I wonder if it's possible to engineer a Democratic Party split somehow.
Maybe get Hearst to run independent? He has the money to self-fund and an ego that could maybe do it. Get some conservative Democrat nominated that he would decide to revolt against.Bryan deciding to take another crack at the nomination and generating a split in the party between his partisans and those who say "enough is enough" might be able to get you that. You'd have to find enough policy point differences between the two though.
Maybe get Hearst to run independent? He has the money to self-fund and an ego that could maybe do it. Get some conservative Democrat nominated that he would decide to revolt against.
Maybe get Hearst to run independent? He has the money to self-fund and an ego that could maybe do it. Get some conservative Democrat nominated that he would decide to revolt against.
I am starting a TL about what if Roosevelt won in 1912 and brought the US into WWI early.
The one (even if achievable) does not imply the other.
TR could almost certainly not have brought America into the war before 1917. Public and Congressional support for intervention was negligible prior to the renewal of USW in Feb '17, and nothing TR said or did would be likely to change that.
For Americans, it just wasn't their war - until the Germans made it so. And given that the Germans backed down even to Wilson, they will do so even faster with TR as POTUS.
Nor is it clear that TR would even want to. A lot of his bellicose language probably stemmed from frustration at being kept on the sidelines, and if his OTL presidency is any guide, a TR in office will be far more cautious. He also has to consider that if he does so, everyone will assume that it's to give himself an excuse for seeking a fourth term. If he goes to war with anyone before 1917, it's more likely to be Mexico.
No doubt it was easier for him to advocate this as a critic than to actually do it as POTUS--but let's say he does seize every German vessel interned in an American port after the Lusitania incident.
He would be winning under slightly different circumstances, but remember that Woodrow Wilson almost was injured in a train accident in our timeline. If he is injured but not killed there could be question as to whether he could govern, especially because his actions after his stroke indicate that even if he were badly wounded he would refuse to step aside.