I do, but I have two kids who don't go to school and Kindergarten now, so no time left for AH...
Feeble Constitution - A Red-and-Green Russia 1917 Timeline
- Thread starter Salvador79
- Start date
Maybe a few answers to the readers' questions every now and then? Pretty please? 🙏
For example, I don't remember the Wall Street Bombing of 1920 being mentioned in the updates centered on the USA, so could you tell us if an allohistorical equivalent happened ITTL? It's an intriguing question because, just to make one example of juicy deviations from the history we know, a Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. happened to be walking by very close to the OTL event (the stock exchange of NYC was kind of his second home in the 1910's/20's), though he ultimately wasn't seriously injured. Of course, with no actual Red Scare it might just be a case of a tragedy which was nearly avoided ITTL. Perhaps a less toxic environment for Socialists and Syndicalists in this alternate America means that there's far less fertile ground for organized terrorist cells in New York City.
For example, I don't remember the Wall Street Bombing of 1920 being mentioned in the updates centered on the USA, so could you tell us if an allohistorical equivalent happened ITTL? It's an intriguing question because, just to make one example of juicy deviations from the history we know, a Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. happened to be walking by very close to the OTL event (the stock exchange of NYC was kind of his second home in the 1910's/20's), though he ultimately wasn't seriously injured. Of course, with no actual Red Scare it might just be a case of a tragedy which was nearly avoided ITTL. Perhaps a less toxic environment for Socialists and Syndicalists in this alternate America means that there's far less fertile ground for organized terrorist cells in New York City.
I'll come back to your question tomorrow, @TheBerlinguer . It's an interesting one. I just asked @LuckyLuciano for a plausible choice of someone for an important political office in this context, and when I have more information on that, I'll give a short reply.
Oh, I would not say there was less of a Red Scare. It was just not directed at emerging parties suspected to plan to take over the national government in a coup, and more a continuation of long-standing fears of militant strikers and "aliens", more on a local level but in times of crises omnipresent across the states of course. These aliens therefore looked less Eastern European and more Italian, Irish and of course, as always, black. (And Asian on the West Coast.)
And escalating conflicts there were plenty. A unified and radical-led SPA has provided political and judicial support and defense of councilisation and the formation of Red militias who assist each other where logistically possible when workers come under attack. Which probably only means escalation... so through 1920 and 1921, the US have seen more than one incident akin to OTL's Battle of Blair Mountain. And political and party media campaigns aimed at exculpating workers in self-defense, documenting aggression aimed at them, agitating for the liberation of political prisoners, outlawing the private "security" companies which fought for industrial enterprises against striking workers, opposing federal anti-sedition forces and quasi-martial law proposals from whichever quarter they come, while supporting parliamentary initiatives for federal laws against lynching.
In such a context, don't expect the establishment to hold back, either. Don't expect leniency for Debs. And the New York Socialist parliamentarians have been robbed of their seats just like IOTL. There is plenty of bad blood and hatred on both sides. Hence, I think there was enough fertile ground for such terrorist cells.
But if we go with the hypothesis that the perpetrators were Galleanists, then I see another potential avenue. The bomb, while it killed mostly (white collar) workers, was indeed the effective exception to a rule of utter Galleanist incompetence and failures - some of the mail bombs from the 1919 campaign had become suspicious because they did not feature sufficient postage stamps or because addresses had errors in them, I mean WTF?!
So, if we assume that whoever planned and executed the plans was killed or imprisoned IOTL, and in his, her or their stead some other Galleanist(s) plan and execute it, and screw it up like they did in various other cases, e.g. unintentionally exploding the load too early somewhere with very little other people hurt except for themselves and their poor horses, then that could have some serious implications.
My favourite one, with which I'll go, is that Knox's (and Harding's, too) Attorney General, James M. Beck, [1] is not going to see much present or future use in the Bureau of Investigations which had been so massively built up in the previous years, and considers this an example of Wilsonian big government which should and could be cut down to size, yielding both cuts in government spending and less infringements on people’s liberties. William J. Flynn is replaced by William John Burns, like IOTL, only ITTL Burns and the Bureau are given the task to downsize and focus on threats to US interests in other American countries (a job which IOTL later the CIA would take on worldwide on a much larger scale; here we’re just talking about a few agents poking their noses into potential revolutionary situations in banana republics). IOTL, the BoI’s future was repeatedly discussed in the 1920s; it was things like the Wall Street Bombing which played into the Bureau’s hands and were argued to demonstrate its necesssity. If the attack fails like so many other Galleanist endeavours, the Bureau’s future is less certain. This leaves a young J. Edgar Hoover very angry in Washington, and he decides to engage politically very actively in the Democratic Party.
Joseph Kennedy goes after his business unscathed for the moment.
[1] Beck was @LuckyLuciano's suggestion for this office after I disclosed that I think Harry Daugherty merely got the job IOTL because he was Harding's campaign manager, so I thought if Knox begins this presidency, he might choose someone else to replace Palmer. Just like Daugherty was an Ohioan like Harding, Beck is a Pennsylvanian like Knox.
Wow! I had definitely not gotten the impression that 1920 and 1921 were so Biennio Rosso-like for the US while reading the actual updates.
I withdraw what I wrote about the lack of a serious Red Scare.I hope this is something you had come up with before my question, since otherwise I really made you do some serious overtime for the sake of this reply!
Anyway, great use of the butterfly effect!You know, I don't remember other timelines which feature J. Edgar getting into electoral politics, so at least it'd be a novelty concept to include in this work. What a pity that Washington D.C. does not elect representatives or senators! Though, if he really put all of his efforts into it, Mr. Hoover would surely find a way to have a DC Statehood Amendment pass both Houses of Congress in record time.
And even if it's not electoral politics he's looking into, were I a Republican politician, a Democratic Brahmin™ J. Edgar Hoover would be by far the last person I'd ever wish to cross.It was difficult to avoid. The US really had a history of violent labor conflicts which by far surpass those of Italy... and the post-war crisis was inevitably bound to hit the US. No splintering of the radical left aka Communist Party and Communist Labor Party besides the SPA also means the SPA is more radical, and a unified and somewhat more radical SPA, especially without the Bolshevik example but WITH the different model of councilisation which is really en vogue around this time ITTL, is going to be a limited-sized but loud and defiant political force. My initial plans had been indeed for the US to be calmer and for the Red Scare to be avoided, but as the timeline took more and more concrete shape, this turned out quite implausible to me.Wow! I had definitely not gotten the impression that 1920 and 1921 were so Biennio Rosso-like for the US while reading the actual updates.
Thanks! Actually, I had not thought about this before, so thanks a lot for the suggestion and for provoking my reflection on that question.I hope this is something you had come up with before my question, since otherwise I really made you do some serious overtime for the sake of this reply!
I'm not sure how fearsome Hoover is at this point ;-)You know, I don't remember other timelines which feature J. Edgar getting into electoral politics, so at least it'd be a novelty concept to include in this work. What a pity that Washington D.C. does not elect representatives or senators! Though, if he really put all of his efforts into it, Mr. Hoover would surely find a way to have a DC Statehood Amendment pass both Houses of Congress in record time.
Later today, I'll follow this up with a very short summary of how Knox's cabinet in general looked, now that this is already a thing of the past ;-)
In 1921 Hoover turns 26... he's an adult, his personality is pretty much carved in stone barring some major traumatic experience. If he's not fearsome right now, he'll do his best to become fearsome, that's guaranteed.
Oh, good! That month-long hiatus is already over!
US Presidential Cabinets Knox and Harding (1920-1923)
I, too, think he has potential...
No, most certainly not. I'm trying my best. I am mulling the ideas for my next update in my head, but I can't find the time to compose it.Oh, good! That month-long hiatus is already over!
So, here is a
Short Update on the US government in 1921:
@LuckyLuciano has been so kind as to provide us with a wikibox for the cabinet of the 29th President of the United States of America, Philander Chase Knox:
Several ministeries are headed by their OTL counterparts, since such a composition always reflects, beyond a president’s preferences, a balance of intra-party groups and above all geographics. Hence Mellon, Weeks, Hays, Denby, Fall, and Wallace in their OTL positions.
As for the changes:
Elihu Root as Secretary of State has already been discussed in a previous update, and James Beck was mentioned in my last reply to @TheBerlinguer. That leaves only Wilson as Secretary of Commerce (instead of Herbert Hoover) and William Stephens as Secretary of Labor (instead of James J. Davis).
Commerce is very much at the heart of Knox’s approach to politics: when he was Secretary of State, he had practiced what was called “dollar diplomacy”, and with his ascension to the presidency, high hopes were attached that Knox would abolish wartime regulations on the US economy and create the right kind of atmosphere and conditions for a speedy economic recovery. And that was Knox’s priority, too. Therefore, someone like Herbert Hoover who had his own set of opinions – even if they converged with Knox’s more often than not – was not the most logical choice for Knox. Instead, I thought Knox would want someone there who was a close associate.
Francis Mairs Huntington Wilson, to quote LuckyLuciano: “served as assistant secretary of state to Knox [and] would be a really good fit upon closer inspection. Knox was apparently a very absent SoS and most of his responsibilities devolved unto Wilson. This was also during the height of dollar diplomacy, wherein the state department was the main arm of commerce even more so than the department of commerce and labor, as Wilson himself argues in a letter to Knox at the time. He would also be president of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum later in [OTL] life, and in 1921 would either be working for the National City Bank of NYC or president of a Connecticut manufacturing company, both positions I think which add to his potential confirmation as Commerce secretary.” Wilson is overseeing the same kind of deregulation that Hoover initiated IOTL, with the difference that he and Knox are somewhat more reserved about the initiatives of the Republican-dominated Congress to raise tariffs once again. At Knox’s death in October 1921, the Emergency Tariff of 1921 which sought to protect agricultural producers has been passed like IOTL, but discussions on the allegedly “scientific” overall tariff reform which IOTL resulted in the Fordney-McCumber Tariff which replaced the overall lower tariffs of the Underwood Tariff, have not made much progress so far. With the transition from Knox to Harding, though, this might change now.
For Secretary of Labor, Knox could not have James J. Davis, since he was another Pennsylvanian (and we already have Beck as Attorney General). Our choice fell on William Stephens, the Governor of California. He was still regarded a progressive, so his choice is a nod to that wing of the party and especially still-powerful Californian progressive Republican (and friend of Knox’s) Hiram Johnson. William Stephens, IOTL and ITTL, is a tough hard-liner on “Criminal Syndicalism” as he had labelled it in California, and that’s cherished by capitalist interests in the current situation more than ever. Stephens’s no. 1 welfare project priority are better provisions for WW1 veterans, including government-sponsored retraining and funds to help re-employment. Stephens implemented a similar scheme as Governor of California. Another political priority of his as a Governor of C. was Japanese exclusion, so that gives you a hint as to what he’s probably up to as US Secretary of Labor... expect an Immigration Act similar to OTL’s which bore the names of Albert Johnson and David Reed to be promoted in Congress and probably legislated earlier than IOTL.
When Philander C. Knox dies, his Vice President Warren G. Harding becomes Acting President, changing the composition of the cabinet to this outlook:
One Hundred and Four: Unification Congress of Munich (December 1921)
Dear readers,
I've managed just a little update on the German lands, also with an open ending and many mere allusions - but I am occasionally looking at the thread and can discuss.
Have a Merry Christmas everyone!
Berlin (Free City of Berlin under EFP Mandate): Berliner Tageblatt, December 28th, 1921, p. 1:
UNIFICATION CONGRESS OF THE PARTY OF UNPRINCIPLED OPPORTUNISM IN MUNICH
by Theodor Wolff [1]
In Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, over a thousand delegates of SPD and USPD have met for the congress in which the remainders of both social-democratic parties plan to merge into the Vereinigte Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. A 35-strong delegation of the Austrian SDAPÖ is also attending, carrying a mandate from Vienna to sound out possibilities for an even greater unification which would encompass the Austrian comrades as well.
From the onset, with the opening speech of the designated new chairman of the united party, Philipp Scheidemann, it has already become clear that Munich is likely to become the unification congress of Germany’s party of unprincipled opportunists. [2] Scheidemann apparently seeks to mould the maxim of the “Frankfurt Talks” [3] into the underlying ideological foundation of the new unified party: The VSPD “aims all its struggles at saving Germany’s workers from their present misery, defending their rights and past achievements, and furthering the cause of socialism, where necessary forming temporary coalitions with other progressive democratic forces”. Who these progressive democratic forces are, they don’t say: in Württemberg, they ally with Erzberger’s Zentrum against the liberals, in the Rhineland, they seek an alliance with the liberals against Adenauer’s Zentrum. Here in Berlin, we hear SPD and USPD declare any cooperation with the IRSDLP absolutely excluded, but in Saxony, the SPD is the junior partner in a coalition with the IRSDLP which has swallowed the local USPD whole. This is not just normal parliamentarian business: the ultimate result of such opportunism is the lack of any defined agenda. In Baden and Württemberg, the SPD pledges to respect the sacrosanctity of private property. In Bavaria, they have implemented a land reform, and in Saxony they have accepted, with their entrance into the coalition government, the much more extreme repartition undertaken by Wilhelm Koenen’s IRSDLP government. On the left bank of the Rhine, Social Democrats try to defend the councils against Adenauer’s charges of sedition, declaring them mere harmless instruments of worker participation and arbitration, while on the right bank, in the Ruhr region, local SPD chapters seem to no longer find fault with wholesale expropriations without compensation and without even the guise of bringing the factories under “national control” or anything of the sort when they insist that the syndicates should be treated as the new rightful owners. Among the alluded “other progressive democratic forces”, patience with SPD and USPD is running low: Social Democratic participation in the consolidation of production and provisioning, in uniting a bitterly divided populace, guaranteeing safety, and working towards rebuilding a democratic united national republic is bitterly needed. But we need to know with whom we’re actually working together, and what their real goals are.
Similarly, while the Austrian delegation has not yet made their decision, it can be considered very unlikely that they agree to join the Social Democratic marriage as the fifth wheel on the wagon. Why would they? Their electoral chances in 1922 look much better than any of their SPD or USPD counterparts, [4] and they have kept the IRSDLP a tiny grouplet on the uttermost margins of Austria’s political landscape. While the new VSPD’s Munich Manifesto speaks favourably, in general terms, of national unity under a republican constitution, the party’s regional leaders will all continue their course of entrenching the divisions, and Scheidemann will continue his strategy of inter-governmental co-operation with every possible entity - well, stop, no, not exactly every single one! The prize question of the day: What legitimacy does the Grand Council of the Syndicates of the Ruhr have that the Congress of Sudetendeutsche Workers’ Councils not have? Yes, exactly: the former is approved of by the Entente, while the latter is not. Why would the SDAPÖ unite with the SPD/USPD if the SPD is unable to find its spine and utterly incompetent to form a coherent position with regard to the question of national sovereignty, self-determination and unity anyway?
[1] Wolff was the best-known head of a liberal newspaper in both Wilhelmine Germany and later in the Weimar Republic IOTL; the call to form the left-liberal “Deutsche Demokratische Partei” was issued in his newspaper IOTL. The Berliner Tageblatt has been named the “core Republican force of Weimar”. ITTL, where the left-liberal / progressive parties still remain un-unified, Wolff is still the leading voice of liberalism and an important figure in the Prussian Progressive People’s Party (FVP). During the more radical Red days in Berlin in 1919, Wolff and his newspaper have been the most vocal critics who were still allowed to publish (the right-wing press having been shut down by Occupation Authorities and the council republic’s police apprehending various of its editors for “instigation of aggressive war and atrocities”). As the situation in Berlin and the Eastern half of Prussia in general has disintegrated even further and the EFP Mandate Authority has assumed many competencies previously held by the Supreme Workers’ Council, more opportunities for the liberal press have opened up, and Wolff employs them to the best of his abilities. By late 1921, he and his newspaper are the leading voice of non-socialist forces in support of a unified republic.
[2] They really were IOTL, too. Or formulated more positively: SPD leaders have consistently attempted to work with almost anyone under almost all circumstances in order to improve the lot of the working classes, with the noble and unambiguous exception of the Nazi era where they were about the only staunch and uncompromising opposition from the start. After a while in which I simply planned SPD politics to pursue a centrist course, out of my own laziness or inability to grasp the fundamental forces at work - I see the SPD always taking the centrist path in so many TLs -, I realized that the SPD leadership was not opting for a bourgeois-republican alliance IOTL because it was full of Lasallean centrists who had an agenda of social liberalism and progressive reform at heart. No. It was opting for this course because Ebert and Scheidemann, Müller and even Hilferding and Kautsky considered this to be the only and the most realistic course of action. Then it dawned on me: If the SPD would find itself in a situation of a multi-party, councilised or syndicalised, economically socialist regime (as is the case in Saxony, the Ruhr and the Eastern half of Prussia), then this adaptive generation of SPD leaders would ultimately opt for working within these systems, even if they opposed them at the beginning, and they would find some superficial rhetoric to legitimise this. And if – and that is TTL’s situation, some parts of the SPD would find themselves in such a situation, while other parts would find themselves in constitutional monarchies forced into coalition alliances with bourgeois parties of various sorts where they have to make painful concessions in order to get any reform done, then the SPD would schizophrenically support course A in place X and course B in place Y. Because the topmost priority for this generation of non-radical labour leaders in Germany, and I think elsewhere, too, was to “get something done” for the working classes.
[3] The “Frankfurt Talks”, hosted by Scheidemann’s Hessian government, have replaced the failed initiatives of the Frankfurt Vorparlament and the Elberfeld Congress of Workers’ Councils at creating a new German state or at least work towards it. The Frankfurt Talks proceed much, much more cautiously, bringing together very different political “entitites” (some notionally sovereign, others under EFP Mandate; some republics, other monarchies; some of very questionable political legitimacy and others broadly democratically mandated) with no previous questions asked, facilitating the negotiation of partial inter-governmental (or inter-structural, for the syndicalists probably don’t take kindly to being called a “government”) agreements, be they concerning trade, currency, free movement, foreign politics, compliance with the EFP etc., all of this garnished with a lot of Sunday talk about national unification as the goal of the process, but without actual proceedings really pointing towards that goal...
[4] Indeed, here is a short overview of party politics in the different German statelets: In Bavaria, SPD and USPD govern together since 1919, in a coalition with the left-agrarian BBB. Unequal terms of trade with regards to agricultural products are especially dramatic for mostly rural Bavaria: the US market has been protected by tariffs against imports, while US producers can sell to any German state without any impediment (this “open door policy” was a precondition for the British to allow free passage of goods between the zone of the Pinneberg Agreement, against whom they had lifted the embargo, and the rest of Germany). Bavarian industry has also not recovered, and the Christian Socials are loudly blaming “socialist mismanagement”. The latter have been rather successful in recent municipal and mayoral elections, and lately a group within the BBB loudly demands protective tariffs at any cost, being held back from dissolving the coalition so far only by the desperate inferferences of the Gandorfer brothers. The Christian Socials like to point to neighboring Württemberg, whose agricultural producers are facing the same difficulties, but where industry has recovered a lot faster. Here, the SPD has formed a great coalition with Erzberger’s Zentrum and the liberals, in which the SPD has acquiesced to a de facto castration of the council movement, turning it into one chamber of a cameralist arbitration and self-regulation regime. SPD ministers have not even intervened in favour of striking workers when these began a general strike in Stuttgart in solidaric protest against wage cuts in a former war wagonry factory converted into a producer of agricultural vehicles in the winter of 1919/20. Therefore, the SPD is expected to lose in the 1922 elections, bleeding moderate Catholic voters in favour of Erzberger’s resurgent fairly centre-leftist Zentrum and radical proletarian votes towards the IRSDLP. In Baden, the situation is similar. In the Rhineland, moderate SPD leaders have been negotiating alliances with liberal parties against the hegemony of Adenauer’s Zentrum – so far, it is unclear whether these alliances will be able to break into Adenauer’s super-majority. First signs of economic recovery, even if with a decidedly French accent (from foreign trade to direct investments), are strengthening the Zentrum’s hold, and Adenauer has announced new infrastructure projects which, while also serving to connect the Rhineland closer with France, are also rather popular. In Hannover, the royalists have pushed a remarkably old-fashioned constitution through against SPD resistance and will be able to keep the SPD at bay as long as this constitution holds. (More on that in a future update which I’ve already roughtly outlined.) In Saxony, the USPD has merged with the IRSDLP already, and the SPD had stayed on the fence for a long while, just like in the Eastern Prussian provinces, where some local SPD chapters sympathised with the “Prussians” in the intra-council struggle. After the latter’s defeat, the Saxon SPD has decided to become a “loyal opposition” in Dresden, but in Berlin, chasms between SPD and IRSDLP are still too deep (and the moderate USPD wing, while having bled its revolutionary left to the IRSDLP, now leans towards making common cause with the SPD, also rejecting an all-socialist bloc with the IRSDLP and the Socialist Revolutionary People’s Party (an SR-offshoot present mostly in Eastern agricultural provinces, where it militates for the preservation of the repartitioning) in the Congress of Workers’ and Peasants’ Councils.
Thus, the only place where SPD and USPD have already joined their hands together in a broader coalition government and appear in a good position to defend their lead in the next elections is Hesse, where the charisma of a surviving Scheidemann is eclipsing all other regional political leaders.
(Oh, and by the way, the IRSDLP's German name is, of course, IRSDAP.)
I've managed just a little update on the German lands, also with an open ending and many mere allusions - but I am occasionally looking at the thread and can discuss.
Have a Merry Christmas everyone!
Berlin (Free City of Berlin under EFP Mandate): Berliner Tageblatt, December 28th, 1921, p. 1:
UNIFICATION CONGRESS OF THE PARTY OF UNPRINCIPLED OPPORTUNISM IN MUNICH
by Theodor Wolff [1]
In Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, over a thousand delegates of SPD and USPD have met for the congress in which the remainders of both social-democratic parties plan to merge into the Vereinigte Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. A 35-strong delegation of the Austrian SDAPÖ is also attending, carrying a mandate from Vienna to sound out possibilities for an even greater unification which would encompass the Austrian comrades as well.
From the onset, with the opening speech of the designated new chairman of the united party, Philipp Scheidemann, it has already become clear that Munich is likely to become the unification congress of Germany’s party of unprincipled opportunists. [2] Scheidemann apparently seeks to mould the maxim of the “Frankfurt Talks” [3] into the underlying ideological foundation of the new unified party: The VSPD “aims all its struggles at saving Germany’s workers from their present misery, defending their rights and past achievements, and furthering the cause of socialism, where necessary forming temporary coalitions with other progressive democratic forces”. Who these progressive democratic forces are, they don’t say: in Württemberg, they ally with Erzberger’s Zentrum against the liberals, in the Rhineland, they seek an alliance with the liberals against Adenauer’s Zentrum. Here in Berlin, we hear SPD and USPD declare any cooperation with the IRSDLP absolutely excluded, but in Saxony, the SPD is the junior partner in a coalition with the IRSDLP which has swallowed the local USPD whole. This is not just normal parliamentarian business: the ultimate result of such opportunism is the lack of any defined agenda. In Baden and Württemberg, the SPD pledges to respect the sacrosanctity of private property. In Bavaria, they have implemented a land reform, and in Saxony they have accepted, with their entrance into the coalition government, the much more extreme repartition undertaken by Wilhelm Koenen’s IRSDLP government. On the left bank of the Rhine, Social Democrats try to defend the councils against Adenauer’s charges of sedition, declaring them mere harmless instruments of worker participation and arbitration, while on the right bank, in the Ruhr region, local SPD chapters seem to no longer find fault with wholesale expropriations without compensation and without even the guise of bringing the factories under “national control” or anything of the sort when they insist that the syndicates should be treated as the new rightful owners. Among the alluded “other progressive democratic forces”, patience with SPD and USPD is running low: Social Democratic participation in the consolidation of production and provisioning, in uniting a bitterly divided populace, guaranteeing safety, and working towards rebuilding a democratic united national republic is bitterly needed. But we need to know with whom we’re actually working together, and what their real goals are.
Similarly, while the Austrian delegation has not yet made their decision, it can be considered very unlikely that they agree to join the Social Democratic marriage as the fifth wheel on the wagon. Why would they? Their electoral chances in 1922 look much better than any of their SPD or USPD counterparts, [4] and they have kept the IRSDLP a tiny grouplet on the uttermost margins of Austria’s political landscape. While the new VSPD’s Munich Manifesto speaks favourably, in general terms, of national unity under a republican constitution, the party’s regional leaders will all continue their course of entrenching the divisions, and Scheidemann will continue his strategy of inter-governmental co-operation with every possible entity - well, stop, no, not exactly every single one! The prize question of the day: What legitimacy does the Grand Council of the Syndicates of the Ruhr have that the Congress of Sudetendeutsche Workers’ Councils not have? Yes, exactly: the former is approved of by the Entente, while the latter is not. Why would the SDAPÖ unite with the SPD/USPD if the SPD is unable to find its spine and utterly incompetent to form a coherent position with regard to the question of national sovereignty, self-determination and unity anyway?
[1] Wolff was the best-known head of a liberal newspaper in both Wilhelmine Germany and later in the Weimar Republic IOTL; the call to form the left-liberal “Deutsche Demokratische Partei” was issued in his newspaper IOTL. The Berliner Tageblatt has been named the “core Republican force of Weimar”. ITTL, where the left-liberal / progressive parties still remain un-unified, Wolff is still the leading voice of liberalism and an important figure in the Prussian Progressive People’s Party (FVP). During the more radical Red days in Berlin in 1919, Wolff and his newspaper have been the most vocal critics who were still allowed to publish (the right-wing press having been shut down by Occupation Authorities and the council republic’s police apprehending various of its editors for “instigation of aggressive war and atrocities”). As the situation in Berlin and the Eastern half of Prussia in general has disintegrated even further and the EFP Mandate Authority has assumed many competencies previously held by the Supreme Workers’ Council, more opportunities for the liberal press have opened up, and Wolff employs them to the best of his abilities. By late 1921, he and his newspaper are the leading voice of non-socialist forces in support of a unified republic.
[2] They really were IOTL, too. Or formulated more positively: SPD leaders have consistently attempted to work with almost anyone under almost all circumstances in order to improve the lot of the working classes, with the noble and unambiguous exception of the Nazi era where they were about the only staunch and uncompromising opposition from the start. After a while in which I simply planned SPD politics to pursue a centrist course, out of my own laziness or inability to grasp the fundamental forces at work - I see the SPD always taking the centrist path in so many TLs -, I realized that the SPD leadership was not opting for a bourgeois-republican alliance IOTL because it was full of Lasallean centrists who had an agenda of social liberalism and progressive reform at heart. No. It was opting for this course because Ebert and Scheidemann, Müller and even Hilferding and Kautsky considered this to be the only and the most realistic course of action. Then it dawned on me: If the SPD would find itself in a situation of a multi-party, councilised or syndicalised, economically socialist regime (as is the case in Saxony, the Ruhr and the Eastern half of Prussia), then this adaptive generation of SPD leaders would ultimately opt for working within these systems, even if they opposed them at the beginning, and they would find some superficial rhetoric to legitimise this. And if – and that is TTL’s situation, some parts of the SPD would find themselves in such a situation, while other parts would find themselves in constitutional monarchies forced into coalition alliances with bourgeois parties of various sorts where they have to make painful concessions in order to get any reform done, then the SPD would schizophrenically support course A in place X and course B in place Y. Because the topmost priority for this generation of non-radical labour leaders in Germany, and I think elsewhere, too, was to “get something done” for the working classes.
[3] The “Frankfurt Talks”, hosted by Scheidemann’s Hessian government, have replaced the failed initiatives of the Frankfurt Vorparlament and the Elberfeld Congress of Workers’ Councils at creating a new German state or at least work towards it. The Frankfurt Talks proceed much, much more cautiously, bringing together very different political “entitites” (some notionally sovereign, others under EFP Mandate; some republics, other monarchies; some of very questionable political legitimacy and others broadly democratically mandated) with no previous questions asked, facilitating the negotiation of partial inter-governmental (or inter-structural, for the syndicalists probably don’t take kindly to being called a “government”) agreements, be they concerning trade, currency, free movement, foreign politics, compliance with the EFP etc., all of this garnished with a lot of Sunday talk about national unification as the goal of the process, but without actual proceedings really pointing towards that goal...
[4] Indeed, here is a short overview of party politics in the different German statelets: In Bavaria, SPD and USPD govern together since 1919, in a coalition with the left-agrarian BBB. Unequal terms of trade with regards to agricultural products are especially dramatic for mostly rural Bavaria: the US market has been protected by tariffs against imports, while US producers can sell to any German state without any impediment (this “open door policy” was a precondition for the British to allow free passage of goods between the zone of the Pinneberg Agreement, against whom they had lifted the embargo, and the rest of Germany). Bavarian industry has also not recovered, and the Christian Socials are loudly blaming “socialist mismanagement”. The latter have been rather successful in recent municipal and mayoral elections, and lately a group within the BBB loudly demands protective tariffs at any cost, being held back from dissolving the coalition so far only by the desperate inferferences of the Gandorfer brothers. The Christian Socials like to point to neighboring Württemberg, whose agricultural producers are facing the same difficulties, but where industry has recovered a lot faster. Here, the SPD has formed a great coalition with Erzberger’s Zentrum and the liberals, in which the SPD has acquiesced to a de facto castration of the council movement, turning it into one chamber of a cameralist arbitration and self-regulation regime. SPD ministers have not even intervened in favour of striking workers when these began a general strike in Stuttgart in solidaric protest against wage cuts in a former war wagonry factory converted into a producer of agricultural vehicles in the winter of 1919/20. Therefore, the SPD is expected to lose in the 1922 elections, bleeding moderate Catholic voters in favour of Erzberger’s resurgent fairly centre-leftist Zentrum and radical proletarian votes towards the IRSDLP. In Baden, the situation is similar. In the Rhineland, moderate SPD leaders have been negotiating alliances with liberal parties against the hegemony of Adenauer’s Zentrum – so far, it is unclear whether these alliances will be able to break into Adenauer’s super-majority. First signs of economic recovery, even if with a decidedly French accent (from foreign trade to direct investments), are strengthening the Zentrum’s hold, and Adenauer has announced new infrastructure projects which, while also serving to connect the Rhineland closer with France, are also rather popular. In Hannover, the royalists have pushed a remarkably old-fashioned constitution through against SPD resistance and will be able to keep the SPD at bay as long as this constitution holds. (More on that in a future update which I’ve already roughtly outlined.) In Saxony, the USPD has merged with the IRSDLP already, and the SPD had stayed on the fence for a long while, just like in the Eastern Prussian provinces, where some local SPD chapters sympathised with the “Prussians” in the intra-council struggle. After the latter’s defeat, the Saxon SPD has decided to become a “loyal opposition” in Dresden, but in Berlin, chasms between SPD and IRSDLP are still too deep (and the moderate USPD wing, while having bled its revolutionary left to the IRSDLP, now leans towards making common cause with the SPD, also rejecting an all-socialist bloc with the IRSDLP and the Socialist Revolutionary People’s Party (an SR-offshoot present mostly in Eastern agricultural provinces, where it militates for the preservation of the repartitioning) in the Congress of Workers’ and Peasants’ Councils.
Thus, the only place where SPD and USPD have already joined their hands together in a broader coalition government and appear in a good position to defend their lead in the next elections is Hesse, where the charisma of a surviving Scheidemann is eclipsing all other regional political leaders.
(Oh, and by the way, the IRSDLP's German name is, of course, IRSDAP.)
Merry Christmas to you too!
At one point when you have more time I would be interested to hear about political situation in Balkans. How are Bulgaria, Albania and Montenegro doing?
Oh, good! That month-long hiatus is already over!
I rest my case!
By the way, I just realized: why was Warren G. Harding being referred to as "Acting President" in the last few updates? With President Knox dead, he should have been elevated to the Presidency like Tyler, Johnson, Arthur and Roosevelt had been before him-- and unlike TTL Marshall, who was the chief executive de facto while the incapacitated Wilson was still POTUS de jure. Or am I missing something?
You are right. He has succeeded Knox like those precedents did. Sorry for that; my ignorance of US politics unfortunately shows...I rest my case!
By the way, I just realized: why was Warren G. Harding being referred to as "Acting President" in the last few updates? With President Knox dead, he should have been elevated to the Presidency like Tyler, Johnson, Arthur and Roosevelt had been before him-- and unlike TTL Marshall, who was the chief executive de facto while the incapacitated Wilson was still POTUS de jure. Or am I missing something?
Just to connect the very far-flung dots of this TL:
In post #1069, I wrote this on the situation of 1919:
When I wrote that Canadian developments would depend to some extent on US developments, the most important development here is the formation of local electoral alliances between the Socialist Party of America and state-level Farmer-Labor parties in some places. Then, there are those people who voted for Robert LaFollette in 1924 in Northern and Western states mostly. They're fishing in similar ponds, and if they're unable to form an alliance, they're not going very far. If they do form an alliance, though, that would have the potential to challenge the two-party system. Thing is, there's a lot of cultural issues working against such an alliance. 1924 is still a bit in the future, though, and LaFollette has not yet made his move to break with the Republican Party and found his own.
In the situation which could lead to TTL's formation of a Progressive Party in Canada, both these developments could be potential sources of inspiration (and vice versa). Like IOTL, Canada's left-agrarians are divided between Henry Wise Wood's "group democracy" approach, and Crerar's approach aimed at a parliamentarian alliance with the Liberals at some point and bargaining some concessions in parliament.
Many global divergences ITTL - the success of the SRs in the UoE and similar left-agrarian successes in Eastern Europe, the formation of the Green Internationale, the popularity of a concept of grassroots "council democracy" (with all its many variations, none of which are associated with Bolshevik Red Terror like IOTL) and the formation of local alliances between left-agrarians and Socialists in the US all point in one direction:
ITTL, Wood's faction is going to be stronger, and it's going to be the one which has a plan forward. It aims not just at punctual special-interest measures, but at "constitutional" change for the creation of a lasting direct-democratic polity and a secure enshrinement of co-operative economic principles (and their Labor allies would add social rights of workers, too). It's the "Ginger Group" who surfs on a wave of left-agrarian radical reformism.
Given the positive example of the SRs and other Green Internationale parties (and the Green Internationale's general pro-parliamentarian stance, which they don't see in contradiction with a pro-council stance), TTL will see a "Green" or "Red-and-Green" party form and run in the elections of 1921, too, and probably with a weak national structure, too - not just becuse of grassroots ideology, but also because it is full of strong-headed people who have quite different ideas and couldn't probably agree on a common national agenda beyond their shared goal of changing the way "politics works" and their anti-establishment rhetoric.
I'll define that the group is not going to call itself "Progressive Party of Canada", but something like "United Farmer and Labour lists".
Some time in January, I'll come up with calculations on how this is going to affect the outcome of the 1921 elections and what happens in its aftermath.
I have rather concrete ideas for Bulgaria, and slightly more vague ones for Montenegro and Albania. I even had planned an update on Bulgaria in 1921, but then decided against it. I'll come back to you with my thoughts next year!
One Hundred and Five: Bulgaria 1920/21
For a start, here is a short authorial overview on
Bulgaria in 1920 and 1921:
Against the global trend, 1920 saw the beginnings of an economic recovery in Bulgaria, synchronous with a regional recovery experienced by Romania and the UoE. Bulgarian foreign policy has come to be very closely aligned to that of the latter – not so much out of left-agrarian ideological proximity or solidarity between Stamboliysky’s Foreign Minister – the liberal Nikolay Mushanov – and the UoE government and its foreign minister Kerensky, but out of sheer necessity. Bulgaria was surrounded by nations with which it had ongoing conflicts: with Romania, the Dobrugea and the question of Vlachs in Bulgaria were controversial, with Greece, Thrace and the question of Slavic speakers in Greece were equally controversial. As for Serbia, well, let’s not mention that. Bulgaria’s wartime allies had either ceased to exist (Austria-Hungary and Germany) or become a shadow of their former self (the Ottomans). While many political planks of Stamboliysky’s BANU-Broad Socialists-Democrats coalition government were controversial and faced not just criticism but outright hostility from both the reactionary Right and the IRSDLP on the Left, this general trend in foreign policy was not. To many, it felt like a return to the general orientation prevalent since the establishment of the independent Bulgarian state in the 19th century.
In terms of the governing coalition’s policies, 1920 was another busy reform year. After 1919 had seen the full implementation of the land reform and a legalisation of the role of workers’ councils in the industry, 1920 brought the beginnings of ambitious plans for an expansion of education and healthcare especially in the countryside, accompanied by major reshuffles in the country’s administrative bureaucracy in which many experienced, but anti-republican civil servants were sent into retirement. Their replacements were not only generally a lot younger, but also dedicated followers of the governing coalition’s parties.
All these groundbreaking reforms met with shrill protests and hostility from the parties of the old regime and the social strata on whom they relied, the former elites, retired military officers and civil servants, and industrialists, too. But this loud noise had accompanied the young Bulgarian Republic ever since its revolutionary birth in the last days of the Great War.
But as 1920 turned into 1921, the situation aggravated seriously for the governing coalition. The putsch in Serbia presented a double challenge to Stamboliysky’s government: on the one hand, it meant a worsening of the situation for the Macedonians in Serbia’s Southern provinces for which many even in the new Bulgarian government felt a degree of national responsibility, and an omnipresent threat by a militarised neighbour who, by any rational measure, should be completely territorially “saturated”, but it was not yet clear how much rationality could be expected from Serbia’s Unitarist regime. On the other hand, Račić’s example emboldened many Bulgarian nationalists and anti-socialists to try something similar in their own country, too. Spring brought the desertion of Ilya Georgov and his Radical Democratic faction, which crossed the floor from conditional support for the government to unambiguous opposition. Now, Stamboliysky depended on the representatives of the minorities in order to avoid a motion of no confidence. The growing opposition and its newspapers hurled nationalist and anti-socialist propaganda against Stamboliysky and his allies like never before. But even the government looked at events in Western Yugoslavia and Montenegro and was no longer so sure if fully complying with the Treaty of Chantilly, which limited the size of Bulgaria’s national army to a mere ornamental status, was really such a good idea (when Serbia’s open aggression went almost un-sanctioned, even the suspension of Serbia’s membership in the EFP only came about towards the end of 1921). Bulgaria had a much larger inofficially state-supported paramilitary force in the form of the BANU-aligned “Orange Guards”, and then there were Red Guards, of which some aligned with the pro-government Broad Socialists and others with the oppositional IRSDLP (formerly Narrow Socialists), the VMRO, and of course countless experienced soldiers and officers who could be easily reactivated. Renewed build-up would require military materiel – but more importantly, it would be in open defiance of Chantilly and it would strengthen groups within Bulgaria who were not at all loyal to its current government. Mushanov conversed with Kerensky. Stamboliysky hesitated.
And then, on June 6th, 1921, an attempt by VMRO members to assassinate the Prime Minister and a coordinated attempted coup by political allies in the anti-socialist and nationalist parties led by Kimon Georgiev occurred and was only suppressed by a strong presence of Orange Guards in Sofia. . Stamboliysky took a bullet in his shoulder and two grazes, while one of his bodyguards died before the others were able to shoot the terrorists. With a handful of supporters, Georgiev took control of the capital’s new radio broadcasting station and announced to the few wealthy citizens who were able to listen to it that a “democratic national government” had been formed and would secure the country’s defenses and the defense of the rights of its conationals under the Serbian yoke.
Just like the assassination, the coup fell in on itself, too, though, when thousands of armed Orange Guards began to comb the capital and apprehend – or in the worst case, shot – real or suspected putschists from among Bulgaria’s old political elites. A massive VMRO mobilisation, promised to Georgiev by Todor Alexandrov, failed to materialise in time. Georgiev’s group was apprehended before they could even try to take over control of parliament or government, and the leading conspirator was shot in the fire exchange. The rest of the bourgeois opposition was paralysed. Most leaders of the People’s Party, the Progressive Liberals, and the Radical Democrats would have loved to applaud and legitimise a successful coup, but had stopped and shut their mouths fast enough when they realised which way the wind was blowing. Still, their future looked grim now.
A few days later, Stamboliysky returned from hospital and addressed cheering crowds of his supporters. The man who had assumed power three years ago at the age of 39 now looked like he had aged ten years at once, but the policies of his government took on a much more resolute shape now. The ranks of the remaining coalition had closed behind him. The immunity of several parliamentarians involved in the attempted coup was lifted and they were imprisoned (thereby handily restoring a majority for Stamboliysky even without the minority representatives again). Orange and Red Guards assisted the state police when it went after the heads of the VMRO. In various successive waves of repression following throughout the rest of 1921, plots among former military officers were discovered, too, and their leaders detained, too, if they had not fled the country already.
But Stamboliysky not only tightened the screws on his internal opponents. A breakthrough solution for the country’s military defense was found in the negotiations with the UoE: Since Bulgaria was not allowed any significant military forces of its own, the UoE would increase its presence of EFP peacekeepers in Bulgaria to a solid 60,000 men, nominally consisting of UoE Republican Guards, but de facto recruiting from rural Bulgarian supporters of the government with only higher commanding positions initially held by seasoned UoE militiamen. To make the solution palatable to UoE President Volsky, too, the costs for the operation were carried by a fund whose contributions came half from the Bulgarian and half from the Union’s budget.
In case you're asking yourself why such a plot would fail ITTL when IOTL it succeeded in 1923, the main difference is in the number and equipment of the Orange Guards who have profited from the benevolence of the UoE forces who occupied the country, have maintained a smaller presence throughout 1920, too, and are now returning in a new shape.
No what I question is the clandestine re-armament of Bulgaria with Russian aid. So will TTL Greece I'm pretty sure.