But he can do nothing w/o Congressional support - which will not be forthcoming until Germany has enough subs to launch full-blown USW against American shipping. So unless you can find a way to drastically speed up German U-boat production, the US won't be drawn in much quicker than OTL- irrespective of who is POTUS.
Keep Woodrow Wilson out of the White House
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But he can do nothing w/o Congressional support - which will not be forthcoming until Germany has enough subs to launch full-blown USW against American shipping. So unless you can find a way to drastically speed up German U-boat production, the US won't be drawn in much quicker than OTL- irrespective of who is POTUS.
If Roosevelt decides to run in 1908 for a third term, probably decent chance that democrats don't win in 1912, regardless of who the nominee is.
Indeed I think it is dubious to assume TR or a Republican is more likely to plunge into war. The freedom of seas issue was nearly as important, the British blockade was as threatening, USW is really just a mask to further Wilson's vision of knocking out Germany to set up against the British, in my opinion I think Wilson was the best chose to get the USA into war, his game was expansionist, the trope that he removed gets the war drums going is too much revision. It is much harder to gauge Congressional sympathy, obviously Wilson steered the course into war but it did take him until 1917, a Republican with a thin majority or worse a hostile Congress might never garner the support. I think these discussions also paper over the butterflies, Wilson gave strong support to the Entente, that pushed Germany to view the USA as a hostile neutral if not enemy. We have not truly delved how in my musings a TR might re-aligning the German vision of the USA, either way, or how a different President acts on the finance given to Britain, we might see a market crash and economic implosion rather than the McAdoo catch, the USA might spin off a non-entity through 1916, Germany pursuing other avenues to upend the blockade, or the British liquidating early and hitting bottom, there are more than just a few irons in these fires. Thus I looked for a later POD in Wilson to get my result, the butterflies released otherwise cloud the thing too much to help me.
That is my read, I think the Democrats cannot win but do erode the hold on Congress. I would argue it gets us some term limit push sooner, or the proposed 6 year term. My thinking was that 1916 becomes the Democrat win, realigning the timing to make it blue through 1932 as opposed to red. We might see Wilson win 1916, likely over the economy and if he plays the keep us out of war card then, he looks more like the popular image of him. But it does not get the OP the result.
My timeline concept was actually Taft sticking to Roosevelt's prior policies more closely, at least enough to make Roosevelt not consider a challenge I guess, and then him winning in 1912. I had the Progressive faction of the Republican party disagree with Taft's decision to go to war, however, but considering some things in this video I honestly am not sure if that is really plausible. Regardless, it then went on to have a four-way split 1916 (Progressives, Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists) which the Republican candidate (Charles Fairbanks) wins in the House. I also didn't factor that the war ending sooner would actually mean less protesting, revolutions, and general unrest in Europe and America, and in fact I had the opposite happen. Overall looking back I don't think it was that realistic.
I think the video poses a good path with Roosevelt unseating Taft and thus winning easily but what the video doesn't factor in is the 1916 election which in his scenario would occur right while the Americans were going to war. If the war effort was popular then I feel like this would be an easy slam-dunk for Roosevelt but it wasn't in OTL and I doubt that Roosevelt alone could make it immediately popular enough. I think Democrats could easily provide enough resistance to the war effort and also campaign against the war to provide a considerable challenge to Roosevelt in 1916 (who I do think would run, as he was open to it in OTL and he died of a blood clot in his lungs, not of any medical condition he knew about in 1916). Also more conservative Republicans as well as the Democrats could easily resist a lot of Roosevelt's reforms. Still, I think a lot of the video is valid.
Wouldn't the Lusitania be enough to convince Dems otherwise? Or what else would need to be done?
Deleted member 109224
Teddy wanted to get into WWI from the get-go.
It'd be a mess.
Considering how much of a mess the 1910 election was for the Republicans, I don't think a unified Republican party would be enough to block Wilson. It seems unreasonable to think that all of either Taft's or Roosevelt's voters would stick to the GOP side if the party were united too. Plenty of progressive roosevelt supporters would prefer Wilson to Taft.
If you want TR just have Taft die of a heart attack or something a year before the election.
Taft had no particular health problems in 1911/12. His health only began to decline after 1920 - even then he gave himself another decade by a fitness programme. He lived to 72 - longer than Wilson, Bryan or TR, and even a year longer than Champ Clark
If you want to keep Wilson out, why not just have him die sooner. That is at least as plausible as Taft doing so, and maybe likelier.
OK, have him get hit by a bus or something. I was talking about having TR win, which is what at least half the people here were talking about.
I know. It is one of the most tiresome things about such threads. Talk about removing Wilson and everyone starts rabbiting on about TR, though his chances were minimal, and almost certainly the only realistic place to stop WW was at the Democratic Convention.
How about a wild card?
Have Bryan die c1910 - whether naturally or by accident/assassination - and a boomlet start for his brother Charles, who OTL was nominated for VP in 1924. If CWB enters the primaries and does reasonably well there with the support of his brother's faithful, he could easily emerge as the nominee, and would of course win in November just as easily as any other Democrat.
Any thoughts on what sort of POTUS he might have made?
The Lusitania was certainly not enough to convince Democrats that the US should enter the War in OTL; even the limited "preparedness" program on which Wilson eventually embarked was attacked by Bryanites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_Movement#Democrats
Champ Clark was definately an adherent of Manifest Destiny, he was very much for taking over Canada somehow.
Would it be possible that Clark demands the British and French colonies of the Americas be freed or be ceded to the US?
Would it be possible that Clark demands the British and French colonies of the Americas be freed or be ceded to the US?
No. Such a demand would mean war, and he wouldn't want war against the Entente any more than against the CP. Iirc he even opposed the Mexican intervention.
"Everything would be ice cream and roses without Woodrow Wilson" is a pretty common but lazy trope. As discussed above, by @David T and others, the GOP split was a symptom of Republican weakness, not the cause, and any Democrat was likely to win in 1912.
Wilson was undoubtedly an important and hugely influential figure, so it's fair to speculate how a different president -- Champ Clark, Charles Evans Hughes, Teddy Roosevelt -- would have handled progressive era reforms, issues around race, immigration, labor, and civil liberties, the First World War, or peace negotiations. But most of Wilson's contemporaries shared his prejudices and preferences, the war was going to cause huge instability and lasting conflicts no matter what the outcome, and much of what happened was shaped by European nations and other figures.
No doubt, but there were differences of degree even then.
Thus in October 1915 Speaker Champ Clark and his son Bennett joined a posse to save a negro (under arrest in the County Jail) from lynching.
Later, in May 1917, Clark spoke at the opening of a training camp for colored army officers, saying that this marked "an epoch in American history and a new day for the Negro." See the links below.
https://cdsun.library.cornell.edu/?a=d&d=CDS19151006.2.18&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN------
http://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/comment/Scott/SCh07.htm
Incidentally, iirc Bennett Clark, as a US Senator, sponsored an anti-lynching bill in 1945, and miffed some Senate colleagues in the cloakroom by distributing graphic photographs of lynchings.
All this does not, of course, make either father or son into passionate civil rights enthusiasts by 2019 standards, but to my mind it puts both of them on the right side of history on this point, in a way that Wilson wasn't.
That's quite interesting (esp the story about Champ Clark helping avert a lynching). I don't know about Champ Clark's racial politics more broadly, however.
And Wilson for all his faults did denounce lynching. Wilson's biographer John Milton Cooper argues that Wilson's views were closer to that of most northern whites at the time. As you yourself have pointed out TR's progressivism on race is often exaggerated (see also Brownsville, his enthusiasm for eugenics and his exclusion of African-Americans from the Bull Moose Party). William Jennings Bryan was an ardent segregationist.
To be clear, a GOP administration would have been better for African-Americans than Wilson's. But it seems likely that any Democrat at the time would have enabled policies like Wilson's.
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