Plausability, Hughes wins 16 Republicans bedome progressive party

I assume that the winner of the 1916 election reacts to the Zimmerman tellegramme and unlimited submarine warfare as did Wilson.

I think Repubicans lose 1920.

Might the Dems have run conservative candidates following otl policies.

Might the New Deal have come from Republicans. (query could FDR have even gone back to his cousin's party)

Does this significantly speed up civil rights for African Americans?
 
Hughes would probably not be a very progressive president--at least if one can judge from his 1916 campaign: the opposition to the Adamson Act, etc. William Allen White, who supported Hughes, nevertheless lamented, "He talked tariff like Mark Hanna. He talked of industrial affairs like McKinley, expressing a benevolent sympathy, but not a fundamental understanding. He gave the Progressives of the West the impression that he was one of those good men in politics—a kind of a business man's candidate, who would devote himself to the work of cleaning up the public service, naming good men for offices, but always hovering around the status quo like a sick kitten around a hot brick!" https://books.google.com/books?id=cnU9AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA138

The Democrats in 1920 would probably run against Hughes from the left--accusing him of not cracking down hard enough on "profiteers", of acquiescing in an imperialist peace, etc. That doesn't mean that they would govern as radicals during the 1920's but they would still be to the left of the Republicans.

See https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/kFsmJQuau10/7M1f-7wAmLoJ for an argument that while in a given election, the Democrats may nominate a relative conservative for president or the Republicans a relative progressive, the two parties are *structurally* different in a way that makes it inevitable that the Democrats as a whole are to the left of the Republicans as a whole.
 
Hughes would probably not be a very progressive president--at least if one can judge from his 1916 campaign: the opposition to the Adamson Act, etc. William Allen White, who supported Hughes, nevertheless lamented, "He talked tariff like Mark Hanna. He talked of industrial affairs like McKinley, expressing a benevolent sympathy, but not a fundamental understanding. He gave the Progressives of the West the impression that he was one of those good men in politics—a kind of a business man's candidate, who would devote himself to the work of cleaning up the public service, naming good men for offices, but always hovering around the status quo like a sick kitten around a hot brick!" https://books.google.com/books?id=cnU9AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA138

The Democrats in 1920 would probably run against Hughes from the left--accusing him of not cracking down hard enough on "profiteers", of acquiescing in an imperialist peace, etc. That doesn't mean that they would govern as radicals during the 1920's but they would still be to the left of the Republicans.

See https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/kFsmJQuau10/7M1f-7wAmLoJ for an argument that while in a given election, the Democrats may nominate a relative conservative for president or the Republicans a relative progressive, the two parties are *structurally* different in a way that makes it inevitable that the Democrats as a whole are to the left of the Republicans as a whole.



Have to agree, much as I like Mr Hughes.

From 1896, if not earlier, the Dems were pretty well committed to being the more liberal party. And what happened on the few odd occasions like 1904 and 1924, when they ran a mildly conservative candidate, only served to show that there was no going back.
 
Still, FDR campaigned to the right of Hoover, so there's always exceptions.

That's an oversimplification, to say the least. Yes, FDR did promise to balance the budget, but he also said that he was "utterly unwilling that economy should be practiced at the expense of starving people." https://books.google.com/books?id=NR_sAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA183&lpg=PA183 Furthermore, the nomination of FDR had been considered a defeat for the more conservative Democrats: FDR's strength at the convention had been in the "radical" West (and he also had the support of radical Southerners like Huey Long) not in the conservative northeast which preferred Smith, Ritchie, Baker, etc. In a letter to Harry Byrd, John Raskob lamented, " When the Democratic Party, born and bred in the fine, old aristocracy of the South, and always fostered and nourished by a conservative people, is turned over to a radical group, such as Roosevelt, Hearst [in the early 1930s Hearst had shown temporary signs of reverting to his earlier radicalism], McAdoo, Senators Long, Wheeler, and Dill, and is taken out of the hands of such men as you, Governor Ritchie, Carter Glass, Mr. Reed, Colonel Breckinridge, Governor Smith, John W. Davis, Pierre S. du Pont, Governor Cox...etc., one cannot help losing faith in the ability of that Party, under such leadership, to command that confidence necessary to elect." https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/x5LjpPOyzaY/YDrILv2u19EJ The few states which FDR lost or came close to losing were almost all in the conservative Northeast.
 
Really, is that true? Why would he do that if right wing economics got them to that mess in the first place?

I bow to David T's superior knowledge, but I would point out that with the exception of Wilson every elected US president simply represented a different shade of conservatism (TR only really ascended to the presidency via assassination, and its far from likely he would have become president otherwise), and even Wilson only won election in 1912 due to the fracturing of the republican vote, when Roosevelt ran in '32 he had little/no idea about the new deal, he just wanted to restore public optimism

As for Hughes winning in 1916, I seem to remember he was much more supportive of womens suffrage than Wilson, so that counts for something. He would certainly have governed to the left of Harding and Coolidge, but to the right of TR. Its fairly likely he would have won re-election in 1920 (I would suggest he might be running against Wilson, trying to pull a Cleveland, after all he might have won the popular vote in 1916 but still lost the election if CA went republican).

I would suggest that whichever party were in office at the time the market crash and worst of the depression occurred would become the more conservative party, and whichever party enters office in '32 would become the more progressive party - regardless of POD.
 
Protectionism was a left-wing position in American politics? The US never ceases to amaze me.

Actually, it is only in relatively recent years that free trade has become the favorite position of conservative Republicans (backed by centrist Democrats). And there are still some dissenters on the Right like Pat Buchanan, who likes to point out that the eight negative votes in the US Senate to JFK's Trade Expansion Act included Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond...

But saying that FDR was a free trader in 1932 is in any event an oversimplification. His advisers included both free traders like Cordell Hull and economic nationalists like Rexford Tugwell and Raymond Moley--though even the economic nationalists were not crude protectionists.
 
I bow to David T's superior knowledge, but I would point out that with the exception of Wilson every elected US president simply represented a different shade of conservatism (TR only really ascended to the presidency via assassination, and its far from likely he would have become president otherwise), and even Wilson only won election in 1912 due to the fracturing of the republican vote, when Roosevelt ran in '32 he had little/no idea about the new deal, he just wanted to restore public optimism

As for Hughes winning in 1916, I seem to remember he was much more supportive of womens suffrage than Wilson, so that counts for something. He would certainly have governed to the left of Harding and Coolidge, but to the right of TR. Its fairly likely he would have won re-election in 1920 (I would suggest he might be running against Wilson, trying to pull a Cleveland, after all he might have won the popular vote in 1916 but still lost the election if CA went republican).

I would suggest that whichever party were in office at the time the market crash and worst of the depression occurred would become the more conservative party, and whichever party enters office in '32 would become the more progressive party - regardless of POD.

I disagree that Hughes would have won re-election in 1920. I think there would be disillusionment with *any* peace treaty as well as with the economic problems (first inflation, then deflation) that would accompany the war and its aftermath. And, however unfairly, many people would blame Hughes for getting the US into the war in the first place.

In short, I think whichever party wins in 1916 is very likely to lose in 1920.

(BTW, I disagree that Wilson only became president in 1912 as the result if the Taft-TR split. See https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/NZXQky_Jgpk/OhWnTSyjfwoJ for my analysis...)
 
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