America The Magnificent

Tested some stuff for this out in the writer's forum, now posting here with final changes.



1.

“When the first U.S. Marines ran ashore at Swakopmund on January 10th, 1890 they were presented with sights none could scarcely have dreamed of before. Moving inland, for the Germans had posted virtually nothing to defend the coast even after two years of war, they looked out other the endless expanse of Namibian desert and many wondered just why the Germans would ever have wanted it. Smoke rose from across the desert where American shells had come down in the pre-landing bombardment, a bombardment rendered completely pointless because the only German-speaking enemy to be found were the civil servants in the town itself, and a couple of Marines shyly pet camels as curious herders stopped to watch these bands of white men in tan uniforms and cowboy hats milling about apparently unsure of what to do with themselves.

“We could hardly believe it,” said a Private Eugene Stetson from Oregon. “We’d crossed an ocean for the grand adventure across Africa, and for what?” A few frustrated Marines found solace by introducing themselves to the local women in Swakopmund, some among a whole community overawed by the flotilla of grand iron ships, many still with sail rigs, on an ocean while glimmered bluer than scarcely any American there had ever seen. Two days later, the Marines would finally get the action they craved – but it was only action they could watch. Belching black smoke from her funnels, the German armoured warship Oldenburg surged over the horizon and the battleship Florida moved to engage. The German turned hard to port to bring her 10 inch guns to bear, but created a greater profile for Florida to target. As the growing crowd of Marines and civilians watched excitedly, Oldenburg fired once only to gain the spectacle of water splashing up in front of the charging Florida. The American fired back, and two shells slammed into the German’s side. Wounded, she tried to turn away but flames were licking all over from within and her captain instead directed the stricken vessel to beach herself at Swakopmund. The Marines on the beach soon had to run as the burning vessel came right for them, her steel bow ploughing into the sand and an intense screeching coming from her body, like a braking freight train, as Oldenburg tore into the beach and came to a rest, still ablaze, her rear half still in the water to be tickled by the cresting white waves. German sailors leaped onto the sand, others into the water to swim the few paces ashore. They watched in despair as the black silhouettes of American soldiers appeared on the beach, moving in a disorganised rush towards them. A few German sailors, soaked from head to toe, stumbled out of the water and tried to shake the hands of the Americans for their honourable defeat. Meanwhile, Oldenburg kept on burning.

The Marines could hardly have known that at that very moment, President Cleveland was standing before a delighted Congress to declare that the liberation of Namibia was the beginning of America’s new mission in the world; “the liberation of all people in all places.” His aides had tried to tone down the language, and that particular phrase had actually been removed at the last moment by Cleveland’s speechwriter. When the President realised as he read from it, he simply improvised it back in and birthed one of the great American moments. Cleveland appealed to the same American spirit which had brought almost all of the North American continent under the Stars and Stripes; at that very moment explorers were surveying some of the most remote parts of what had long ago been called Rupert’s Land. The speech was a moment that Europe watched with trepidation. France and Britain had been content to let the German-American War rage, both having been slowly coming to the realisation that there might not be enough room in Europe for three great powers. If America wanted to cut Germany down to size, they were happy to let her. But President Cleveland’s language was incendiary as far as all European empires were concerned. Was America planning on “liberating” their empires too? She was about to strip Namibia from Germany and had already wrestled away all her hard-won (or hard-bought in the case of what had once been Spanish) possessions in the Pacific. Now in some quarters there was even talk of revolution on the streets of Vienna, the German capital.

A few months later, on June 7th, the Treaty of the Hague would see Germany accept the independence of Namibia as a U.S. protectorate while German New Guinea, Palau, the Caroline Islands, Nauru, and the Marshall Islands would all become U.S. territories. Back in Germany the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was beside himself. The German Empire was, for all intents and purposes, gone after just a few years. It was a humiliation from which he could not recover. Nor, it seemed, could his bodyguards. One, Adolph Schneider, shot him in the back of the head as he retired to his study on June 10th. As the news of the killing spread, rioting erupted in the streets. The unrest was an expression of the German people’s horror at what had befallen their nation; they had been humbled, humiliated, by the Americans. “The world laughs at us,” cried the soon-to-be Maximilian I. When on December 7th, Maximilian took to the throne it was seen by some as a chance for Germany to start again. The new Kaiser hoped so too. But the only way that could happen would be if Europe, not just Germany, recognised the danger posed by America. Speaking to the French Ambassador two days after his coronation he said, “everything we could do to each other, they could do a thousand times worse.” A coalition was needed, he said. One that would ensure the Americans wouldn’t dare interfere in the grand European empires. Who were these Americans, anyway, to tell the enlightened centre of civilisation how it should behave? He asked the same question to John Sherman, who succeeded Cleveland in 1893. “We are the New World,” the 21st President replied. “Your betters in every way.”

- R. Wang, The Greatest Nation on Earth?, p.148.
 
2.

“While much of imperial Europe was in 1890 adjusting itself to the new reality of American power by preparing to face it with swords drawn, the greatest of empires was dithering. The British Empire was in its heyday, a heyday that many civil servants were raising glasses to America to thank it for saving. Indeed at a dinner a few days after the Treaty of the Hague, Queen Victoria herself remarked that the situation seemed to have turned out quite well for Britain. Her Prime Minister was not so sure.

In the twilight of his premiership, Lord Churchill was fighting regular bouts with syphilis but still found the time to deliver one of his regular grandiose speeches to the House in which he warned that the “formidable republic is not a state with whom enmity should be so readily acquired.” He urged a strong line against America but, crucially, not so quite as strong as to declare the United States an enemy. Had the U.S. not just dealt a killer blow to the German Empire, an empire that many in the Foreign Office had thought would one day threaten to overtake even Britain? Churchill was practically gleeful at the prospect that the U.S. could prove useful to maintaining British global pre-eminence, by keeping the other empires in line. So it was that a “third way” was born, which was to dictate British foreign policy from 1890 onwards. Accepting the new reality of American power, Britain would not try to directly challenge it but rather offer itself as the moderate, friendly European state that the Americans could perhaps rely on. In the process it could play the Europeans and Americans off against each other, and Europe’s other great empire – France – could be kept in check. Already, Paris was mobilising its cheque books to begin a naval expansion in defence of her Caribbean colonies; Martinique, Guadeloupe, and others were to become the front line of a growing arms race. Spain, though in terminal decline, hoped to cling onto what little she had left in the Americas too and was finding common cause with the French.

This process of coalition-building in Europe did not happen overnight. Centuries of suspicion and hostility still lingered. The 1890s were a time for Europe to gradually re-assess its situation. It was clear to even an amateur student of history that the United States would not tire of expansion once it hit the Pacific. Thirteen small colonies on the eastern coast had turned into a vast federation stretching to the Pacific and now scattered oceanic islands in the west, the 25th parallel in the south, and the Yucatan even further than that after the 1882 intervention to end the Caste War, to the most remote of tundra at the top of the vast North West Territory. It was seemingly increasingly likely that Canada and Quebec would soon be incorporated too, while the U.S. had already entrenched itself into the Caribbean with the annexation of Santo Domingo in 1872. What would come next? The Spanish were particularly anxious about the fate of Cuba and Puerto Rico, which were already teetering amid the decline in Spanish power. France was entirely willing to throw herself into helping the Spanish, fearful that if Spain was expelled from the Caribbean then the Americans might get a taste for aggressively enforcing the Monroe Doctrine and turn on the French colonies too.

While France and Spain were drawing up plans for some form of mutual assistance in the Caribbean, Britain was doing something rather different. When Lord Churchill retired in 1892 his successor, Lord Verwood, practically begged the Foreign Office to find Britain a way to make a grand signal to the United States to demonstrate its willingness to be friends. The British had recognised early that a great power was in the making, and so it was that the big symbol came in 1894 with the Treaty of Vancouver. The United States would purchase the Crown Colony of British Columbia, with Vancouver Island remaining under British sovereignty, for $3 an acre. The $700 million purchase was thought too generous by many in Britain, and was enough to trigger Lord Verwood’s downfall and the return of the Liberals to power in 1896, and the same was true in America; it is one of the great enduring myths of American history that the Columbia Purchase was received poorly by the American public. In fact it easily passed through the Senate, thought vital to enhancing American trade and power in the Pacific, though the continued British administration of Vancouver Island – which continues to this day – was controversial as by 1896 one of the Royal Navy’s largest bases was under construction there. Nevertheless, as part of independence celebrations on July 4th, 1895 the Territory of Columbia came into being. The last British colony on the North American mainland was gone.

For some Americans, the Columbia Purchase represented the beginning of the end of what had come to be called Manifest Destiny. After all, North America was nearly united under the Stars and Stripes. Some wanted a drive south all the way to the Panama Isthmus; one congressman even presented a proposal to go as far as Tierra del Fuego, which wasn’t dignified with a response from the White House. But all of this reflected a hunger, a deep longing for “completion” of the American project. What this meant varied depending on who you asked, but it certainly involved Canada and Quebec. Statehood for them someday seemed like a foregone conclusion, though this was much more the case amongst Republicans than Democrats; the appetite in both Dominions was for protectionism, meaning they were certain future Republican states. Never mind that the residents might have some loyalty to Britain. All this talk of expansion was a symptom of the maturing of American nationalism; Americans thought themselves above such imperialist European concepts, but the simple fact was that Manifest Destiny was a nationalist project. “From sea to sea, from pole to pole,” read the motto of the American Expansion Society, whose president Clayton Williams would tell anyone who listened that the British Isles were “perfect candidates” for statehood.

President Sherman believed in expansion, but not for its own sake and he admitted in his memoirs that he worried about what a future president might drag the country into in order to satisfy the hungry of the more fanatical expansionists. Russian America was an obvious possibility, and Sherman had foreseen the likelihood of future war scares with Russia fuelled by the newspapers and the expansionists in Congress. How dare a repressive European monarch hold territory in the New World? Sherman hoped to do what he could to prevent the inevitable. So it was that in his 1895 State of the Union address he outlined the Sherman Doctrine; that the United States reserved the right to act unilaterally against acts of repression by other states in the Western Hemisphere. It was a challenge to the European powers; behave in your colonies, or we’ll have all the reason we need to take them away. America certainly seemed to be punching above its weight, to challenge all of superpower Europe like that. But it was also a challenge to the ardent expansionists, making clear that such intervention couldn’t happen for its own sake and had to have genuine moral purpose. But for the Europeans the interpretation was that having tasted the wine of victory over Germany, the United States was finally laying down a definitive challenge. New World against the Old.

At the prime ministerial residence in Kensington Palace, gifted by Queen Victoria to Lord Churchill in 1884, Lord Verwood had been idly fretting about French plans. Telegrams seemed to arrive daily from Paris carrying probing questions that amounted to “are you with us or against us?” Britain just dug its heels in even deeper. When William Harcourt moved into Kensington Palace in the 1896 Liberal landslide, his party were happy to walk the tightrope between the two sides. “Let us wait and see what the French do,” said Harcourt. “One shouldn’t declare oneself when success is unclear.” Nevertheless, amid the increasing naval arms race in which the United States and France were participating, the Royal Navy could hardly pretend it wasn’t happening and British shipyards were soon just as hard at work. The Cold War between capitalism and communism was still many years away, but one between the Old World and the New had clearly arrived."

- Q. Nkrumah, The Old Empires: A History of Euro-American Relations, p.183.
 
3.

"President John Sherman was never hugely popular. The satirical cartoons in the newspapers often portrayed him as a hapless sea captain, desperately trying to persuade his ship – the Republican Party – away from driving itself onto rocks marked “expansion.” It was a cruel joke. But the Republican Party was by the closing years of the 1800s truly drunk on expansion; indeed, the growth of the Dallinger Club – formed at the Dallinger Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts – was becoming a particularly difficult force to grapple with. The Dallinger Club represented some of the most intense expansionists, or imperialists as Sherman and others called them, in frontline politics and their very presence made the Republican Party a laughing stock as far as many Democrats were concerned. The Democrats certainly needed ammunition against a Republican Party which had dominated American politics since the end of the Civil War; they were further handicapped by the fact that Reconstruction still ostensibly continued with Alabama only being fully reincorporated in 1887. Expansion had following the German-American War become one of the key issues in domestic politics, and Sherman dithered. He seemed unable to take a side – with his fellow Republicans and their ambitious talk of liberation, or with the Democrats and the message of calm, thoughtful process. The Sherman Doctrine had hardly satisfied the Dallinger Club; when in 1894 the Spanish were widely reported to have massacred political opponents in Cuba, a claim falsely trumped up by the nationalistic papers, the White House refused to respond and some Republicans discussed a third-party bid in Congress.

Sherman’s difficulties were compounded by recession in 1894; the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s had seen some of America’s finest days with substantial growth accompanying the nation’s expansion, but much depended on high international commodity prices. But as these prices rose even higher, much of it manufactured by the French, Spanish, and Germans introducing more hostile trade policies, the industrial heartlands of the Northeast and the agrarian Midwest were both hit hard. An extended recession and stagnation would rip through America from 1894. It would not be limited to the United States; with the recession limiting supply of American goods, combined with the continued artificially high commodity price, a bubble burst which rippled all throughout Europe as commodity prices fell everywhere to initiate the 1894-96 recession. It was this recession which brought the Liberals to a sweeping victory in Britain, widespread unrest in the wheat-dependent farmlands of northern France, and open fighting on the streets of Vienna. But surely most crucial was the Treaty of Santander in 1896 which created between France and Spain a common market for wheat, which had been particularly badly hit by the recession, to reduce competition and stabilise prices. It was an unprecedented act of cooperation and revealed the depth to which France and Spain were willing to work together if it would safeguard their Caribbean colonies. London watched anxiously, afraid that a triumvirate with Germany was taking shape, and in the days after the treaty was signed deployed an oversized naval squadron to Jamaica as a show of force to the Franco-Spanish axis which seemed to be forming.

Many Republicans insisted on a more forceful attitude to what some called a trade war, but again Sherman didn’t budget. His annual budgets had repeatedly increased naval expenditure but to many in his party this was just window dressing. Amid recession and a divided party, Sherman decided to announce in 1895 that he would not run for re-election. Instead the following year saw a Republican convention about as badly split as could be imagined; when the Dallinger Club member Walter Dobbins (R: NY) eventually failed to defeat Vice President Asa Bushnell after eight ballots, he stormed off into the night and the following day emerged at a press conference in Manhattan to announce he would run as an independent. President Sherman tried to talk him out of it with the famous “Dear Dobbins letter,” but the congressman instead held up the letter in front of supporters to gloat that even the President of the United States was afraid of him.

Vice President Bushnell was facing a shining star of the Democratic Party; William Bryan. An intellectual and oratorical heavyweight of his party and indeed of his time Bryan had, in his own words, “energy for years.” It was rather different to Bushnell, portrayed by the satirists as a meandering walrus, and Bryan is arguably just as famous for his campaign as he is for his later presidency; he invented modern campaigning, visiting every state in the union while Bushnell largely remained in and around Washington. Bryan seemed to be the candidate the Democratic Party needed; still internally riven by the question of equal rights for African-Americans, the extended period of Reconstruction had created an entrenched black voter base in the former Confederate states which voted, seemingly man-to-man, for the Republicans who had sponsored the Civil Rights Acts of 1874 and 1886. Efforts by Democratic legislatures in these states to reduce rights for the men some of them would be happy to see re-enslaved had been consistently crushed by the federal government, and the party was desperately trying to find its soul again. But there were two very different ideas of what shape that soul should take. Bryan, with his public intellectualism, oratorical brilliance, and moral crusading against lynching in the earlier part of the decade, was one ideal. Yet his very nomination demonstrated how internally riven the Democratic Party was; many Southern members came exceedingly close to supporting an aborted independent bid by Governor John Durham of Mississippi, who looked to resurrect the infamous Black Codes passed after the Civil War which had restricted the freedom of newly emancipated slaves.

The campaign itself ultimately did not see Negro rights feature heavily, though there was plenty of fury in the South. Bryan was helped by his opposition to tariffs, which had attracted much ire for the public mood was that protectionism had gotten America into this economic mess to begin with. Bushnell’s clumsy defence of tariffs, hit home with his foolish “tariffs can only do good” comments at a town hall in Brooklyn, had even some members of his own party breaking from him. Amid recession, foreign policy and expansionism ultimately factored little though both candidates were generally supportive of further expansion to fuel further economic growth. Bryan wisely stayed quiet about his wish to incorporate every territory as a state at some point. Bushnell also fought for the gold standard, which helped Bryan paint him as an enemy of the working man and crony for the rich; Bryan instead fought for silver. His appeal was enough amongst poor farmers that the Populist Party didn’t run a candidate, instead endorsing him and sparing him the guaranteed loss of at least several percentage points from his share of the popular vote.

William Bryan won. The recession was bad enough in some areas that New Jersey flipped, narrowly, to the Labor Party. Black voters in the south seemed, unsurprisingly, unwilling to place their trust in a Democrat and their solid Republican support remained while many of the more anti-civil rights Democrats stayed at home or voted for the Populists. The vote being split so many ways saw the Democrats actually manage to sweep the South for the first time since before Reconstruction, while the industrial states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan all fell into the Democratic lap. The most recently admitted states, “acquired” from Mexico – Yucatan, Jefferson, and Franklin – all went Republican. Walter Dobbins, in a pattern so familiar for third parties in America, was the keystone to Vice President Bushnell’s failure. In some reliably Republican states like Illinois or Indiana, Dobbins nearly matched Bushnell’s vote. The result was that William Bryan overwhelmed both, and would be the 22nd President of the United States.

The Third Party System was dead. The Fourth Party System was painted as rich versus poor; for the Democrats came the suffering industrial workers and poor farmers, while businessmen, professionals, African-Americans and prosperous farmers turned out for the Republicans. It was a flimsier victory than Bryan would have liked; he knew were it a straight contest between he and the Vice President, he would have lost. But he did not, and he intended to shape America in the image he desired."

F. Phillips, A History of American Elections, p.87.
 
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What a surprisingly great TL. Keep it up, dude.

Such a shame about Bismarck, though. I thought he could have come with a better outcome for Germany, as he was never really found of colonization and it just hurted the country overall.
 
What a surprisingly great TL. Keep it up, dude.

Such a shame about Bismarck, though. I thought he could have come with a better outcome for Germany, as he was never really found of colonization and it just hurted the country overall.

I do think I'll provide a chapter giving some insight into how Bismarck's career went different; one of several PoD's here is that Austria, not Prussia, came to dominate Germany (hence Vienna being the capital) and yet so too did Bismarck.
 
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