So after reading a little bit about the 1910s, I was wondering how history would have progressed differently had Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 election instead of Theodore Roosevelt. Would the US have joined the Great War? Would Colonialism still be as prevalent as it is in OTL?
 
I mean it's hard to say wrt Colonialism, Wilson was an academic who talked about the necessity of political sovereignty, but he was also kind of a White Supremacist even for his time (Not that Teddy wasn't one himself). On balance though I could see the Philippines not joining the union at all, I doubt he'd be up to the task of arguing for the prolonged pacification and assimilation campaigns there that Teddy did. On the domestic front, I wonder if the sort of Quasi-Populist/Technocratic Nationalism the Progressive Party espoused at the time would take hold; Ironically it might also stymie the rise of actual Socialists as well.
 
I can't see Wilson or any other Democrat defeating TR in 1912. Once TR had won his "second elective term" in 1908, his reelection in 1912 and indeed his eventual wartime elevation to "President for life" were more or less inevitable.
 
I can't see Wilson or any other Democrat defeating TR in 1912. Once TR had won his "second elective term" in 1908, his reelection in 1912 and indeed his eventual wartime elevation to "President for life" were more or less inevitable.
Yeah, I would ask what the World would have been like if Teddy lived all the way through his final term, but thats a topic for another thread.
 
Since other folks have already tackled the later question, I'll answer the former. I fail to see any POD in which the US is going to let itself get dragged into the senseless Old World slaughter called "The Great War" without butterflies blowing away the Mexican Revolution. Sure, Teddy was probably quicker with the trigger against Huerta than Wilson would have been, but the dictator's accepting of British arms in exchange for oil concessions was a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine, and Villa, Zaoasta, and Caranza's program for agrarian reform really appealed to the highly popular Progressive sentiment, to say nothing of Villa's genius media campaign and larger than life personality. The resulting Mexican intervention and brief Quasi-War with Britain's military "advisors" and illegal blockade of European non-belligerents in clear violation of American commercial rights really stabbed any possibility of American or British intervention.
 
I can't see Wilson or any other Democrat defeating TR in 1912. Once TR had won his "second elective term" in 1908, his reelection in 1912 and indeed his eventual wartime elevation to "President for life" were more or less inevitable.

There was a chance, the backlash of Roosevelt's decision to pursue a third term could become larger so as to give Wilson a victory. There was a reason why Wilson was the first Democrat since Cleveland to reach 200 electoral votes (though to be fair, Wilson was just two EVs away from 199).
 
The man wanted to segergate the armed forces and was a racist jerk who would have set back race relations by at least a generation.
If he sucedes it means bad things for every one, world war 1 was the war where whites, blacks, asians, latinos, what ever your ethnicity what ever your religion you all fought, bleed, and died in the same trenches.

That experience is what helped kill Jim crow during the 1920s, 1930s.

If he had won, its likely that segergation would have lasted much longer possibly to modern day Its good for the country that he lost.
 
This also means the Western White House stays a proposal and Washington might still be the capitol instead of the F.A.D.C. (Federal Administrative District - Colorado). It might also mean that Canada and Mexico remain independent countries as do the other polities annexed during the Banana Wars. Imagine a United States with only 48 or 50 states instead of 100...
 
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