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

Ireland Unfree

    • KingSweden24

    "...a profound awkwardness for both of the Redmond brothers; Willie was not John, that was for certain, but he was nonetheless a Member of Parliament and his open participation in the Irish Volunteer movement spoke broadly to the way that not just volunteerism but mass political organizing had brought together Irishmen of all stripes. His murder by Ulster gunmen in Cork on August 2nd, 1915, was like a thunderclap across the island. This was the first Parliamentarian to have been killed, and for all his heightened rhetoric and radicalism compared to other members of the IPP - certainly conciliatory John Redmond - he was still one of their own, and his death seemed to portend a newer, more dangerous phase of the Civil War, in addition to so devastating poor John that he retreated into a despair that greatly diminished his influence.

    Redmond's death, rather than plunging Ireland into a new round of mindless sectarian violence, represented something else instead - a bookend to the horrific communal slaughter of the past twelve months that had begun with the eerily similar assassination of Hubert Gough in Belfast, in which the violence sank instead into a lull. By the second half of 1915, all sides involved were exhausted and martial law had been extended to thirty of the thirty-two counties, enforced largely by the RIC arbitrarily depending on which community local constables belonged to; Irish Volunteers were given broad leeway in Munster and the west, while the Orange Order operated effectively unfettered under the wandering eyes of sympathetic policemen across Ulster. The disproportionately Protestant officer corps of the RIC regularly fed information to the UVF while the overwhelmingly Catholic beat policemen passed along tips on upcoming raids or arrests to the IRB and IV; Protestant officers were even occasionally assassinated by their own men. This left security across Ireland tribal but intact, to the point that despite violence being a frequent occurrence it was felt unevenly and for many barely at all. [1] The conditions on the ground for average Irishmen had drastically improved towards the end of 1915 as well. The collapse of the distillery industry due to wartime American import bans had left thousands unemployed and ripe for recruitment into the various paramilitary forces, but the mounting price crisis for food imports across Britain made farming in Ireland, at least temporarily, lucrative for many otherwise marginally employed and the increased land ownership by former tenants meant the profits of inflated grain costs did not exclusively flow to absentee landlords back in England.

    More than anything, though, it was the events in India which led most in Westminster to conclude that endless escalation in Ireland was not feasible, what with new commitments needed to keep the Raj from collapsing and falling out of the Empire, and this combined with the genuine shock and grief experienced in London at the news of Willie Redmond's assassination moved many of his colleagues who had respected him. Redmond's murder in particular seemed to finally persuade Austen Chamberlain, who had been one of the most militant opponents of Home Rule within the Liberal Party and had greatly watered down Haldane's Government of Ireland Act the year before, that the status quo was untenable, and as he budged on his line of keeping Ireland with a foot inside Westminster - now coming around to a "Grattanist" solution in which Ireland would remain in a personal union with Britain a notch above the Dominions of Canada, Australia and South Africa - many of the more conservative Liberals came with their party leader. Five bullets in Cork did more for Irish liberty than five years of infighting amongst the Liberal Party to sway the intransigents.

    The Nationals were beginning to desire a solution, too. Cecil, craven weathervane he may have been, was loathe to be the Prime Minister to lose Ireland and India on his watch, and as Chamberlain began to shift the Liberals towards demanding a negotiated solution in alignment with the Crown, Cecil found the political tightrope he was on increasingly difficult. The Liberals "supported" his minority government in theory but were more of a sword of Damocles over the Cecil ministry than the IPP had ever been over them, making it abundantly clear that their support was required on essentially any act of the Commons, even ones that typically did not require a confidence vote. To lose the Liberals, who had supported what Britons considered a "middle-path" course on Ireland pursued by Cecil so far to the chagrin of Ulster Unionists, would doom his government. But being too conciliatory to Irish nationalists, who had clearly won the hearts and minds of the Irish populace (particularly in the rural constituencies once attracted to Parnellism and the Plan of Campaign), was also a clear path to a permanent rift with the Ulster Unionists who already saw him as unreliable and spineless in the face of the IPP. Further complicating that matter for Cecil [2] was that Ulster Unionists were extremely unpopular with the general public, held responsible for the debacle at Curragh Barracks, for the revolt in which the Carrickfergus depot was seized, and now the murder of an Irish MP, the brother of the IPP's leader no less. [3]

    Cecil was thus loathe to stick his neck out for a political solution but facts on the ground at least opened up the opportunity for his government to place their focus on India and let Ireland simmer rather than continue to boil. The public outrage on both sides of the Irish Sea over Redmond's murder made Carson blink for the moment and make clear through backchannels to UVF commanders that no more assassinations of that kind were to occur, lest the UVF lose all their public credibility. Furthermore, the internal feuds between the more radical IRB and the mainstream Irish Volunteers associated with Devlin and his AOH was exacerbated with the death of Redmond, and two organizations never known for their internal cohesion rapidly deteriorated in their coordination over September and October of 1915, with the IRB successfully curbed by the British Army's Limerick Raids in late September and the IV pivoting to pseudo-policing as a Catholic paramilitary operating in a defensive crouch to keep sectarian violence away from churches and schools, become even more a tool of Devlin than before.

    What followed then was one of the strangest times of the war - the lull in violence that began in the autumn of 1915 and would carry through deep into the following year, where war didn't end but didn't get worse, and while no end was in sight it became enough of a sideshow to India that politicians in London and Dublin could take a deep breath and try to figure out how, precisely, Ireland was to extricate itself from the bloodshed. A policy of muddling along, waiting for some external event to force everyone's hand, became a sudden and disliked consensus..."

    - Ireland Unfree

    [1] This is materially different from how things with the RIC worked during OTL's Irish War of Independence, where they were the IRA's number one target.
    [2] So things are going just great for Hugh and the Hughligans, if you can't tell.
    [3] Of course it bears mentioning that Willie Redmond was to the IV what MPs like Edward Carson are to the UVF
     
    • Mosaic: The Endurance of South Africa

    • KingSweden24

    "...even as British influence in India seemed to the rest of the world to be waning as the Punjab province burned and restlessness spread to other corners of the Raj, in August of 1915 the South African Customs Union expanded to include not only the British protectorate of Bechuanaland but also the Native kingdoms of Basutoland and Zululand. It was not just Merriman's collegiality that drove this, or ambitious Colonial Office civil servants in London (they had bigger issues to worry about, regardless), but also the pragmatic streak of Orange Free State's Francis Reitz. Skeptical as Transvaal may have been, the increasingly close relationship between the Dominion and the Free Republics and their royal allies served all parties well..." [1]

    - Mosaic: The Endurance of South Africa

    [1] As always, I don't quite know what to do with South Africa other than keep the Boer States out of it and thus the region remains largely functional. If it isn't clear, Britain's economic domination of the region is growing, but the political divisions are staying intact.
     
    • Pershing

    • KingSweden24

    "...estimates that it would take three months to fully reconstitute Army Command Ohio after the grueling attritional hell of the past year, but Pershing was curtly nudged multiple times by Bliss in a way that subtly but very decidedly was designed to let him know he did not, in fact, have until September to put the Confederacy on her back heels again. Thus, on August 10th, 1915, the newly-constituted First Field Army - at a full-strength twenty-four divisions organized into six corps - marched out of its camps in western and central Tennessee, the largest armed force assembled under an American flag yet in the war, as the Tullahoma and Chattanooga offensive began. They were supplemented by smaller commands under General Ed Wittenmyer, with three divisions, and General Joe Dickman, with four divisions, attacking from southwest and northeast.

    Pershing's approach was based on strategies drawn up by Farnsworth and Lenihan before the great command reorganization of May 1915 and refined since the Long Branch Conference. The First Field Army, one of the largest forces ever assembled in the history of the Republic, would press out from the Nashville Basin towards the Confederate pickets east of Murfreesboro, with their main objective securing the Eastern Highlands and the Duck River, particularly the strategic crossing at Shelbyville. From Shelbyville, the First Army would attack Tullahoma, split in two and secure the two main cities on the Tennessee River - Chattanooga in the east, Huntsville in the south. The first objective was in order to set up for an invasion of Georgia, likely in in early 1916; the second was to screen against any attacks towards Tennessee from Alabama's industrial heartland. Dickman's divisions would attack at Corinth, Mississippi - a critical rail juncture in that state's far northeast - and then march alongside the Tennessee towards Huntsville, pincering the city from both west and north against the Appalachians and the river.

    Wittenmyer - a staff general who had acquitted himself well in the East under Liggett and who had been reassigned to Tennessee at Pershing's request - would meanwhile take his smaller force and press towards Knoxville, a mountainous mining city east of the Cumberland Gap that had been mostly secured by American forces since earlier in the spring in the vicinity of Williamsburg, Kentucky. Knoxville was a hugely important source of coal and other minerals for the Confederate war machine, lay on a key trans-Appalachian railroad route between Virginia and the Midlands, and by that same token sat north of Chattanooga in the Appalachian Valley; a Confederate force could easily collapse down onto Pershing's forces from there with little issue. In all, the strategy would be two smaller offensives directed by Wittenmyer and Dickman on the periphery of Pershing's First Army punching its way across the Duck and through Tullahoma towards the Tennessee River and the critical mountain passes to Georgia, what War Department correspondence called "the three-headed monster."

    Of course, such offensives were easier said than done, and all three thrusts met stiff resistance. Due to the First Army's position deep inside Confederate territory, it was harder to place aircraft at landing fields in proximity due to fears of Confederate sabotage and thus Pershing lacked the air cover from Maryland or West Virginia that was becoming a staple of battles in Virginia; furthermore, the collapse of Nashville's defenses had seen Beaumont Bonaparte Buck relieved of command in the Midlands and replaced with Robert E. Lee III, whom it was hoped would channel his ancestor's tenacity and tactical acumen into victories in the field. His cousin, George Bolling Lee, was in defense of Corinth and had spent the time since the initial press of Dickman's forces back to Memphis in the early spring building the city into a fortress that would have impressed its Peloponnesian namesake, a maze of trenches, Maxim gun nests and hardened artillery. Dickman's attempt to seize it in mid-August ended in fiasco, and he would settled in for a long siege in the area that would last deep into early autumn, slowing down Pershing's offensive plans considerably. Wittenmyer had little more luck - his offensive was harried as early as Carthage on the Caney Fork, repulsed briefly at Gordonsville, and stopped in its tracks entirely at Cookeville on August 20th with a decisive defeat thanks to a cavalry attack by Confederate General Richard "Dixie" Taylor, who had been a standout in West Tennessee earlier in 1915 and now enjoyed a command of his own on the approaches to Knoxville. Both armies fought again Macedonia and Sparta August 24th-25th, in a bloody orgy of violence, with Wittenmyer emerging victorious this time but having to retrench his forces to regroup after the ugly battles to advance barely 100 kilometers over two weeks from his base camp in Lebanon.

    Pershing had at least marginally more success, but did not want his operations to get too far ahead of his flanking offensives. On the 13th, he fully secured Murfreesboro and on the 16th had managed to press across the Eastern Highlands in the Battle of Bell Buckle; the next two weeks saw the hideously violent Battle of Shelbyville, in which his forces took disproportionate casualties but with the support of landships were able to finally break across the Duck to the west of the city on the 1st of September and by the 4th cut around to the south of Tullahoma, threatening Lee's headquarters, only to be defeated at Lynchburg thanks to the first significant Confederate air cover of the war. Pershing was stunned - the ferocity of fighting in Tennessee was over and above even what Mexicans had doled out at Los Pasos. Grievously wounded as Dixie was after the Black May, four months later the attacks were just as stiff, and as the war reached its two-year mark days after the fiasco at Lynchburg, Pershing came to realize just how long and ugly the year of fighting ahead of him was likely to be..."

    - Pershing
     
    • Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War

    • KingSweden24

    "...bonanza. There was thus an incredible amount of interest, particularly by Congressional Democrats but also a fair deal of moderate Liberals, to investigate potential war profiteering and alleged corruption in "procurements," as it was called. The LaFollette Committee was at the heart of this, a strange animal unlike any that had come before or after. The Senate was, narrowly, majority Democratic, but Wisconsin's Robert LaFollette was a longtime Liberal with a maverick reputation who largely marched to the tune of his own drum and whose home state was something approximating a personal political fiefdom, at least in years when he was on the ballot. In some cases, he was more left-wing than many populist Plains Democrats, and he had forged an electoral ceasefire with Socialists in Milwaukee that benefitted both sides. When officials in the Hughes administration had pushed back on acquiescing to Congressional inquiry in wartime, the compromise forged between Senate Majority Leader Kern and the President had been a committee that would have full cooperation of the executive, with LaFollette as its head to mollify skeptical Liberals who were convinced Democrats sought to run on baseless allegations ahead of 1916 that various Cabinet officers had profited from the war, or at least mismanaged the procurement of shells, guns, and other materials. LaFollette was known first and foremost for his honesty, and so Democrats begrudgingly accepted the set up.

    They perhaps should not have been so begrudging. The LaFollette Committee may have been chaired by LaFollette, but six of its nine members were nonetheless Democrats, and as one of the first Congressional committees to utilize full-time staff and researchers, it quickly became not only a highly professional but sophisticated vehicle of what many Liberals grouchily disdained as "the Wisconsin Inquisition." LaFollette's partisan allegiances, it turned out, were left at the committee room door - along with Democrats such as Iowa's Claude Porter, the Deputy Chair, and Colorado's John Shafroth, he charged headfirst into making the investigation comprehensive and thorough with no stone unturned. Businessmen, War Department bureaucrats, union bosses - nobody was safe from coming before LaFollette, perched imperiously at a high centered desk with his great head of hair casting a shadow before him, to answer for why their prices were X, when their competitors were charging the government Y.

    LaFollette's endeavor had tacit support from Stimson, who was a fiscal conservative who appreciated "daylight" on how the war was actually being financed on the home front (bank loans, often foreign, for the government were in his view unfortunately not under the Committee's remit), and Hughes had largely arrived at a point where he deferred most decisions on the nitty-gritty of the war to Stimson, seeing in him at last a totally competent War Secretary who he could finally relinquish his instinct for direct control over to. Other Cabinet officials were not so sure, particularly Richard Ballinger at the Naval Department, and for good reason. The First LaFollette Report was released in late August of 1915, shortly before Congress was to return from a brief summer recess that LaFollette and his chief aide, John J. Blaine, had foregone to put the finishing touches on their report. Modern scholarship has largely diminished the severity of the findings in LaFollette's report as being accurate but poorly contextualized, but the contemporary reaction, in part encouraged by Democratic-leaning newspapers such as those owned by the Roosevelt family, treated its findings as incendiary and its publication as a bombshell.

    In its second section, the LaFollette Report suggested that several major firms, including a few of US Steel's successors, were marking up war orders, and that a great number of businessmen or union bosses, often working in concert, had leveraged their connections to individual War Department officials or Congressmen to secure favorable contracts in which their services were more expensive but the product cheaper. This was not the core of the report, by any means - LaFollette's first, third and fourth sections outlined inefficiencies in transportation, procurement, storage and coordination and suggested a number of improvements that the War Department ought to consider making, and he himself treated its contents as something of an independent audit designed to help Stimson - but it was treated as an attempted crucifixion by conservative Liberals and hailed as "the necessary view into the inner dealings of a triangle of graft between the administration, industry and certain organs of labor" by many Democrats.

    The most crucial allegation in the Report, which made it such a scandal upon its release, was its well-evidenced allegation that shipbuilding firms in Seattle had benefitted from contracts given to them at low bids by the Naval Department thanks to the status of Naval Secretary Ballinger having previously been Mayor of that city, and that Ballinger had coordinated illegally with the city from Philadelphia to suppress labor activity after gross abuses in the area's shipyards, in coordination with powerful local allies such as newspaperman Alden Blethen. On its face, this was not necessarily outright corruption - Ballinger insisted to his deathbed that he had saved the Navy critical funds by leveraging personal relationships - but it reminded many Democrats of the circumstances that had brought down former Navy Secretary Lewis Nixon during the Hearst years and they cried, with good reason, hypocrisy. Hughes, uninterested in a public relations battle to save one of his least favorite Cabinet officials, requested Ballinger quietly resign, which the Naval Secretary begrudgingly did.

    LaFollette had thus proven that Congressional inquiry of an administration even in a time of war could not only prove problematic issues but even potentially malfeasance, up to and including taking down a powerful member of the Cabinet riding high after the successes of his department. The Ballinger Affair was thus a major moment in executive-legislative relations in the United States in terms of Congress asserting itself regardless of partisan affiliation, and forever changed the nature of Congressional accountability against the Presidency..."


    - Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
     
    • The American Socialists

    • KingSweden24

    "...in the space of less than two years, the American railroading industry was unrecognizable. Historians of the American labor movement note the formation of the USRA as a key inflection point not only in the development of labor as a factor in partisan politics but also the development of sectoral bargaining as the median position between the craft unionism of the AFL and the more radical syndicalism of the Haywood faction of the IWW. Debs' "socialism by any means" position and his canny pragmatism in managing the ARU thus left him enormously influential. With the USRA's formation, it meant that in practical terms the ARU now had only one "boss" to deal with. Rather than negotiating with the constellation of railroad trusts large and small under auspices of the ICC and the Labor Act, the USRA now was the exclusive management of all rail infrastructure in the United States and was thus highly dependent on good relations with the country's largest union.

    Debs was quick to leverage this influence. Industrial unionism of the non-syndicalist variety was suddenly in vogue; even if the more conservative United Mine Workers or United Steelworkers had not joined the IWW, their approaches were similar and their leaders looked to Debs for inspiration. The ARU's locals had the ear of Congressmen and Senators of both major parties and several of Debs' chief deputies organized one-on-one meetings with Secretary of War Stimson and President Hughes to discuss matters pertaining to the railroad, minimizing the reputation of the ARU as a den of wild-eyed syndies.

    It was not just in political terms that Debs was now ascendant, either. The success of the ARU in streamlining industrial unionism with unions that had soured on Gompers' dictatorial rule over the AFL badly diminished the Western Federation of Miners' ability to define its militant syndicalism as the only alternative vision for organized labor specifically and socialism in general..."

    - The American Socialists
     
    • wikipedia.en - William Sprague IV

    • KingSweden24

    William Sprague IV (September 12, 1830 - September 11, 1915) was an American Liberal politician from Rhode Island who was the US Senator for that state from 1863 until his death in 1915 - at 52 and a half years, it remains the longest tenure of any Senator in United States history. Sprague was elected Governor of Rhode Island during the War of Secession, serving in the Rhode Island Militia at the First Battle of Bull Run, and in 1862 was elected by the state legislature to serve as Senator. Sprague was an important figure in the Republican Party, as the son-in-law of President Salmon Chase, whose agenda he vigorously supported in the Senate, including helping sponsor the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery. With the collapse of the Republican Party in the mid-1870s, Sprague followed many of his current and former colleagues into the new Liberal Party and was an important partisan of the James Blaine and John Hay administrations, including serving as the Liberal Conference Chairman and Senate President pro tempore at various times.

    Though often associated with fellow New England Protestant conservatives in the "Clique" that dominated the Senate in the 1890s and building the Rhode Island Liberal Party into a personalist machine that allowed him to effectively control both federal patronage for that state as well as much of the state government, Sprague occasionally had an idiosyncratic voting record, surprising observers late in his career by voting in favor of the Revenue Act of 1910 that established a peacetime income tax under the direction of Democratic President William Randolph Hearst. He was successfully elected by popular ballot that same year, the first time in half a century he had faced voters in a general election rather than vote via state legislature, and in the final years of his life supported Rhode Island's contributions to the Great American War. Upon his death the day before his 85th birthday, he was succeeded by his son and protege, William Sprague V.

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    (Good night, sweet prince - and with his death also dies one of this TL's most niche and exquisite memes, where every election update somebody goes "how the hell is William Sprague still in office?!")
     

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    • War in the Cone

    • KingSweden24

    "...remarkable speed with which Brazil's domestic situation deteriorated between August and November of 1915. The failed counteroffensive on the heels of Argentina' Repulsa had left Fonseca perhaps more exposed than ever to his political (and, crucially, typically civilian or Naval) critics in Brazil but yet still hugely influential with the press. Pinheiro Machado had little appetite to split his threadbare conservative coalition in two by sacking him, but liberals and naval officers alike had vehemently turned against Fonseca's strategic thinking and calls to end the war were finally mainstream, despite continued raids on opposition press by military police for "defeatism" or "sedition."

    The inability to establish a firm grip of the far bank of the Parana in June and early July was a potentially fatal mishap, however. In late July, the United States delivered two additional light cruisers to the Argentine Navy as a lease, and buffed up the numbers of American vessels moored off of Mar de Plata; if a second Brazilian attempt to seize the River Plate had been highly unlikely since the late October of 1913, it was now virtually entirely foreclosed upon. In mid-August, a full division of American expeditionaries fresh from Chile arrived in Buenos Aires in a support role, and thanks to Argentina's now-famously poor operational security, Brazil was well aware that the Axis Powers intended to increase this number to closer to fifty thousand by year-end and possibly a hundred thousand by the middle of 1916, provided offensives in the Confederacy and Mexico went as planned. News of the liquidation and collapse of Centroamerica as August turned to September and the hurricane season disrupting Mexican abilities to defend their sea lanes created a sense of despondency at the Imperial Admiralty, where Dom Augusto Leopoldo - head of the Navy and the Emperor's influential cousin - for the first time advocated a "real peace."

    The sense was growing amongst Fonseca's enemies and even with Emperor Luis himself that Brazil was quite possibly at its high-water mark. It had not meaningfully advanced in Argentinean territory in well over a year and had secured its primary strategic goal of vassalizing Uruguay, but now at the cost of Chile as a functional ally and with hundreds of thousands of men dead in vain offensives. Augusto Leopoldo pointed out that, again thanks to intercepts of Argentinean communications, there were no immediate plans for Argentina to attack across the river until they could adequately resupply their forces and depend upon American (and, possibly but less likely, Peruvian) reinforcements and equipment. At the earliest, a late summer attack in February, but clear-eyed Brazilian generals such as Isidoro Dias Lopes expected the coming Axis offensive to occur likelier in March or even April, meaning Brazil had as much as six months of summer to either attack or prepare, and neither option seemed likely to produce the results Fonseca demanded. A two-year stalemate, then, seemed like it would most probably produce a third year of the same, until the Americans finally just sank Augusto Leopoldo's prized fleet (having already destroyed the Rio de Janeiro at Hilton Head Island) and left Brazil supine to further attacks.

    Fonseca would have none of it, declaring that Argentina's struggles to produce sufficient equipment and sustain offensives [1] was a sign of the decadent weakness of their progressive republic. The air cover used in the last two offensives by Brazil had done real damage to Argentine defenses and he began eyeing another attack around Christmas that would finally break through at Santa Fe and put Brazilian forces on the road to Buenos Aires for good. Dias Lopes and several younger, more politically ambitious junior officers such as Bertoldo Klinger and Euclides Figueiredo reluctantly began drawing up plans both for such an offensive and, potentially, for a putsch to secure the capital if it were to fail, with Lopes informing Klinger personally that this was the "last offensive" and that there would be peace in 1916 one way or the other. A political military was, it turned out, not solely an invention of Fonseca.

    The looming hour of the putative offensive in late November or early December was scrambled on September 8th, however, during Pinheiro Machado's visit with veterans in Rio de Janeiro a day before the two-year anniversary of the start of the war. As he was greeting the discharged soldiers, many of whom were missing limbs, digits and eyes, a man ran up behind him and shot him four times in the back, including once at the base of his skull. The Prime Minister died nearly instantly, the first major Brazilian political figure assassinated since the bombing murder of Emperor Pedro III nearly sixteen years earlier, and with his death sent shockwaves through Brazil. There had been no protagonist of wartime Brazilian politics as close to Fonseca as Pinheiro Machado and so there was a huge gap to fill. A few years earlier, Fonseca likely could have named his preferred candidate to the Emperor and had such a choice rubber-stamped. In September of 1915, though, with his braggadocio and ideological intensity having worn thin, there were more constituencies that Luis had to consider, and thus the conservative-liberal technocrat, abolitionist and former Finance Minister Ruy Barbosa was appointed as a caretaker.

    Historians have generally disagreed about the exact impact of Barbosa's brief ministry. His previous service in earlier Brazilian governments had been middling and he was near the end of his career, thus inspiring little opposition from those who were worried about an ambitious foil to their own ends. He and Fonseca did not get on well, but Barbosa surprised observers by not pushing back particularly hard on Fonseca's goals and indeed Barbosa's resignation in November, just two months on the job, was as much due to Fonseca's declining political fortunes as it was his inability to stabilize Brazil's spiraling wartime economy, which during the spring and early summer at the end of 1915 was starting to reveal just how dire it was as European loans started to finally dry up once it was clear after the Mexican defeats at Los Pasos and Cozumel and the chaos that erupted in Mexico City during October that the Bloc Sud was about to be cloven in half along the western Caribbean.

    Eventually, in early November, the Conservatives revolted after Klinger was forced to lead a division into Sao Paolo to put down a violent worker's strike and Barbosa resigned, exhausted and unwilling to manage party politics while trying to coordinate the war effort. In his place was put Epitacio Pessoa, a staunch conservative and unabashed racist who nonetheless was skeptical of Fonseca and was, as a native of Paraiba, from the Northeast rather than the oligarchy-dominated provinces of Sao Paolo or Minas Gerais that typically dominated Congress. In this sense he was a curious Prime Minister - more pro-slavery and pro-Confederate than Pinheiro Machado had been, but also less tied into the Uruguayan and Argentine obsessions of the landowner class of the Southeast that had helped trigger the war...."

    - War in the Cone

    [1] Remember that Argentina's strategy is basically just "turtle" so Hermie doesn't have to great of a sense of what his enemy aims to achieve
     
    • The Forgotten Front: The Isthmian Campaigns of the Great American War

    • KingSweden24

    TRIGGER WARNING​

    "...from the hour of the Huertazo [1] that signalled that Centro and Mexico were, to put it mildly, no longer allies. As the steamy and violent days of August advanced, it was Honduras that landed purely in the crosshairs. Mexican soldiers were ordered to evacuate to the Military District, in part because Centroamerica had effectively ceased to exist as a viable federation and also because Huerta was worried that he would need to defend himself in Guatemala City from government forces that might try to dislodge him there. The retreat was occasionally met with violence from Honduran recruits outraged by their seeming betrayal at Huerta's hands, and mutinies by soldiers and riots by civilians in the path of the Mexican evacuation route were often met with massacres and mass rapes, atrocities for which the Mexican government did not formally apologize until the 1960s.

    This was paired with a general deterioration throughout the month of the basic rule of law in most of Honduras even as Centroamerica was formally dissolved and Honduras declared independence after thirty years in the federation. The Honduran state had been held together in part by the personalism of Cabrerismo, which had elevated the interests of Guatemala above all but critically had placed external tensions with the United States and Nicaragua, both crucial matters in Honduras, over and above the long-simmering and familiarly Latin feud between the pre-Cabrera Liberal and Conservative factions of Honduran government, which he had successfully suppressed. After decades where Honduras had been held together by the strength of Guatemalan autocrats like Rufino Barrios and Estrada Cabrera, the evaporation of public order lit a fuse that had long been idle but increasingly oiled.

    Mexico's abandonment of Honduras during August of 1915, and the poor condition of Centro troops even before the traumas of that year, left central Honduras badly exposed, and suddenly the Nicaraguan National Guard was not on its back feet but rather saw the enemy melting before it. In response, Zelaya ordered the immediate attack into Honduran territory he had been waiting for years to execute, in part to annihilate what was left of the Conservative opposition militias that had been hiding in Honduran borderlands for half a decade but also to avenge himself upon Honduras for two years of violence. Defensive positions near Somoto and Choluceta, long the front line of the conflict, collapsed and Nicaraguan soldiers surged forward on the roads to Tegucigalpa from south and east, reaching the city on August 22nd. A group of Conservative Honduran militias gathered force along with Nicaraguan exiles to defend the city and a brutal five-day battle ensued that ended with Nicaraguan forces taking the city and, effectively, putting it to the sword. The Sack of Tegucigalpa saw the city's churches and cathedrals ransacked and burned, priests and monks summarily shot alongside soldiers and statesmen, and between five to ten thousand civilians slaughtered in addition to close to ten thousand soldiers killed in the fighting - a number as much as a quarter of the city's pre-war population. Fearing for their safety, Nicaraguan soldiers did not advance much further, thus decapitating the Honduran state and then doing nothing to ameliorate the chaos north of it. Survivors fled out into the countryside, where they encountered a rapidly-collapsing civil order as Liberals attacked monasteries and missions and drove indigenous villagers, long protected by Honduran Conservatives, off of their land. Retaliatory attacks were then carried out by Conservative paramilitaries, hoping to assert power before a Liberal regime backed by Nicaragua could be consolidated.

    Worse was what occurred on the massive fruit plantations across north-central Honduras. The long-abused workers supine to Standard Fruit and its Mexican partners revolted across several major farms, tearing up railroads and murdering those foremen who had not fled. Confederates attempted to stampede their way to San Pedro Sula or Guatemala to evacuate, and those who were intercepted by roving bands of Hondurans were hung, chopped to pieces or crucified. This was a brief respite, however, as mercenaries associated with Boston Fruit rapidly moved from Nicaragua and El Salvador into the void to seize the plantations for themselves, killing off what little was left of Standard Fruit's presence but also, with tremendous brutality, attempting to force revolting laborers back onto the farms. US Marines often materialized beside them, sometimes on orders from Philadelphia and sometimes because they were absent without leave and did not want to fight Mexicans in Guatemala, which Butler's men still had not reached even by the end of August.

    The Honduran Civil War that erupted, then, completely threw the central Isthmus into chaos and dramatically changed the strategic calculations of both the United States and Mexico, to say nothing of the Nicaraguans who had now succeeded in their goals and were essentially satisfied to exit the war...."

    [1] Grammar check from our Spanish speakers here? This is derived from terms like Bogotazo but if it isn't correct I will fix.
     
    • Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100

    • KingSweden24

    "...violent winds; the hurricane that had made landfall in East Texas in the middle of August had been the most powerful storm to hit the North American continent since a similar cyclone had nearly wiped Galveston off the map fifteen years before. Another potent storm followed thereafter mere weeks later, punching its way from near Jamaica across the western tip of Cuba, devastating Havana with heavy rains and forcing Mexican vessels out to sea from their safe harbor near Cozumel Island, where they were protecting the Yucatan Straits. Soon thereafter, an even more powerful storm would follow a similar course, slamming into New Orleans and flooding much of low-lying Louisiana, disrupting supplies from the Confederacy's last untouched state to elsewhere.

    Of course, the hurricanes themselves were not so much the problem for the wavering Mexicans as the impact thereof. The Cozumel Squadron being forced out to sea caused it to be spotted by an American scout off the coast of Cuba as the hurricane subsided and coded telegraphy, which Mexico had not invested particularly in, allowed the weight of the reconstituted I Atlantic Squadron, also bobbing through the storm nearby, to regroup and steam rapidly to catch the Mexican fleet before it was able to reenter port. The Battle of Cozumel on September 11th was thus the second action in the course of about a month, after the Florida Straits, in which Mexico suffered severe and debilitating losses of capital ships, this time including not just cruisers but the sinking of the dreadnought Texcoco, the flagship of the Mexican Navy, the lead vessel of its class of four, and taking with it to the bottom of the Caribbean Prince Salvador de Iturbide y Green, the Emperor's adoptive son and the head of the Armada Imperial on the high seas. Lost with it were the cruisers Miguel Hidalgo and Tuxpan, and the battleship Yucatan and cruiser Principe Luis Maximiliano were able to escape destruction with severe damage and ensconce themselves in port, but were barely seaworthy at that point. It was the worst defeat for the Mexican Navy yet, now running on fumes after having suffered similar damages and losses near Key West in early August.

    News of the disaster at Cozumel - Mexico's Hilton Head, as it was described in the increasingly agitated press - struck Maximilian extremely hard, and some observers questioned whether the Emperor would survive the death of his beloved adoptive son. Naval patrols were ordered much closer into shore, reneging on an agreement Mexico had with the Confederacy and thus leaving the Gulf essentially wide open for the interdiction of Confederate shipping as Europeans made it quietly known to the United States Navy's General Board that their expectations for protections on shipping did not, it turned out, extend west of Florida. A planned blockade of the ports of Tampa, Mobile, Galveston and most critically New Orleans was now possible and approved to begin as soon as possible; as a result, with the Confederate Navy at the bottom of the sea and the Mexican Navy seeming well on its way to joining them, Cozumel was the last major naval action of the war.

    It also occurred roughly at the same time as twin disasters in the north of Mexico, too, which presaged the collapse just weeks later of the Carbajal government in Mexico City, the putsch of Bernardo Reyes and the subsequent end of the war for Mexico. The rebel army of Pancho Villa, now supported by a vibrant propaganda campaign in the United States and dissident Mexico, personally led his men into Chihuahua and sacked the armory and railroad station there. Casualties were few - Villa was careful not to attack Mexican conscripts when he could avoid it, unlike the Zapatista revolt that now controlled much of Chiapas and Oaxaca and threatened the ability of the Mexican state to dislodge its warlord general Victoriano Huerta from Guatemala City - but the psychological impact of the fall of the main supply node keeping Los Pasos fed was huge. Days later, with Chihuahua now in American hands after Villa left the gates open to John Hines' men and supplies running thin, General Aureliano Blanquet signaled to American forces on the Texas side of the Rio Bravo that they would retreat back into Mexico under a putative ceasefire lasting the next three days. Charles Gerhardt's forces responded by rapidly overwhelming the heavily Texan fighters left in El Paso and at the expiry of the ceasefire overran Blanquet's piecemeal defenses; after nearly a year and a half of fighting, the Battle of Los Pasos was over, and the key rail link between Mexico and the Confederate States (though one used progressively less as the battle raged) was in American hands.

    All three losses simultaneously suggested to Mexican leadership the same thing: the war was over. American forces now held not just Hermosillo as they had since the start of the year but Paso del Norte and Chihuahua and could, presumably, strike either southwards or eastwards at leisure. Mexico's ports were blockaded and vulnerable to seizure by the US Marines from sea. The efforts to capture Nicaragua and incorporate it into a client Centroamerica had failed miserably to the tune of thousands of Mexicans dead in the Honduran jungle and with Centro's obliteration, with an errant Mexican general now running Guatemala as his personal fiefdom in practice. It was not clear to anybody in Mexico City, save for a handful of the northern oligarchs whose landholdings were being attacked by Villa nearly weekly, what exactly Mexico was doing still in the war. The Confederacy had started this mess, the Confederacy would have to get itself out. For much of the political establishment, including for the first time Emperor Maximilian and his inner circle of advisors and courtiers, it was time to accept reality - Mexico had lost, but it could still lose with its dignity. The secret efforts at peace feelers from Foreign Minister Pedro Lascurain were now to be encouraged, rather than kept silent..."

    - Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100
     
    • Bleeding Heartland: The Midlands Front of the Great American War

    • KingSweden24

    "...summer-long Red River Offensive that captured the Chickasaw Nation's capital at Tishomingo and placed American cavalry on the border with Texas at the Red River for the first time; additional infantry thrusts deeper into hillier, more remote Choctaw territory to clear out the most stubborn war bands ended with the first American push into northeast Texas with the capture of Texarkana on September 11th, and six days later American forces four hundred kilometers west raided across the Red River, capturing Wichita Falls for a period of ten days before withdrawing thanks to a counterattack by the Texas State Militia, though not before dynamiting the city's grain elevators and train depot and ripping up railroad tracks, leaving them tied around nearby trees. With the US Army having occupied Amarillo even further west in the Panhandle region for over a year and capturing Lubbock in early October with the focus on Los Pasos entirely satisfied, the defenses of northern and western Texas were essentially in tatters, a fact on the ground that was not lost on Native leadership.

    It was in this context that the defeated leaders of the Six Tribes - the Five Nations along with the Osage - gathered at Kansas City on October 8th, 1915, to sign instruments of surrender to the "Great White Father," as American leadership was derisively known amongst Natives. Considering the bloody and cruel history of relations between white settlers and indigenous nations in North America, the Treaty of Kansas City was, by all accounts, fairly mild, though many Natives didn't particularly consider it that way. To the Cherokee in particular, Kansas City represented the final chapter in a century-long humiliation that began with the tensions in northeastern Georgia and evolved into the Trail of Tears of the 1830s. In hindsight, the terms imposed on the Five Nations could have been considerably worse.

    The Indian Territory had been regarded as a protectorate of the Confederacy since 1863 and the Five Nations were permitted under treaties with Richmond to send non-voting delegates to advocate on their behalf in the Confederate Congress. That the Indian Territory had escaped being absorbed as a state by the Confederacy and the Natives within it put to the sword was, in some ways, a quirk of history - all Five Nations kept slaves themselves, and in elite Confederate circles this was taken as a sign that it was possible to "civilize" the indigenous peoples of the Americas, because keeping Negro slaves was to them after all the epitome and end stage of white civilization. Accordingly, though it was a minority and oft-unspoken view, there were a fair deal of Confederate leaders throughout the previous fifty years who considered the Five Nations more civilized and enlightened than the Yankees; the more common, indeed plurality, opinion was that the Natives were useful as a buffer and as allies and thus in good esteem.

    To many Confederates, then, they were of the mind that the Five Nations should have allowed Richmond to negotiate on their behalf at the end of the war, but Natives had always viewed their relations with Richmond as bilateral, and now sought to approach Philadelphia the same way. It was a stroke of luck that the American delegation sent to Kansas City was inexperienced and that the United States was in the midst of secretly negotiating Mexico's exit from the war as well; unlike with Chile, the United States was in the mood to be more gracious than it would have been had the titanic victories of spring and summer 1915 not occurred.

    The most straightforward demand of the United States was the transfer of protectorate status from Richmond to Philadelphia; American diplomats would represent Native interests with the rest of the world, and the Six Nations and the smaller tribes who leased their lands would make no bilateral agreements with any other nation independently of one another or without consultations with the United States. Beyond that, though, the "Indian Territory" would be regarded as the territory of "all the tribes residing within it" and not as an integral part of the United States. However, Americans would enjoy considerable extraterritorial rights; they could not be tried for crimes under tribal law, their property rights would be respected, and they would enjoy free movement and rights of residency within the Indian Territory. In practice, this meant that Americans could come to Native lands as often as they pleased and do essentially whatever they wanted, lending to the area's reputation for vice and violence in the decades to come.

    Furthermore, lands in central, northwestern and southwestern Indian Country would be carved off as new "nations" for white and Black settlers, who would be on those lands permitted to write their own local laws which Natives would be governed by. With the exception of the Oklahoma Country in the central part of the state adjacent to the Choctaw, Seminole and Pottawotamie lands, these territories were generally harsher and less suitable for agriculture than other areas of territory, and freedmen who flocked to the possibility of a new life in the Indian Territory were often left with desolate, difficult land that performed poorly in good times, to say nothing of the severe droughts twenty years later during the Dust Bowl.

    The United States was satisfied with leaving Indian Territory out of its borders, though, thanks to a unilaterally favorable minerals treaty. The Indian Territory would be permitted to export all agricultural, industrial and, crucially, raw resource products exclusively to the United States for a period of twenty years and would be beholden to importing finished and raw goods exclusively from the United States for a period of forty. This economic vassalization was intended to leverage American advantages in the Osage Hills oilfields, which some Congressmen of both parties had otherwise suggested simply annexing to Missouri or Kansas outright. In part, too, it reflected the lack of awareness that Philadelphia had in terms of just how much oil there was on Native land - it was generally thought that the Osage Hills would be exhausted as soon as 1940. Additionally, there was some partisan scuffle over exactly how far to go with the Indian Territory - Liberals generally assumed that due to its similar economic profile an Indian state would be quickly overrun with white settlers and soon vote lockstep Democrat like Missouri or Kansas, while Democrats assumed that due to Natives and Blacks generally favoring Liberal candidates historically, a future Indian state would simply add another two Liberal Senators. With both parties assuming that adding the Indian Territory to the United States would benefit the opposition, keeping it a supine vassal for the next half-century while sucking it dry seemed the better solution.

    The chiefs of the various Native tribes begrudgingly signed this treaty on October 12th, still celebrated as Treaty Day in what is now the Confederated Nations of Sequoyah. The Indian Territory had exited the war with, all things considered, relatively low loss of life and, as it turned out, a remarkably favorable settlement on mineral rights, particularly for the Osage and Cherokee. The United States now had the perfect place from which to attack the industrial nodes of northern Texas directly, and one more domino had fallen for Philadelphia in terms of removing opponents from the board..."

    - Bleeding Heartland: The Midlands Front of the Great American War [1]

    [1] Once again, full confession that my thumb is pretty heavily on the scale here in keeping alt-Oklahoma out of the United States, but having an Indigenous Dubai/Kazakhstan in the middle of the continent is too interesting a hook to avoid even if, realistically, there's little chance that either the Liberal administration and Democratic Congress of the United States would ever be this magnanimous in dealing with the Five Nations. Mutual mistrust and, unspoken but surely considered, the potential for perpetual guerilla violence is my in-story excuse for making this happen.
     
    • Jix

    • KingSweden24

    "...its own advantages. As a ministerial deputy, rather than a Cabinet officer himself, Jix was in position to enjoy influence without vilification and final responsibility. It also should be noted that, as the chief aide at the Home Office during the period 1914-16, he was somewhat squirreled away from the two most crucial issues of the day - Ireland and India - while nonetheless in a position to serve as the architect of a much more muscularly nationalist and reactionary brand of politics for High Toryism than many of his more staid, aristocratic Old Etonian colleagues had perhaps thought possible. Jix, in his memoranda, outlined a policy doctrine meant to scratch for the first time the itch of the frustrated impulses of the post-Victorian middle class and appeal to their resentments rather than the peculiarities of the landed gentry and British nobility; before long, this would go from policy programme to political manifesto, even if Jix was reluctant to ever describe his proposals as such. [1]

    The programme of the Home Office under Walter Long reveals shadows of the kind of skull-knocking ruthlessness for which Jix would be associated with in opposition-friendly press in the 1920s but also his curiously empathetic streak. In 1915 in particular, Jix was viewed by some of his colleagues as something of a soft-willed squish, which was one reason he was not handed the Special Branch portfolio in dealing with the troubles in Ireland; the junior ministerial deputy's main cause celebre in the early Cecil ministry was that of penal reform. Jix had visited a number of British prisons and come away appalled with the conditions in which British prisoners were kept, and was taken aback by the prevailing attitude that such depredations were what said prisoners deserved as the moral degenerates they were. [2] Jix had a different view, albeit one he did not arrive at from the same direction as the more liberally-minded reformers of the age. In his view, it was not the fault of common criminals that they lived in a morally degenerate society, and that the "near-medieval conditions of the British gaols" prevented them from escaping "the rot of the public order of modern Britain." In the prison systems, Jix saw the logical endpoint of the Liberal state that had begun under Chamberlain and been insufficiently challenged by the Nationals going back a quarter-century now. As he outlined in an extensive proposal to Long, the British prisons should instead be used to reform and rehabilitate criminals, that these reformed criminals could return to society as hardworking moral pillars rather than broken men chewed up and spat out by the penal system. Long was unmoved by this moralistic appeal - prisons were meant to punish, after all - and unpersuaded by Jix's considerably more radical suggestion that the question of the "hardship" of the gaols missed the point: a penal system meant to reform criminals could reform society if, for example, considerably more Britons were made to experience it to help "cure" their degeneracy.

    Nonetheless, in a fairly vapid government largely filled and staffed by "old chums" who knew each other from Oxford if not Eton, Jix quickly earned a reputation as a man of ideas, and Long's opposition to his programme for penal reform did not place a limit on Jix's ability to quickly show off a darker streak in other matters. It was Jix who was the main proponent, author and enforcer of the Alien Act, which for the first time handed the Home Office control over the regulation of immigration, both regular and for claims of asylum, and allowed it to restrict the immigration of those who "could not support themselves" or were thought "burdensome upon the state." Within a year of its passage, the number of immigrants to Britain fell by close to 80%, primarily Jews fleeing persecution from Russia, and Jix's reputation as an anti-Semite was further cemented. In other notes to Long or Cecil, he advocated "joining the rest of the industrial world" in arming the British police to better counteract not just Irish terrorism, the chief concern of the day, but also to combat revolutionary trade unionism and "better demonstrate steel in the face of public degeneracy," taking the view that the vast amount of drinking, fornicating and gambling prevalent in London my the mid-1910s flowed from a general social permissiveness that began with elite mores but manifested itself in things such as unarmed Bobbies refusing to enforce the law for the good of public order.

    In this vast array of missives and memoranda from his years under Long at the Home Office, the political ideology of William Joynson-Hicks can be seen charted out in its nascent stages and one can see why the sharp tongue, aggressively conservative propositions and lawyerly arguments on display earned the man a reputation as a well-informed MP capable to defending his views and outlining innovative ideas in a government often stuck gazing longingly into the past. The project of Jix, that being updating his evangelical Victorian zeal for the 20th century, had found fertile ground - it just hadn't quite been properly watered yet..." [3]

    - Jix

    [1] Recall that one reasons why the Tories/Nats fizzled out after the 1870s ITTL - since 1878 they've held power for only ten years on aggregate through 1915 - is that Disraeli and the Representation of the People Act never came as a package deal, and Disraeli's innovation of pitching nationalist but paternalist conservatism to the working and middle classes never really metastatized on the British Right. Jix is now doing that, but with a twist of the politics of the 1910s/20s which of course are very different.
    [2] Up to here, this is true - William Joynson-Hicks (who it will never cease amusing me took his wife's last name despite being a late Victorian arch-reactionary) was very committed to reforming the state of British prisons during his time at the Home Office. Everything that follows is my darker extrapolation
    [3] So yeah things are going to go great in Britain in ~8 years or so
     
    • Land of the Morning Calm: Korea's 20th Century

    • KingSweden24

    "...tight control. Kim Hong-jip's death in September 1915 thus became emblematic of the late Gojong period; the sense that the reformist zeal that had marked the late 1890s and all of the 1900s had run out of steam, and that Korea had stalled out and struck a plateau in terms of what it could accomplish. That is not to downplay the accomplishments of Kim Hong-jip, who had created out of the arch-conservative and flimsy Joseon administration he had inherited a functional state that had a professional army that could actually pay its soldiers and could credibly fend off a foreign invasion, had raised Korea's living standards from one of the poorest countries in Asia to a burgeoning light industrial economy, and had created a neutral foreign policy that expertly played Russia, Japan, the United States, France and China off of one another. [1]

    His death came after many years of illness, however, and left something of a void in the middle of the Korean state as King Gojong himself began to see his health begin to fail him over the last three years of his life. The regionalism that Kim Hong-jip had largely crushed began to rear its head again, particularly encouraged by aggressive French emissaries in Busan pushing for more influence in Gyeongsang Province, which Paris had begun to more assertively view as their stomping grounds after years of neglect of their formal but unenforced protectorate. Conservative and liberal factions in Seoul began to more outwardly fight one another again, too; Kim Hong-jip's iron fist and long shadow had left many ambitious men without a place in the sun, and military officers trained by the Russians feuded almost publicly with progressive, Amerophilic merchants and religious leaders who viewed Korea's burgeoning Christendom as crucial to its emerging place out of the shadow of Japan and China.

    That all this was paired with a general economic malaise as the Gojong Reforms lost their vigor created a volatile atmosphere in Seoul and to a lesser extent the churches and temples of Pyongyang, more dangerous less due to what could happen in Korea herself but rather due to the uncertainty domestic Korean concerns began to present to the Great Powers that surrounded her and depended on a certain predictability in the peninsula for managing their own affairs in East Asia..."

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

    [1] You'll notice that this comparison sounds a good deal like Bismarck, which I think would be apt to think of as a good corollary for what Kim Hong-jip has accomplished so far in Korea
     
    • Spanish general election, 1915

    • KingSweden24

    Spanish general election, 1915​

    All 408 seats in the Cortes; 205 seats needed for a majority [1]

    National Liberal (Canalejas): 193 (+4)
    Conservative (Maura): 71 (-13)
    PSOE (Iglesias): 62 (+14)
    Radical (Alvarez): 38 (+14) [2]
    Regionalist (Prat): 14 (+3)
    Traditionalist Catholic (Mella) 11 (+11)
    Independents (N/A): 8 (-15) [3]
    Cuban Nationalist (Palma): 6 (-1)
    Integrist (Olazabal): 5 (-8)
    Progressive (Moret*): 0 (-17) [3]
    Republican Reform: 0 (-6)

    [1] Three more than in 1910
    [2] Gumersindo de Azcarate stands aside for Melquiades Alvarez as Republican Reform is re-merged back into Radical.
    [3] Segismundo Moret's 1913 death obliterates the Progressive Party and they eventually all become independents and then either seek re-election as such or retire; most of their voters split between PNL or the Radicals
     
    • The Statesman: The Spain of Jose Canalejas

    • KingSweden24

    "...powerful oratory of Alvarez. Nonetheless, the election to Canalejas represented a triumph of his moderate liberalism and he viewed it as an endorsement of the remarkable improvement of Spanish standards of living since he had taken over at the end of the postwar depression in 1910 as well as his more creative legislative proposals.

    What really cemented 1915 as a landmark election was not the status quo result for the ruling National Liberals or the re-consolidation of the left wing under two parties rather than four, but rather the further splintering of the right wing as Maura's Conservatives saw further erosion, this time not just to the Integrists and Regionalists (the former indeed lost votes), but rather the emergence of Mella's Traditionalist Catholic Party, which was an explicitly Carlist Party (in contrast to Olazabal's Integrists, who were merely arch-reactionaries but reconciled to the House of Hohenzollern). Indeed, the Partido Catolico Tradicional was larger than the Integrists now and the only party of the right to have gained significant new followers, and with two ultra-right, anti-parliamentarian parties represented in the Cortes now, Canalejas made note in his diary that these developments amongst Spain's culturally powerful but politically heretofore docile Catholic lobby [1] would need further observation..."

    - The Statesman: The Spain of Jose Canalejas

    [1] Post-1868, that is
     
    • The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33

    • KingSweden24

    "...politicians pledging their fealty to the National Alliance for Victory - after all, how could one say they were against victory?

    The slogan that emblazoned every campaign stop Vardaman made across the Confederacy read "Vardaman for Victory," but nobody really dared ask, in part because they suspected he had no good answer but also because of concerns of what his rabid Red Scarves might do to them in response, what exactly he intended to do to secure such a victory. After all, September and October, the months immediately ahead of the vote, were the months in which what little remained of Confederate control in Tennessee broke apart at Tullahoma and Knoxville and Alabama became threatened for the first time, while in Virginia Lejeune was able to score a major defensive victory at Fredericksburg but his counterattacks fell short of his own stated goals. The Confederacy was struggling to keep up with the industrial production of the North, and now with the sea lanes in the Gulf of Mexico utterly unprotected a blockade that would dramatically tighten over the next year had been imposed on Confederate ports, and by the end of October Mexico would have exited the war, creating even more chaos.

    Throughout this, though, the Confederate populace remained lockstep in continued support of the war, in part thanks to the sophisticated propaganda machine from the NAV that promised a slave rebellion that would dwarf the legendary Nat Turner and Jed Ford uprisings. Caricatures of white women carrying mulatto babies were particularly popular, explicitly suggesting that a future in which the Confederacy failed to repel the Yankee was one in which freedmen would impregnate "the daughters and sisters of the noble soldier at will" while implicitly insinuating via the clever use of the word "soldier" that men were fighting for the honor of white women at this point more than anything else. Other pamphlets mused that a Yankee victory would see the Confederacy annexed with Black men appointed "military governors" in perpetuity, or stood aghast in detailing the poverty that the collapse of the slave economy would bring about.

    For that reason, Vardaman's rallies drew hundreds if not thousands of people, with an outdoor screed in Atlanta pulling probably close to a third of the city to listen to him speak, and his rallies were often followed by riots and lynchings carried out by his Red Scarf mob that very pointedly attacked suspected naysayers. Though there was not much in the way of organized opposition to Vardaman and his coming election really a fait accompli despite a spirited campaign by Tillmanite protege Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama, the "we shall win with the bullet box if we cannot win with the ballot box" philosophy that became pervasive amongst reactionary Confederate paramilitary organizations in the late 20th century had its origins in the Red Scarves Movement that increasingly came to inhabit their own reality and increasingly demanded that their fellow citizens inhabit it with them.

    A Vardaman speech was a social event as much as a political platform, but there was a kernel of the old Vardaman in them. His speeches expounded at length upon the sacrifice that the common Confederate was making, and much of his motivation to find an "honorable conclusion" to the war seemed just as much tied up in the political realities of the 1915 Confederacy as it did his equating the loss of his son Jake at Nashville to the losses other fathers and mothers around Dixie had felt; he could, quite credibly, suggest to them that he felt and understood their pain and grief. Violent and revanchist as his movement was and cynical as his betrayal of Tillman had been, Vardaman's populist cry to continue the war at all costs did seem to have been grounded in a very real realization that as bad as the war was, whatever would follow in a defeat Confederacy was likely to be worse, a sentiment he shared with his much more sober-minded and rhetorically cautious running mate, George Patton. Thus the struggle was just as much about defeating the enemy as it was about haphazardly gluing together a quickly collapsing social order, and few realized that the Confederacy had about a year left in it until the apocalypse they had feared was upon them..."

    - The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
     
    • The Central European War

    • KingSweden24

    "...most surely did not subscribe to the French concept of Europe Peripherique; in October 1915 a new antagonist for France emerged in the form of Antonio Salandra, an arch-conservative ally of Giolitti who replaced the more experienced Sonnino. Salandra was openly ambitious and really wanted Giolitti's job, and though the two men often did not agree on much, the aging and increasingly embattled Prime Minister viewed a "strongman" in the mold of Salandra as his best potential successor. [1]

    Italian attitudes towards Greece, Montenegro and Serbia were hardly progressive or of the view that these countries were her equal - Salandra derisively referred to his counterparts in Belgrade as "the hill people" and Italian public consciousness at the time stereotyped the Balkans as a place where siblings were married to each other - but what Rome offered was at least not strategic subservience at the level of France. By late 1915, especially after the disastrous French elections which badly damaged the Poincare government [2], Serbia in particular was starting to tire of French meddling and the Quai d'Orsay's use of loans to demand foreign policy concessions, with even King Mirko grumbling, "Serbs are not to be bought!" Mirko's closeness to his Montenegrin family swayed them as well, and while Serbia purely by necessity remained the closest of the three independent Balkan states to their longtime patrons in the Iron Triangle, Montenegro began to rapidly explore her options across the Adriatic in following Greece into ever-closer relations with Italy, punctuated by the sumptuous state visit of King Nikola I of Montenegro to Rome in December 1915.

    Austria more than France reacted poorly to these developments; Greece's drift into the Italian sphere of influence had already sullied relations with the Ottomans and potentially portended a Greco-Ottoman War as soon as the following year, and now Montenegro and her crucial port at Cattoro seemed to be moving in Italy's direction, with Serbia under Nikola's son Mirko potentially likely to follow. The "Southern Flank" looked by the start of 1916 to potentially be in tatters, and with it the security that underpinned Austria's ability to aim all her guns at Germany and Italy.

    This was a fairly strong misreading of the strategic situation in the Balkans - Montenegro in particular was in no condition to go to war with Austria in the 1910s on behalf of Italy - but the developments of 1915, starting with the Greek Naval Act and ending with Nikola's visit at the behest of Giolitti and Salandra, upended longstanding thinking in both Paris and Vienna, and neither reacted particularly pragmatically. France, in particular, doubled down on her policy of using financial support as both diplomatic carrot and stick, only worsening Francophobic sentiments in Podgorica and Belgrade, while also making a series of bellicose notes to Greece that only further convinced Athens that its own naval deterrent was necessary to perhaps counteract French ambitions in the region. To Paris, it was a nightmare scenario - the Ottoman relationship fraying just as Montenegro and Serbia began having their own independent ideas and joining a Greco-Italian alignment that threatened their access to Suez and suzerainty in the Mediterranean. Peripheral as the Balkans may have been to European affairs, and to the Central European War once it actually broke out, the region was fairly central to the insecurities that set France on a path of continued and escalated confrontation over the coming years..."

    - The Central European War

    [1] Consider this a prelude to an Italy-specific entry
    [2] Ditto for France - here we're just tying it all together in context
     
    • French election, 1915

    • KingSweden24

    French election, 1915​

    527 seats in the Corps Legislatif

    National Bloc (Poincare): 217 (-51)
    Union of Socialist Reform (Briand): 95 (+95) [1]
    Action Francaise (Maurras): 73 (+2)
    Radicals (Caillaux): 70 (+6)
    SFIO (Jaures): 49 (+9)
    Ligue des Patriotes (Barres): 9 (-53)
    Independents of the Left (N/A): 8 (-)
    Parti des Regions (Ribot): 5 (-2)
    Independents of the Right: 1 (-3)

    ----

    "...curious decisions in French political history. Under the legislative reforms of 1906 [2] an election was not due until late spring of 1916, and there were a great many allies of Poincaré, Paleologue and [Andre] Tardieu chief among them, who would have preferred to wait an additional five or six months before calling France to the polls. There was no particular impetus for the early election call, not with the Bloc National enjoying an outright absolute majority of its own and supermajority support when taking into account the oft-feuding but support AF and LdP. While economic statistics from the 1910s are by nature quite dodgy, scholarship today suggests that the French economy enjoyed one of her best half-year periods since the Decade d'Or between when Frenchmen went to the polls in October 1915 and when they would have been due in early May of 1916, at the very beginning of the robust 1915-18 European economic boom - put more simply, Poincaré would have had a considerably stronger hand had he merely waited as he could have. In his diaries and correspondences to colleagues, Poincaré defended his unilateral suggestion to the Emperor that the Corps legislatif be dissolved with his supposition that it would catch his rivals, particularly Briand, wrong-footed; it in the end left them more befuddled than caught off guard, particularly the canny Briand who had been preparing for an election since the first breaths taken by the URS the year before.

    In practical terms, the elections of autumn 1915 did not change much. The Prime Minister was still, after all, responsible first and foremost to the Emperor, and as the Bloc National remained the largest party in the Corps legislatif by a broad margin and the choice in the end rested with Napoleon V, Poincaré found himself back at the Hotel Matignon, which in the previous six months he had formally established as the official residence of the Prime Minister. In symbolic and historical terms, however, it was a watershed election. France's legislature had always been a weak institution, dismissed by Napoleon IV as a rubber-stamp for his more popular ideas and ignored by a rotating cast of Prime Ministers dating back to MacMahon all the way through Boulanger who regarded it as "a debating society of great pretense and little import," too weak to even bother dissolving when bothersome. Poincaré had positioned himself as something different, though, as a Prime Minister who valued the role of the Corps legislatif, a conservative but a democrat at heart who would make no moves without the confidence of the majority of the voix populaire. When he had a clear majority thanks to his own party and a supermajority with the support of the right-wing cadres, that was a perfectly fine position to take that cost him nothing. But the Bloc National had lost its narrow but absolute majority, shedding fifty seats and falling well shy of being able to do as it pleased. Of course, the Bloc could rely upon the support of Action Francaise, at least to block the opposition, as well as the increasingly conservative Regions Party of Alexandre Ribot, but the AF had shifted even further right in its total and complete contempt for democracy, arguing in favor of the elimination of Parliament altogether and proposing a state ruled exclusively by royal decree, a position that gained increasing traction amongst the ever-reactionary officer corps of the Empire. Democratic, mainstream moderate conservatives like Poincaré were now dependent on the goodwill of monarchist absolutists whose ideas would form the basis of integralist thinking in the decades to come, and the hard-nationalist Ligue des Patriotes, without its north star in Boulanger, had been virtually wiped out in the same election, denying the Bloc its critical outside support from a far-right faction that was not led by the genuinely troublesome figure of Maurras.

    Of course, Poincaré had another option - to pivot to the increasingly resilient center and center-left, which had recovered from their nadirs of the 1890s and early 1900s to genuinely flex their muscles again. Had Poincaré been somewhat more astute of a domestic operator than he was, the ability to play the rival factions off each other tactically would have been clear to him. All three of the opposition parties had enough legislators now on their own to be able to carry in alliance with the Bloc any element that Poincaré brought to the floor, even the SFIO, smallest and most radical (theoretically if not always in practice, at least) of the three. As this was also the case with the AF, this meant that Poincaré, had he seized the opportunity better, had a minority government that was strong enough to survive on its own feet and an opposition that could be triangulated transactionally and individually, thus always kept on their toes, and allowed the Bloc not to have to form a permanent coalition with any other party but rather operate in temporary alliances of convenience.

    While this came to be in practice how Poincaré addressed the circumstances of French politics over the next several years, it was a circumstance that he approached with improvisation rather than strategy, and frustration rather than the cunning and caution it required. The most immediate problem was that the elections of 1915 had elevated Aristide Briand from first among equals to the clear and most straightforward opponent of the Poincaré regime and indeed much of the increasingly clerical project of the monarchy as pushed by the Dowager Empress Eugenie. Briand was reconciled to the Empire but a staunch atheist and a socialist reformer, keen on using the power of municipalities rather than the entire state to bring about genuine and true improvements in the French standard of living as well as French education, sanitation and worker's rights. As such, while he was impressed and more than a little surprised by how well his URS did in the election, particularly its dominance in Paris and replacing the Radicals as the largest party there, he viewed the results more as a springboard to build his fledgling opposition party up across Paris, particularly in the industrial areas around Lille, Calais and Marseille, rather than doing battle with the hated conservatives as Caillaux and Jaures would have preferred.

    What resulted was that Poincaré, always with a sense of embattlement and bitterness, came to perceive himself as ever-further under siege, despite French politics' remarkable placidity in the years that followed. In his worldview, there was always a knife being sharpened to be used on him, even by his erstwhile allies - Paleologue, Tardieu, Castelnau, it could have been any of them - and he was convinced that Briand, who had burst onto the scene as a bonafide new leader of oppositional forces from one member of the Corps legislatif (himself) to nearly a hundred, was now as much a threat from the outside as conservatives questioning his judgement and rigor were from the inside. Dangerously, this sense of insecurity for Poincaré and new questions of stability within the monarchist-conservative alliance created a space in which politicians felt they needed to outdo one another in seeming the most nationalist (and, on occasion, the most pious), and of course the targets of French clerical-nationalist zeal were familiar names - Britain, but more realistically Germany and Italy, the bete noires of Parisian foreign policy since the traumas of 1867..."

    - La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers

    [1] Recall that Aristide Briand decided to position himself separately from the SFIO and the Radicals with this outfit in this update here, a decision that most certainly worked out in his favor as you can see
    [2] Not gonna go into details this is just a throwaway, presume that in all countries things get tinkered with periodically, got enough to cover in this sprawling mess as it is lol
     
    • In Rome's Image: Italy and the 20th Century

    • KingSweden24

    (Since we were just talking about Italy...)

    "...perhaps traded a conservative autocrat in Crispi for a liberal one in Giolitti. This, of course, was not entirely fair - Giolitti's social reforms were rooted in a certain progressivism and it is not particularly a trait of autocracy to expand the voting franchise. Nonetheless, Giolitti was often of the mind that the glue that held together Italy's fractious politics was his own personage, and as he ticked ever-closer to his mid-70s, his worries about his own health and the stability of the system began to grow.

    Broad centrist "natural governing" parties across Europe have always had a hard go of it because they open themselves up to attacks from two directions, sniped at by the right for moving too far to the left and by the left for moving too far to the right. For Giolitti's Liberal Union it was even more difficult to manage by late 1915 as there was no particular party structure and his personal patronage was often required to maintain order and unity. Without him, it wasn't clear who exactly could take over between the conservatives arranged around Salandra and Sonnino or the progressives behind Boselli.

    For the first time in his tenure, too, Giolitti was increasingly embattled by opposition parties that were not utterly supine to his carefully-managed triangulation, on both left and right, rather than merely regionalist discontent from the South of Italy, which while strong as ever was not particularly organized politically. The election of the ultramontane Domenico Serafini as Pope Gregory XVII at the end of 1913 had reinvigorated the traditionalist Catholic right, which was starting to chafe under the more moderate (albeit quite effective) leadership of Catholic Electoral Union chief Gentiloni and his protege Father Luigi Sturzo and demand a more muscular political Catholicism, a current in Italian politics that may have had some staying power had it not been strictly anti-nationalist and pan-Catholic, thus running into the rocks of the Central European War within a few years. To his left, too, there were problems, increasingly thanks to Giolitti's partnership with the UEC and the unpopular Gentiloni Pact. Sacchi's Radicals had elected to dispense with their refusal to cooperate with the Socialists and so, despite giving Giolitti support for the time being, Sacchi and Nitti had now both expressed willingness to cooperate in a future coalition with not just the Republicans but also the Socialists, who under a grouping of bright, charismatic and young leaders such as Giacomo Matteoti, Niccolo Bombacci and the pugilistic, uncompromising editor of the Socialist Party newspaper, Benito Mussolini. It was this group of revolutionaries who would lead the PSI in the first wave of Socialist parties across Europe either purging their moderates or splitting with them into separate parties throughout the late 1910s that challenged the rise of the movement in the years immediately preceding the war and polarized the left's reactions to it.

    As with other European countries at this time, Italy in the mid-to-late 1910s was thus a place of remarkable rising standards of living thanks in large part to Giolitti's social reforms and favorable disposition towards organized labor (especially compared to many classical liberals elsewhere) but also an increasingly educated and demanding electorate leading to a livelier, more complicated political and cultural scene. What created issues for Italy specifically was that the UL was no longer able to simply point and demand and had to manage coalition partners with ideas of their own and an opposition that was increasingly strident in its calls for revolution or reaction, which appealed to workers both in wealthy but unequal Piedmont and Lombardy as well as the impoverished peasantry of the South, and an independent foreign policy that intersected poorly with the ambitions of its neighbors or the Great Detente once pursued by Germany to keep the peace with France. In short, the popular perception of Italy as an erratic time bomb seeking an external conflict to paper over internal issues is grossly overstated, but nonetheless as Giolitti's power and prestige declined, it was an open question what exactly would come next and what exactly that would mean for the average Italian after so many good years under first Crispi and then Giolitti leading many to take that stability for granted..."

    - In Rome's Image: Italy and the 20th Century
     
    • Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100

    • KingSweden24

    "...general consensus that John Lejeune was one of the Confederacy's more capable generals, though his contemporaries were of the mind that this was because the "Hero of the Occoquan" had more daring and grit, whereas modern scholarship reflects more on his fairly clear-eyed assessment of logistics, when to hold and when to counter, and his refusal to countenance war crimes committed by his men. For close to nine months he directed a tight, disciplined defense between the hills and rivers of north-central Virginia, of which Fredericksburg was its first line of defense and where he made his name; despite rapidly deteriorating conditions for the Confederate cause, his doggedness and talent kept the Eastern Front from turning into the kind of slow-grinding war of annihilation experienced in West Tennessee, northern and central Alabama, Georgia and parts of South Carolina during the last year of the war.

    But John Lejeune had not been appointed to merely hold the Yankees at bay; he had been given his job over the spent and unimaginative force of Alexander Dade to drive the Yankee back across the Potomac. After the Warrenton Offensive, however, Lejeune quickly deduced that this was simply not going to happen. The chance for that had come at the Occoquan and narrowly been denied him, and though perhaps had a better result at the Bull Run River allowed a Confederate division or two to snake up towards Fort Arlington, it could have been different, that was not how it had gone. The Yankees had retrenched after the Occoquan, solidified their crossing points, and then made clever use of counterattacks and superior airpower with a level of coordination that was denied Lejeune as the Confederate Army Air Corps was indulged by Richmond in their refusal to be brought under his direct command.

    What Lejeune did realize, however, was that the Yankees could be kept north of the Rappahannock, thanks in large part to excellent sight-lines from the hills around Fredericksburg, and upon Lenihan's attack there in late September and early October, Lejeune doled out a defeat that was similar to the early campaigns of the war in its disproportionality. Artillery and air attacks rained down on Yankees trying to get across the river, and the unique topography of Fredericksburg allowed the Confederates every advantage in the defense. It helped that Lejeune was not trying to attack very far back across the river himself, and so when his forces were able to clear Yankee trenches it forced Lenihan to pull back.

    There would be no repeat of the heroics of the Occoquan, however. Lejeune's attempt at a quick counteroffensive towards Warrenton were stopped within days in mid-October, thanks as always to landships deployed in defense, longer-range artillery that could start bombarding Confederate positions well in advance of them being in range of Yankee trenches, and continued aerial cover from across the river in Maryland. Lejeune halted his forces and elected to regroup, figuring that there would be another offensive from Lenihan within weeks, and indeed in late November when the Yankees attacked again at Second Fredericksburg, they received a similar bloody nose.

    Lejeune's success at Fredericksburg was well-timed; the powerful Virginia Senator Thomas Martin's newly-formed National Alliance for Victory was headed to the polls in early November, so a major victory in Martin's home state to recompense for less exciting news out of Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas was seen as a must. As such, Lejeune acquitted himself well. However, the battles of Fredericksburg in the end did little to alleviate the mounting logistic problems facing the Confederacy, especially as simultaneous to his fight at the Rappahannock, an American force under General Herman Hall had punched its way down the Shenandoah Valley, seizing Harrisonburg just as Lenihan's men were in retreat and by the end of the month besieging Staunton, which would fall shortly after the elections. The crucial harvest out of the Shenandoah was thus largely unavailable to Lejeune's tired, hungry men, and the fragility of Confederate defenses, to say nothing of their ability to mount the kind of counterattack that could actually dislodge the enemy, was laid bare once more..."

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

    (Kept things kind of high-level here, and will likely continue to do so/accelerate that process, as I'm reaching the point where I'm tired of writing the GAW - its been nearly a year! - and want to wrap it up.)
     
    • Burning Punjab

    • KingSweden24

    "...particular ire towards Taraknath Das, the Berkeley professor who spoke frequently in front of adoring crowds across the United States and corresponded with sympathizers across the world more or less openly, including Virendranath Chattopadhay at the University of Berlin who was himself a staunch Ghadarite and covertly led Indian fundraising for the Kabul-based activities of Raj Mahendra Pratap, who by late 1915 had come to be in charge of the smuggling operations bringing weapons through Persia and Russia to Afghanistan and from there across the Khyber and thus into Punjab; it is widely believed that without Pratap's herculean efforts, the Mutiny would have failed within days, and there is a reason why he is held in esteem as a Father of Independence among the hard core of Indian nationalists even today.

    Das, as would befit an academic and lecturer, knew his audience and how to appeal to them. There was no shortage of racism in the United States, particularly on the West Coast towards Asians who were treated suspiciously as cultural interlopers, socialist agitators and most importantly a threat to White livelihoods, but the short, plump Bengali cleverly draped his lectures on the struggle for Indian independence and the noble cause of Indian nationalism in language drawing heavily upon the ideals of the American Revolution. "The Sikh laborer," he often noted, "has upon arriving on the North American shore discovered in his heart a passion for liberty and justice, and now stands as committed as any American to casting off the shackles of slavery." While the American academy often leaned conservative and counterrevolutionary in 1915, it was an ardently nationalist institution, deeply proud of its heritage as the "wellspring of freedom" and the idea of India following the United States into the breach of revolting against colonial masters in London a hundred and forty years after Lexington and Concord struck the right emotional chords. The lurid descriptions of conditions in India for the average Indian were well-timed, too; the United States, in the middle of the Great American War against the slaveholding Confederate States, was at a point in its history where it could possibly not have been less sympathetic to any connotation of slavery anywhere in the world. Das was feted as a genius - the "brown Benjamin Franklin" in one review - and the Ghadar Party, despite its often syndicalist outlook, hailed as standing at the forefront of the global fight for liberty. [1]

    The United States government, crucially, was neutral on its outlook towards Ghadar, at least officially. The height of the Punjab Mutiny largely overlapped with the administration of Charles Hughes, a moderate liberal-conservative who while disinterested in socialist ideas was a fairly robust supporter of universal rights of political organization and speech, and thus while officials of his government declined to meet with Das or any other Ghadarites for that matter - they had their hands fairly full with the war, anyways - there was no concerted effort to respond to British demands that the Americans "do something" about Ghadar, demands that grew ever-louder as it became more and more clear in the autumn of 1915 that Kitchener's Indian Field Force would require considerably more resources to retake Punjab and put down the Mutiny. In fact, the Foreign Office's strident missives loaded with insinuations that the British had protected the Americans by demanding neutrality of shipping be honored by the Confederacy may have had the opposite effect: while the Hughes administration, particularly its chief diplomat Elihu Root, were thought of as strong Anglophiles, they deeply resented the idea of London dictating to them how they were to manage a domestic matter of men that had broken no laws of the United States or even the state of California, where Das maintained most of his advocacy, and pressure to curb Ghadar's growing strength and organization on the American West Coast was thus nonexistent or effectively slow-walked at a time when the Canadian government was cracking down aggressively on Ghadar's original heartland in Vancouver. [2]

    It was thus that the intellectual and financial project of Indian nationalism, above and beyond Ghadar's relative focus on Punjab and Bengal, came to find its beating heart in the East India Association and Indian Independence League in the San Francisco area, or in Seattle, or in the mining camps full of Sikh immigrants across the West Coast, able to connect with sympathizers not just in Vancouver but in Singapore, in Europe, and even places as far flung as Kabul..."

    - Burning Punjab

    [1] While Das did IOTL enjoy a fair deal of support in the American academy for precisely these reasons, and Ghadar's intellectual project was a well-spring of intellectuals in San Francisco in particular at Stanford and Berkeley, once the Hindu-German Conspiracy came to emphasize the "German" part, suffice to say this was not the reception that men like Taraknath Das received in the US any longer
    [2] This is what we call an "own-goal". Bear in mind Democrats, and some Liberals who need to keep an eye on such things, are already grumpy with Britain about the Irish Civil War
     
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