A TR Victory in 1912

The 1912 election seems to me to be one of those major turning point elections on which things would have gone in a very different direction had Roosevelt one. For purposes of this thread, he can win as either a Bull Moose Progressive or he can defeat Taft for the nomination and win as a progressive Republican.

What I find interesting about this WI is that it would seem most of the changes would be positive ones.(depending on perspective of course)

- a more progressive Republican party if TR wins as a Republican, but a more progressive course for the country overall. Assuming Roosevelt could get legislation through, he had a pretty ambitiously progressive agenda. A sort of proto-New Deal.


-earlier intervention in WWI, possibly from the Lusitania sinking, means an earlier Allied victory, no Bolshevik Revolution, a totally different peace settlement, and a U.S. that stays interventionist to enforce the peace

-good possibility no WWII in this scenario, with a more thoroughly defeated Germany and an enforced peace, no "stab in the back" myth and no opportunity for massive re-arming


I'm not seeing to many negatives from this scenario. Am I looking at it wrong?
 
I don't think that TR can sell a declaration of war in 1915. I think if he tries he gets into political trouble. Remember OTL in 1916 Wilson won on slogan of he kept us out of war.
 
I don't think that TR can sell a declaration of war in 1915. I think if he tries he gets into political trouble. Remember OTL in 1916 Wilson won on slogan of he kept us out of war.

I agree. Even if Roosevelt won the Republican Party's nomination and didn't alienate a large number of his former supporters, he wouldn't have the support of the isolationists. He would have had a good chance of passing a large portion of the New Nationalism, but would have been frustrated on foreign policy.
 
I don't think that TR can sell a declaration of war in 1915. I think if he tries he gets into political trouble.

Agreed. War in 1915 is ASB. Congress and the public were nowhere near ready for it. There might be a chance if the Germans refuse to back down, but they yielded to Wilson so they surely will to TR.

War in early 1916 is just conceivable if the Germans renew ASW then, but with TR in the White House that again is unlikely. They know what the consequences would be.

In all probability, nothing really changes until 1917. By then, the Germans are getting desperate enough to be ready to gamble on US intervention, so ASW probably goes ahead. TR won't mess about with half measures like armed neutrality, so war may well be declared in February or March rather than April.

After that it depends whether TR has managed to get the US armed forces significantly expanded from their OTL levels. Again, this is remotely possible, but not terribly likely, given Congressional attitudes to military spending in peacetime. That goes double if the Democrats have retained control of the HoR (or narrowly lost it in 1912 but regained it in 1914) which, given the top-heavy majority with which they go into the 1912 election, they are highly likely to. They won't be especially co-operative with a Republican president.

All in all, probably not all that much change.
 
-earlier intervention in WWI, possibly from the Lusitania sinking, means an earlier Allied victory, no Bolshevik Revolution, a totally different peace settlement, and a U.S. that stays interventionist to enforce the peace

OTOH the cost to the US is far higher. She would be intervening while things were still stalemated in trench warfare, so her experience would be much bloodier. Instead of the 120,000 of OTL, expect maybe up to half a million doughboys "hanging on the old barbed wire".

She would also be doing so for no particular reason. The Germans hadn't torpedoed a single American ship in 1915, and wouldn't for nearly two more years. The only American victims so far had been a few dopes who chose to travel on a belligerant ship in the middle of a war.

Finally, this means that the US (and Britain ftm) plays little part in the peace settlement - certainly far less than OTL. Since this TL aborts the Russian Revolution, the Franco-Russian Alliance continues, and can dictate peace without reference to their Anglo-Saxon partners, so expect millions of Poles, Galician Jews and others to be consigned to the tender mercies of the Tsar. Their compatriots in the US will scream blue murder.

In summary, the US will emerge having suffered horrendous casulaties in a war entered for no reason on the mere whim of a bellicose president, and having then been pushed aside from the peacemaking while her erstwhile partners imposed a "settlement" disgusting to American opinion. If the end of the war is followed by a depression (OTL it was in 1920/1) that just puts the tin lid on things. Expect the retreat into isolationism to be even greater, if anything, than OTL's. If TR tries to run again, expect him to be soundly defeated. After all this he will be about as popular as Wilson was in the aftermath of his war.
 
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