A Day in July: An Early 20th Century Timeline
- Thread starter Zulfurium
- Start date
The update is ready to be posted, so should be there within half an hour at the most.
As to your question, there are definitely more casualties on the Western Front than IOTL, but they are much more spread out over a longer period of time which allows particularly the Germans to absorb the losses better. It isn't a great deal more than OTL, but particularly the Americans experience significantly more casualties.
Bruxelles should be in the Netherlands, being located in Flanders, correct me if I am wrong.
The Mexican Revolution largely follows OTL, with most of the major instances of American involvement having been prior to the butterflies hitting the US. It will more be a matter of the 1920s playing out differently, so you still have Obregon in power by the time we get to Mexico.
Update Twenty-Two: A New Order
A New Order
Hungarian Troops Lead Away Captive Serbian Guerillas
A Broken Empire
The Hungarian thrust into Croatian territory met with immense resistance and the bloody fighting which resulted grew rapidly in scale and viciousness. Alongside the more direct military opposition of the Croatian Home Guard, the Honved also found itself inundated in a large number of partisans, who took to raiding and ambushing smaller contingents of Hungarian soldiers whenever possible. These partisan groups, which were strongest in the chaos of Bosnia and often saw young Croatian Bosnian men and women emerge as dominant in the region, proved an absolute pest to the Hungarians, blending seamlessly into the native population and easily being mistaken for any of the many equally hostile Muslim Bosniak or Serb Bosnian partisan groups which had emerged by this time. With the partisan groups fighting not only amongst themselves along ethnic lines, but against Honved forces caught in the middle of the various sides, the brutality of the struggle proved incredible.
Hungarian Troops Lead Away Captive Serbian Guerillas
A Broken Empire
Alongside the strong showing by Serb forces in Bosnia, further south in Serbia proper the situation was growing increasingly dire for the Hungarians. While Pál Nagy had turned westward in his focus, he had left the south under the command of Janky Kocsard, who had in turn spent that time developing an incredibly effective counter-partisan military effort which had seen Serb forces suppressed across much of the region north of the Danube. However, in that time Kosta Pećanac had been able to muster an incredible 30,000 Serb irregulars south of the river, a significant portion of which were veterans of the Great War, and had effectively driven the Hungarians from much of central Serbia. In late 1922, with the Austrians preparing for another assault from the north and the struggle in Croatia growing ever more bitter, Pećanac saw an opportunity. While Kocsard was preparing to push south of the Danube and had already largely purged Belgrade of partisans, he had nowhere near the forces required to hold back the sudden Serb onslaught. Rushing out of the countryside, Pećanac and his men swept across the region and crushed all resistance before them - sending Kocsard and his subordinates into a panic and placing Belgrade under threat of defeat. Hungarian resistance proved insufficient to the needs, and with other fronts taking a forefront it was only a matter of time before the Hungarian positions around Belgrade collapsed.
On the 8th of December 1922, the Serb Rising retook Belgrade to immense celebrations, despite paying heavily for it in the form of nearly 6,000 casualties, executing many of the prisoners taken, including Kocsard. Barely a week later, on the 16th, Croatian forces met and defeated the Honved invaders at the Battle of Bjelovar and sent Pál Nagy and his men into retreat. As if this was not enough, the Austrians made a new series of forays, clearly searching for weakness in anticipation of a spring offensive against the Hungarians. With defeat and crisis on all sides, Minister-President Hadik's position became increasingly embattled and calls for his removal grew increasingly incessant. Cries for the release and appointment of Mihály Károlyi began to spread and relations within the liberal ruling elite became increasingly loud even as the political star of Admiral Miklos Horthy grew ever brighter in response to his successful countering of the Austrian thrusts towards Budapest (1).
In Vienna, conflict between the pan-Germanist government and its supporting coalition on one side and the splintered nationalist, republican, imperialist and anarchist opposition became increasingly heated as German entreaties to mediate the Austro-Hungarian conflict and initial forays surrounding the possibilities of supporting an Anschluss of Austria to Germany came under way. For the time being, the matter remained unresolved, even as Galicia saw itself engulfed by a growing nationalist movement pushing for unification with the Kingdom of Poland, and the Czechs began to question whether their continued alliance with the Austrians might actually put them in a worse position than in a Hungarian-dominated Empire. German entreaties were met with rather mixed responses in Budapest, where it was felt that the Germans were incapable of serving as neutral arbiters in the conflict. However, these diplomatic efforts were able to open a line for dialogue between Vienna and Budapest in early 1923, just in time for the Austrian Spring Offensive to meet with disaster at the Battle of Sárvár when Pál Nagy's recently defeated Honved forces and Miklos Horthy's Hungarian Volunteers were able to catch the Austrians from both sides, cutting off their vanguard and driving the rest of the invasion force back in a chaotic retreat.
This defeat was sufficient to drive the Galicians into action, as Polish and Ruthenian nationalists took over military strongpoints and armed their supporters. It did not take long before Ruthenian and Poles were at each other's throats, having expelled the barebones Viennese administration, and the region began to collapse into bloody civil war. This provoked Poles in the Kingdom of Poland into action, and by May of 1923 Polish forces were crossing the border into Galicia to aid their brethren. The bitter ethnic fighting quickly turned in Polish favor, even as in the Duchy of Bukovina Romanian, Ukrainian and Polish figures each declared the Duchy annexed to the individual ethnic states they associated with. While the White Russians proved uninterested in participating in yet another conflict, with negotiations to end the Russian Civil War ongoing, the Romanians and Poles were swift to jump into action, with the Ukrainians swiftly aligning with the Romanians given the violent suppression of Ruthenians in Galicia. While neither the Romanian or Poles entered the Bukovinian Civil War officially, they would supply arms and volunteers in the bitter struggle which erupted in the small duchy.
With the civil war seemingly spreading across its borders, the Germans turned to harsher methods of diplomacy just as the disappointment following the Battle of Sárvar led to a collapse in support for Imperialist and Nationalist ideological forces in favor of the Pan-Germanists, the dream of a Austrian-dominated Habsburg Empire having seemingly died on the field of battle. With talks of Anschluss in the streets of Vienna, the Austrians turned to diplomatic means with the support of their German backers. The arrival of the ambitious and unscrupulous Franz von Pappen as leader of the German delegation to Budapest to negotiate an end to the Austro-Hungarian struggle proved immensely worrying for Hadik, who had found his position increasingly under assault from all sides. With Horthy publicly opposed to any deal which would sunder the Habsburg Empire while Karolyi called for the removal of Hadik and the Habsburgs in their entirety in favor of a Hungarian-dominated Danubian Republic, in effect seeking to form a Magna Hungaria, Hadik found himself struggling to stay afloat (1).
With the Serbs on the Danube, raiding and pillaging the Hungarian hinterlands in revenge for Hungarian actions in Serbia, the Croats in fine fighting form and the Germans seemingly on the verge of direct intervention into the Austro-Hungarian Civil War, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Hungarians would be unable to hold onto everything they wanted to keep. Hadik met multiple times with both Károlyi and Horthy in search of a solution, while Emperor Karl gave voice to his willingness to part with parts of the Empire if it should save the larger part and keep his family safe. With Imperial backing, Hadik stood in a better place with the royalists, who in turn exerted considerable influence on Horthy to bring his begrudging support for an end to Austro-Hungarian struggle. Károlyi remained steadfast in his opposition to anything like the deal imagined by the Germans, but soon found himself bombarded by rumours, slander and sabotage, which it soon became clear was the work of Ambassador von Pappen. Using overt diplomatic power and covert force, Pappen was able to weaken Károlyi's support and successfully turned sections of the nationalist wing against him, using his own presence at various events to insinuate some sort of partnership with Károlyi, leaving some convinced that the magnetic Hungarian politician was in fact a German agent.
By zoning out Károlyi and leaving him busy with internal clashes with his own supporters, Pappen cleared the road for a compromise with Hadik. In a series of covert negotiations, with the Germans doing double duty as neutral party and representative of the Austrians, much to the frustration of the Hungarians, a set of agreements were laid out which would see Cisleithania and Transleithania split, with Dalmatia to be transferred to Hungarian control. The key development of this agreement was that it essentially abandoned the Croatians to their fate while providing the Hungarians with control of the Dalmatian coast, which should allow them to cut off the Croatians from external trade and thus weaken the Croatian independence movement sufficiently to strangle it. After a great deal of back and forth, the Hungarians eventually assented to the agreement, with Archduke Maximilian Eugen von Habsburg, the Emperor's brother, to take up rule of Austria in his brother's place. Emperor Karl and his successors would still be entitled to rule as King and Emperor of the Hungarian Empire, but would surrender their claims in Cisleithania to Maximilian Eugen.
The signing of the Treaty of Budapest in mid-1923 would bring an end to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as Cisleithania was divided according to German whims under the nominal rule of Maximilian Eugen von Habsburg, while Transleithania expanded and found itself transformed into the whole of the Empire. Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia, united in the Bohemian Crown Lands as the Kingdom of Bohemia, were offered independence along similar lines to that enjoyed by the Poles and Lithuanians under the Kingship of Carl Alexander von Württemberg, Emperor Karl's cousin by his eldest aunt, who would take the throne as King Karel IV from his cousin. Carl Alexander was a deeply devout man and following his experiences as a captain in the Great War, he had hoped to enter into a monastery, but had been held back by his family's ambitions which came to final expression in this gambit. After a good deal of back and forth internally, the Bohemians eventually acquiesced, though with significant reservations and stringent limitations on royal power, greatly displeased with what they viewed as a German-enforced settlement.
With German backing, the Poles would secure their control of Bukowina and Galicia, the Romanians find themselves pressured into abandoning their Bukovinian supporters, while the Poles found themselves forced to accept the establishment of German military bases and a further weakening of Polish trade barriers to German trade in return for these developments. Austria proper and the myriad associated smaller duchies, margraviates and counties would find themselves incorporated into the German Empire under Maximilian Eugen von Habsburg, finally fulfilling the dreams held by many German nationalists of Greater Germany. The end of the war with Austria allowed the Hungarians to shift considerable resources southward and westward to counter the encroachment of the Croats and Serbs, and allowed them to reestablish their relationship with the Germans, setting the stage for a potential Hungarian resurgence (2).
As fighting in Austria-Hungary shifted and changed, the struggle in Italy took on increasing complexity, most significantly amongst the Royalists. It was in this increasingly tenuous environment that Pope Benedict XV had passed and a chaotic conclave had ensued. At the time of his death, there were 60 cardinals - although one died the same day as Benedict. However, of the 59 remaining cardinals only 53 would actually participate, with three too sickly to attend and three cardinals from the Americas left unable to arrive in time with the Italian cardinals pushing for a swift conclave in order to secure strong leadership in this time of crisis. Key to the conclave was the issue of the Italian Civil War, which had seen increasing amounts of anti-clerical violence as the communist regime grew more confident in its message and spurred on violence against the Holy Church in a bid to strengthen their public appeal.
As the conclave was coming under way, word of lynchings of church figures, most significantly the recently raised Archbishop of Milan and Cardinal, Achille Ratti, who had been torn apart by a mob in Milan when anti-clerical attitudes had first exploded, the vandalisation of church sites and the repurposing of churches, monasteries and abbeys to the purposes of the Communist state, spread and provoked considerable unease and worry. To make matters worse, the bitter infighting between Royalist factions, with both dominant factions quite vocally anti-clerical in outlook, presented immense worries on behalf of the church.
At the conclave, the College of Cardinals was divided into two factions. One conservative faction known as the "irreconcilables" and "integrationists" led by the Secretary of the Holy Office Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val favored the stringent and forceful policies and style of Pope Pius X, and called for the use of all church resources in the conflict against anti-clerical regimes like that in Milan. The other more conciliatory faction favoured the style and policies of Pope Benedict XV, was led by the Cardinal-Camerlengo Pietro Gasparri, who had served as Benedict's Secretary of State. The key difference lay not so much in objective as methodology, with the conciliators more interested in a diplomatic approach which would see some sort of accommodation reached with the anti-clerical forces in order to save what one could of the church in Italy. The Irreconcilables called this cowardice and were firmly wedded to opposing the communists and any other who would infringe on the rights of the Holy Catholic Church.
There was a fierce back and forth, and for the first several days neither side was able to secure the backing needed to emerge victorious. The conciliators looked increasingly towards some compromise figure, anyone not associated with the irreconcilables, who might be able to lead the church on a more moderate path and navigate the chaos and fury of the times. However, these efforts proved for naught as the irreconcilables were able to prey on the fears of the moderate cardinals, swaying them in their favor with lurid descriptions of what the communists would do to them if given the chance. More than a week after the conclave began the Spanish Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val found himself with the majority required and as such secured his ascension as Pope. Taking the name Gregory XVII, del Val signaled his intensions to resist any encroachment on the church and immediately threw himself into the brewing struggle in the Royalist camp (3).
The appointment of the combative and activist Pope Gregory served to further split the Royalists when it might have proven a unifying boon. This was mainly due to the intense opposition of the Liberals to Papal and Church influence on domestic affairs, their political alignment having traditionally focused significantly on combatting Church power. The meant that the most obvious potential center of power, between a Church experiencing an upward swing in popularity in response to outrage at the Communist treatment of church members and the Liberal government, was next to impossible while the contrasting potential alignment with the Fascists quickly led to considerable hesitancy on the part of the church, and fierce opposition from several sections of the Fascist movement.
Achille Starace was amongst the most vocal in his resistance to an alliance with the church, viewing them as little more than leeches out to bleed the good people of Italy of their last coppers. The result was that rather than the church's entry into the conflict serving to swing the power struggle between Fascist and Liberal power centers one way or the other, it instead created further division and created a third power base of conservatives who were opposed to both Fascist and Liberal leadership and looked to the Pope as a possible temporary leader figure to lead them through this time of crisis.
On the 22nd of August 1922 the Communists launched a long-delayed offensive into Liguria, having previously threatened a crossing of the Apennines into Tuscany and another thrust down the east-coast of Italy, and caught the Royalists by surprise. With power increasingly split between heavily armed Fascist militias and increasingly disillusioned Royalist conscript soldiers, the front had collapsed within a week and the Communists were able to sweep into Genoa to the shock of the world, the international press and the royalists having largely been lulled into a sense of complacency by reports of a power struggle in the Communist leadership. While there had been considerable conflict within the ruling clique of the Communist movement, centring on the issues of behaviour towards the church and relations to the both the international revolution, most significantly in Russia, and the Bourgeois world, by the latter half of 1922 most of these tensions had either been buried temporarily or resolved.
Most significantly, the conflict between Amadeo Bordiga and Errico Malatesta on one hand and Giacinto Serrati and Antonio Gramsci, ably supported by Palmiro Togliatto, on the other over the internal division of power in the party had been at least partially resolved by the adoption of a veto on the part of each member of the Central Committee. The issue of Gramsci and his supporters overwhelming the rest of the committee had first come into play when he had pushed for the deadly turn against the Church and had really exploded over the role of the Anarchists in the movement, most significantly on the Central Committee, due to the belief on the part of Serrati and Togliatto that it would be impossible to achieve peace with the Habsburg realms as long as a primary figure in the events leading to the Schönbrunn Raid sat amongst them. In this case Gramsci had broken with his primary supporters, believing that retaining the link to the Anarchists in the form of Malatesta was necessary, for the time being, to ensure the internal cohesion of the party.
The capture of Genoa sent shockwaves through Europe and lead to the French deciding to coordinate their response with the British, backing the Liberal Royalist government. These events proved a step too far for the Fascists who had finally had enough. The arrival of Achille Starace in Rome, having covered himself in glory in Liguria at the expense of the Royal Army, set the fuse which erupted late on the 3rd of October 1922 when a mob of Fascist supporters attempted to storm the Ministerial Palace and were broken by the palace guard. This unorganized and unplanned mob, which had been whipped into a fury by Starace's inflammatory language during an event earlier in the day, was all the liberals needed to act. With royal sanction and Anglo-French volunteers in support, the Liberals went on the counterattack in Rome and began rounding up everyone they could get their hands on - quickly turning into an open conflict in the streets of Rome as Fascist bands fought the police and Royal Army. Caught by surprise, the Fascist positions in the city themselves collapsed and Dino Grandi was captured and imprisoned by the Liberals, although Starace himself was able to make his escape southward, ending his flight in Naples where he immediately set about mounting a force to take Rome itself. In the meanwhile, Royal Army forces and Fascist militias began to clash across the length and breadth of the peninsula while Mussolini and Italo Balbo went into hiding in Umbria, wherefrom they hoped to lead the resistance to this Liberal crackdown (4).
Footnotes:
(1) Everything is shifting and changing in Austria-Hungary with incredible rapidity, and it is threatening to spin out of control. With Germany's puppet regimes proving themselves capable of independent action, the Germans are now suddenly staring down the worrying possibility that their grip on the vast eastern empire they carved out during the Great War might not be as stable as expected. At the same time, both the Austrians and Hungarians are faltering in the face of fierce internal divides and pressure from minority ethnicities. With Galicia lost and the Bohemians increasingly questioning their position in the whole matter, there is reason to be worried in both Vienna and Budapest. The chaos has also proven sufficient to stir the Germans to action, resulting in the dispatch of everyone's favorite conspirator - Franz von Pappen.
(2) Thus ends the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Hungarians are still standing, but both they and the Austrians realized that they would be unable to secure control of the whole Empire. As such, they end up going the route of Solomon, if neither can have the whole - then they can split it between themselves. This does completely screw over the Croats, but the Austrians are interested in forcing an end to a disastrous war which they have come to accept they cannot win. The question now will be how well Germany copes with this massive new territorial expansion which gives Germany naval access to the North Sea, Baltic Sea and Mediterranean Sea, and whether matters with the Ruthenians will fester. Furthermore, how will the Hungarians deal with the sudden reduction in pressure alongside their abandonment of half the Empire. I will have a map of the situation in the next update.
(3) So I decided to kill off Pius XI in favor of the irreconcilables. I actually find Pius a really interesting figure who dealt with a lot of the contemporary issues with surprising competence. He was an intellectual who was forced to deal with a lot of worldly chaos but was able to leave a significant mark on the Papacy. Without him we instead have Gregory XVII. Del Val is in many ways more interesting than Pius to me. He was the son of a Spanish diplomat and nobleman who grew up mostly in Great Britain and was largely educated there. He went into the church and rose quite quickly, becoming a significant voice in the church's internal matters by the turn of the century. Over the next decades he became one of the leading figures in the church and came to head the irreconcilables. He will have an active and complicated papacy, much as that of Pius XI was complicated and action-packed, but brings a very different outlook and life experience which should present some interesting possibilities.
(4) Things go dreadfully wrong for the Royalists, who go to war with each other by the end of 1922. It is important to note the continued impact of anti-French sentiment in Fascist and ultra-nationalist ranks on triggering this break within the Royalist faction and the challenges faced by the Communists. While the Communists have so far been able to keep a lid on their differences, and haven't even come close to the absolute shitshow the Royalists have turned into, as time goes on there are going to be more and more issues which divide them. The current status quo there works for the time being, but it is a tenuous situation which could quickly turn against the leaders of the Communist movement in Italy.
Amsterdam Armaments Conference
The Amsterdam Conference
This forced the French and German cooperation efforts to remain bilateral in nature. It was under these circumstances, and with the recent shoring up of the situation in Austria, that Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand decided to push for an international peace and disarmament conference now that many of the great powers were beginning to recover from the Great War and talks had already begun in Germany, France and Britain for an expansion of their naval resources, even though none of them could really afford such an expansion at the time. The British were initially leery in the face of Franco-German cooperation, but eventually jumped aboard what they had proposed, namely a League of Nations' sponsored conference to be held on Armaments and the rules of war, with the Dutch having already presented themselves as a potential host.
The British were able to convince the Liberal government in Japan to participate, while the Chinese found themselves snubbed and ignored on the basis that it was unclear whether the northern restored Qing dynasty or the southern KMT dominated republic should be considered the legitimate government of China. The Iberian nations were convinced to join, and the Scandinavians were swift to jump aboard as well, hoping to build on the successes they had secured at the Copenhagen Conference. The most problematic and difficult party to entice into participation would prove to be the Americans, which was already then experiencing a growing wave of isolationism and conservatism, where it would require the heartfelt and passionate efforts of William Borah to convince Congress to participate. It was during this period that Alice Roosevelt Longworth and William Borah rekindled their longtime friendship, with Alice turning the mighty Roosevelt Machine in support of Borah's proposal. By mid-1923, as the Russian Civil War came to an end, it seemed as though this dark period in world history was nearing an end and the Amsterdam Conference was increasingly looked upon as the solution to all the world's problems - an exorcism of the many woes of the Great War. With Russian participation, as well as that of the Hungarian Empire, the Amsterdam Conference was ready to meet, with the starting date set for the 19th of November 1923 (5).
The Amsterdam Conference of 1923 was the single largest gathering of powers since the Copenhagen Conference and met with far more hope than was present at Copenhagen. The media addressed the Spirit of Amsterdam as the global hope and wish for peace and stability, an end to war and a settling of society. There was immense pressure to limit armaments and to prevent any sort of conflict which might ignite another Great War. The Great War had left an indelible mark in how people perceived warfare, having turned what was viewed as a great and noble endeavour into grimy industrial murder - with gas, sickness, trenches and an endless bombardment by artillery the most memorable aspects of the conflict. It was under these circumstances that efforts at negotiating a naval arms limitation agreement were undertaken.
At the heart of this effort was the United States, which feared the potential of an unchecked Japan, and the United Kingdom, which remained fearful of its ability to protect the Home Isles and the eastern Dominions at the same time. It was in this area that the creation of the Dominion Navy at Singapore, even if still grossly understaffed and underfunded, presented an opportunity. In the intense negotiations over naval armaments it quickly became clear that the British simply did not have the finances required to remain a dominant naval power, and as such they worked hard to limit naval armaments where possible and sought to cut naval commitments globally where possible. The issue was a challenging one as none of the participants were truly willing to push forward with a naval arms race, but at the same time could not trust that the other states wouldn't exploit this weakness to make gains.
At the crux of this division was the United States, which had the capacity for significant naval spending - it might even help spur further economic growth and help shield America from Japanese expansionism in the Pacific. The British and Germans were also divided on the issue, with the British unable to accept German parity with their own naval resources because of the danger it would present to the Home Isles. At the same time the Germans were unwilling to see themselves limited in the naval arena after they had been able to demonstrate its potential during the Great War. Ultimately the solution would be to leave the specifics of the agreement vague, essentially having the powers that be pledge to limit naval expansion, while establishing an oversight committee which would keep a check on the signatories' naval capacities which would need to be consulted prior to any major changes in naval tonnage (6).
Alongside these naval armaments limitation efforts, the Amsterdam Conference also saw the use of asphyxiating and poisonous gasses prohibited in inter-state conflicts, which was expanded at German suggestion to include a prohibition on the use of bacteriological weaponry. An independent inspection agency under the League of Nations was also established at the Amsterdam Conference which would monitor the conduct of warfare wherever it may occur to ensure compliance with what would come to be known as the Amsterdam Protocol. It was also here that the signatory nations publicly renounced warfare for aggressive purposes and placed demands that any annexationist activities must occur with popular backing in the region. While the definition of aggressive purposes and popular backing were left vague on purpose, this would have the effect of severely limiting the ability of aggressive powers to act unilaterally and created an expectation that warfare would only occur under absolutely necessary circumstances. While there were plenty of loopholes left, and rhetorical finagling would allow most states to circumvent this renunciation, it was firmly in line with the pacifistic beliefs dominant at Amsterdam and which would come to be characterized as the Spirit of Amsterdam in the years to come. By the time the Amsterdam Conference came to an end with the signing of the Amsterdam Treaty on the 4th of January 1924 it was felt that a dark era had been brought firmly to a close. A feeling of hope suffused many, as the economic motors in Europe and America began to speed up and prosperity seemed to beckon (7).
The Spirit of Amsterdam and the general push to end war between "Civilized States" would have a profound impact on the years that followed the Amsterdam Conference. While individual nations would fall into and out of the Spirit of Amsterdam in the years to come, the general direction remained consistent across Europe, and much of the rest of the world. The League of Nations would truly come into its own in this period as more and more tasks were turned over to it, and it came to serve as a coordination platform for international activities. The International Olympic Committee was linked to the League alongside a newly established International Research Committee meant to foster scientific cooperation amongst the members of the League for the betterment of all. This was in addition to the Trade Arbitration Court and the International Court of Justice as well as the Secretariat for International Displaced Peoples and charity designed to help fund the efforts of the League. Furthermore, a profusion of agencies, organisations and secretariats bloomed in this period in an effort to coordinate cultural, social and economic exchange with the aim of creating a united and peaceful world.
After the savage blow given to the international relations by the Great War, the efforts of the League to soothe the hurt would help propel its popularity. Its scrupulous efforts at neutrality and the decision to primarily locate League headquarters and major offices in smaller nations outside the larger power blocks did much to help this with Switzerland, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations becoming the primary bearers of this standard. Perhaps the most significant event for the League of Nations in the years immediately following the Amsterdam Conference was the assembly of a proper Congress of Nations with permanent representatives in Copenhagen, as had initially been agreed in the Copenhagen Treaty, only to be delayed time after time as crisis upon crisis kept everyone occupied. Perhaps the most interesting development in this period was the rapidly expanding efforts of the League in Africa, where it secured permission to set about efforts at uplifting the populace. While it would remain severely underfunded and largely insufficient, the League's establishment of schools, clinics and a system for small-scale loans, and their hiring of many natives to staff these institutions at low cost, would set the stage for a blossoming of Africa. With particularly the Germans and French proving inviting towards the League, viewing them as a cheap supplement to their own administrative efforts, it would be these colonies that reaped the benefits and challenges of these efforts the most, with the Portuguese essentially refusing the League entry while the British proved leery of the prospect. These would mark the early steps in the creation of indigenous institutions and would serve as the foundation for many later efforts on the part of the African people to improve their lot (8).
Footnotes:
(5) The Amsterdam Conference is a much more multilateral and all-encompassing conference than the OTL Washington Conference, and in many ways combines many of the efforts of the OTL post-war conferences together. Without the issue of reparations hanging over everything, there hasn't been the same need to meet constantly, and with crises sort of limited to Austria-Hungary, where the Germans are taking a lead, and Italy, where the British and French play the role of most important external power, there hasn't been the same immediate need for conferences. This means that the Amsterdam Conference ends up serving as stand in for the Conferences of Washington, Genoa, Rapallo, Lausanne and Spa, as well as a good deal of the diplomatic partnership efforts of the Kellogg-Briand pact. This is also the first real test of the LoN framework which, while having a set of small delegations, has largely been sidelined in favour of bilateral relations for a while.
(6) None of the powers are actually able to come to an agreement on specific tonnage or parities with each other, leaving them forced to make a gentleman's pledge instead with an oversight committee to keep everyone honest. This isn't exactly a particularly robust agreement, but it is enough of a fig leaf to allow for a significant reduction in naval spending. The vagueness of the agreement leaves it open to exploitation, but it is better than nothing.
(7) It really cannot be understated how influential the Amsterdam Conference is in marking a clear end to the horrors which have engulfed the world arguably since 1910. It is the end of an era and the dawning of a new one. While there continues to be war and the threat of revolutionary agitation is felt everywhere, there is a general feeling that people want to leave the dark times behind and move into a brighter future.
(8) This section takes somewhat of an idealistic outlook on events, but I thought it would be a good idea to show the slow change in attitudes. People are trying to leave the Great War behind and recover from its devastating consequences. The small-scale loans mentioned in Africa can be considered a forerunner to OTL's micro-loans, although even less standardised and organised than that. Keep in mind that a lot of the Europeans involved in the Leagues efforts in Africa are going to have time-relevant biases, and while they are probably better than the average on such issues - they will have various hang ups. The US is probably where the League is least popular, both because it tries to intervene in state affairs, but also for these precise efforts in Africa, which stick in many a racist's craw.
Gustav Ernst Stresemann, Chancellor of Germany
The Elections of '24
The Ku Klux Klan made itself felt from early in the race towards the American elections with their vocal support for the Democratic Senator for Indiana, Samuel Ralston. With a surge of support, pushed forward by the Ku Klux Klan but also supported by a wide variety of more establishment forces in the Democratic Party, it seemed as though Ralston would feature heavily in the primaries and convention to come. However, Ralston's weakening health eventually forced him to end any consideration of running for president and the Ku Klux Klan was suddenly left to scramble for another candidate to support. In the meantime the former presidential candidate McAdoo was back at it again, hoping that second time would be the charm. He schmoozed the powers that be and redirected any ire at the results of the last election onto the shoulders of former President Marshall while strengthening his already powerful ties to labor and the Wilsonians. He toured the South and the West, as well as working hard to secure the backing of elites in both New York and Washington with a campaign focused on economic prosperity, the removal of foreign influence on American governmental affairs, a thinly veiled criticism of the close relationship of Grand Duchess Anastasia with the Roosevelt clan, and stronger enforcement of Prohibition and the criminality it had brought to the surface.
While the Republicans clashed internally, with the Conservatives in near-open revolt against a President who had increasingly sidelined them from his government and had gone against their own wishes, most recently in the signing of the Treaty of Amsterdam, the Democrats were surprisingly soft-spoken in the lead-up to the Democratic Convention. The gains made by the Democrats in 1922 had many convinced that the Democratic Party was on the rebound and that there was a good chance of emerging victorious against the unpopular President Wood. As such, the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia in late June proved an immensely contentious affair as the issues of the Ku Klux Klan, Catholicism, Immigration and Prohibition, all of which divided the party.
While McAdoo was a clear favorite to begin with, he experienced a surprising amount of opposition on the basis of his unwillingness to clearly identify where he fell on many of these precise issues. He had remained silent on the Klan, although aping some of their more popular points, vocally opposed to immigration, which was predominantly Catholic at the time and was seemingly without position on the issue of prohibition. McAdoo would find himself challenged on these positions, and opposed in many of them by the Irish-Catholic Governor of New York, Al Smith, who was not only vocally wet but opposed both the Klan and the anti-immigrant talk of McAdoo. The fiery Governor of New York launched scathing attacks on McAdoo but found his own position relatively weak. In search of a compromise, many looked to venerable John W. Davis and the popular James M. Cox. However, in the end it would be McAdoo who emerged victorious, his supporters quenching the attempt at finding a compromise and instead driving the supporters of Smith from the convention, several fist fights breaking out in the chaos. With Smith's supporters driven out, the Democratic Party rallied behind William Gibbs McAdoo and his platform, causing a severe rift in the party with the Catholic faction in the party, which led Smith to publicly declare his support for the ongoing Progressive Party campaign of Robert M. La Follette, strengthening the Progressive Party campaign with a large number of Irish voters, most significantly in New York and Massachusetts. The Republican Convention would settle for renominating President Wood, but replaced Elihu Root with the firmly conservative Calvin Coolidge in a major defeat for the progressive wing of the party. It would be this development which pushed La Follette to restart the Progressive Party and put forward a run for the presidency in 1924 (9).
The US elections of 1924 would prove extremely contentious, with powerful accusations levelled at McAdoo that he was little more than a puppet of the Klan, with a great deal of fear-mongering on the part of Republicans to drive voting against the Democratic candidate. At the same time McAdoo and his supporters slammed the President for the failures of his administration and highlighted what the Democrats would paint as considerable foreign influence in the government. McAdoo was able to secure the backing of various Dry organisations as a result of considerable lobbying efforts aimed at them but was faced with a major challenge in the form of staunch Catholic opposition to his candidacy. By rallying nativist sentiments, McAdoo was able to contrast himself with President Wood, who he was swift to claim had allowed a flood of foreigners into the country who would be unable to hold proper allegiance to the American nation, an unsubtle dig at Catholic allegiance to the Papacy.
While the President and McAdoo went each other like wild beasts, La Follette and the Progressives were left effectively unchecked, running on an agrarian, progressive and isolationist platform, and as a result were able to run rampant across much of the Prairie region, the North-West and the upper Great Lakes region, winning significant gains in the region. It would be in these regions that the Progressive Party, Socialist Party of America and the incipient Communist Party of America, would all find themselves vying for the Farmer-Labor vote in a series of bitterly contested local elections. While this placed the Socialists at odds with the Progressives, it also had the effect of driving the party platform of the Progressives further to the left, as they sought to compete with the Socialists.
When election night finally came it would be the Democrats who emerged as the clear victors in the clash between the Republicans and Democrats, however it would be the results for the Progressive Party which would truly shock political figures on all sides. Robert M. La Follette emerged from the election with 94 electoral votes, having swept much of the the Prairie, Upper Great Lakes and the North-West states in the greatest results for the Progressive Party in its history. Having won 274 electoral votes, William Gibbs McAdoo became just the third elected Democratic President since the American Civil War, with the defeated President Wood having to content himself with just 163 electoral votes. With this success, and the electoral success of Progressive candidates down-ballot, it was decided that the Progressive Party would continue its existence as a major political party, having secured a combined 8 senate seats, preventing either of the other parties from securing control of the Senate, with the Republicans holding onto 43 to the Democrats 45. In the House of Representatives, the Progressives secured 34 seats - mostly in the regions they dominated in the presidential vote, but also in a surprising development consisting of a large section of the formerly Democratic Irish Catholics in the north-east, most significantly in New England, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania. This left the Democrats to secure 188 seats while the Republicans retained the majority of their House seats with 209 - the Socialists securing 3 seats and Farmer-Labor a single seat (10).
The German elections occurred at a time of cultural, social and technological flowering under the protective auspices of the NLP-DKP-Centre national government. While the majority of the credit for much of this development was rightly given to the innovative and forward-thinking SPD-FVP government in Prussia under Friedrich Ebert, Stresemann and his government's light touch had allowed much of this prosperity to bloom while focusing on foreign affairs and the repayment of state debts, helping to fuel the growing prosperity of a divided middle-class, as the employed white-collar working classes, working primarily in public and private office settings, began to challenge the old middle-classes of self-employed merchants, artisans and small-scale business people. The years of relative stability and recovery proved sufficiently popular to extend Stresemann's government by another term. Nonetheless, while power remained concentrated in these three parties, the SPD and FVP became something more than a token force in the Reichstag for the first time since the recent government reforms.
However, while in Germany the 1924 elections changed relatively little and proved surprisingly sedate, the same could not be said of France, where powerful forces on the right posed a significant challenge to the centrist government which had led the French reconstruction since the end of the Great War. The 1924 election saw Millerand's term as President come to an end and led the fabulously popular Briand to seek the Presidential post. While Briand would cruise on to secure the presidency with barely any challenge, no one believing that they would be able to challenge the most popular French politician of the time, the same could not be said for Briand's protege Philippe Berthelot who sought to succeed his mentor and close friend as Premier. The challenge came from the Right, where the relatively right-wing Radical Paul Doumer had emerged victorious in a leadership struggle against both Clemenceau's political heir Georges Mandel and the wildly popular protestant politician Gaston Doumergue. By turning further to the right than either of the two others, draping himself in his Catholicism and anti-communist attitudes, Doumer had been able to exploit a surging feeling of Catholic reaction to events in Italy and defeated his two closest contenders in the process. The elections had seen the centrist block which had served as a bulwark for the Briand and Millerand government shaken by a surging rightwing but were able to secure a majority despite these losses.
While the Right emerged as the major challenger to the centrists in France, in Germany it would be the Left which pushed forth its challenge instead. The intra-Leftist relations between the SPD and KPD proved particularly tense and marked by considerable discord as major ideological differences became increasingly clear. Under the influence of Rosa Luxembourg and other former Spartacists, the KPD had opened up to Anarchist influences with the result that the party took on an increasingly anti-statist outlook, looking more towards local autonomy, cooperative and volunteer organisations and a on the part of a few idealistic souls, a total disengagement from government affairs, in some ways mirroring the radical religious sects of yore which sought to disengage from the rest of the world to live in isolated autarky. While only the most radically idealistic in outlook would follow this path of disengagement, the remainder of the movement remained firmly anchored in political affairs and stood for elections at local, regional and state levels - having proven unable to breach the barriers erected around the Reichstag.
In contrast, the SPD increasingly looked towards a merging of nationalist, socialist and centralist ideological strains as presented by a young and rapidly rising clique of National Socialists, many of them veterans of the trenches and freikorps, who sought to unite their fierce pride in their German nationality with their wish for a more socialist order. Amongst the young leaders of this movement within the SPD were Otto Strasser, Ernst Niekisch, Walther Ehrhardt and Walther Stennes who had been influenced by more senior ideologues such as Johann Plenge, Werner Sombart and Oswald Spengler (11).
In Great Britain it was a nearly newly-minted Prime Minister in the form of Austen Chamberlain who found himself forced to call for re-elections. While Chamberlain himself proved quite popular and had been able to accomplish a great deal in the short time he had been in power, many felt that the Conservative Party as a whole had mismanaged the post-war period. Thus, while Chamberlain's appointment and steady leadership over the past year had done much to repair the damage, many in the party feared it would prove insufficient. At the same time a stark divide within the Conservative Party presented significant challenges to Chamberlain as the more Liberal-Conservative wing of the party, aligned with Chamberlain and in favour of a push to restore Britain the grandeur of the pre-war years, continued foreign involvement and an alliance with the Liberals, perhaps even compromising with Labour to ease the transition out of the crisis period, found itself increasingly at odds with the Nationalist and Unionist wing of the party which aligned behind the powerful and intelligent Chancellor Stanley Baldwin. While the relationship between Chamberlain and his Chancellor remained functioning, these divisions strained the party considerably and weakened its cohesion.
This created an opportunity for both the Liberals and the Labour Party to challenge the supremacy of the Conservatives in the 1924 elections. While H. H. Asquith's reunited Liberal Party had emerged from its coalition woes, it found itself targeted by the Labour Party who viewed the weakened state of the Liberals as an unprecedented opportunity to emerge from their previous secondary role in parliament into the sole party on the Left in Britain. To this end, the Labour Party invested considerable energies into races going up against the Liberals and sought to secure control of as many urban seats as possible in the emerging scrum. Labour promised a great deal, wanting major social and economic reforms including unemployment insurance, a wider social security system, regulations on housing, a minimum wage law and an expanded pensions act. Perhaps the most enticing proposition on the part of the Labour party under Ramsay MacDonald, was the idea of taking the preexisting veterans' security system and expanding them to cover the entire population, although the feasibility of such activities were widely questioned.
The most significant argument on the part of both the Liberals and Conservatives against Labour hinged on their belief that Labour was quite simply incapable of judicious rule and was unfit to rule. They used a mix of red-baiting and enticements in their quest to weaken the appeal of Labour, an act which actually met with considerable success in better-off areas. The spectre of revolution still lingered, not helped by the terminal calls for a General Strike from one section of the Labour Party or another, and with Italy to point to immediately as a scare tactic the Conservatives and Liberals were able to drive voters to the polls in opposition to Labour, if nothing else.
The end result was a major victory for the Conservatives and a significant defeat for the Liberals, who saw their seats in Parliament significantly reduced, mostly to the benefit of Labour. The Conservatives were just barely able to eke out a majority allowing Chamberlain to continue as Prime Minister for another term, relying heavily on the continued dominance in Ireland of Unionist politicians. However, Labour was able to present a surprising challenge to the Unionist dominance of Ireland in areas previously dominated by Irish Nationalists, more out of opposition to the Unionist-Conservatives than any particular Labour affiliation. The entry of Labour into Irish politics would prove massively important, for it served as the introduction of Celtic Communism to Ireland at the hands of John MacLean, who saw an opportunity to unite the oppressed Celtic Peoples against their Anglo-Saxon bourgeois exploiters (12).
Footnotes:
(9) The main take-away from all of this should be that the Ku Klux Klan is extending its tentacles into national politics, that the Catholics of the Democratic Party have been alienated from the party and are seeking shelter with the slowly rebounding Progressive Party, and that McAdoo has emerged from the chaos of the Democratic Primaries with strong backing. Without the Teapot Dome Scandal he is in a much stronger position than IOTL and if it weren't for the vocal and powerful Irish Catholics in the party, the convention wouldn't have been anything close to the shit-show of OTL. ITTL there is still drama, but it is resolved quite quickly and McAdoo emerges relatively unharmed from it. He will have a hard time with immigrants and Catholics, but the nativist vote should outweigh that considerably. The Progressive Party's reappearance is stronger than IOTL, but is still unlikely to win. The major effect of the 1924 election is that it sees the Irish Catholic wing of the Democratic Party make the jump to support the Progressives though with a weaker siphoning of progressive votes from the Democrats and Republicans than IOTL due to the ostensibly progressive credentials of both Wood and McAdoo.
(10) This is a momentous election to say the least, seeing not only the fall of the Wood Presidency and its replacement by a Democratic regime, but also the outsized success of the progressive party, which is in part a counterreaction to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, disapproval of rising conservative power in the Republican Party and a response to fatigue with red-baiting from both Republican and Democratic side. One important thing to note is that with the Progressive Party's greater success, both the Republicans and Democrats have had their own Progressive wings weakened and as such take on a more conservative or nativist outlook respectively. I have included an election map in the end notes if that should interest anyone. I have to say, it is an interesting experience writing about a US election during US elections.
(11) The two central powers of the Continent continue plodding forward but both see their governmental coalitions begin to erode as more radical forces begin to impact their ideological development. The important development in France is the sudden rise in Catholic power which had been on the wane for decades, largely in response to the horrors perpetrated against the Catholic Church in Italy which outrage even relatively irreligious Catholics. This is a central reason for Doumergue's loss to Doumer ITTL. This rising Catholicism on the right will have some interesting consequences as we move forward but at least for the time being the rising power is on the Right, not on the Left, in France. The matter is almost directly the opposite in Germany where it is the Left which is experiencing a growth in power. One interesting development to note, beyond the presence of various OTL National Socialists in the SPD, is that the SPD is moving in a more Centralist direction - i.e. wanting to reduce the regionalisation of Germany and to consolidate power on a national level under their control. For now the older leadership is content with demonstrating its competence on a regional level, but eventually ambitious figures in the SPD are likely to look into strengthening their national platform. The greatest challenge they face in this matter is overcoming the indirect electoral system to the Reichstag, which has already proven a significant challenge to overcome for them.
(12) The UK also retains the recently secured status quo under Austen Chamberlain's leadership, but how long that will hold is very much in question. Perhaps as interesting is the introduction of Celtic Communism to Ireland. While there remain only a few Celtic Communists amongst the Irish, it will prove influential in the Irish Labour movement and begins building a bond between the strong leftist movement in Scotland and the nascent leftist movement in Ireland. The Liberal party comes out of the election having taken a beating, but they are actually better off than IOTL while Labour has done worse than IOTL.
Moonshine and Prohibition
Prosperity, Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan
The arrival of President McAdoo would see a prodigious spurt of legislation passed in a bid to return much of the American foreign investments made overseas, particularly in Europe, in a bid to secure greater domestic investment. The result of this was the issuing of a warning to all major American investors in foreign markets that capital gains taxation on international investments would be implemented to spur domestic investments as part of McAdoo's promise to strengthen the American domestic economy. This was coupled with the implementation of a series of major tariffs on both agricultural and industrial goods in a bid to shield the rapidly strengthening economic growth of America's domestic industries. Much of this work was done with the backing of the Republican Conservatives, who found a willing partner in the new President. McAdoo's economic plans would be implemented in the first half of 1925 and had major consequences for the economic development of the United States. He proved more than willing to throw the federal government behind American business in both domestic and foreign affairs and appointed a series of pro-business figures to his cabinet which left many nativists questioning his intentions and allegiances. All of these efforts would have the effect of greatly strengthening American domestic economic prospects and would play a key role in allowing Ford to truly emerge as the undisputed hegemon of the American automotive industry (13).
The implementation of Prohibition in the early post-war years was a matter widely considered a failure of the Republican government. With much of the Republican leadership firmly in the Wet camp on the issue and far more concerned with the ideological protection of the American citizenry, the issue had largely been left severely underfunded and ignored in Republican circles. In fact, there was so little interest in pursuing the matter that most cities, particularly in the Urban North, continued on as though the Eighteenth Amendment had not been passed. While state governments, particularly in Rural and Southern regions of the country, went forward with prohibition efforts it was widely felt by various Dry organisations, such as the Temperance Movement and the Anti-Saloon League, that the Republican government was failing in its duties to uphold the constitutional amendment. It was also in this time period that the Ku Klux Klan became firmly entrenched on the side of the Dry's, using prohibitionist agitation in conjunction with their anti-Catholic, racist and anti-immigrant propaganda efforts. The growing outrage on the part of the Drys had the effect of spurring Klan recruitment and played a key role in the Klan's rise to prominence.
McAdoo's staunchly Dry political alignment, even if he was prone to a quiet drink or two in the evenings, would play a key role in his victory and his Presidency would see a major realignment on the issue of prohibition. Significantly, the AILE had seen its mandate expanded to include prohibition enforcement under the Wood Presidency, although for the first several years they had largely left prohibition enforcement severely underfunded in favour of focusing their efforts against subversive movements. This changed with the ascension of McAdoo, who immediately ordered the organisation to shift its attention away from the ideological struggle and towards the enforcement of prohibition.
The first pillar to fall was the massively successful George Remus, a former Chicago Criminal Lawyer turned bootlegger, who had moved to Cincinnati and grown to dominate the cross-Great Lake alcohol trade. Living a lavish lifestyle and doing little to hide his activities, Remus was well known throughout the mid-west for his central role in the distribution of alcohol. The AILE came down hard on Remus and made a public example of him, imprisoning him for racketeering and tearing apart his family before an incredulous news media, who turned Remus' trial into the first of several media sensations.
The fall of George Remus in mid-1925 signaled the first in a series of major arrests as the AILE turned its hard-earned experience combatting subversive elements against the gangsters, bootleggers and racketeers who had felt themselves safe from persecution. New York, Chicago, Boston and Atlantic City all found themselves targeted by the AILE in the year that followed, with several major organizations crushed, most significantly the Chicago South Side Gang under Johnny Torrio, who was imprisoned while several of his associates, including Alphonse Capone and the three Genna brothers, Angelo, Antonio and Mike, were killed either in the power struggle that followed or as the Irish North-Side gang moved in against the Italians. Also in New York would the hammer come down disproportionately on Italian criminal organizations, with the Black Hand gangs largely shattered in the effort. The White Hand under Wild Bill Lovett was able to maneuver through much of this with success, having been slow to get into bootlegging and were thus able to both learn from Italian mistakes, better hiding their activities, and secure control of Italian infrastructure abandoned when the AILE came down on them. Under considerable pressure from the Irish, Jewish and Italian criminal organizations now began to subordinate themselves to Irish dominance, making money where they could but always under pressure from the Irish (14).
Alongside his criminal and economic reforms, President McAdoo would also sponsor the passage of a major immigration act meant to sharply curtail immigration and set out clear ethnic and religious quotas to entry into the United States. In 1921 there had been an effort on the part of more conservative forces in the Republican Party alongside the Democratic Party to implement restrictions on immigration, but this had met with resistance from President Wood and his supporters who had stalled out the effort for fear of its impact on international relations. A major plank in the Democratic presidential campaign centred on immigration reform, specifically aimed at preventing the flood of Catholic migrants who were arriving in large numbers at the time and forcing a halt to the large amount of Asian migration experienced by the Western states, most prominently California.
Thus, McAdoo focused a considerable amount of his resources on the passage of an immigration act in 1925 and was able to secure its passage with Democratic and Conservative Republican backing. The 1925 Immigration Act would see the implementation of the National Origins Quota which restricted immigration on the basis of existing proportions of the population. It aimed to reduce the overall number of unskilled immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe and Asia, to allow families to re-unite, and to prevent immigration from changing the ethnic distribution of the largely Protestant Northwestern European-descended United States population.
The Act established preferences under the quota system for certain relatives of US residents, including their unmarried children under 21, their parents, and spouses aged 21 and over while also preferring immigrants aged 21 and over who were skilled in agriculture, as well as their wives and dependent children under age sixteen. Non-quota status was accorded to wives and unmarried children under eighteen of US citizens; natives of Western Hemisphere countries, with their families; non-immigrants; and a few other minor categories. The 1925 Act also established a consular control system of immigration, which divided responsibility for immigration between the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It mandated that no alien should be allowed to enter the United States without a valid immigration visa issued by an American consular officer abroad and provided that no alien ineligible to become a citizen could be admitted to the United States as an immigrant, this was aimed primarily at Japanese and Chinese migrants. It imposed fines on transportation companies who landed aliens in violation of U.S. immigration laws and defined the term "immigrant" while designating all other alien entries into the United States as "non-immigrant" - in effect temporary visitors.
This sharp curtailment of immigrants opened up a large amount of jobs in the north and served to accelerate what had already been an emergent trend of northward and westward migration by the African Americans of the South. Over the course of the next several years, African American populations in northern cities would grow rapidly, bringing with them a unique culture and flavor to many of these cities and causing clashes with the traditional white population of the north as the African Americans often filled in for union workers as scabs, sometimes even displacing the former white workers in the region. During this time it became increasingly clear that the Supreme Court was deeply divided between Progressive and Conservative figures, with the Conservatives having a majority of the seats while the Progressives held the seat of Chief Justice in the form of the Chief Justice Learned Hand, a man with deep ties tot he Roosevelts who had been appointed in 1921 to replace Edward Douglass White (15).
During this time the Ku Klux Klan firmly entered the political arena and became an issue of national importance. With a President championing many of their longed-for changes and the election of several local, state and even a couple of national figures with Klan ties, the menace presented by the Ku Klux Klan seemed increasingly magnified. Immigrants, Jews and Blacks found themselves under attack, most prominently in the South, the Mid-Atlantic Belt and in the Midwest, the latter of which saw the powerful Indiana Klan growing ever more powerful. There were varied efforts to combat the Klan across the country. In Indiana, the Attorney General Arthur Gilliom arrested Edward Shumaker, the leader of the Indiana Anti-Saloon League, and charged Shumaker with contempt of court because of newsletters he was circulating that attacked the Supreme Court of Indiana, he criticised them for what he viewed as lax enforcement of prohibition laws. He was convicted and sentenced to serve time on the Indiana work farm.
As Shumaker was a Klan member and leader of a key Republican support group, the recently elected Klan-backed governor Edward Jackson pardoned Shumaker and when Gilliom took the pardon to court to have the pardon overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court he found his proposal tossed out, several of the justices having illicit ties to the Klan. It wouldn't take more than a month before Gillom himself was removed from his position by a public pressure campaign. Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan, gaining national attention. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed in the early 20th century in response to attacks on Jewish Americans, including the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta, and the Klan's campaign to prohibit private schools which was chiefly aimed at Catholic parochial schools.
These opposing groups worked to penetrate the Klan's secrecy and experienced some success, with one group even succeeding in publishing a partial list of Klan members in Indiana at the start of President McAdoo's term. However, this event was soon pushed aside by the national media by a much more heart wrenching and horrific tale, for the body of a young woman by the name of Madge Oberholtzer had been discovered in a garbage heap in an immigrant neighbourhood of Indianapolis, mutilated and horribly abused. The Klan was swift to champion Oberholtzer's case and was presented as the archetypical maiden of Protestant Womanhood, their case made the stronger for Madge's participation in Klan events and service as aide to Indiana Grand Wizard D. C. Stephenson. Stephenson would use the Oberholtzer case as a cudgel against his enemies, pointing to her death as a clear example of the way in which white protestant women could not remain safe from the Black, Jew or Catholic. While the Oberholtzer case remained unsolved, this did not prevent the Klan from exacting punishment, raiding immigrant neighborhoods near where she had been discovered and lynching several individuals they suspected of the crime. The publicity of the Oberholtzer case served as the key to allowing Stephenson to separate his branch of the Klan from that under Imperial Wizard Evans, beginning a bitter intra-Klan struggle for supremacy between the young, charismatic and dynamic Stephenson and the calculated Hiram Wesley Evans (16).
Footnotes:
(13) Interestingly, McAdoo's early presidency has a lot in common economically with the approach taken by the Harding and Coolidge governments IOTL, The Tariffs mentioned as implemented in 1925 are based on the OTL 1921 and 1922 Tariffs. The capital gains taxation scheme is something which is meant to appeal to his more nativist base and has the impact of calling back a good portion of the money American investors funnelled out of the US during its recession and serves as a proper kick-off to the growing American economy. For many it will be the implementation of these reforms which will be considered the end of the US' economic turmoil.
(14) As I have mentioned before, the Sicilian Mafia isn't really getting sent into exile ITTL and as such the Italian criminal organisations are less tradition-bound, less cohesive and not nearly as powerful. However, they are early adopters of bootlegging and as such get hit hard by the AILE when crackdowns begin. While there are a swarm of Italian refugees entering the United States at this time, the majority of them are political refugees and as such they don't really come to dominate the criminal underworld as the Italians did IOTL. By contrast, the Irish are a great deal stronger, are reinforced by veteran fighters in the bitter war in Ireland, are lucky in avoiding the initial AILE crackdown and are consolidating under more centralised leadership - Bill Lovett in New York and Dean O'Banion in Chicago.
(15) This is actually very similar to the immigration laws of OTL in the same period. The most significant difference on this issue is that the OTL migrant stream which was largely shut down in 1921 with the emergency act, here continues to 1925, giving four more years of relatively high levels of migration before the gates are shut. The Great Migration is also largely OTL, although the timing and numbers are slightly different, not enough to really matter, ITTL. Finally, I would like to thank @DTF955Baseballfan for mentioning Learned Hand, who I decided would work well as Chief Justice in this context. This has the interesting dynamic of leaving Hand and Brandeis in prominent positions on the court, but largely outnumbered by Conservative justices.
(16) This is a really dark series of events and I hope people aren't too discouraged by it - but I think that a lot of the necessary elements were there for the Klan to really take off in the 1920s. I don't know if everyone is aware of this, but I think I should mention either way that Madge Oberholter was murdered by D.C. Stephenson IOTL (and presumably ITTL). The main difference here is that rather than her death becoming a scandal which fundamentally weakened and undermined the Klan, she instead becomes a macabre martyr for their movement and helps to both strengthen the Klan and spur Stephenson to publicly challenge Evans.
End Note:
There are a lot of things going on in this update and I hope people are able to manage the whiplash. I know that there are a lot of dark and worrying developments in this update and some hopeful steps elsewhere, but I think and hope that it all remains at least mostly plausible. I am having a lot of fun reading up on the history of the Irish Mob during Prohibition and playing around with electoral results. I will see if I can't get a map up of the situation in Austria-Hungary once the war comes to a proper end.
One thing, I was changing around the results on the electoral map and got to wondering what an actual three-way tie electorally would look like. I know that if no candidate can secure a majority of the electors it is sent to the House for a vote on presidency and senate for VP, but what if those houses were also divided in three on that issue and unable to secure a majority there?
I don't know quite how stable of an update rate I will have moving forward, there are a lot of threads to keep track of and research to do on these things, but I hope that people enjoy this latest instalment in A Day in July.
US Electoral Map for 1924:
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Are we going to get a map at any point? Mainly of Europe I mean, I always find it hard to visualise treaties personally without a map but I understand the work they take.
I am hesitant about a map of Europe in its entirety, but I will be including a map detailing the split of Austria-Hungary in the next update where things settle down a bit.
The Senate is a quite simple matter as only the top two vp candidates are up for a vote, so you get an acting President if the House cannot chose (at worst, the sitting VP can cast a tie-breaking vote here if that comes to 48-48).
As for the House, it would depend on the way the state delegations are controlled in the lame-duck session, so you need a precise breakout of the House state by state after the 1922 election, and I don't know if the Progressives control then enough delegations to make a tie.
I am sorry to say it, but that would be extremely difficult for me to work out. Particularly Operation GEORG should be possible to work out on the basis of what I wrote in the updates given that it is mostly a matter of shifting pre-existing units from the OTL Spring Offensives into their new positions. The Eastern Front and FRO are half-way impossible to work out given how shifted everything is by that point.
You are more than welcome to try to work it out and if you have any questions I would be happy to help where I can, but it isn't really something I worked out when I was writing it up.
One thing to point out, the Senate has 96 seats at this point without Alaska and Hawaii. So, 2 less Democrats and Republicans for each, or however you want to do it.
I'm enjoying this a lot but I'm a bit sceptical about red small-'u' unionist Ireland. That's a cliche I've seen on this site before. If anything I'd think the Irish left would be weaker than OTL which increased emigration rates among the young and more radically minded and (presumably) the anti-nationalist edict hitting the Irish Labour Party which was openly pro-independence after the OTL conscription crisis.
I understand why voters are unable to vote for outright nationalist parties but wouldn't it be more realistic to see a sweep of barely-disguised nationalist 'independents' or Liberals and minor parties than a surge for Celtic Communism, which is a (again small 'u') unionist ideology?
I understand why voters are unable to vote for outright nationalist parties but wouldn't it be more realistic to see a sweep of barely-disguised nationalist 'independents' or Liberals and minor parties than a surge for Celtic Communism, which is a (again small 'u') unionist ideology?
Nothing to do with trade unionism.
In this context both refer to pro-British unionisms. A big 'U' Unionist would be a member of the Unionists (the political party of that name) while a small 'u' unionist would be a member of a party or faction with a different name that still supports the British link - the Liberals for instance, or in this case the Celtic Communists who admittedly while have a different conception of Britain still endorse subordinating an independent Ireland to a union.
The thing to note is that Celtic Communism isn't really surging, it is more of a small ideological movement which is playing around with some nationalist and communist ideas. They are not unionists - hell, in Scotland they are actually pretty vocally anti-English, but given circumstances in Ireland it isn't exactly something anyone actually mentions. The move towards Labour is more of a f* you to the Conservatives and Liberals than anything and while the original Irish Labour Party is caught up in the anti-nationalist edicts and policies, the British Labour Party is able to step in in their place pushing for policies which would alleviate the strain on Ireland, reduce the power of the military there and return some domestic power to the island.
At this point the only parties actually running in Ireland are the Unionists (who are essentially part of the Conservative Party at this point) and the British Labour and Liberal parties. All those attempts at establishing anything that seems remotely nationalist like what you are mentioning is explicitly prevented by the Conservative government. The only reason Celtic Communism is making any inroads is because it is essentially a minority "sect" of the larger British Labour Party, which shields them because of their growing importance in Scotland.
Just to be clear, there is no Celtic Communist Party - they are a small faction and ideological clique of the Labour Party.
At this point a political party in Ireland is forced to take an officially unionist stance, but that does still leave some room to maneuver. While ordinarily the Liberals might serve as a possible better solution than Labour, keep in mind that for much of the Great War and the violence in Ireland the Liberals were at the helm and as such receive a great deal of blame for the course of events in Ireland. Labour support is more a matter of being the least odious political party for them - and the fact that it pisses of the Conservatives and Liberals is just another boon.
Thank you for pointing out the issue, I hope that the answer is satisfactory - I really enjoy getting these sorts of comments, they help me clarify things for the reader and improves my own thought process on the matter.
I completely understand, thanks for your help. I hate to disappoint, but due to other projects, I'll have to indefinitely delay my updates on Britain's railways (if you couldn't already tell).
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You might want to take a look at this comment on reddit (by the lead dev of an Hoi4 mod that adds among other things a 1933 start date) on the beliefs of Strasser (which are in fact quite un-socialist):
https://www.reddit.com/r/CBTSmod/co...s_friday_teaser_enjoy_germanys_first/e93l0mp/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CBTSmod/co...s_friday_teaser_enjoy_germanys_first/e93l0mp/
Damn the SPD going full national socialist looks bad. People may pretend Strasser was merging socialist and nationalist thought (as ridiculously oxymoronic as that is), but really, he was just a more populist nazi, and bought fully into the antisemitism.
What are the people who OTL joined the USPD doing? Did they merge with the KPD since it is more open in outlook? Contesting local elections and trying to wring any form of autonomy for all it is worth could lead to an interesting strategy.
I wonder if the socialists, communists and progressives can do the same in the US. The progressives may be thoroughly reformists, but they're slowly pushing to the left and they're not capable of contesting national elections yet, so they may look to form coalitions in state legislatures, especially since socialism is less threatening or doctrinarian without the USSR looming in the background.
What are the people who OTL joined the USPD doing? Did they merge with the KPD since it is more open in outlook? Contesting local elections and trying to wring any form of autonomy for all it is worth could lead to an interesting strategy.
I wonder if the socialists, communists and progressives can do the same in the US. The progressives may be thoroughly reformists, but they're slowly pushing to the left and they're not capable of contesting national elections yet, so they may look to form coalitions in state legislatures, especially since socialism is less threatening or doctrinarian without the USSR looming in the background.
That was quite interesting, thanks for pointing it out to me. There are a couple of things which jump out at me, most specifically that Strasser seems to have looked more towards something like right-wing syndicalism - which is certainly interesting. It will be interesting to see whether he remains in the SPD, and if he does - what changes that brings to the party, or if he goes another way. There are also a couple of things to note about his views of socialism IOTL, where his biggest problem with it seems to be that it is too centrally oriented rather than some decentralized neo-feudalist system. It also bears mentioning that the different political climate will have consequences for how his ideological development changes compared to OTL.
Well there are several concrete differences between Strasserite and Hitlerite nazism. The idea of replacing the proletariat with the entire ethno-national populace doesn't seem too far fetched given the context and is something that seems to have been a general trend. To me it seems as though anti-semitism was something pretty broadly applicable to most political movements of the era and not something exclusively nazi in nature. I think that the difference between the nazis and other political movements lies in the obsessive nature of nazi antisemitism rather than it simply being part of people's world view.
The USPD has a good number of people join the KPD while others go the other direction and return to the SPD. They are primarily contesting local and regional elections while exploring ways of breaking onto the national stage.
The Progressives working with communists and socialists would be pretty risky image-wise, but they could probably absorb a lot of people on the left regardless.
Anti semitism was fairly common, but the willingness to act on it to that level was all nazi. And definitely not something Strasser differed on significantly. Also, the fact the most significant leftist and socialist movements so far have been from slavic nations with a heavy jewish participation isn't going to endear them to the ethno-populist ideologues.
Right wing """syndicalism""" was a fairly common view in fascistic circles before they embraced the elites that lifted them to power fully and purged the more populist and economically divergent people. National syndicalism.
In practice, those ideas are more corporatist than anything, and seek to create a harmony between the private sector, workers (of the right ethnicity) and the very much anti democratic state, with the third arbitrating and controlling the first two to meet its goals. This syndicalism has very little to do with unions and a lot with micromanaging workers and putting the state's ideology in every workplace.
I think it's a terrible fit for the SPD, which was often the party of extending democracy, and still very much a boogeyman to elites despite being fairly moderate and willing to compromise by comparison to the communists. Jews were also fairly common and important to the party's development. And even if they didn't stop the war the way they did OTL, the SPD was still less nationalistic than the other German parties.
Honestly, Strasser and co are much more likely to found their own party and try to mooch from the leftist vote with populist rhetoric while attracting elites disabused with increasingly ineffective traditional right parties. And even then, without the trauma of military defeat and weimar's issues, I don't see it working nearly as well as the nazis.
It's also worth remembering that with the different Russian revolution, threats of a SPD-KPD alliance would loom much larger since the red factions did end up making up and the social democrats didn't sit out this revolution. Even if it isn't true, the red/not red polarization is probably prevalent.
I think the SPD without the stab in the back myth would be a massively threatening beast to the whole conservative order, especially since they still have the managed democracy as a target to rail against. I don't think they would welcome shady figures driving them closer to the right in terms of nationalism when there is no large national malaise to justify it as a good strategy and they've been arrayed against the parties adhering to it the hardest in their drive to get a fairer democratic system. In fact they're probably more likely to drift to the left with the communists being less scary. Maybe use the fairly good situation to argue what the communists want can be done through reform if people back them instead.
A somewhat nice democratic and reformist Germany would be able to balance between the liberal whites and the communist reds and play both to get trading advantages too, while condemning the Americans for supporting the backward reactionary whites in their backyard.