Update Seventeen: Picking Up The Pieces
Picking Up The Pieces
African-American Questioned by Armed Vigilantes During The Red Summer
American Living
The announcement that a ceasefire had been negotiated on the 16th of June 1919 was met with a good deal of consternation in American circles, where the sudden end of the conflict came as a surprise to a populace increasingly steeped in propaganda promising a long and grueling military effort with ultimate victory at the end. The suddenness of the ceasefire, so different from the government's messaging left many confused and worried. This was not at all helped by the devastating stroke President Wilson experienced and the sudden succession of President Marshall - a man who while generally well liked, seemed to have had little involvement in the day-to-day running of the country. While American troops were steadily withdrawn during the Conference Year, as the period between the Armistice of 16th June 1919 and the signing of the Treaty of Copenhagen on the 8th of May 1920 came to be known, and more men were thrown into the fighting in Siberia, the public's reaction remained relatively uncertain.
African-American Questioned by Armed Vigilantes During The Red Summer
American Living
However, with the end of open warfare, the demand for the release of all the people jailed under the Sedition Act grew ever louder and general resistance to the government grew exponentially, as calls for a return to normality spread. While there were some efforts within the government to secure the release of political prisoners in an effort to quiet this unrest, President Marshall found himself strongly influenced by the recommendations of Attorney General Palmer, resulting in him refusing these efforts. The anti-war movement grew more militant as a result of all of these developments, prompting major demonstrations and several riots (1).
The worst the unrest would occur in Boston, where anti-war sentiment amongst the Irish-American population, the start of the Boston Police Strikes and growing general lawlessness culminated in an absolutely horrific tragedy. The roots of the Boston Riots traced back to August 1919, when the spread of police unions finally reached the city - the Boston police deciding to organise under an AFL charter in order to gain support from other unions in their negotiations and any strike that might ensue. On the 9th of August, 1919, the Boston Social Club requested a charter from the AFL. On 11th August, the Boston Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis issued a General Order forbidding police officers to join any "organization, club or body outside the department", making an exception only for patriotic organisations such as the recently founded American Legion. His administration argued that such a rule was based on the conflict of interest between police officers' duties and union membership. Despite this, the Boston Police secured their AFL charter on the 15th, but Curtis refused to meet with the eight members of the police union's committee. He suspended them and eleven others who held various union offices and scheduled trials to determine if they had violated his General Order. At this point, Curtis was a hero to business interests with the New Hampshire Association of Manufacturers calling him "The Ole Hanson of the East" in late August and equating the events they anticipated in Boston with the earlier Seattle General Strike.
Boston Mayor Andrew Peters sought to play an intermediary role by appointing a Citizen's Committee to review the dispute about union representation and as a result chose a well-known local reformer as its chair, James J. Storrow. Storrow's group recommended that Curtis and the police agree to a police union without AFL ties and without the right to strike. Curtis in turn would recognise the police union and the union would agree to remain "independent and unaffiliated", while stating that no action should be taken against the 19 men whom Curtis had suspended. Curtis, with the backing of Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, rejected the Storrow Commission's proposal and proceeded with department trials of the 19 and on 8th of September found them guilty of union activity. Rather than dismiss them from the police force, he extended their suspensions. The police union members responded that same day by voting 1134 to 2 in favour of a strike and scheduled it to start at evening roll call the next day on the grounds of omitted wages and working conditions. They said the strike's rationale was to protest the Commissioner's denial of their right to ally themselves with the AFL.
On the 9th of September, the Boston Police Department officers went on strike with 1,117 - around 72% - failing to report for work. Coolidge assigned 100 members of the state's Metropolitan Park Police Department to replace the striking officers, but 58 of them refused to participate and were suspended from their jobs. Despite assurances from Commissioner Curtis to Mayor Peters and Governor Coolidge, Boston had little police protection for the night of the 9th while volunteer replacements were still being organized and were due to report the next morning, many of those who provided scab labor being students at Harvard University. Over the night of 9th–10th September, the city witnessed an outbreak of hooliganism and looting. Some was rowdy behavior that scared respectable citizens, such as youths throwing rocks at streetcars and overturning the carts of street vendors. More overtly criminal activity included the smashing of store windows and looting their displays or setting off false fire alarms. Such activity was restricted to certain parts of the city and, according to the New York Times, "throughout the greater part of the city the usual peace and quiet prevailed." In the morning the mayor asked the governor to furnish a force of State Guards, which Coolidge promptly agreed to, providing almost 5,000 men by the following day. The morning papers following the first night's violence were full of loud complaints and derogatory terms for the police including talk of them as deserters and servants of Trotsky, fit only to be shot (2).
The next day, a series of pre-planned protests against the ongoing American alliance with the British, who were themselves deeply enmeshed in a bloody conflict in Ireland, by Irish-Americans coincided with the strike, while other unions across the city, alienated by the government's harsh line against them declared that they would launch solidarity strikes. In response to these major protests, and with no real police force to keep them in check, Governor Coolidge ordered even more State Guards into the city, but these would be unable to arrive in time for the evening of the 10th when violence engulfed the city. After a day of relatively peaceful protests, the arrival of a large number of State Guards provoked considerable anger from the crowds. Inexperienced at handling such large and angry crowds, the State Guards reacted violently to provocations. Gunfire erupted across the city, provoking panic and outrage. By the time dawn rose red over Boston there would be more than eighteen protesters lying dead in the streets and almost sixty injured enough to be rushed to the hospital to have their wounds treated, most of the injuries and three of the deaths having resulted from the panic of the packed crowds.
As more State Guards rushed into the city, the populace reacted with horror. Particularly in Irish quarters of the city, there was a feeling that the government was making war on them. Schools shut down and the Central Labor Union met to discuss a general strike, with votes streaming in from their constituent unions over the course of the day. Despite efforts at delaying the vote, an agreement was eventually made to launch a Boston General Strike on the 12th, to capitalize on the situation. At the same time, a message arrived from AFL President Samuel Gompers urging an end to the strikes and demonstrations. However, with blood spilled there was little that could hold back the strikers. With a curfew enforced harshly to push people off the streets on the night of the 11th-12th, the outpouring of rage against the State Guard came on the 12th.
Massive protests were launched on the morning of the 12th, alongside a General Strike, but when the State Guard opened fire once again, the situation quickly degenerated. Enraged, the mobs stormed points across the city, seeking to drive the Guard from the city. Bloody street fighting resulted, while criminals rushed into the chaos to exploit the situation. By evening, the State Guard found itself driven out of much of the city with casualties nearing 40, and Boston found itself abandoned to the mob. It would take until the 20th of September before order could be restored in an effort led by the former Mayor of Boston James Curley, both Mayor Andrews and Governor Coolidge having completely failed to quell the unrest. The Boston Riots, resulting in casualties in the excess of six hundred and several thousand injured, as well as unimaginable amounts of damage to the city itself, would shock the American public and resulted in further divisions, as conservative America rallied against communism, socialism and unruly minorities such as the Irish and African Americans while liberal, anti-war and socialist America cried out in horror at the violence and trampling of rights that had come to characterise the period (3).
Prior to the violence in Boston, more than two dozen American communities, mostly urban areas or industrial centres, would see racial violence in the summer and early fall of 1919. Unlike earlier race riots in U.S. history, the 1919 riots were among the first in which blacks responded with resistance to the white attacks. Martial law was imposed in Charleston, South Carolina, where men of the U.S. Navy led a race riot on 10th May. Five white men and eighteen black men were injured in the riot. A Naval investigation found that four U.S. sailors and one civilian, all white men, were responsible for the outbreak of violence. On 3rd July, the 10th U.S. Cavalry, a recently returned segregated African-American unit founded in 1866, was attacked by local police in Bisbee, Arizona.
Two of the most violent episodes occurred in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. In Washington, D.C., white men, many in military uniforms, responded to the rumored arrest of a black man for rape with four days of mob violence, rioting and the beating random black people on the street. When police refused to intervene, the black population fought back. When the violence ended, ten whites were dead, including two police officers, and 5 blacks. Some 150 people had been the victims of attacks. The rioting in Chicago started on 27th July, where the beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated in practice, if not by law. A black youth who drifted into the area customarily reserved for whites was stoned and drowned to which blacks responded violently when the police refused to take action. Violence between mobs and gangs lasted 13 days and resulted in 38 fatalities included 23 blacks and 15 whites. Injuries numbered 537 injured, and 1,000 black families were left homeless. Some 50 people were reported dead but unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and a militia force of several thousand was called in to restore order.
On the heels of the Boston Riots, the AFL membership voted 98% to strike. They shut down half the steel industry, including almost all mills in Pueblo, Colorado; Chicago, Illinois; Wheeling, West Virginia; Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; Lackawanna, New York; and Youngstown, Ohio. The owners quickly turned public opinion against the AFL. As the strike began, they published information exposing AFL National Committee co-chairman William Z. Foster's radical past as a Wobbly and syndicalist, and claimed this was evidence that the steelworker strike was being masterminded by radicals and revolutionaries. The steel companies played on nativist fears by noting that a large number of steelworkers were immigrants and public opinion, already scarred by the Boston Riots and the Red Summer, quickly turned against the striking workers. State and local authorities backed the steel companies and prohibited mass meetings, had their police attack pickets and jailed thousands. After strikebreakers and police clashed with unionists in Gary, Indiana, the U.S. Army took over the city on October 6, 1919, and martial law was declared. National guardsmen, leaving Gary after federal troops had taken over, turned their anger on strikers in nearby Indiana Harbor, Indiana leaving many injured. Steel companies also turned toward strikebreaking and rumor-mongering to demoralize the picketers while they brought in between 30,000 and 40,000 African-American and Mexican-American workers to work in the mills. Company spies also spread rumors that the strike had collapsed elsewhere, and they pointed to the operating steel mills as proof that the strike had been defeated. The Chicago mills gave in at the end of October and by the end of November, workers were back at their jobs in Gary, Johnstown, Youngstown, and Wheeling. The strike collapsed on January 8, 1920, though it dragged on in isolated areas like Pueblo and Lackawanna (4).
The United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis announced their own strike for 1st November, 1919. They had agreed to a wage agreement to run until the end of World War I and now sought to capture some of their industry's wartime gains, but Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer invoked the Lever Act, a wartime measure that made it a crime to interfere with the production or transportation of necessities. The law, meant to punish hoarding and profiteering, had never been used against a union. Certain of united political backing and almost universal public support, Palmer obtained an injunction on 31st October 31 and 400,000 coal workers went on strike the next day. Palmer stated that the President had authorised the action, proffering a telegram from London, while also asserting that the entire Cabinet had backed his request for an injunction. This infuriated Secretary of Labor William Wilson who had opposed Palmer's plan and supported President of the AFL Samuel Gompers' view of President Wilson's promises when the Act was under consideration. The rift between the Attorney General and the Secretary of Labor rapidly grew bitter, as Palmer turned his attentions on Secretary Wilson, initiating a bitter power struggle between the two. While Gompers sought to protest Palmer's actions, there was little he could do with President Marshall in Europe and believing Palmer to be the only man seemingly able to do anything to hold in check the domestic turmoil that had engulfed America.
Under threat of criminal charges and an intensive propaganda campaign set to smear him, Lewing withdrew his call to strike, though many strikers ignored his actions. As the strike dragged on into its third week, coal supplies began running low and public sentiment called for ever stronger government action, eventually resulting in Palmer getting authorization from Marshall to break up the strikes, sending in National Guard units to accomplish the job. By the 10th of December the strike had been broken and Palmer had gained enough political capital to force Secretary of Labor Wilson from his post. He would be replaced on Palmer's suggestion with the controversial Ole Hanson, the former Mayor of Seattle who had helped break up the Seattle General Strike and built a profile on that basis. Hanson and Palmer would work hand-in-glove against strikers, socialists, anarchists and various other perceived threats to the social order, seeing J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau of Investigations secure near total support from the Department of Labor in the deportation of suspected anarchists (5).
While it had taken Palmer months to get under way, by the last quarter of 1919 his efforts to combat revolutionary radicalism, terrorism and domestic disturbances were truly about to come under way. Despite the initial raids in July, the public and Congress believed that too little was being done. With the Boston Riots causing considerable anxiety, the Senate demanded that Palmer explain what he was doing to resolve the issue and what support he would need to secure America against the crises facing it. These would be key factors in allowing Palmer to break the Coal Strike and force an end to the Steel Strike. Palmer replied to the Senate's questions on the 17th of October, reporting that his department had amassed 60,000 names with great effort but that they were required by the statutes of the Anti-Sedition Law to work through the Department of Labor. In its place he proposed a new Anti-Sedition Law to enhance the authority of the Justice Department to prosecute anarchists and other seditious groups. After some deliberations, work to prepare such a law was begun (6).
On the 10th of November 1919, agents of the Bureau of Investigation, together with local police, executed a series of well-publicised and violent raids against the Union of Russian Workers in 12 cities. Newspaper accounts reported some were badly beaten during the arrests, although efforts to suppress such accounts were undertaken by the Bureau, who spread rumours of the reporters having anarchist or socialist tendencies, occasionally with merit but most often without. Government agents cast a wide net, bringing in people of all sorts, including American citizens, passers-by who admitted to being Russian, teachers conducting night school classes in space shared with the targeted radical group and many more, in fact arrests far exceeded the number of warrants. Of the 650 arrested in New York City, the government would deport nearly 400 with the backing of the Department of Labor. As Attorney General Palmer struggled with exhaustion and devoted all his energies to the United Mine Workers coal strike in November and December 1919, Hoover organised the next series of raids. He successfully persuaded the Department of Labor to ease its insistence on promptly alerting those arrested of their right to an attorney, instead being issued with instructions that its representatives could wait until after the case against the defendant was established, "in order to protect government interests." Less openly, Hoover decided to interpret Labor’s agreement to act against the Communist Party to include a different organisation, the Communist Labor Party, provoking former Secretary of Labor Wilson's outrage, but securing Secretary Hanson's go ahead.
The Justice Department launched a series of raids on the 2nd of January, 1920, with follow up operations over the next few days. Smaller raids extended over the next 6 weeks during which some 3000 were arrested, and many others were held for various lengths of time. The entire enterprise replicated the November action on a larger scale, including arrests and seizures without search warrants, as well as detention in overcrowded and unsanitary holding facilities. The raids covered more than 30 cities and towns in 23 states, but those west of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio were mostly publicity gestures designed to make the effort appear nationwide in scope. Because the raids targeted entire organizations, agents arrested everyone found in organization meeting halls, not only arresting non-radical organization members but also visitors who did not belong to a target organization, and sometimes American citizens not eligible for arrest and deportation. The Department of Justice at one point claimed to have taken possession of several bombs, but after a few iron balls were displayed to the press they were never mentioned again. All the raids netted a total of just four ordinary pistols. While most press coverage continued to be positive, with criticism only from leftist publications like The Nation and The New Republic. The Washington Post endorsed Palmer's claim for urgency over legal process: "There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties." (7).
Within Palmer's Justice Department the Bureau of Investigations had become a storehouse of information about radicals in America. It had infiltrated many organisations and, following the raids of November 1919 and January 1920, it had interrogated thousands of those arrested and read through boxes of publications and records seized. In the early February of 1920, the bill proposed by Palmer in October finally passed, greatly strengthening the Department of Justice, giving it the power to enforce deportations, hold people on suspicion of revolutionary activities and a whole host of other capabilities that greatly strengthened the Department's abilities to act, expanding the wartime capabilities of the Department of Justice into the Conference Year and beyond. Furthermore, in the landmark case of Abrams v. United States the Sedition Act was upheld unanimously, further legitimising the Departments activities.
As news of the American failures at the Copenhagen Conference spread, first by rumour and later by media and political speeches, a sense of outrage began to consume America - a feeling that the sacrifices of so many brave soldiers had been for nothing more than the furtherance of European Imperialism. As it became ever clearer that the war had been a costly and wasteful affair, and particularly that President Marshall had seemingly pissed away any American leverage at the negotiating table, the mood in the United States turned increasingly sour. The former anti-war movement, still campaigning for the release of those imprisoned on sedition and espionage charges, built considerable support and were able to organise major rallies. At this time, in early March, word began to spread amongst agents of the Bureau of Investigations that amongst the information collected in the roundup of radicals, there had been indications of a planned overthrow of the United States government on May Day 1920.
With Palmer's backing, Hoover warned the nation to expect the worst: assassinations, bombings, and general strikes. Palmer issued his own warning on April 29, 1920, claiming to have a "list of marked men" and said domestic radicals were "in direct connection and unison" with European counterparts with disruptions planned for the same day there. Newspapers headlined his words: "Terror Reign by Radicals, says Palmer" and "Nation-wide Uprising on Saturday." Localities prepared their police forces and some states mobilized their militias. New York City's 11,000-man police force worked for 32 hours straight. Boston police mounted machine guns on automobiles and positioned them around the city. These warning coincided with plans to hold the largest series of protests yet against the Copenhagen Treaty, despite the best efforts of some of the more moderate organisers to delay the demonstrations, and in protest of the prominent socialist Eugene V. Debs' continued incarceration.
The result was that on May Day 1920, peaceful mass demonstrations were launched in most of America's largest cities. However, with the police prepared for violence these demonstrations quickly turned bloody as the order to suppress them went out, with claims that the protests were a front for the Radicals' plans. Around three thousand were injured and more than one hundred fifty people were killed across the United States on that day, as the demonstrations collapsed in chaos and panic - the day becoming known as Bloody Saturday. Many thousands were rounded up and arrested with over a thousand eventually facing deportation. Palmer claimed absolute victory, presenting himself as the vanquisher of sedition and revolutionary radicalism, to great acclaim. While some newspapers quietly lamented the violence, most were drawn along in howling hysteria.
Drowned out by the political battle that ensued over the Democratic Nomination was the publication of the Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice by the nascent American Civil Liberties Union, signed by prominent lawyers and law professors such as Felix Frankfurter, Roscoe Pound and Ernst Freund. In response, Palmer ordered the ACLU disbanded as a subversive organisation, undertaken by an eager Hoover who had much of the staff arrested and held in detention for several days before releasing them - having secured all of their documentation and suspending the organisation indefinitely (8).
Footnotes:
(1) In contrast to OTL, where many of the people imprisoned for breaches of the Sedition Act were released, ITTL they are kept in prison. This is mainly because with President Marshall focused on events in Europe, he is forced to rely on the recommendations of his cabinet to a much greater extent, allowing Attorney General Palmer to push himself to the forefront.
(2) Up until this point most of this is largely based on OTL as regards the Boston Police Strike. However, the fact that this is so soon after the ceasefire and the uncertainty about whether the ceasefire will hold means that the situation is even more heated than IOTL and the strike finds itself snowballing as others throw their own issues into the mix. In the end everything spins out of control and Boston goes through a major crisis. This will have consequences, particularly for the politicians involved, but also for Boston and the political situation in America as a whole.
(3) IOTL things didn't quite spin this far out of control, and leadership on various sides were able to force an end to the Police Strike before it could cause further tension. Keep in mind this is in the midst of the Red Scare and with the threat of war still on the horizon, so the entire situation is even further heightened. The State Guard opening fire on protesters is also OTL, though with more people on the streets it is a bit more bloody on the 10th-11th. Another key shift is the Central Labor Union voting in favour of a general strike, which is the result of slightly more casualties and the fact that they seem to have greater backing both nationally and in Boston itself. From there the situation completely spins out of control as violence on the part of the State Guard whip up popular fury, as mobs of poor people, mostly Irish-American, tear through the city. With law and order collapsing, the entire city is given over to criminality and vandalism. In the end it takes a community leader to restore the public peace.
(4) This is basically all based on OTL, there aren't any major divergences but I have included it because it plays an important role in the growing paranoia of the Red Scare. This is really not a period that is particularly nice to read about in any particular detail. American history can get very grim at times.
(5) While the Coal Strike is OTL, the differences here are that Palmer is considerably more powerful than IOTL, with Marshall distracted and distant. In this situation, Palmer is able to better make his case than Secretary Wilson and makes himself seem increasingly indispensable. The result is that when the OTL power struggle between the Attorney General and Labor Secretary occurs ITTL, Palmer is in a better position to secure victory. The end result is that Palmer secures even further domestic power and is able to remove a key rival. By the time we get into 1920, his power has massively consolidated and he is likely one of the most powerful men in America.
(6) Here we see another butterfly from the greater success of the bombing campaigns in early and mid-1919 come into play. This is all a matter of events cascading, one after another, with the strikes leading into the bombings leading into the race riots leading into the Boston Riots and the major strikes that follow. For the past year, it has been one crisis after another. Most of these happened IOTL, but here the greater success of the bombing campaign, the scale of the Boston Riots and the continuation of the war combine to increasing support for Palmer's efforts. As such, he is able to gain enough support for the bill he proposed IOTL which would have further expanded his remits.
(7) This is almost exclusively OTL, with the exception of the Labor Department cooperating. Under these circumstances, there aren't anywhere near the same limitations on deportation and as a result many of those scooped up in the raids end up harmed for it. There are pretty widespread abuses in these efforts but it does secure considerable popular support, particularly on the right wing.
(8) It took a while to get there, but there you have it. Rather than have the Red Scare turn out to be a hysterical movement, ITTL it gains further credence when peaceful May Day demonstrations against the peace treaty intersect with the Justice Department. With Palmer's May Day Revolution averted bloodily, he comes across as an American savior and gains even further support. With President Marshall declining rapidly in popularity, he is now set to contest the Democratic nomination. The ACLU is also nipped in the bud, with its resources drained away, leaving the advocacy of civil liberties neutralised, at least for the time being. Additionally, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes killed in the anarchist bombings earlier in the year, he isn't available to write his dissent to the Abrams v. United States case, resulting in a much more strident and undivided position on the issue by the Supreme Court. Civil Liberties in the United States thus take a pounding at this time, with plenty of consequences to follow.
Proclamation of The Treaty of Copenhagen in Bremen
The Busy Bees of Germany
These reforms included the formulation of a series of basic rights and obligations held by every German citizen, although privileges of social status remained in place, if somewhat reduced, while economic and religious freedoms were enshrined and all public offices were to be opened to all citizens based on merit while gender discrimination towards female civil servants was abolished. Freedom of speech was pushed for, but conservative forces were able to place limitations on seditious and revolutionary speech, concepts that would remain ambiguous for quite some time and find themselves used against both the far-left and far-right. The expropriation of property would be made only on the basis of law and for the public welfare, with appropriate compensation. The Reich further protected labor rights, intellectual creation, and the rights of authors, inventors, and artists. The right to form unions and to improve working conditions was guaranteed to every individual and to all occupations, and protection of the self-employed was established. Workers and employees were given the right to participate, on an equal footing with employers, in the regulation of wages and working conditions as well as in economic development.
When it came to electoral reforms, the franchise saw itself extended from 25 years of age to 20 and women's suffrage was included. However, the main shift would prove to be the shift from single-member constituencies by majority vote to direct proportional representation single transferable voting at the state level and in local elections, with indirect voting to the Reichstag state-level representatives. This would allow for greater proportional representation at lower levels of government, but would leave the Reichstag a more elite body, where securing the good will of state representatives was more important than popular acclaim. Given that such representatives would commonly belong to the societal elites, it was believed by both Conservatives and Liberals that they would be able to secure greater support than those of a left-wing orientation to the Reichstag while the left believed that dominance at a local level would transfer to the national level. These changes to the constitution were voted through by the Reichstag and Bundestag in early 1920 and were signed into law by the Kaiser soon after, despite Wilhelm's own considerable reservations (9).
In the year between the ceasefire and treaty signing, the Germans rushed vast numbers of men eastward to exploit the end of the Western Front and the reopening of trade to considerably strengthen their uncertain hand in Eastern Europe. In Poland, the initiation of negotiations prompted mass unrest, as the Poles sought to throw off the German yoke and secure independent representation at the Copenhagen Conference in late September. The insurrectionist forces were led by members of the Polish Military Organization, who formed the Citizen's Guard, later renamed as the People's Guard, which included many volunteers, including many veterans of the Great War. The first contingent to reach the Bazar Hotel, wherefrom the uprising was initiated, was a 100-strong force from Wilda’s People’s Guard led by Antoni Wysocki. As the insurrection spread rapidly through the Polish countryside, and men took up arms under the political leadership of Jędrzej Moraczewski. However, the sudden arrival of German forces crushed any hope of success, and over the course of the Conference Year the Polish Military Organization would find itself ground to pieces.
It was during this period that a candidate for the Polish throne was selected in the form of Friedrich Christian von Wettin, Margrave of Meissen, who was elected King of Poland in early March 1920 at German insistence, followed by a crowning ceremony attended by the Kaiser and a host of other royalty. Beneath the new Polish king, a civilian government led by the former first Prime Minister of Poland, Jan Kucharzewski, was formed and work was begun to summon a Polish Sejm modelled on the recent constitutional model established in Germany. During this period a number of Polish exiles, primarily from the former Blue Army in France, sought passage to Poland. However, for fear of further Polish unrest their requests were denied by the German government, to the great distress of the Poles. Martialing around their former commander, Jozef Haller, these Poles would form the nexus of a continued Polish independence movement which stretched across the Channel and the Atlantic, based out of London. While they did not secure official support from any of the former Entente powers, they would find themselves welcomed with opened arms by all of them in the hopes that they might prove of use at some point in the future.
Around the same time a civilian government under Augustinas Voldemaras had been formed in Lithuania and Duke Wilhelm von Urach was given permission by Kaiser Wilhelm to take up the Lithuanian throne - ascending as Mindaugas II in mid-1919. With control of Vilnius, the city quickly became the center of the nascent Lithuanian kingdom formed under German auspices. This left only the United Baltic Duchy, which saw itself affiliated but not incorporated into the German Empire under Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and now Duke of the United Baltic Duchy, with a government formed by the Latian Andrievs Niedra in an initial effort to secure Latvian backing for the new government. The Baltic Duchy would find itself struggling to conform to its new circumstances, but as money flooded in to rebuild the new duchy's capital of Riga and the world went mad across the border, it was generally felt that waiting out the Russian storm under German protection would probably be for the best. In addition to securing their eastern allies, the Germans provided immense amounts of aid to the Don Whites, sending military surplus and mercenaries in the form of quickly forming Freikorps made up of volunteers from amongst the general German soldiery who wanted to keep fighting, allowing Germany to work towards demobilization in a slower and more orderly manner. Throughout this period, large streams of refugees from the conflict in Russia rushed into the German subordinate states across Eastern Europe while those who had fled their homes during the Great War for fear of the German advance began their steady return to their new home countries. As Germany moved into the post-war world, it faced considerable danger and pressure from the East (10).
Germany itself would experience some turmoil in the lead-up to the signing of the Copenhagen Treaty, as socialist and communist extremists sought to whip up a furore in an effort to provoke a revolution. However, many of the leaders of these groups remained imprisoned at the time of the unrest, and the USPD remained reluctant to commit to such an effort when revolution might threaten the prospect of peace. Furthermore, the recent governmental reforms had done much to take the wind out of these revolutionary efforts and, following a brief economic recession in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire as the demands of the war fell precipitously, lasting until just around the new year, the German economy had begun shifting away from a war footing as preparations for demobilisation of millions of soldiers were begun. A sudden influx of foreign imports and the rebuilding of Germany's civilian economy prompted the beginnings of an economic boom as factories were steadily shifted back to the pre-war production of consumer goods and work on restoring and expanding the logistical network across Eastern Europe was begun. A spending frenzy ensued, as pent up purchasing power from the war years was let loose while revolutionary new technologies and products were shifted from military to civilian use. The government, concerned at the sudden leap in inflation that resulted from this economic boom and the weakened taxation structures of the war years, sought to stabilise the economy in as stage-managed a manner as possible.
However, it would take until the signing of the Copenhagen Treaty in May before the German economy truly took off. With the reopening of international trade, the already expanding German industrial complex suddenly had markets aching for their products, prompting an explosion in German exports across the world, with particularly their by now well proven weapons industries remaining a strong economic driver. While the war years had been hard, Germany had largely been able to keep the fighting outside its borders, meaning that its industrial and logistical networks were fully operational when the peace was signed. By October 1919, the Germans had begun a slow and orderly demobilisation of their army, ensuring work for as many of them as possible. At the same time the expansion of social security was undertaken, with the creation of veteran's care facilities as well as a host of subsidiary organisational structures to support the large number of invalids from the war. At the same time, the forces moving eastward to help stabilise the new German vassals in the east further reduced the need for immediate job creation, with many intrepid Freikorps men eventually settling into the growing German expat communities in Eastern Europe.
During this period a variety of veterans organisations were founded, both by the military itself and by home-bound veterans. (11). At the same time, the political reforms, the general political ferment and the return of so many soldiers from the front resulted in a dynamic and chaotic political scene as parties sprouted up across Germany seeking to secure support for their goals. This coincided with OHL ending its funding of the Vaterlandpartei, forcing the party to adapt. This would lead to the party's transition into the national conservative DNVP party, which took on a more fervently militaristic and nationalistic tone than the other conservative parties and was thus able to secure more of the former Vaterlandpartei members, making them one of the strongest conservative forces in Germany in the process. This would prompt the older conservative parties, the German Conservative Party and the Free Conservative Party, to join together as a more moderate alternative under the name of the German Conservative Party, DKP. Shortly after this, the Christian Conservative Party splintered between supporters of the DNVP and DKP, with anti-Semitism at the heart of the issue, with the DKP securing the more moderate faction of the Christian Conservative Party while the more reactionary joined the DNVP.
This coincided with the unification of most social liberals into the powerful Progressive People's Party, FVP, while the National Liberal Party, NLP, remained dominant amongst national liberals. However, the most significant political shift in the immediate post-war period would occur with the SPD, which first saw the USPD join back with the MSPD, only for the more radical wing of the party to revolt against the increasingly national socialist nature of the MSPD under the influence of its right wing, led by ideologues like Paul Lensch and the up-and-coming Ernst Niekisch, resulting in the formation of the Communist Party of Germany, KPD, led by the recently released Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, mixing their ideology with some of the anarchist and syndicalist factions in a bid to follow the lead of Moscow. Although there were some extremists who proposed attempting revolutionary unrest, this was eventually rejected by the recently formed party after a great deal of back-and-forth.
These political shifts culminated in the November 1920 elections, the first under the new constitution, which saw the conservative and liberal parties secure considerable gains on the federal level, but saw the conservative grip on Prussia collapse in favour of an FVP-SPD coalition government led by the ascendant Friedrich Ebert, with the KPD seeing some success particularly in the Ruhr and Berlin and capturing three seats in the Reichstag as a result which would allow them a national platform for their message. The federal elections led to the ascension of Gustav Stresemann as Chancellor of Germany on the basis of a liberal-conservative coalition between the NLP, the DKP and the Centre party (12).
Footnotes:
(9) While this isn't quite what @Rufus proposed for Germany, it does hold a number of similarities so I feel I should give kudos for some of the inspiration. I think that this is probably the best set of reforms Germany could have secured at the time and given the political climate. This reform answers many of the critiques and problems most people had with the German system at the time, at least to some degree, while also protecting conservative and monarchical interests to some extent. By moving to a federal indirect voting system, the system becomes considerably harder for populist parties to secure federal power in, be they left or right wing, while greatly strengthening the status quo. At the same time, the direct proportional elections at a state and local level means that there are places for popular will to find itself expressed which, when coupled with the relatively power held by the state and local levels in the Imperial system mean that these are actually pretty significant avenues to power. Perhaps the most important point here is that this opens up the Prussian Kingdom from the iron grip previously held by the conservatives in the region with the end of the Prussian Franchise, which will have some interesting consequences. While Germany already had a bill of rights, this sees an expansion of those rights based partially on what was set out in the Weimar Constitution, though of a considerably more limited nature. The most implausible point is probably Wilhelm accepting the change, but I think he is on thin enough ice at this point that informal pressure would be sufficient to force him to accept.
(10) I need to call on @Augenis for the invaluable discussions on Eastern Europe post-Great War in a German victory scenario for this. I have decided to take something of a middle path in regards to how great an amount of autonomy most of these states possess and how interfering the Germans are in local affairs. The defeat of the Polish uprising sees most the remaining Polish resistance collapse. With Pilsudski and various other Polish nationals still imprisoned as IOTL, there isn't much that can be done to hold the line here. With Poland and Saxony's historic ties, I thought the Wettin candidate would work best, while Lithuania gets Urach, who just generally seems to be the best candidate available for Lithuania. As IOTL Adolph Friedrich becomes Duke of the United Baltic Duchies, though this time around he actually takes up residence there. At the same time, we see the appearance of Freikorps, but only in their mercenary role, serving as an outlet for those who don't think they will cope well with demobilisation. They bring invaluable resources and capabilities to the Don Whites, greatly strengthening Brusilov's position.
(11) From my reading of the post-war situation in Germany, even with the defeat and absolute political chaos the main source of Germany's economic woes in the late 1910s and early 1920s stemmed from governmental sabotage and reckless economic policies more than anything else. Without any of the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty and with massive new markets in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as the opening up of international markets, it would present a massive economic opportunity. In similar ways to America in the same immediate post-war period, Germany goes through a short recession as the industries of war shift to civilian production, but then the economy takes off. This actually happened IOTL as well, but ended up getting wasted in the fight over reparations IOTL, where the German government deliberately tried to make itself appear so weak that it wouldn't be able to repay reparations. Furthermore, without the crash demobilisation of OTL there is far less political and economic turmoil as the economy prepares for their return. All in all, Germany is set to massively expand its already powerful economy, now with a massive captive market in the east to exploit.
(12) There isn't the same degree of political fragmentation and destruction as IOTL, where many of the pre-war parties dissolved. Instead, we see the rise of a new political forces in the DNVP and KPD, the consolidation of the SPD and DKP and the ascendance of the NLP. It is important to note that the SPD take a more nationalist line ITTL, retaining its socialist character but adding some nationalist elements to the mix. This is part of what leads to the KPD forming. In addition, without a Sparticist Rising, Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht live on to influence politics in a post-war world. It also bears noting that Otto Strasser is slowly gaining a following in the SPD and is one of their young but rising leaders. Gregor Strasser is involved in the Freikorps fighting in Russia while Adolph Hitler is back in Münich, having joined a local veterans organisation, involving himself in local politics and flirting with joining the DNVP. He is not elected in 1920 but is able to build a minor following of fellow anti-Semites and ultranationalists.
Georges Mandel, Clemenceau's Heir
Rebuilding The Republic
While the initial protests and demonstrations against the partition of Belgium took place during the Conference Year, it would be the Summer Uprisings in Wallonia which consumed French focus in the immediate aftermath of the treaty signing, as Belgian nationalists sought to provoke general revolt across the region, but were largely met by exhausted apathy amongst the general public. The French soldiers were thus able to secure the region after a few skirmishes and the imprisonment of the movement’s ringleaders. One immense challenge facing the French government of Aristide Briand came in the form of the hundreds of thousands of deserters who had abandoned their posts during the chaos of the war and now lived in a state of limbo, fearing that the government might well punish them for the act. In the end the issue would be solved by a general pardon, though this would inflame the French Right even further than the concessions in the peace treaty. Agitation against Briand grew increasingly raucous over the course of 1920, while the governmental coalition he had pieced together piecemeal in 1919 began to crumble around him. It was during this period that political prisoners, including both Poincaré and Foch, were pardoned and released as efforts at reconciling with the right to ease the tense French political situation were undertaken. However, as 1920 moved from summer to autumn, the calls for elections grew ever louder, culminating in Briand and Millerand's decision to call for elections in early December 1920, when they felt that they would be able to showcase as much of their reconstruction efforts as possible.
In the months that followed the peace treaty, the political legacy of the Great War became a key point of contest and conflict between a wide variety of political factions. On the far left, revolutionary agitation by a large portion of SFIO and the anarcho-syndicalist faction of the French General Confederation of Labor (CGT) led by Pierre Monatte, provoked considerable worry and disarray in the French labor market. The vital role that these organizations had played in securing the peace resulted in a rush of support towards the factions in the Conference Year, which had been exploited fully by the far-left’s leadership. With the CGT increasingly dominated by Monatte, in spite of moderate opposition, and the SFIO increasingly aligning itself behind the Communist ideology coming out of Moscow, the fears of revolution grew ever greater. While violence remained limited during the lead-up to the 1920 elections, this did not prevent the rise of relatively a united right wing in fearful opposition to the radicals on the left, even if they could barely stand each other. At the forefront of this right wing movement was Clemenceau's chosen successor, Georges Mandel, who took his mentor's assassination by the anarchist Cottin hard and turned fervently against any compromise with such terrorists. While conservative republicans rallied around Mandel, the far-right ligues, foremost among them Action Francaise, agitated against the growing leftist revolutionary menace. Caught between these two factions were the moderates around Briand and Millerand, who set themselves forward as the only true hope of France for a secure post-war period (13).
It would be these moderates, of split left and right belief, who joined together during the elections. In the end, the French people were weary of conflict and voted for what was widely viewed as the safest option, returning a majority to the parties supporting Briand and Millerand, restoring the stable foundations of their coalition for the time being. However, the election period would see the CGT and SFIO grow closer, and see the ascent of more radical figures within both the confederation and political party, while the far-right was able to mount a surprising degree of support on the basis of claiming that true victory had been stolen from the French people by the weakness of their home front - an argument that met with only limited agreement even amongst the right.
Former Generalissimo Ferdinand Foch was named ceremonial president of the Union Nationale de Combattants (UNC), which was founded in Paris on 16th June 1919 on the initiative of Catholic veterans led by Father Daniel Brottier. While the association founded a national weekly newspaper called La Voix du Combattant, it would be with the support of the Church, the army and conservative political business interests, that the UNC grew to become the largest right-wing veterans’ association in France. By contrast, the moderate Union Féderale (UF) was founded in Lyon in February 1918 as a federation of provincial veteran and war-wounded associations and quickly began aligning itself with the moderate Briand and Millerand governments. The UF would soon prove itself extremely active in the international veterans’ community, building contacts with veterans organizations in all combatant nations. A number of smaller veterans associations would align themselves with the Left, but they were never able to achieve quite the same level of success or cohesion as the UNC and UF.
The Briand and Millerand government would find itself constantly overburdened, resolving crisis after crisis, while investing massively in the reconstruction of France. Paying for these efforts would prove an immediate challenge, and reconstruction efforts would find themselves disrupted on a continuous basis by strikes over insufficient and intermittent wages, harsh working conditions and revolutionary agitation, all while dealing with ferocious efforts by the CGT to unionise working men and women wherever they could find them. Clashes between the CGT and right-wing ligues would prove a common occurrence in this period, often requiring direct governmental intervention to separate the two. It was during this period, as American support for the wartime alliance seemed to waver and with the British increasingly occupied with domestic affairs, that Briand was able to secure what would widely be considered one of the greatest diplomatic achievements of his eighth term as Prime Minister of France. Prompted by the seemingly breakneck rise of Germany, Lloyd George offered a military guarantee of immediate aid against German aggression in the early months of 1921. It was a sensational suggestion, and was strengthened by Lloyd George’s promise to authorise the building of a Channel tunnel, already under discussion in London, so that British troops could be quickly dispatched to France (14).
However, the Americans would prove more reticent, as the new President of the United States weighed the merits of such an alliance, eventually giving his response in mid-1921. Either way, Lloyd George's promise would open the floodgates of Anglophone investment, as investor confidence in the French domestic situation grew, soon joined by payments from the Central Powers of Serbia's war guilt and German encroachment into the French market. This sudden influx of capital greatly expanded the capabilities and security of the French government, who were now able to direct considerable financial flows into their reconstruction efforts. However, the growth of German, British and American imports would follow soon after, threatening the viability of domestic French industry and, resulting in considerable protests from the French business community. Under considerable pressure from his own coalition, Briand would call on the League of Nations' Trade Arbitration Court for the first time in order to avoid provoking conflict through unilateral trade sanctions, hoping to secure some form of understanding with the other great powers on the issue.
In its first major case the recently established permanent Trade Arbitration Court in Zürich sought to bring together the various parties. In a series of negotiations, Briand was able to negotiate an agreement with new German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, a major Jewish-German industrialist who had supported Stresemann's campaign in 1920 and been rewarded for it, whereby the Germans promised to limit dumping of products in struggling French industries in return for a significant reduction in the sum they were paying as part of Serbia's war guilt. The British were agreeable to such measures as well, but the Americans would prove intransigent on the issue of tariffs, eventually forcing Briand to give in to American pressure for fear of losing their economic aid and investments. While unpopular in radical circles, these moves would ease the pressure on French capital considerably and allow for the continued rebuilding of devastated industries, though American imports would present a considerable threat which the French business community could do little about for the time being. This agreement with the Germans would mark the beginnings of the Briand-Stresemann Rapprochement as Germany and France sought to lessen the mutual animosity between their peoples, working through veterans organisations such as the UF and cultural exchanges primarily early on, most prominently in a joint project to create a massive Verdun Peace Monument and mausoleum (15).
Since the moment the war ended, all belligerents had been trying to deal with the challenge posed by the millions of dead. The first part of this challenge was to recover the bodies, identify, and inter them. It had been clear from the opening campaigns that this war was the greatest in history and all sides believed that its memory must be kept alive, not only to honour the fallen but also to prevent them from becoming a matter of indifference to later generations who might never understand what this one had endured. The names of the lost had to be preserved, and already during the war the belligerents prepared to commemorate them. Lawrence Binyon’s elegy, ‘To the Fallen’, whose refrain ‘We will remember them’ became a fixture of British Armistice Day rituals, was written in September 1914.
The Western European belligerents quickly established that all dead soldiers of whatever rank would be buried in special cemeteries. American legislation during the Civil War provided a precedent, but there was little in Europe, where the Napoleonic war dead had been shoveled into mass graves and their remains sometimes re-used as agricultural fertilizer. During the nineteenth century, however, tremendous romantic and humanitarian changes had suffused the attitudes of Western societies towards death, and democratic citizen armies, whether volunteer or conscript, evoked different feelings from the mercenary forces of earlier conflicts. The French passed legislation in 1914 creating military cemeteries; by the end of 1915 they were gathering their dead for reburial, and the war ministry issued regulations for the permanent care of the graves. In 1916–17 proposals emerged for a national mausoleum at Verdun, which would morph into the Verdun Peace Monument in cooperation with Germany. Other countries followed this lead. Once the guns fell silent, the first tasks on the battlefields were to remove the detritus of combat, explode the mines and shells, reclaim the soil, and reconstruct towns and villages.
Along the Western Front these tasks were mostly accomplished within six years, but monuments such as the cathedral and cloth hall at Ypres were lovingly reconstructed and were not completed until 1930–34. Of the corpses, many of which had been buried in mass or unmarked graves, tens of thousands were condemned to remain anonymous. Battlefield monuments represented only a portion of the construction effort, with the memorials in the home countries leaving an architectural imprint throughout the Western world. Perhaps the most characteristic creations of the period, and another innovation, were the tombs of the Unknown Soldiers. To some extent a forerunner of the idea in Britain was the Cenotaph, literally an empty tomb, which Lutyens designed as a temporary feature for the Whitehall peace parade that celebrated the end of the war. It proved so popular that a permanent replacement was unveiled on 11 November 1920 when the Unknown Warrior was buried at Westminster Abbey.
The idea for such a tomb originated separately in France and in Britain and had a special significance after a conflict that had simply obliterated without trace huge numbers of combatants. In Paris a warrior was buried on the same day under the Arc de Triomphe in the midst of elaborate ritual, before spreading across the Atlantic and to the Central Powers. Having poured forth unprecedented resources on the war, the new industrial civilization now did likewise to commemorate it, creating a memorial architecture unparalleled since ancient Egypt. Yet the monuments were not simply static representations: they became the focal points for public acts of mourning, and here too patterns of ritual were pioneered that have would become familiar calendar fixtures. As the war itself had been an apprenticeship in modern conflict, so in its aftermath Western countries evolved new modes of mourning, but they drew heavily on established civic and religious motifs. In societies that were only partly dechristianized such symbols had an evocative and reassuring potential that abstract and modernist alternatives lacked (16).
Footnotes:
(13) ITTL the pressure for a split over joining a Communist International is not present, at least not at this point in time, and as such, there is less internal conflict amongst the French Left. Furthermore, with their role in forcing an end to the war, they are able to reap considerable benefits. This is a key factor in the continuation and strengthening of Anarchist influences in the CGT, although Communists also have a growing presence in the confederation, while the SFIO remains a united party for the time being. The French Right remains deeply divided, but they are able to unite behind Mandel on the issue of opposing revolutionary leftism.
(14) When I read that there were actual considerations given to constructing a Channel Tunnel in the immediate post-war period IOTL, being abandoned when Anglo-French relations soured over reparations, I felt I had to include it somehow in TTL. We will follow the efforts of France and Britain to build this tunnel for a while, but I hope to make it an interesting journey. The British made a similar promise of alliance IOTL, but tied it to American agreement. ITTL I think that they would be more willing to make such a guarantee for fear of German aggression.
(15) I personally think that without the rancor of the fight over war guilt and reparations, the OTL rapprochement efforts of the mid and late 1920s could have happened a lot earlier with considerably greater impact. While these initial meetings are tense, you saw a general wish to prevent conflict on both sides IOTL and would see similar ITTL. Here the politicians are more willing to go for it. Briand is the great peacemaker who avoided losses at the Copenhagen Conference, while the Germans want peace in the west so they can deal with their massive new acquisitions and unstable subordinates in the east and south-east.
(16) This is basically based on OTL. The important difference is that ITTL, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians follow suit in these practices, and participate in all of these rituals as well, creating ones distinct from their western adversaries. IOTL memorialising the Great War was largely something done by the victorious powers, the Weimar Republicans wanting to forget the conflict and put it in their rearview mirror, while the nationalists looked at the conflict as a betrayal of their nation. Basically, no one wanted to remember the ignominy of defeat, while the victors felt better able to try dealing with their sacrifices. At the same time many former Austro-Hungarian nations had their independence struggle in this period, which tended to fill a larger part in their collective memory. Here the situation is considerably different.
The Aftermath of the Burning of Cork
Rule Britannia
The end of the war was swiftly followed by a general election in a bid to strengthen Lloyd George's hand at the negotiating table, the first election held under the expanded franchise created by the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which had effectively introduced universal male suffrage and extended the vote, on a limited basis, to women. The election proved a tumultuous affair, as Lloyd George's rivals sought to smear the Prime Minister with the stench of defeat, while Lloyd George claimed to have brought peace with honour. With labor unrest at a height and Ireland up in arms, there were considerable questions about Lloyd George's success as prime minister and whether his continued hold on power would be for the best. At the heart of this campaign was Lloyd George's rival Asquith, who sought to rally Liberal opposition to the Prime Minister. It would be the October 1919 election which marked the devastation of the Liberal Party. A week prior to the election, Lloyd George’s Liberal ministers agreed to continue their membership of the coalition, but an invitation to Asquith, who had remained the official leader of the Liberal Party after 1916, to join the government as Lord Chancellor was rejected. This would mark the official schism of the Liberal Party into the Asquithian "Official" Liberals and the Coalition Liberals of Lloyd George. Lloyd George’s lieutenants secured from the Unionists an agreement not to challenge 150 Liberal MPs identified as supporters of the government, many on the basis of their loyalty throughout the challenges to Lloyd George's power, with 133 of these duly reelected. However, the Asquithian Liberals, denied the protection of the coalition “coupon”, were routed at the polls and reduced to just thirty-six MPs. Asquith, McKenna and most of their senior colleagues lost their seats.
While the Liberals’ position at Westminster deteriorated, the prospects for the Labour Party in 1919 were rather brighter. Like the Liberals, Labour was torn between patriotism and pacifism during the war, but unlike the Liberals the party never suffered a serious institutional split. Indeed, while the Liberal Party organization had decayed conspicuously since the general elections of 1910, the war enhanced the political and social importance of the industrial working class and the trade union movement from which Labour drew its strength. Experience of ministerial office boosted the party’s credibility, yet Henderson’s defiance of Lloyd George in 1917, when he left the government, ensured that Labour retained its political independence. After his resignation Henderson embarked on a major reorganisation of the party which led to the adoption of a new constitution, containing an explicit commitment to socialism, and laid the basis for Labour’s emergence as a truly national party. The party was able to field an unprecedented 400 parliamentary candidates in 1919, winning 78 seats.
The real political “winners” to emerge from the Great War, however, were the Conservatives. With Ireland in chaos and both Sinn Fein and the Irish Parliamentary Party unable to contest the elections due to their participation in the conscription crisis, allowed the Unionists to sweep up a vast majority of the seats in Ireland while the Conservatives secured just over 100 seats in Britain - leading to a combined increase of nearly 170 seats leaving them with what amounted to a supermajority in the Parliament with around 440 of 707 seats. While Bonar Law and his conservatives could have taken power, they decided instead to continue the coalition government under Lloyd George on the condition that everything possible be done to restore order to Ireland and secure an honourable peace (17).
The British, too, emerged from the war in a weakened financial position. There had been a considerable sale of overseas assets quite apart from domestic war debts and money lent to their allies, which would be difficult to recoup. The British owed the Americans immense sums and were, for the first time, in debt to their transatlantic cousins, though still in a creditor position worldwide. With a far more effective tax structure than the French, British governments had covered more of their war costs through taxation, but there was still a large budgetary deficit in March 1920. The removal of wartime controls fueled an inflationary spiral; the pound, off gold and no longer pegged to the dollar, began to fall below its pre-war dollar-exchange rate. Lloyd George’s Coalition government was determined to put its financial house in order. The Treasury, the Bank of England, and the City, London’s financial district, charted a strict deflationary policy, arguing that by cutting expenditure, restricting government borrowing, and raising interest rates to discourage private investment, the country would be prepared for a return to the gold standard and the restoration of the international financial structure, and Britain’s own dominant position in international finance would be ensured. Even when it became clear by the summer that the post-war boom was over and that further deflation would depress trade and create massive unemployment, Austen Chamberlain, the chancellor of the Exchequer, persisted with these policies, and his second budget of 1921 already showed a surplus available for debt redemption.
Britain’s deflationary policies did not stop the pound’s deterioration in relation to the dollar, nor reverse the flow of gold to the United States. The government insisted that London could meet the competition from New York and resume its place as the center of the world’s financial system. Imperial ties, habit, and geography meant that many continued to look to London. The need to strengthen the pound was seen, above all in the influential City of London, as more important than worries about British trade. There was, in the immediate post-war period, little opposition to the Treasury position or any challenge to its assumption that balanced budgets, stabilized currencies, and the reintroduction of the gold standard were essential for economic recovery. Like the French, the British hoped to secure, if not the cancellation of the war-debt payments owed to the Americans, then at least better terms than those that had been set near the end of the war. In the face of a sharp recession and mounting unemployment during late 1920 and early 1921, the London government insisted that financial instability was the cause of the present malaise, with uncertainty regarding French repayment of loans a primary factor in the instability. It would be these factors that led to Lloyd George backing the series of economic support policies for the French in this period, strongly lobbying the US government to either remit British and French debt, or push forward with economic aid for the French and British, using their own position as creditor in Europe to threaten a wider default (18).
While the Great War played a key role in weakening the British economy, it would be the ongoing conflict in Ireland and the British efforts at restoring their colonial empire which turned what could have been a brief post-war recession into an economic depression. By the signing of the ceasefire, more than 80,000 Irish Conscripts had found themselves forced into uniform, of which some 4,000 would die either as a result of the Flu or the fighting. In that time, the situation in Ireland had turned ever more violent as a bitter Irish insurgency sought to force an end to the conscriptions, while calls for independence grew ever louder, even amongst the ostensibly Home Rule favouring Irish Parliamentary Party, although support and politicians from the IPP were increasingly jumping ship for Sinn Fein. On March 1919, as word of continued fighting in France spread and news of the French strikes and pro-peace protests hit Ireland, the Sinn Fein found themselves provoked into establishing an independent Parliament, called the First Dáil, and a ministry to govern it, named the Aireacht, consisting of pro-independence Irish figures from Sinn Fein and pro-Independence members of the IPP.
Throughout this period, Haig worked to coordinate British military responses to insurgent assaults with the Unionist population, tacitly accepting Unionist assaults on anti-conscription supporters and pro-independence strongholds. The signing of the 16th of June Ceasefire brought a temporary slowing of the march to war, as conscription came to an end and hopes for the restoration of Home Rule rose precipitously. While the situation remained tense through the first quarter of the Conference Year, with numerous skirmishes, ambushes and raids between Unionists and Sinn Fein in particular, a sense of hope was present as everyone looked towards the promised elections and the return of the conscripts. While the conscripts returned from the front, all eyes turned to London as the weak hopes that the British would uphold their promises slowed everything to a crawl.
The decision to declare Sinn Fein and the Irish Parliamentary Party ineligible for election as seditious and treasonous movements was taken by Lord Lieutenant John French in an effort to bring the treasonous Irish out into the streets where they could be met forcefully by the rapidly expanded British forces in Ireland. Events would largely proceed as expected, with the declaration prompting outrage and sending thousands into the streets in protest, where they were met by heavily armed British soldiers who began mass arrests of the protesters, weeding out ringleaders and protest leaders for extradition to Britain on a variety of charges, most significantly Arthur Griffin and Kevin O'Higgins. The harsh and clearly prepared nature of the crackdown sent waves through the Irish populace and forced many prominent pro-independence Irish leaders into hiding and brought more radical figures to the forefront of the movement, most prominently the recently returned Michael Collins, Frank Aiken and Liam Lynch, who had forged close bonds and a seething hatred of the British during their time as conscripts (19).
Volunteers began to attack British government property, carry out raids for arms and funds and target and kill prominent members of the British administration. The first was Resident Magistrate John C. Milling, who was shot dead in Westport, County Mayo, for having sent Volunteers to prison for unlawful assembly and drilling. They mimicked the successful tactics of the Boers' fast violent raids without uniform. Although some republican leaders, notably Éamon de Valera, favored classic conventional warfare to legitimize the new republic in the eyes of the world, the more practically experienced Michael Collins and the broader IRA leadership opposed these tactics as they had led to the military debacle of 1916. The violence used was at first deeply unpopular with Irish people but the heavy-handed British actions both during and after the war did much to popularize it among large segments of the population. During the early part of the conflict, roughly from the middle of 1919 to early 1920, there was a relatively limited amount of violence while much of the nationalist campaign involved popular mobilization and the creation of a republican "state within a state" in opposition to British rule.
Unrest finally became open rebellion in the first six months of 1920. The most prominent representatives of the British state in Ireland, the armed Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), came under increasing attack from the Irish Volunteers, who by now were generally known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Ambushes of police patrols and attacks on constabulary stations grew more frequent and more violent. The strength and morale of the RIC declined, as hundreds of constables quit the force and the remainder were concentrated in fewer, more defensible stations. Sinn Féin won local government elections across the country, and both town and county councils proclaimed their allegiance to Dáil Eireann. More seriously, the revolutionaries undermined the British legal system: the Dáil established its own courts of justice and Volunteers acted as Republican police. Once again, the baffled British government’s response was ineffective. A new Home Rule Bill was introduced, which would create two devolved assemblies: one at Stormont for the six counties of Northern Ireland, which were dominated by Ulster Protestants, and one in Dublin for the remaining twenty-six counties; but this concession was widely seen as too little, too late. The Dublin Castle administration was reformed, but both its conciliatory gestures and its clumsy counterinsurgency campaign did nothing to slow the collapse of the British regime.
By the summer of 1920, faced with a choice between crushing Ireland’s rebels by force, and offering the country dominion status, the Lloyd George government opted for increased repression. Thus, in the summer and autumn of 1920, the war began to ramp up. The British government rushed emergency legislation through Parliament, the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act, while the RIC was reinforced with large numbers of British ex-servicemen. Ex-soldiers became ordinary constables, and were quickly nicknamed Black and Tans, as ex-officers joined a mobile and heavily-armed paramilitary gendarmerie, the Auxiliary Division. Assisted by the military, the police went back on the offensive: but the IRA rose to the challenge. Ambushes of police and military patrols grew bloodier and more frequent, and, in retaliation, the police in particular took reprisals, looting and burning homes and shops and summarily executing suspects. Meanwhile, as both sides fought a war of words for public opinion, in Parliament and in the press, their intelligence services played a deadly game of cat and mouse on the streets of Dublin.
As the conflict grew ever bloodier, increasingly radical action came to be called for. Terror attacks on civilians, assassinations of rival supporters, extrajudicial executions and a series of bloody massacres would raise the stakes in late 1920. County Cork was an epicentre of the growing conflict. On 23rd November 1920, an RIC in civilian dress threw a grenade into a group of IRA volunteers who had just left a brigade meeting on St Patrick Street in Cork, killing three and injuring sixteen. In retaliation, on the 28th November 1920 the IRA's 3rd Cork Brigade ambushed an Auxiliary patrol at Kilmichael, killing 17 Auxiliaries. This was the biggest loss of life for the British in County Cork up till this point and prompted the British forces to declare martial law in counties Cork, including the city of Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary. With martial law in effect, the IRA launched an assault on an auxiliary patrol in Cork city on the 11th of December, wounding a dozen and killing two, provoking horrific retribution that evening.
The Auxiliaries, Black and Tans and British soldiers looted and burnt numerous buildings in the city centre. Many civilians reported being beaten, shot at, and robbed by British forces. Firefighters testified that British forces hindered their attempts to tackle the blazes through intimidation, cutting their hoses and shooting at them. More than 40 business premises, 300 residential properties, the City Hall and Carnegie Library were destroyed by the fire while more than £3 million worth of damage was wrought, 2,000 were left jobless and many more became homeless. Two unarmed IRA volunteers were shot dead in the north of the city and terror ran through the Irish populace. The Burning of Cork threw the conflict into overdrive and led to a massive expansion in the level of violence of the conflict and marked the beginnings of plans to expand the war across the Irish Sea to Great Britain itself. At the same time, the growing levels of violence in Ireland proved increasingly unpopular in England as calls for an end to the conflict grew louder (20).
Footnotes:
(17) With Home Rule suspended and both Sinn Fein and Irish Parliamentary Party up in arms, the Conservatives make even greater gains than IOTL. At the same time the longer conflict and greater labour agitation results in a somewhat better result for Labour ITTL at the expense of the Asquinian Liberals and the National Democratic Party. The main impact here is that the coalition holds and the Conservatives, particularly the Unionists, are even stronger than IOTL.
(18) A lot of this is based on pressures that were present in OTL and British efforts to restore the European economy. The main difference is that with Germany recovering from the war and with their markets expanding explosively into Eastern Europe, the necessity of keeping France on its feet makes Lloyd George much more willng to coordinate with the French. This in turn places greater pressure on the Americans, who are forced to aid their wartime allies for fear of default. This isn't exactly something that improves Transatlantic relations, but it does stabilize the British and French economies allowing them to begin rebuilding their economic positions.
(19) The circumstances surrounding what turned into the Irish War of Indepenence IOTL are somewhat different ITTL. The primary point is that with the expanded Conscription crisis and conflict surrounding it, Irish society is more brutalized than IOTL and violence proves greater as a result. Perhaps the most significant divergences here are the absence of Griffith and O'Higgins from amongst the Irish leadership. This has the effect of increasing the radicalism of the IRA and Sinn Fein, pushing them to fight to the finish. While this won't have too immense an impact immediately, it will become particularly clear as we move further into the conflict and particularly when we start nearing the OTL treaty negotiations.
(20) This is largely based on OTL events and probably doesn't fit completely with what is actually happening. The conflict plays out with a lot of similarities to the OTL early period of the conflict, but as we move forward from here events are going to move increasingly in a different direction in Ireland.
End Note:
This is something of a monster update covering a ton of events in several of the key powers of the period. We have the 1920 US elections coming up soon and that is going to be a major can of worms, while the Russian conflict moves into its next phase and revolutionary efforts spread further into Europe.
While I was right in saying I wouldn't get much done today, I was able to get my computer to work and read corrections on this update so I decided to post it, don't want to leave you all hanging. That said, I should start getting more time to work after tomorrow. I really hope you enjoy.
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