortresses and a devastating counter launched across the plateau at Forbach. The risk of a Belgian breakthrough in northern Luxemburg out of the Ardennes, and the fall of Aachen, was a huge risk, and men would need to be diverted from the Second and Third Armies to prevent an attack from Galicia into Upper Silesia. Belgium had badly scrambled German war planning, and now Berlin needed to hope against hope, even after Cases East and West were separately approved as individual war plans rather than a comprehensive one, that Italy would rise to the occasion when called upon..."

- The Reich at War

[1] I forget where exactly I read this, but as I understand this one of the major limitations on a "France attacks through Belgium to get to Germany" alt-WW1 scenario, and a major reason why the Schlieffen Plan really needed to go through Belgium to work.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...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.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...remarkable report - of the United States Army escorting Arkansas state legislators, some of them with their hands bound, into the intact half of the State Capitol in Little Rock, its construction interrupted by the war and suffering substantial though not irreparable damage during the fall of the city two years earlier. The Speaker of the Arkansas House, the handsome Lee Cazort - only thirty years old - hobbled into the well of the House with the assistance of a cane due to his prosthetic foot, a memento courtesy of an artillery shell at Nashville, though most of his classmates from Hendrix and the University of Arkansas had not been so lucky. Behind him hung the flag of Arkansas, only designed a few years earlier, a Confederate flag, and between the two and conspicuously larger, the Star-Spangled Banner of the United States; as if the point was too subtle, on either side of him stood Yankee soldiers, their rifles slung over their soldiers, one of them chewing gum and the other with a cigarette dangling between his lips. Throughout the Arkansas House Chambers stood about a hundred other soldiers, half as many as the legislators gathered for the extraordinary joint session to vote through the Third Amendment of the Confederate Constitution. That the Army was literally occupying the partially-destroyed Capitol, and staring at legislators - some marched from prison to take the vote - with guns in their hands, the result of the vote was clear even before it was tallied, in a similar scene to the Treaty of Mount Vernon and near-identical to a set of events already played out across other states of the South.

With Arkansas' vote, gaveled through "with a heavy heart" by Cazort, the Third Amendment was formally ratified on August 28th, 1918, nearly five years to the day from when the Confederacy elected to go to war and launched the surprise attack across the Potomac and Chesapeake at the Yankees. "Consider it, if you will, the mark of your atonement, and the price of your forgiveness," went the apocryphal quote attributed to a Yankee major in Little Rock shortly thereafter.

The passage of the Third Amendment was met with a surprisingly muted reaction. The vast majority of the millions of freedmen across Dixie had, effectively, already been emancipated by force at least two years earlier, longer for a great many concentrated in western Kentucky, and this was essentially just the final step in a process that had begun long ago. No white man worth his salt was going to celebrate the formal, legal end of the peculiar institution, either, even those who had believed it was evil. And for the Yankee soldiers and government, it was potentially just the first step in a coming road to limit and wind down occupation activities, with the maintenance of such an aggressive occupation outside of crucial cities already becoming a major issue that neither party was willing to fully commit to long term.

The end of slavery in the country that had committed itself to defending it to the death and made it a core of their very being thus came with a whimper; August 28th came and went like any other day, the institution ushered out not because its purveyors confronted the wickedness of their ways, but because they were forced to as punishment for a war they had begun. The free Negroes of the Delta, or those who now had formed communities on the plantations they had once worked, never made it a day of remembrance; the whites were too resentful at the whole of the Gunbarrel Amendments and their defeat to pinpoint that day as a day to grieve.

Only for one person did August 28th, 1918 come as a moment of some import - George S. Patton, the President of the Confederacy, who had promised skeptical legislatures full of opponents to the Amendment that he would fall on his sword for them, and swallow his pride and resign as a gesture of good faith if they would swallow their pride and pass the Amendment to get the Yankees to relent and begin plotting their exit. His many defenders in later decades would note that Patton should not have had to resign; Dixie had not just lost a war, they had been obliterated economically, physically and demographically, and the gaping wound that the war left on the collective cultural and civilizational psyche could have healed faster had Dixie not picked at the scar every time it started to scab over. Patton tried to get the best deal he could, not out of the kindness of his heart towards the Negro but because he understood that his people were defeated and he was left trying to do the best he could.

Accordingly, Patton became the second consecutive Confederate President to resign the office, signing simply, "I hereby resign my office as President of these Confederate States" and the resignation went into effect on noon, September 1st. With no formal process in place, he hand-delivered three copies of it, one to Martin, and one each to the Secretary of State and Attorney General; with that act, he ceased to be President and Commander-in-Chief. His Presidency had been a short one, a little under twenty-one months, but it was perhaps one of the most impactful in Confederate history; his name would be damned for decades until the revisionist Reconciliation of the post-Carter Protocol 1990s, when both white and Negro scholars began to reassess the damning choices he had before him and had to make.

Patton was escorted to the train depot in north Charlotte by an honor guard of Confederate soldiers and Martin himself, and with two bodyguards hired on his dime in tow he departed on the 12:17 to Richmond, where he would briefly stay at his old townhome for a few weeks before an attempted break-in persuaded him that some embittered veteran was trying to assassinate him, and on October 20th he left his affairs in the hands of a solicitor friend and boarded a ship to England. His considerable assets in Dixie were over the next several years liquidated, for he never once returned across the Atlantic; he established himself at a small home he purchased in the countryside of Essex, near Colchester, where he would write a brief and succinct memoir before he died in the winter of 1925, aged 69, in relative obscurity. With his wife and son both already dead, and his daughter estranged due to his self-imposed exile, there was nobody to speak for him or attempt to bring him home; Patton remains buried in a small Anglican cemetery in Colchester to this day, the only Confederate or American President interred outside of North America.

Martin, for his part, returned to Executive House once Patton was gone, and was sworn in on his personal Bible by John Pettigrew Sullivan, a close friend and state judge in North Carolina. With that act, he became the 14th President of the Confederate States, and the fourth man to hold the office in the space of as many years as well as the oldest to serve in that office at the age of seventy-one years...."

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

 

[KingSweden24]

"...for a young revolutionary like Bose, the post-Mutiny India was a time of tremendous opportunity and upheaval, which did not always redound to the benefit of Congress.

The Mutiny may have been dead, but well into the mid-1920s, the efforts of a more strident and unforgiving brand of Indian nationalism continued their pushback against the sporadic and haphazard imposition of martial law sector by sector undertaken by Kitchener until his return to Britain in early 1919. The Jugantar and Samiti could continue carrying out the work of the Ghadarites from the shadows, now emboldened by the brief hour of success in February 1915 and the numerous connections abroad they had made. What became known as the "Struggle" ensued, a campaign not just of shootings or stabbings but bombings, including of rail infrastructure (often in protest of temporary movement restrictions placed on Indians by the Indian Army and its military governors), boats in harbor destroyed by naked men swimming out to them in the dark of night, and occasionally goverment offices. The state of emergency was lifted in July 1918 not because the emergency was over, because it clearly was not, but because the India Office believed with good reason that it was a greater political liability than the sabotage and assassination campaign that seemed to be accelerating.

Bose remarked in a letter to a comrade, "There is perhaps no country on earth that has less a shortage of pistols and bombs today than India." This was not entirely true, but that untruth spoke to why it was available in such ample amounts to the Jugantar. The end of the Great American War had brought with it probably the largest surplus of arms in history, a downstream effect of American overproduction even as the war drew to a close. Rifles, pistols, bullets, and bombs were thus extremely cheap and in considerable supply, locked up in poorly-guarded armories and thus easily obtainable for those who were enterprising enough to pay off armory guards. Not far from Berkeley - that hotbed of revolutionary Ghadarite opinion, thanks in part to the United States refusing to deport Taraknath Das and his coterie of comrades - sat the Alameda Army Depot, the largest weapons cache of the United States Army on the West Coast, situated at the Oakland, California docks so that weapons could easily be distributed out, and spare parts shipped by sea or rail could easily be brought in, if needed. It was the logistical hub associated with the major army command at the Presidio just across the harbor, and it was notoriously easy to buy weapons on the side from; one guard in particular, a William Kenton O'Doyle, is thought to have become a millionaire - in 1918-19 dollars - purely from selling off "surplus" under the table to rumrunners, Chinese gangsters, and of course what constituted the remainder of Ghadar. Das, the clever revolutionary commandant from afar masquerading as a bright-eyed academic, had by the fall of 1918 established out of Oakland one of the world's most sophisticated gun-running networks, aided by O'Doyle and other guards, with money from India, China and elsewhere flowing in and guns flowing out, generally aimed for the Budge Budge docks of Calcutta. What could not get into India directly went through the well-established web of Chinese pirates and smugglers operating across the East Asian coast, with Chusan - a key US Navy port with famously lax customs controls or inspections, even by the laissez-faire standards of the time - a popular site for weapons to come through with Navy sailors looking the other way and then getting move ashore to the Chinese mainland just a few kilometers away by night.

This steady trickle from Oakland, California to the Far East was virtually unstoppable for British security services. Even the suspension of non-British flagged shipping at Budge Budge and, later, Madras and Bombay, seemed to have little effect. This was because Bai Sagwhan Singh, a Ghadar chieftain, could from his exile in Canton easily coordinate with Guomindang paramilitaries across southern China to coordinate the shipment of arms into China, provided they, too, got their cut, inextricably tying Indian revolutionary leaders with Chinese nationalism and ideology and forming, by way of financial and, frankly, criminal bonds, a formidable machine to move weapons over oceans, across mountains, and through jungles into India..."

- Bengal Tiger: Subhas Chandra Bose and India

 

[KingSweden24]

United States elections, 1918

United States Senate elections, 1918​

The 1918 midterm elections were, for the Liberal Party, an unusually fierce disaster, a generational wipeout rivalling the 1902 debacle - which occurred before the popular election of Senators - perhaps best represented by the "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. The wealthy patriarch of the du Pont family was narrowly beaten in Delaware, a state trending Liberal for well over a decade; Medill McCormick, heir to a Chicago newspaper empire and a progressive reformer, was knocked out by Barratt O'Hara. Former Senator and one-term governor Woodbridge Nathan Ferris returned to claim Michigan's other Senate seat, and the flamboyant populist Governor of Oregon, Oswald West, took his colorful style to Philadelphia after defeating Jonathan Bourne.

A number of old hands passed on or retired in 1918 as well, meaning that the first true postwar elections represented a real, genuine generational shift in the composition of the upper house; perhaps O'Hara, a veteran of both the Boxer and Great American Wars who had been wounded in both, represented the coming sea change in Congress over the next decade the best. In all, eight seats fell from Liberal to Democrat and none the other way; it was a rout, and sent a clear message to the Root administration exactly what the public even in "safe" states in New England thought of their management of the Republic.

CO: John Shafroth (D) Re-Elected
DK: Fountain L. Thompson (D) Re-Elected
DE: Henry Algernon du Pont (L) DEFEATED; Albert F. Polk (Democrat) Elected (D+1)
ID: Fred Dubois (D) Re-Elected
IL: Medill McCormick (L) DEFEATED; Barratt O'Hara (Democrat) ELECTED (D+2)
IN (special): Harry New (L) DEFEATED; Samuel Ralston (Democrat) Elected (D+3)
IA: William Darius Jamieson (D) Re-Elected
KS: Dudley Doolittle (Democrat) Re-Elected
ME: Frank Guernsey (L) Re-Elected
MA: John W. Weeks (L) DEFEATED; David I. Walsh (Democrat) Elected (D+4)
MA (special): Fred Gillett (L) DEFEATED; John Fitzgerald (Democrat) Elected (D+5)
MI: William Alden Smith (L) Retired; Woodbridge Ferris (D) ELECTED (D+6) [2]
MN: Knute Nelson (D) Re-Elected
MT: Thomas Walsh (D) Re-Elected
NV (special): Francis Newlands (D) Died in Office; Charles Henderson (Democrat) Appointed and Elected (Democrat Hold)
NE: Gilbert Hitchcock (D) Re-Elected
NH: William E. Chandler (L) Died in Office; Rolland Spaulding (L) Appointed and RETIRED; Henry W. Keyes (Liberal) ELECTED (Liberal Hold) [1]
NJ: Mahlon Pitney (L) DEFEATED; Edward I. Edwards (Democrat) Elected (D+7)
NM: Octaviano A. Larrazola (D) Re-elected
OR: Jonathan Bourne (L) DEFEATED; Oswald West (Democrat) Elected (D+8)
RI: George Wetmore (L) Retired; LeBaron Colt (Liberal) ELECTED (Liberal Hold) [1]
WA: George Turner (D) Re-Elected
WV: John J. Davis (D) Re-Elected
WY: Frank Houx (D) Re-Elected

United States House elections, 1918​

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. 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. It delivered for the Democrats their best result, at 248 seats, in a decade, and one of the best returns for Socialists in history, all while badly ravaging the Liberal caucus; several prominent committee chairmen were defeated, including Harold Knutson, Horace Mann Towner, and Caleb Layton, and even James Mann, the Speaker of the House, saw his reelection margin slip to just over a thousand votes in his traditionally Liberal, wealthy South Chicago 1st District. It was a full-throated rejection across the country, which saw Liberals denied any House seats in every state west of the Mississippi save California and Minnesota, and saw Democrats prevail in urban Massachusetts in a way they never had before.

United States State elections, 1918​

The 1918 elections saw Democrats largely hold and expand upon their gains of 1914 and 1916, building up larger majorities in state legislatures and flipping the California Governorship, after Congressman Marion de Vries, deducing that he would never be Speaker, returned home to win by a decisive margin. Other Democratic incumbents, like Ohio's James M. Cox, were reelected, and Democrats did not lose a single Governorship to the Liberals anywhere in the country in 1918 as they ran wild up and down the ballot in a triumphant night, even flipping Massachusetts and defeating Lieutenant Governor Calvin Coolidge with John Jackson Walsh, an otherwise obscure member of the Boston planning board and an ally of former Mayor John F. Fitzgerald, thus completing the so-called "Massachusetts Miracle."

66th United States Congress

Senate: 39D-25L/FL

President of the Senate: James Garfield (L-OH)
Senate President pro tempore: George Turner (D-WA)
Chairman of Senate Democratic Conference: John E. Osborne (D-WY)
Chairman of Senate Liberal Conference: Boies Penrose (L-PA)

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. Albert F. Polk (D) (1919)

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

Illinois
2. Barratt O'Hara (D) (1919)
3. Richard Yates Jr. (L) (1909)

Indiana
1. James E. Waston (L) (1917)
3. Samuel Ralston (D) (1918)

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. John Fitzgerald (D) (1918)
2. David I. Walsh (D) (1919)

Michigan
1. Charles E. Townsend (L) (1911)
2. Woodbridge Ferris (D) (1919) [2]

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 (D) (1911)
3. Charles Henderson (D) (1917)

New Hampshire
2. Henry Keyes (L) (1919)
3. Winston Churchill (L) (1909)

New Jersey
1. Joseph Sherman Frelinghuysen (L) (1911)
2. Edward Edwards (D) (1919)

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. Oswald West (D) (1919)
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. LeBaron Colt (L) (1919)

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: 248D-171L-16S (+52D)

Speaker of the House: Champ Clark (D-MO)
House Majority Leader: John J. Fitzgerald (D-NY)
House Majority Whip: Thomas Gallagher (D-IL)
House Democratic Caucus Chair: Edward T. Taylor (D-CO)

House Minority Leader: Thomas S. Butler (L-PA)
House Minority Whip: Charles Mann Hamilton (L-NY)
House Liberal Caucus Chair: John Q. Tilson (L-CT)

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

[1] Some of the last "Clique" Liberals from the 1890s die or retire here, further wiping out that region's longstanding seniority and shifting Senate power further from a seniority standpoint to well-tenured Western Democrats, and leaving George Turner and Boies Penrose as the last Senators first appointed or elected in the 19th century
[2] A former Senator for the Class I seat, meaning that he got to serve in both Michigan Senate seats and be Governor ITTL.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Root had lived through the infamously dire 1902 elections, which on paper were worse, but 1918 felt much more like a wholesale rejection. In 1902, at least, the explanations were more benign from his point of view - enormous demographic changes in the electorate over the last fifteen years, the end of the Democratic-Populist split which Liberals had come to lazily rely on, a party machinery that was atrophied and out of new ideas for appealing to the electorate, and a whole host of other small problems that had consolidated over twenty years before finally the dam burst all once.

The condition of the Republic in 1918 was very different. The frustration, the anger, the economic malaise, the spread of disease; it all felt different in a way that the realigning factors of 1902-04 did not. This was not a correction from Liberals winning in districts and states they had no business winning; this was Massachusetts, the rock-ribbed stronghold of yellow Brahmin Liberalism, flipping to usher in not just another Irish-American to the governor's mansion but two of them to the United States Senate, permanently changing assumptions about that state and badly kneecapping the Liberal patronage on which its party bosses had grown fat on being accustomed to. Democrats had expanded margins where they had majorities and flipped to new majorities where they lacked them; only California retained any Congressmen of the party West of the Mississippi, and in Idaho, Wyoming and Dakota, not a single Liberal would sit in either house of their state legislatures, while Colorado, Montana and New Mexico would have awfully lonely Liberal state house caucuses of one.

A few days after the smoke cleared from the carnage, a reporter asked Root for his thoughts as he prepared to return home to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving; Root quipped, "Well, we'll see if they let me off the train when I arrive." Newspapers announced the results as a "Revolution of 1918," and considering the constitutional reforms and policy changes just a few years away, they might not have been entirely wrong. Root would of course not appear on the ballot in 1920, so the 1918 results are the closest one gets to a referendum on the man himself; and it was an utter repudiation, one even he understood..."

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

"...some concerns that the massive wave of tenant strikes that had begun during the atypically cold winter would carry on to foretell a Socialist landslide in the city; this did not occur, and indeed Smith carried many of the same precincts that Hillquit had dominated just a year earlier, even as Socialist Assemblymen carried them for the first time. The margin was not even close - Smith dispatched Whitman with close to a twenty-point margin, carrying every county south of Albany by double-digit margins as well as Erie and coming close to flipping the Liberal stronghold of Monroe, home to Rochester. Democrats won a supermajority in both houses of the State Legislature, and Socialists won double-digit seats in the Assembly; it was going to be a very different Albany that awaited Smith as he transitioned into the Governor's mansion, and the ability to pursue an ambitious policy agenda that addressed many of the issues brought up by the rent-strikers would be possible.

Smith was now New York's first Catholic Governor, a sea change in how the state operated and made him, overnight, a national figure; almost as soon as ballots were done being counted across the four boroughs, newspapers were already asking if he would be the first Catholic to occupy the Presidency as well. That was a question for another day, of course, with celebrations to be had and a new dawn in Albany to break - but it was certainly a question that Smith was already asking himself, too..."

- The Happy Warrior

 

[KingSweden24]

"...a domestic moderate reformist and chief figure in the Opportunist camp who nonetheless held a number of views that made him not just acceptable to but popular amongst the Militarist clique, most importantly Yamagata Aritomo. Goto thus found himself in a unique position, of being the first Foreign Minister of Japan to personally visit another Asian state rather than accept dignitaries and envoys in Tokyo, and it was lost on few what the symbolism was when in September 1918, mere weeks before his tenure in that office concluded, he led a delegation to Bangkok to meet with Rama VI, whose personal name was Vajiravudh.

Siam had a number of similarities to Japan that were more than just cosmetic. It was an ancient monarchy, steeped in unique traditions that set it apart from other parts of Asia, with a vast and devout Buddhist population and a traditional authority structure embodied in the Emperor, much as was the case in Japan after the Meiji Reforms. Crucially, too, it had avoided colonization, being an independent and free royal state in Asia that had instead ingratiated itself to local European powers, playing them off of one another (Siam balancing Britain and France on either side, while using Germany as a guarantor). Siam under Chulalongkorn, the previous Emperor, had pursued an effort of vast modernization and reform, aided in great part by German investment and direction, though it was still well behind where Japan had arrived by the end of the 1910s, and Rama VI aimed to change that.

The visit itself was fairly perfunctory, with the usual diplomatic niceties, exchanges of gifts, introductions of new envoys, and a tour on the back of an elephant through a bustling, traditional Bangkok neighborhood followed by Rama VI proudly showing off a new district of factories on the Chao Phraya. But it represented a genuine step forward in the Japanese school of expansionist and opportunist pan-Asianism; Rama VI was a staunch Siamese nationalist growing increasingly worried about European ambitions in the region, and had been alarmed by the force of the Ghadar Mutiny in India and the May Rebellion in neighboring Vietnam in particular. An alliance was not struck in Bangkok in September 1918, far from it, but it marked a brief moment of Japanese outreach to a co-equal power, in which common interests were discussed, common fears allayed, and a common path could start to be vaguely charted on the horizon if one squinted closely enough...."

- Our New Asia: Revolution and Retrenchment in the Early 20th Century Far East

 

[KingSweden24]

"...arguably the most important development on the Spanish right since the fall of the Maura government in 1910. For without Nocedal's dogged leadership, the Integrists had been waylaid and rudderless since his 1907 death, struggling to return their neo-Carlist, reactionary to the forefront of Spanish politics. And with Maura's defeat and the triumph of Canalejismo, the conservative movement in Spain was increasingly looking creakier than ever, struggling to find a purpose. Was it a modernizing but softly authoritarian and paternalist, mass movement, "street politics" force of traditionalism and anticorruption, as argued by Maura's son Gabriel or Antonio Goicoechea, or should it look to the ideals of the emerging Christian democratic movement as led by Angel Ossorio, seeking to look to a moderating Catholicism as preached by the Rerum novarum and root its principles in popular democracy that sought to act as a vanguard of faith?

Complicating this "breach of the right" was Mellismo. Juan Vazquez de Mella was many things - a firm Carlist, a devoted opponent of democracy, and also deeply pragmatic and willing to play a long game in pursuit of the restoration of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne. He was also, much like Nocedal, an important thinker on the role of Catholicism in public life, sharing the view that all things should flow out from a foundation in the Church and her teachings, but taking a much more sophisticated view of organic corporatism as a way to organize society in a way that ideologues such as France's Charles Maurras would not for many years. He did not advocate openly for the overthrow of the Hohenzollern dynasty, instead maintaining a position that the Restauracion should be peaceful if possible, but did advocate, unequivocally, for the undoing of the Gloriosa as the clear and obvious endgame of his ideology. In foreign policy, he was pronouncedly opposed to the Canalejas' government clear Germanophilic sympathies and dismissed the ideas of Ossorio as naive and supine to "secularism." Catholics, Mella huffed, should never bow to temporal laws; temporal laws should instead bend to the laws of the Church. Rather, Mella viewed a future government headed by him and Olazabal and, ideally, a Bourbon King to be a crucial leg in a new reactionary alliance of Spain, France and Austria that would restore the Papal State as its first order of business and reinforce Catholic monarchies and governments under siege in places like Belgium, Brazil, and Mexico.

The merger of the Integrists into the Partido Catolico Tradicionalista, Mella's outfit, in October of 1918 marked the first union of rightist parties in Spain since the Gloriosa, but ironically it would spur further disintegration of the traditional Conservative Party of Canovas, Maura, and now Dato. For the right wing of a "party of the system" that had sat in government once since 1868, they were unsure why exactly they were staying on their back heels forever and playing nice within the confines of a constitutional system they had been convinced since the Carlist Wars hated them; they had watched the National Liberals embody a mix of corruption, oligarchy, and secular arrogance while pissing away the empire in the Orient to Japan. For traditionalist Catholic voters in northern Spain, particularly the Basque country, the emergence of a party that was unapologetic about its traditionalism and hostility to the secular kingdom of the 1870 Constitution was of comfort to people wholly put off by what they perceived to be as a ruling class in Madrid that largely hailed from cities where few people attended church and that had imposed upon them the hated "schools compromise" that allegedly took God out of Spain's classrooms, even if the regionalist compromises had finally quieted their calls for autonomy.

This was, at least not immediately, not a threat to Canalejas' grip on the Cortes, indeed it arguably enhanced it. Dato was a fine man, honest and brilliant, but he was very much not a man of the people, and had even less of a popular touch than Maura, who at least made attempts to embracing a populist streak such as on questions of caciquismo. Dato sat on the board of one of Spain's largest banks, the Hipotecario, and he had briefly been a justice in the Hague; little of what he stood for, conservative and quietly devout as he may have been, held much appeal to the types of people increasingly alarmed by Spain's march into industrial, democratic modernity. [1] The Conservative Party had not realized it yet, but it was already shedding voters to the PCT; for those whom the ultra-right politics of Mella and Olazabal was too much, the Social People's Party would be founded in late 1919 by Ossorio to provide a middle-path, Christian democratic alternative that nonetheless foregrounded its Catholicism and agrarianism. As the 1920s loomed on the horizon, Spain's politics were about to get their biggest paradigm shift since the shock win and sudden decline of the Radicals nearly thirty years earlier..."

- The Statesman: The Spain of Jose Canalejas

[1] What I'd say to these people is if they think Canalejas is bad, they could cross over into OTL and see how the Second Republic was for their brand of politics.