It might be interesting to see a situation where Brazil is dominant in South America but there is *always* the Spanish/Portuguese language divide that keeps the rest of South America in some way separated. I *doubt* that even if Brazil does as much as it can, could bring Portuguese to language dominance beyond OTL Uruguay and *maybe* Paraguay. (If Spanish falls in Bolivia, Quecha(sp?) might become dominant.
Cinco de Mayo
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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Good analysis. Beyond Benny the Moose staying in the PSI and eventually being crushed by a circus elephant (at the suggestion of @LordVorKon ) I don’t have quite everything mapped out yet for Italian postwar politics, but your thinking closely mirrors my own, which opens all kinds of cans of worms. Suggestions welcome here of course!
More or less, yeah, and add in Asia as another clusterfuck of competition and subterfuge too
Which of course is a divide that would redound to the benefit of Mexico, Argentina and even Spain…
As of today, 10/18/2022, I do not plan on Germany Anschlussing Austria, a set of events that had to go precisely correct to happen IOTL, after all.
Partially because I want to toy around with the idea of more uniquely crackpot European regimes in the 20th century and “Austrofascist neo-Luegerism/Alpine integralism” is a much more interesting hook to me than yet another TL where Germany absorbs Austria, and also because the Junkers were not huge fans of absorbing more Catholics who would just be rigid Zentrum voters, and also because AH’s fate will fall well short of Versailles/Trianon in terms of its harshness
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well otl brazil has paraguay in the sphere of influence, i don't see how ttl brazil (which is much stronger and more organized) could not achieve the same. Mercosur was supposed to be a co-sphere of influence between Brazil and Argentina, but ended up basically becoming a sphere of Brazil. I think it is likely that the USA controls North America and is in dispute with Mexico for control of the countries of Great Colombia (Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela). These are countries that, apart from the recent relationship with venezuela in otl, were ignored by brazil (the only problem at the moment is the fact that brazil and colombia do not recognize the edge of each other's territory in the amazon). Brazil is so far removed from the rest of the world that the country can ignore much of the world. One region that I see Brazil getting involved in the future is Africa due to proximity (through Angola for example). But other than that, I don't see Brazil interfering in Europe or Asia. a bigger and better relationship with japan perhaps. It is the country with the most Japanese descendants.
With all the debacles that entails, especially in the SEA region
I’d say this is largely correct
So i'm guessing a smaller Austria-Hungary or some other sort of Hapsburg-continuation state will exist and may or may not be a basket case full of fascists, integralists and outright loonies who froth at the mouth at the mere mention of Germany?
Honestly I think that a regime led by someone like Dollfuss or Schuschnigg would be more likely than Anschluss. The Austrian fascists might be a problem but nowhere nearly as a big as they were IOTL when they destabilized the country. The regime will probably have a Luegerian/integralist flavor as you indicated and that might help to keep the fascists at bay.
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It is also important to note that the relationship between AH and Germany is different. IOTL I always felt there was a much stronger shared German nationalism. But in this case Austria would be more likely to have a grudge against and thus oppose union with Germany
🤐🤐🤐🤐
(You’re on the right track though)
I will say though that I personally think my solution to “prevent the total collapse of the Habsburg realms without the AH continuation cliches” is somewhat novel, but it won’t be reforms initiated internally by the Habs
Absolutely. Might not necessarily been Dollfuss, since he very much was just the guy left standing with a chair when the music ended, but somebody similar like Starhemberg would not be unlikely
Big part of my thinking here too is that an Austria that just went to war with Germany for the second time in half a century and views Berlin as responsible for its decline and defenestration is a much different beast than an Austria that was supported by Berlin to the hilt over Serbia and the Balkans
Hell at Sea: The Naval Campaigns of the Great American War
"...Mayo's advantage compared to his peers, and the reason why he was recommended to President Hughes to be in charge of Pacific Command, was that he had served at length in the Chilean-American War as a junior officer and taken part in the Battle of the Magellan Strait; a conflict in the Pacific was personal to him, which a number of his comrades being lost to the freezing July waters off the Southern Cone nearly thirty years prior. In much the way that Admiral Sims in the Atlantic was regarded as deliberate and well-connected diplomatically, crucial for dealing with potential encounters with European navies, Henry Mayo was seen as aggressive and unrelenting and his dedication to prosecuting a war in the Pacific with no mercy was to his credit. His belligerent but well-argued memoranda throughout October of 1913 to his superiors and his and their staff officers became the basis of the "Chile First Policy" implemented the following month, and even before that strategic policy was formally promulgated by Hughes and Naval Secretary Ballinger in internal communications, Mayo was preparing for vengeance. [1]
Mayo, once at Pacific Command in San Francisco, had considerably fewer resources at his disposal than Sims across the continent. The Far East Squadron was still steaming back from Port Hamilton and Guam, which left them vulnerable to interdiction, and the Isthmian Squadron was effectively pinned back in the Gulf of Fonseca by Mexican and, soon, Chilean vessels that did not engage them directly but threatened their attempted escapes. Much of the South Pacific Squadron now lay at the bottom of Chimbote Bay, and the forces assigned to the Pacific had always dramatically lacked the firepower of their Atlantic comrades. Mayo was also boxed in by cadres of Naval command that remembered Chilean raids in 1885 against West Coast ports and shipping and who wanted to first prioritize convoying and coastal defense, which would leave Nicaragua further unguarded.
Though well aware of the limitations of his resources and equally aware that reinforcements around the Horn would be rare to nonexistant, Mayo nonetheless regarded this line of thinking as the same navel-gazing defeatism and small-bore bureaucratic nonsense that had left the Confederacy occupying Washington and Baltimore and marching on Harrisburg, and perhaps Philadelphia, next. Mayo immediately fired much of Pacific Command's career staff and installed his own preferred officers, and created three squadrons of vessels inclusive of the ships in Nicaragua's western ports. The first priority of the I Squadron, comprising ships in San Diego, would be to deny Chile and Mexico harbors close to the United States. Within weeks of taking command in San Francisco, Marines had set ashore and captured Ensenada, Magdalena Bay, and the small fishing harbor at Cape San Lucas, with batteries established to fend off Mexican reinforcements. The port at Mazatlan was aggressively bombarded to draw Mexico's Pacific Fleet north, and Mayo requested more resources and materiel be diverted to shipyards in San Francisco Bay and the Puget Sound to more aggressively build attack vessels for his use. Chimbote Bay, it was apparent, was not going to go unanswered for long..."
- Hell at Sea: The Naval Campaigns of the Great American War
[1] Henry T. Mayo was, in fact, a very infamously aggressive attack dog of an admiral (responsible for OTL's Tampico Incident), and that's precisely who you want to send out tosink Chile's fleet develop a coherent strategy for placing the enemy on the back foot and regaining strategic initiative
Mayo, once at Pacific Command in San Francisco, had considerably fewer resources at his disposal than Sims across the continent. The Far East Squadron was still steaming back from Port Hamilton and Guam, which left them vulnerable to interdiction, and the Isthmian Squadron was effectively pinned back in the Gulf of Fonseca by Mexican and, soon, Chilean vessels that did not engage them directly but threatened their attempted escapes. Much of the South Pacific Squadron now lay at the bottom of Chimbote Bay, and the forces assigned to the Pacific had always dramatically lacked the firepower of their Atlantic comrades. Mayo was also boxed in by cadres of Naval command that remembered Chilean raids in 1885 against West Coast ports and shipping and who wanted to first prioritize convoying and coastal defense, which would leave Nicaragua further unguarded.
Though well aware of the limitations of his resources and equally aware that reinforcements around the Horn would be rare to nonexistant, Mayo nonetheless regarded this line of thinking as the same navel-gazing defeatism and small-bore bureaucratic nonsense that had left the Confederacy occupying Washington and Baltimore and marching on Harrisburg, and perhaps Philadelphia, next. Mayo immediately fired much of Pacific Command's career staff and installed his own preferred officers, and created three squadrons of vessels inclusive of the ships in Nicaragua's western ports. The first priority of the I Squadron, comprising ships in San Diego, would be to deny Chile and Mexico harbors close to the United States. Within weeks of taking command in San Francisco, Marines had set ashore and captured Ensenada, Magdalena Bay, and the small fishing harbor at Cape San Lucas, with batteries established to fend off Mexican reinforcements. The port at Mazatlan was aggressively bombarded to draw Mexico's Pacific Fleet north, and Mayo requested more resources and materiel be diverted to shipyards in San Francisco Bay and the Puget Sound to more aggressively build attack vessels for his use. Chimbote Bay, it was apparent, was not going to go unanswered for long..."
- Hell at Sea: The Naval Campaigns of the Great American War
[1] Henry T. Mayo was, in fact, a very infamously aggressive attack dog of an admiral (responsible for OTL's Tampico Incident), and that's precisely who you want to send out to
I think you got sanguine mixed up with one of the other humors. Keep it coming, you've got a good thing going!
Ayyyyyy
Sanguine as in “realistic, reserved”
Though perhaps I’m using it wrong?
Now we just need to develop the cloning technology in order to make four more of him.
Did Mexico leave Magdalena Bay undefended? If so that was pretty foolish considering Chile was able to use it to attack the Americans without Mexico knowing about it.
American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes
"...save for the absolute leftmost flank of the socialist movement - and even then, a minority of that political persuasion - there was no real antiwar position to speak of. The Confederacy was the clear aggressor and not only occupied American territory but in the span of less than a month committed grievous atrocities against two major American cities and their citizenry. The Senate voted unanimously in favor of war when it reconvened in Philadelphia, and even William Jennings Bryan, though no longer a Senator and perhaps the most ferocious critic of the Hughes administration's agenda, called for "a consolidation of the national spirit and the Republic's full energy behind the expulsion of the Southron from our soil." Hughes had not intended to be a war President - indeed, part of his program for voters in the previous autumn that now felt like an eternity ago had been that he, rather than the more unpredictable Hearst, would be a steadier hand in handling the Confederacy [1] - but a war President he was, and that would require a response.
Despite all that, beneath the overwhelming unanimity of public outrage towards Richmond, there was a variety of opinion on how exactly to proceed. "Every man today is a war hawk," wrote Senator George Turner of Washington - the powerful and influential chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the President pro tem of the Senate - in a public essay, "but some are mere hatchlings." At one polar extreme was what Root came to term the "irreconcilables," led by Lodge and a hardened cadre of New Englanders and Philadelphians who made up the right wing of the Liberal Party and also the most ardently anti-Confederate politicians going back to the turn of the century. These were the men who had doubted Hughes' ascendancy to control of the party apparatus - Lodge had privately dismissed the President as "Hearst with whiskers" in his domestic compromises with Democrats and an "invertebrate" in his dealings with Hoke Smith at Niagara - and, as Yankee abolitionists, saw the war in raw ideological terms and indeed a civilizational struggle. Lodge, in an address in Trenton shortly after the fall of Baltimore, declared, "The moment is at hand to rid the world of the most vile, savage and evil regime that has ever plagued its face," and the bloodshed to come was justified largely through that lens. Though most Irreconcilables couched their anger in softer terms, they would to the man largely not be satisfied until the US Army had not only thrown the Confederacy from American soil but marched out to the very tip of Florida and freed every slave along the way.
At the other end of the spectrum, a few notches right of the IWW that was unable to see past its "pacifism at any price" position, was a multipartisan agglomeration of Congressmen and Senators from the Midwest, Plains and even Mountain West who could see the situation spiraling out of control with the entrance of three Latin powers into the conflict [2] and advocated for the ejection of the Confederacy from American territory and then pressing for terms once the United States had won a victory or two. This position included not just influential and ascendant Socialists such as Victor Berger, with whom the idea behind the so-called "Hatchlings" came to largely be associated, but also Democrats such as future Senate Majority Leader George Hodges of Kansas and Wisconsin's chief Liberal potentate, Robert La Follette. In their view, a defensive war was just, but the position of the Irreconcilables was overzealous and would cause billions in unnecessary damages and cause millions of lives to leave North America a desolate wasteland. Though outside the Senate, Bryan still commanded some respect and influence, and was perhaps the loudest and most charismatic exponent of this view.
The largest bloc landed somewhere in between these two positions and included the bulk of Congressional leadership, from Speaker Mann and Minority Leader Clark in the House to chief and key Senators of both parties, most importantly Turner and Majority Leader Kern. The view of this large cross-partisan majority was that the Confederacy should be ejected, and then humiliated, repeatedly, but the door left open to terms every step of the way if they were not unfavorable, such as the insulting secret offer made through Canadian interlocutors by Confederate agents shortly after Baltimore fell and which were rejected immediately. Hughes was himself favorable to this view, as was Root, and the "Axis Address" should be understood first and foremost as being an effort to publicly synthesize and distill this view as the stance of both the administration and the vast majority of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, for the citizenry's consumption.
The speech that largely defined Hughes' career and has come to be seen as an essential moment of Presidential oratory has lost much of its contemporary context. Hughes gave it on the steps of Independence Hall as much to draw on the symbolism of the American Revolution and cast the Great American War as its natural successor conflict ideologically as he did because no President had directly addressed Congress in over a century and he did not plan to break that precedent, [3] and also he needed space for dignitaries and journalists that several other sites in Philadelphia did not provide. Contrary to the understanding of the address today as a rallying cry, it was just as much an outlining of government policy as it was an emotional appeal to an angered nation. At the time he gave it his Presidency looked like a failed humiliation that had fled the burning capital, and contrary to pop history it was not the Axis Address but tangible victories on the Susquehanna and at Tucson, followed by the Kentucky Offensive in the spring, that turned around the fortunes and reputation of Charles Evans Hughes. He was never a talented orator, but at that moment he said what the country needed to hear; and though the twenty-five minute, two-thousand word speech is today remembered as an optimistic paean to American liberal idealism and a defense of the "unrealized principles of the revolution of 1776," it had some fairly bloodthirsty moments that promised not reconciliation but vengeance.
The address drew its name from Hughes description of the stakes: "At this moment, a bloc has formed that declares war on all we hold dear; a bloc of monarchy, of tyranny, of slavery. This force seeks to not just arrest but perhaps undo the social and economic progress made by this Republic and others in the past century, progress made towards the promise of the revolutionaries of both continents of this Hemisphere a hundred years ago, a promise it falls upon our generation to keep. Standing against this advancing column of treachery is an axis of liberty that extends from the banks of the St. Lawrence to far southern plains of Patagonia; an axis around which the project of democracy, freedom, and opportunity revolves and which our enemy seeks to break asunder."
This, along with other allusions to the "unfilled hope of 1776 and the more perfect Union we have sought to build in the shadow of that promise," is the most famous quote from this speech historically, but newspapers of the time focused on a different section since largely forgotten (or perhaps ignored) - that being Hughes' declaration: "Let us not be mistaken of the cost of the struggle ahead, of the price we will pay for our liberty. As Thomas Jefferson said, the tree of liberty is watered by the blood of patriots; but let it also be clear that the tree of our generation's liberty from threat of coercion, extortion and subversion by the Confederate States will be watered with the blood of Confederate soldiers, as we drive them back into the cottonfields from which they came. Let it also be clear, my fellow citizens, that we will never once withdraw the hand of friendship to any who will seize it - but that the hand of friendship when swatted away may form a fist, and though we desire peace, let it be clear that for every drop of blood drawn from us, ten shall be in turn spilled from them..."" [4][5]
- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes
[1] Whoops! Though to be fair, the Confederacy's choices led us to this point, regardless of what Hearst, Hughes or any other hypothetical US President of either party may have done
[2] Centro is not exactly a "power"
[3] I don't know when exactly I'll bring back spoken SOTUs before a joint session, but it won't be in the 1910s as IOTL
[4] My feeble attempt at "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with one drawn by the sword." Lincoln's second inaugural was not exactly the Kumbaya historians often make it out to be, and that's the parallel - that and Gettysburg - I'm endeavoring to draw here
[5] As an addendum, historiography - especially American historiography - is replete with things getting papered over or desensitized. What we're shooting for here is pop history basically taking Hughes channeling the very real rage of the American people to give a speech where he basically goes "you fucked around, now you're about to find out" and somehow only remember the part where he talks about freedom and liberal idealism and peace and happiness and Mom's apple pie and so on
Despite all that, beneath the overwhelming unanimity of public outrage towards Richmond, there was a variety of opinion on how exactly to proceed. "Every man today is a war hawk," wrote Senator George Turner of Washington - the powerful and influential chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the President pro tem of the Senate - in a public essay, "but some are mere hatchlings." At one polar extreme was what Root came to term the "irreconcilables," led by Lodge and a hardened cadre of New Englanders and Philadelphians who made up the right wing of the Liberal Party and also the most ardently anti-Confederate politicians going back to the turn of the century. These were the men who had doubted Hughes' ascendancy to control of the party apparatus - Lodge had privately dismissed the President as "Hearst with whiskers" in his domestic compromises with Democrats and an "invertebrate" in his dealings with Hoke Smith at Niagara - and, as Yankee abolitionists, saw the war in raw ideological terms and indeed a civilizational struggle. Lodge, in an address in Trenton shortly after the fall of Baltimore, declared, "The moment is at hand to rid the world of the most vile, savage and evil regime that has ever plagued its face," and the bloodshed to come was justified largely through that lens. Though most Irreconcilables couched their anger in softer terms, they would to the man largely not be satisfied until the US Army had not only thrown the Confederacy from American soil but marched out to the very tip of Florida and freed every slave along the way.
At the other end of the spectrum, a few notches right of the IWW that was unable to see past its "pacifism at any price" position, was a multipartisan agglomeration of Congressmen and Senators from the Midwest, Plains and even Mountain West who could see the situation spiraling out of control with the entrance of three Latin powers into the conflict [2] and advocated for the ejection of the Confederacy from American territory and then pressing for terms once the United States had won a victory or two. This position included not just influential and ascendant Socialists such as Victor Berger, with whom the idea behind the so-called "Hatchlings" came to largely be associated, but also Democrats such as future Senate Majority Leader George Hodges of Kansas and Wisconsin's chief Liberal potentate, Robert La Follette. In their view, a defensive war was just, but the position of the Irreconcilables was overzealous and would cause billions in unnecessary damages and cause millions of lives to leave North America a desolate wasteland. Though outside the Senate, Bryan still commanded some respect and influence, and was perhaps the loudest and most charismatic exponent of this view.
The largest bloc landed somewhere in between these two positions and included the bulk of Congressional leadership, from Speaker Mann and Minority Leader Clark in the House to chief and key Senators of both parties, most importantly Turner and Majority Leader Kern. The view of this large cross-partisan majority was that the Confederacy should be ejected, and then humiliated, repeatedly, but the door left open to terms every step of the way if they were not unfavorable, such as the insulting secret offer made through Canadian interlocutors by Confederate agents shortly after Baltimore fell and which were rejected immediately. Hughes was himself favorable to this view, as was Root, and the "Axis Address" should be understood first and foremost as being an effort to publicly synthesize and distill this view as the stance of both the administration and the vast majority of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, for the citizenry's consumption.
The speech that largely defined Hughes' career and has come to be seen as an essential moment of Presidential oratory has lost much of its contemporary context. Hughes gave it on the steps of Independence Hall as much to draw on the symbolism of the American Revolution and cast the Great American War as its natural successor conflict ideologically as he did because no President had directly addressed Congress in over a century and he did not plan to break that precedent, [3] and also he needed space for dignitaries and journalists that several other sites in Philadelphia did not provide. Contrary to the understanding of the address today as a rallying cry, it was just as much an outlining of government policy as it was an emotional appeal to an angered nation. At the time he gave it his Presidency looked like a failed humiliation that had fled the burning capital, and contrary to pop history it was not the Axis Address but tangible victories on the Susquehanna and at Tucson, followed by the Kentucky Offensive in the spring, that turned around the fortunes and reputation of Charles Evans Hughes. He was never a talented orator, but at that moment he said what the country needed to hear; and though the twenty-five minute, two-thousand word speech is today remembered as an optimistic paean to American liberal idealism and a defense of the "unrealized principles of the revolution of 1776," it had some fairly bloodthirsty moments that promised not reconciliation but vengeance.
The address drew its name from Hughes description of the stakes: "At this moment, a bloc has formed that declares war on all we hold dear; a bloc of monarchy, of tyranny, of slavery. This force seeks to not just arrest but perhaps undo the social and economic progress made by this Republic and others in the past century, progress made towards the promise of the revolutionaries of both continents of this Hemisphere a hundred years ago, a promise it falls upon our generation to keep. Standing against this advancing column of treachery is an axis of liberty that extends from the banks of the St. Lawrence to far southern plains of Patagonia; an axis around which the project of democracy, freedom, and opportunity revolves and which our enemy seeks to break asunder."
This, along with other allusions to the "unfilled hope of 1776 and the more perfect Union we have sought to build in the shadow of that promise," is the most famous quote from this speech historically, but newspapers of the time focused on a different section since largely forgotten (or perhaps ignored) - that being Hughes' declaration: "Let us not be mistaken of the cost of the struggle ahead, of the price we will pay for our liberty. As Thomas Jefferson said, the tree of liberty is watered by the blood of patriots; but let it also be clear that the tree of our generation's liberty from threat of coercion, extortion and subversion by the Confederate States will be watered with the blood of Confederate soldiers, as we drive them back into the cottonfields from which they came. Let it also be clear, my fellow citizens, that we will never once withdraw the hand of friendship to any who will seize it - but that the hand of friendship when swatted away may form a fist, and though we desire peace, let it be clear that for every drop of blood drawn from us, ten shall be in turn spilled from them..."" [4][5]
- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes
[1] Whoops! Though to be fair, the Confederacy's choices led us to this point, regardless of what Hearst, Hughes or any other hypothetical US President of either party may have done
[2] Centro is not exactly a "power"
[3] I don't know when exactly I'll bring back spoken SOTUs before a joint session, but it won't be in the 1910s as IOTL
[4] My feeble attempt at "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with one drawn by the sword." Lincoln's second inaugural was not exactly the Kumbaya historians often make it out to be, and that's the parallel - that and Gettysburg - I'm endeavoring to draw here
[5] As an addendum, historiography - especially American historiography - is replete with things getting papered over or desensitized. What we're shooting for here is pop history basically taking Hughes channeling the very real rage of the American people to give a speech where he basically goes "you fucked around, now you're about to find out" and somehow only remember the part where he talks about freedom and liberal idealism and peace and happiness and Mom's apple pie and so on
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Yeah, Mexico has been fumbling a lot during the early stages of the war. Not a good look for them.
Beautiful made me shed a tear with how patriotic this speech is. No wonder the Liberal Party keeps on winning.
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