Cinco de Mayo
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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The country. They're getting a bit too big for their britches and need to be taken down a peg.The country....or the author? š¤Ø
Thanks! āMarch of Timeā was definitely an influence in how I approached the 1905 eruption even if it goes in a radically different direction. Im excited to see what postwar Sweden looks like there!
Yeah, its hard to overstate to what extent Sweden basically rolled sixes for an entire century in contrast to basically not just every other European country but maybe even every other country on earth. Sitting out two World Wars, punching well above their weight class culturally, the only real hardship encountered was Palmeās freak assassination followed by the 1990s economic crisis that went way better for them than our friends to the East (Finland and the Soviet Bloc)ā¦ basically nothing bad or that could cause a major setback happened to Sweden between 1914 and the present and theyāve somehow managed to more or less make good choices at every junction. Hugely implausible string of events that actually happened. Its unreal.
(Norway of course is a petrostate so they get to play on easy mode, but before oil it was the sad unloved stepchild of Scandinavia)
When Norway was about to start the off-shore drilling thing and as you wrote propbably the poorest of the Scandinavians, they made an offer to Sweden to join them despite them all being in Norwegian waters, share the costs, share the profits. Refusing that offer seems like a big mistake to me, one not even requiring the benefit of hindsight to not make. Just less influence from Enviromentalists and other "Profits = Evil" groups. Without this screwup Sweden - not to mention it's welfare state - would be playing it a lot easier.
Cant say I knew that story, but woof, talk about a missed opportunity. Especially since there were a lot of ways Swedenās post-1994 economic boom could have gone awry; wrong policies during the crisis (a la Finland, which had a severe depression 1990-93), Ericsson or Electrolux going the way of Swedenās shipbuilding industry, Volvo going kaput, the tech industry not being attracted ro Stockholmā¦
It does give me an interesting idea though. Since Sweden and Norway will be much more attached at the hip ITTL and both states being more conservative you probably wont see a similar mistake made. Could drive Swedenās GDP per cap close to OTL levels!
I have been reading this thread for the first time and thus far it's quite creative and interesting. I really applaud your efforts to try to find butterflies where you can find them and avoid steering history too much in the direction you want to go in. However, and if this (on page 53) has already been raised you may ignore me (I couldn't find whether it had been) this is very wrong, for the same reason the Nassaus only inherited Luxembourg rather than the Netherlands IOTL when the main branch died out: Luxembourg and the Netherlands had different succession laws. Both were governed by semi-Salic succession, but Luxembourg, which had been acquired by William I of the Netherlands as a replacement for the original Nassau lands in the Holy Roman Empire, was governed by the family treaty between the senior and junior branches of the House of Nassau. When the junior branch died out with William III's death in 1890, under Salic Law, Luxembourg was transferred to the senior branch and Adolph of Nassau became Grand Duke. However, the Netherlands was governed by Wilhelmina because Salic Law in the Netherlands only went back to William I, who after all was the first king of the Netherlands. As such, even if in this scenario William III's sons succeed to the throne and then die without children, the throne would simply pass to William III's sister and her offspring (who were indeed treated as Wilhelmina's heirs IOTL until the birth of her own daughter) and after that to the descendants of William III's uncle (who did have a daughter though no sons) and aunt.
Thank you so much for reading!
Well, shoot. Sounds then like the likeliest King of the Netherlands in 1914 would be this guy, William Ernest of Saxe-Weimar, no? So it'd still be male-preference primogeniture if he had living male heirs, it sounds like.
Sweden has the same GDP per capita as OTL, but it suffers from rural underinvestment and persistent inequality, an interesting contrast.
And a considerably smaller cultural footprint overseas, and without all its dynamic international star firms, and suffers from Dutch Disease with all its oil money and raw resource export-dependent economy
A Game in the Shadows: Diplomacy, Espionage and Subterfuge in the Great American War
"...unique work. Even more, Yardley was as abrasive as he was innovative and viewed his role as naturally leading itself to pushing boundaries; it was for this reason that he infamously found himself in a bad feud with future Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who considered cryptography as ungentlemanly outside of war and often considered what the Black Chamber got up to as little better than "snooping through the mail." [1]
Considering the institutional forces both military and civilian that held the young rulebreaker in contempt, that Yardley was able to get his Cipher Bureau up and running and the impact it had on the war is frankly remarkable and borders on utterly implausible. The Black Chamber would have been little more than a curiosity at the War Department had it not been for the famous Durand Intercept, in which Yardley's chief lieutenant, William George Durand, decoded a Confederate radio transmission in less than three days in early February. The Durand Intercept revealed a valuable piece of information - the schedule on which the Confederacy would be rotating their troops away from the front to be replaced by fresh divisions bolstered by newly-trained and equipped recruits. While several regiments were replaced on a staggered schedule before then, between March 24th and 26th the largest rotation of soldiers would be occurring since the failed Susquehanna Offensive, meaning that if the United States struck before those dates, they had a window where they could attack Confederate lines when the soldiers there were at their most exhausted and catch the arriving recruits possibly on railcars. The War Department had already been planning the York Offensive, codenamed Operation Rose, since the beginning of December, and had ten divisions of fresh soldiers ready to cross the river after their required ninety days of training and had cycled most men who had actually fought off the attack over the Susquehanna to other theaters or into reserve positions for the coming offensive, rather than the first "over the top," meaning that their troops would be more raw, but less spent.
To say this was an intelligence coup without compare is an understatement, and despite being an irritant to his superiors for much of the rest of the war, Yardley had proven his value and that of his other young Cipher Boys. The Black Chamber's funding was tripled by War Secretary Goff within weeks and dozens more smart young mathematicians and cryptographers were brought into his bureau to continue the work. Today, Yardley is regarded as the father of American cryptanalysis and the United States' first proper spymaster, and the traditional signifier at the OSS of the head of signals intelligence - Y - was in part inspired by his surname, as the legend went..."
- A Game in the Shadows: Diplomacy, Espionage and Subterfuge in the Great American War
[1] This is all true, for what it's worth - Herb Yardley was very good at his job but also tended to piss his superiors off
Considering the institutional forces both military and civilian that held the young rulebreaker in contempt, that Yardley was able to get his Cipher Bureau up and running and the impact it had on the war is frankly remarkable and borders on utterly implausible. The Black Chamber would have been little more than a curiosity at the War Department had it not been for the famous Durand Intercept, in which Yardley's chief lieutenant, William George Durand, decoded a Confederate radio transmission in less than three days in early February. The Durand Intercept revealed a valuable piece of information - the schedule on which the Confederacy would be rotating their troops away from the front to be replaced by fresh divisions bolstered by newly-trained and equipped recruits. While several regiments were replaced on a staggered schedule before then, between March 24th and 26th the largest rotation of soldiers would be occurring since the failed Susquehanna Offensive, meaning that if the United States struck before those dates, they had a window where they could attack Confederate lines when the soldiers there were at their most exhausted and catch the arriving recruits possibly on railcars. The War Department had already been planning the York Offensive, codenamed Operation Rose, since the beginning of December, and had ten divisions of fresh soldiers ready to cross the river after their required ninety days of training and had cycled most men who had actually fought off the attack over the Susquehanna to other theaters or into reserve positions for the coming offensive, rather than the first "over the top," meaning that their troops would be more raw, but less spent.
To say this was an intelligence coup without compare is an understatement, and despite being an irritant to his superiors for much of the rest of the war, Yardley had proven his value and that of his other young Cipher Boys. The Black Chamber's funding was tripled by War Secretary Goff within weeks and dozens more smart young mathematicians and cryptographers were brought into his bureau to continue the work. Today, Yardley is regarded as the father of American cryptanalysis and the United States' first proper spymaster, and the traditional signifier at the OSS of the head of signals intelligence - Y - was in part inspired by his surname, as the legend went..."
- A Game in the Shadows: Diplomacy, Espionage and Subterfuge in the Great American War
[1] This is all true, for what it's worth - Herb Yardley was very good at his job but also tended to piss his superiors off
Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
"...certain inefficiencies and, more alarming to the War Department, insufficiencies. While war production was viewed at most factories as a patriotic duty, this was certainly not the case at all manufacturing firms, and a collapse in consumer goods was viewed as an economic crisis as well which many companies sought to avoid until the bitter end. Resources were precious and had to be allocated straightforwardly and properly, which private firms and federal bureaus, even with best intentions, had a difficult time coordinating ad hoc and case by case. Secretary Goff delivered to the War Cabinet on February 27th a lengthy report on the procurement crisis, particularly around the building of artillery shells and internal transportation, which had been distributed to every bureau chief and field commander as a memorandum in the previous days; the Goff Report was dire and alarmist, but did not sugarcoat the predicament the United States found itself in on the cusp of six months into the war, as the shift to a total war economy had yet to fully finish even though the industrial advantages of the republic's behemoth economy would by summertime be beyond apparent.
That it was at Nathan Goff's suggestion that Charles Evans Hughes issued the War Procurement Order is a particularly ironic moment. Goff was very much a man of the late 19th century, a rational modernizing Blainist Liberal who had made his name as an outstanding Navy Secretary and a thoughtful, moderate and cautious jurist, with his career punctuated by thirteen years on the Supreme Court. To put it simply, the idea of nationalizing entire industries to keep the war effort afloat was not something he would have pondered lightly. Indeed, in diaries published posthumously (and to great controversy, as they did not always paint a flattering portrait of colleagues at the War Department and indeed fellow members of Hughes' Cabinet), Goff grappled with the implications of what Hughes was about to do, coming to the conclusion that he was almost certainly proposing something unconstitutional and "we break all I have worked for in my career to save the Republic herself from breaking." Due to his legal background, Goff largely drafted the order for Hughes himself, cabining some of its provisions, aware that the President himself was highly reluctant to sign it and had agreed to proceed only thanks to how severe the Goff Report's portrait of the situation at hand was.
The War Procurement Order essentially authorized the War Department to "direct and, if necessary, secure in the national interest" any "firm, interest, infrastructure or place of manufacture which is required to more capably support the United States Army and United States Navy in finishing the war." Goff was skeptical of the executive order's legal footing outside of common carriers such as telephones and the railroads, and initially only nationalized those two industries to secure clear communication and transportation for field commanders and support their logistical needs. The gambit largely worked; steelmakers building shells and artillery largely swallowed the pricing dictated to them from then on, and shipyards had already largely accepted contracts agreeable the Navy, and no further full scale nationalizations would follow save the Navy forcibly procuring oil supplies from four of the seven largest petroleum producers in the country when they failed to accept their mandatory pricing scale.
The real long term impact of the War Procurement Order was instead its impact on US railroading, which never returned fully to private hands again. The precarious financial situation of most railroad firms had been an issue even before the war, and during demobilization the re-privatization of railroads was regarded as infeasible in the near term until the nationalized status of rail infrastructure was made permanent by an Act of Congress in 1922. It is profoundly ironic that it was Goff and Hughes - members of the conservative Liberal Party which still today tends to prefer less statist intervention in the economy than the Democrats - were responsible for the most statist intervention in American history up until that point, and one of the most important to this day, and achieved a goal of radical populists of the left that even most progressive Democrats of the previous peacetime years had regarded as a step too far politically. War, as it turns out, changes everything..."
- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
That it was at Nathan Goff's suggestion that Charles Evans Hughes issued the War Procurement Order is a particularly ironic moment. Goff was very much a man of the late 19th century, a rational modernizing Blainist Liberal who had made his name as an outstanding Navy Secretary and a thoughtful, moderate and cautious jurist, with his career punctuated by thirteen years on the Supreme Court. To put it simply, the idea of nationalizing entire industries to keep the war effort afloat was not something he would have pondered lightly. Indeed, in diaries published posthumously (and to great controversy, as they did not always paint a flattering portrait of colleagues at the War Department and indeed fellow members of Hughes' Cabinet), Goff grappled with the implications of what Hughes was about to do, coming to the conclusion that he was almost certainly proposing something unconstitutional and "we break all I have worked for in my career to save the Republic herself from breaking." Due to his legal background, Goff largely drafted the order for Hughes himself, cabining some of its provisions, aware that the President himself was highly reluctant to sign it and had agreed to proceed only thanks to how severe the Goff Report's portrait of the situation at hand was.
The War Procurement Order essentially authorized the War Department to "direct and, if necessary, secure in the national interest" any "firm, interest, infrastructure or place of manufacture which is required to more capably support the United States Army and United States Navy in finishing the war." Goff was skeptical of the executive order's legal footing outside of common carriers such as telephones and the railroads, and initially only nationalized those two industries to secure clear communication and transportation for field commanders and support their logistical needs. The gambit largely worked; steelmakers building shells and artillery largely swallowed the pricing dictated to them from then on, and shipyards had already largely accepted contracts agreeable the Navy, and no further full scale nationalizations would follow save the Navy forcibly procuring oil supplies from four of the seven largest petroleum producers in the country when they failed to accept their mandatory pricing scale.
The real long term impact of the War Procurement Order was instead its impact on US railroading, which never returned fully to private hands again. The precarious financial situation of most railroad firms had been an issue even before the war, and during demobilization the re-privatization of railroads was regarded as infeasible in the near term until the nationalized status of rail infrastructure was made permanent by an Act of Congress in 1922. It is profoundly ironic that it was Goff and Hughes - members of the conservative Liberal Party which still today tends to prefer less statist intervention in the economy than the Democrats - were responsible for the most statist intervention in American history up until that point, and one of the most important to this day, and achieved a goal of radical populists of the left that even most progressive Democrats of the previous peacetime years had regarded as a step too far politically. War, as it turns out, changes everything..."
- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
Woah, the OSS still exists! (Iām not sure why Iām thrilled, I donāt know anything about it.)
And railroads are Europeanized! Huzzah for decent public transportation! Is the nationalization bill similar to the Defense Production Act, where the President canāt nationalize, but can order, businesses to prioritize national security?
Well the OSS exists at some point in the TL, I havenāt decided for how long haha
Yes! This seemed the most logical jumping off point since most European nationalizations trace their origins to WW1.
DPA was definitely my inspiration but the Procurement Order is a notch or two less powerful (since DPA was from the Korean War era, when government powers were understood to be much more robust.) its more of a happy medium between DPA and the Confederacyās real life wartime command economy in the 1860s (something something muh states rightsā¦)
So Democrats get out flanked on their left and the Liberals are the ones who get (rightly) praised for going after the wildly unpopular railroads.
It seemed like such a layup for Hearst and his prairie powered populism to do given how unpopular railroads were but that would involve actual political acumen which is something Democrats don't really have ITTL.
It seemed like such a layup for Hearst and his prairie powered populism to do given how unpopular railroads were but that would involve actual political acumen which is something Democrats don't really have ITTL.
This is not only about Sweden. Norway was seen such a poor cousin that needed every little help it could get that the HƦkkerup-Evensen deal witnessed Denmark observing the "middle line" policy when dividing the economic rights of the North Sea (at the time this mostly meant fishing), effectively giving away the area that would soon host the Ekofisk oil field, the most important field of North Sea oil industry.
To be fair, this is something the Dems would have likely done also had they been in power, it's just that the Liberals get the credit because 1. They're in power to nationalize the railways, and b) Their platform previously disapproved of such a move, something that likely amps up their reputation as being willing to sacrifice long-held principles for the national interest, which people tend to like. Maybe a third Hearst term wouldn't have gone as far thanks to fear of backlash from Liberal newspapers and politicians, but the result would have still been the same - the railways stay in state hands, even despite various efforts to privatize them.
My issue is why didn't Democrats nationalize the railways before the war? You know, when they had eight years of a trifecta? It was such an easy call, with very limited fallout (who cares what Liberal papers think? They're the Fox News of this timeline - Hearst can walk on water and the New York Tribune would call him out for not being able to swim) and tons of upside. And now you've ceded yet more ground to the Liberals and they're the ones who get credit for doing it when it could have been the Democrats. I finally get why Democrats keep losing ITTL - because they're flat out morons who refuse to even think about making drastic change, much less actually delivering any.
No, but you see, that'd mess up the whole "natural party of governance" the author wants the Liberals to be. That requires the opposition to be splintered, incompetent, or both.
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So what youāre saying is they there could have been a Danish petrostate, rather than a Norwegian one? Perhaps that should be the butterfly hereā¦ it pains me as a Swede to wank the Danes but I hold myself to a certain standard of plausibility š
I think yāall are missing the forest for the trees here a bit. The Hughes admin isnt really worrying about if nationalizing the railroads will be popular or not, this is seen internally as an extreme necessity in the heat of war that will be temporary - indeed, had there been any sense that it would be permanent, Hughes/Goff probably dont go ahead with it, or at least do something more modest. Its only politically ironic because the planned re-privatization postwar never happens, unlike with telephone/telegram services
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