Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I see the confederacy are appointing command by “vibes” now, hes a Lee so he will do!
We’re at that stage of the war, yes, no matter how gallantly the individual CS corps fare in combat
Not that anyone asked me but I'm not a super huge fan of OCs, especially in this story where you have real world people all over the place already.
1 - It is way more interesting to me to see real world characters interact with this world you've created.
2 - If you are gonna go through all the trouble to make a OC and give him/her traits of a real person just to make an OC, why not use the real person and tweak them? So, for example, instead of making an OC that's a RFK equivalent (I'm just picking a random name), why not just use RFK himself and tweak him but keep him more or less identifiable? IMO, it helps ground the reader.
But that's just me, I'll still read either way so 🤷
I look forward to seeing the stylizations of names like George Corley Wallace, Abner Linwood Holton, Reubin O'Donovan Askew (BCM reference unintended), and William Jefferson Blythe (among others of the treasure trove of insanity that is Southern politicians' names).
To be clear, any OCs will be pretty minor, unless they are royalty from alt-dynastic marriages. When possible, I’ll still lean heavily towards RCs, butterflies be damned
Not just a Lee, but the grandson of THAT Robert e lee- and has the same name as well.
Clearly now the Yankees are in trouble, soon they will be defeated. They will have no choice but to sue for peace. /s
Last edited:
dcharles
Banned
"But you must really be great, seeing as you have the same NAME as him and all."
---The Death of Dixie, a film by Armando Ianucci
The Grandson of *that* Grandson (Robert E. Lee V) got interviewed after Charlottesville in 2017 in the Washington Post
(His son is Robert E. Lee VI). He works as a boy's sports coach at a private school in Northern Virginia.
Among the quotes...
"First and foremost, if it can avoid any days like this past Saturday in Charlottesville, then take them down today. That’s not what our family is at all interested in, and that’s not what we think General Lee would want whatsoever. . . . And maybe the second step is put these statues in some place where there is historical context, like a museum, and people can talk about the context. Put it in context of the 1860s and the 1800s, so people better understand the times they [Civil War figures] lived in."
The CSA should have put with "Dixie" Taylor in charge. He stopped a modern army "in its tracks entirely" with a cavalry attack of all things. Now that's a guy who should be in charge of things - imagine what he'd do with modern equipment!
This made me think of the other end of the scale (sort of) Jubilation T. Cornpone (
Starring Jason Isaacs, who inexplicably has a Yorkshire accent, because of course
A laudable point of view considering his family heritage, though I'm strongly skeptical that his ancestor the OG Bob Lee would agree, as he here posits
He'll likely make his way higher up the ranks in short time - the CSA is running out of generals they haven't simply cashiered for "failure"
"I Buhned Ahtlantuh I Think Ah Can Tek A Fookin Flesh Lump In A Wasitcoat!"
Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
"...bonanza. There was thus an incredible amount of interest, particularly by Congressional Democrats but also a fair deal of moderate Liberals, to investigate potential war profiteering and alleged corruption in "procurements," as it was called. The LaFollette Committee was at the heart of this, a strange animal unlike any that had come before or after. The Senate was, narrowly, majority Democratic, but Wisconsin's Robert LaFollette was a longtime Liberal with a maverick reputation who largely marched to the tune of his own drum and whose home state was something approximating a personal political fiefdom, at least in years when he was on the ballot. In some cases, he was more left-wing than many populist Plains Democrats, and he had forged an electoral ceasefire with Socialists in Milwaukee that benefitted both sides. When officials in the Hughes administration had pushed back on acquiescing to Congressional inquiry in wartime, the compromise forged between Senate Majority Leader Kern and the President had been a committee that would have full cooperation of the executive, with LaFollette as its head to mollify skeptical Liberals who were convinced Democrats sought to run on baseless allegations ahead of 1916 that various Cabinet officers had profited from the war, or at least mismanaged the procurement of shells, guns, and other materials. LaFollette was known first and foremost for his honesty, and so Democrats begrudgingly accepted the set up.
They perhaps should not have been so begrudging. The LaFollette Committee may have been chaired by LaFollette, but six of its nine members were nonetheless Democrats, and as one of the first Congressional committees to utilize full-time staff and researchers, it quickly became not only a highly professional but sophisticated vehicle of what many Liberals grouchily disdained as "the Wisconsin Inquisition." LaFollette's partisan allegiances, it turned out, were left at the committee room door - along with Democrats such as Iowa's Claude Porter, the Deputy Chair, and Colorado's John Shafroth, he charged headfirst into making the investigation comprehensive and thorough with no stone unturned. Businessmen, War Department bureaucrats, union bosses - nobody was safe from coming before LaFollette, perched imperiously at a high centered desk with his great head of hair casting a shadow before him, to answer for why their prices were X, when their competitors were charging the government Y.
LaFollette's endeavor had tacit support from Stimson, who was a fiscal conservative who appreciated "daylight" on how the war was actually being financed on the home front (bank loans, often foreign, for the government were in his view unfortunately not under the Committee's remit), and Hughes had largely arrived at a point where he deferred most decisions on the nitty-gritty of the war to Stimson, seeing in him at last a totally competent War Secretary who he could finally relinquish his instinct for direct control over to. Other Cabinet officials were not so sure, particularly Richard Ballinger at the Naval Department, and for good reason. The First LaFollette Report was released in late August of 1915, shortly before Congress was to return from a brief summer recess that LaFollette and his chief aide, John J. Blaine, had foregone to put the finishing touches on their report. Modern scholarship has largely diminished the severity of the findings in LaFollette's report as being accurate but poorly contextualized, but the contemporary reaction, in part encouraged by Democratic-leaning newspapers such as those owned by the Roosevelt family, treated its findings as incendiary and its publication as a bombshell.
In its second section, the LaFollette Report suggested that several major firms, including a few of US Steel's successors, were marking up war orders, and that a great number of businessmen or union bosses, often working in concert, had leveraged their connections to individual War Department officials or Congressmen to secure favorable contracts in which their services were more expensive but the product cheaper. This was not the core of the report, by any means - LaFollette's first, third and fourth sections outlined inefficiencies in transportation, procurement, storage and coordination and suggested a number of improvements that the War Department ought to consider making, and he himself treated its contents as something of an independent audit designed to help Stimson - but it was treated as an attempted crucifixion by conservative Liberals and hailed as "the necessary view into the inner dealings of a triangle of graft between the administration, industry and certain organs of labor" by many Democrats.
The most crucial allegation in the Report, which made it such a scandal upon its release, was its well-evidenced allegation that shipbuilding firms in Seattle had benefitted from contracts given to them at low bids by the Naval Department thanks to the status of Naval Secretary Ballinger having previously been Mayor of that city, and that Ballinger had coordinated illegally with the city from Philadelphia to suppress labor activity after gross abuses in the area's shipyards, in coordination with powerful local allies such as newspaperman Alden Blethen. On its face, this was not necessarily outright corruption - Ballinger insisted to his deathbed that he had saved the Navy critical funds by leveraging personal relationships - but it reminded many Democrats of the circumstances that had brought down former Navy Secretary Lewis Nixon during the Hearst years and they cried, with good reason, hypocrisy. Hughes, uninterested in a public relations battle to save one of his least favorite Cabinet officials, requested Ballinger quietly resign, which the Naval Secretary begrudgingly did.
LaFollette had thus proven that Congressional inquiry of an administration even in a time of war could not only prove problematic issues but even potentially malfeasance, up to and including taking down a powerful member of the Cabinet riding high after the successes of his department. The Ballinger Affair was thus a major moment in executive-legislative relations in the United States in terms of Congress asserting itself regardless of partisan affiliation, and forever changed the nature of Congressional accountability against the Presidency..."
- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
They perhaps should not have been so begrudging. The LaFollette Committee may have been chaired by LaFollette, but six of its nine members were nonetheless Democrats, and as one of the first Congressional committees to utilize full-time staff and researchers, it quickly became not only a highly professional but sophisticated vehicle of what many Liberals grouchily disdained as "the Wisconsin Inquisition." LaFollette's partisan allegiances, it turned out, were left at the committee room door - along with Democrats such as Iowa's Claude Porter, the Deputy Chair, and Colorado's John Shafroth, he charged headfirst into making the investigation comprehensive and thorough with no stone unturned. Businessmen, War Department bureaucrats, union bosses - nobody was safe from coming before LaFollette, perched imperiously at a high centered desk with his great head of hair casting a shadow before him, to answer for why their prices were X, when their competitors were charging the government Y.
LaFollette's endeavor had tacit support from Stimson, who was a fiscal conservative who appreciated "daylight" on how the war was actually being financed on the home front (bank loans, often foreign, for the government were in his view unfortunately not under the Committee's remit), and Hughes had largely arrived at a point where he deferred most decisions on the nitty-gritty of the war to Stimson, seeing in him at last a totally competent War Secretary who he could finally relinquish his instinct for direct control over to. Other Cabinet officials were not so sure, particularly Richard Ballinger at the Naval Department, and for good reason. The First LaFollette Report was released in late August of 1915, shortly before Congress was to return from a brief summer recess that LaFollette and his chief aide, John J. Blaine, had foregone to put the finishing touches on their report. Modern scholarship has largely diminished the severity of the findings in LaFollette's report as being accurate but poorly contextualized, but the contemporary reaction, in part encouraged by Democratic-leaning newspapers such as those owned by the Roosevelt family, treated its findings as incendiary and its publication as a bombshell.
In its second section, the LaFollette Report suggested that several major firms, including a few of US Steel's successors, were marking up war orders, and that a great number of businessmen or union bosses, often working in concert, had leveraged their connections to individual War Department officials or Congressmen to secure favorable contracts in which their services were more expensive but the product cheaper. This was not the core of the report, by any means - LaFollette's first, third and fourth sections outlined inefficiencies in transportation, procurement, storage and coordination and suggested a number of improvements that the War Department ought to consider making, and he himself treated its contents as something of an independent audit designed to help Stimson - but it was treated as an attempted crucifixion by conservative Liberals and hailed as "the necessary view into the inner dealings of a triangle of graft between the administration, industry and certain organs of labor" by many Democrats.
The most crucial allegation in the Report, which made it such a scandal upon its release, was its well-evidenced allegation that shipbuilding firms in Seattle had benefitted from contracts given to them at low bids by the Naval Department thanks to the status of Naval Secretary Ballinger having previously been Mayor of that city, and that Ballinger had coordinated illegally with the city from Philadelphia to suppress labor activity after gross abuses in the area's shipyards, in coordination with powerful local allies such as newspaperman Alden Blethen. On its face, this was not necessarily outright corruption - Ballinger insisted to his deathbed that he had saved the Navy critical funds by leveraging personal relationships - but it reminded many Democrats of the circumstances that had brought down former Navy Secretary Lewis Nixon during the Hearst years and they cried, with good reason, hypocrisy. Hughes, uninterested in a public relations battle to save one of his least favorite Cabinet officials, requested Ballinger quietly resign, which the Naval Secretary begrudgingly did.
LaFollette had thus proven that Congressional inquiry of an administration even in a time of war could not only prove problematic issues but even potentially malfeasance, up to and including taking down a powerful member of the Cabinet riding high after the successes of his department. The Ballinger Affair was thus a major moment in executive-legislative relations in the United States in terms of Congress asserting itself regardless of partisan affiliation, and forever changed the nature of Congressional accountability against the Presidency..."
- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
There is evidence that General Lee in his lifetime opposed having statues made of him. Honestly, from what I've read about the man, he and Grant were more or less matched in being uninterested in Politics. Now Grant ended up as President, but I don't think he really wanted the job.
Love a good domestic politics update! Let's dig in.
If Hughes balks at that, tell him too bad and set the committee up anyway and subpoena everyone in the "White House." If they don't co-operate, you shout from the mountaintops "Look! What is this administration hiding that they won't cooperate with us?" over and over and over again. That's how you set a narrative. Instead, by putting a Liberal in charge you defang the political impact going into an election year because the narrative now is "hey, it can't be that bad, one of ours in charge, so all these investigations are a bipartisan effort!" and Liberals can use that veneer of bipartisanship to also claim credit on the committee's finding. After all, it is named after one of their guys, so Democrats can't run on "corrupt Liberals" because Liberals can rightly claim that they also helped expose the corruption. So you've removed that tool from the toolbox in 1916.
Yet more proof that Socialists are just catspaws to empower Liberals. The same party that has no qualms at all attacking progressive Democrats in cities and out West is totally on board with a progressive Liberal? Makes you wonder.
Strong disagree here as we've discussed in the past. It is a Democratic-run Senate, a Democrat should be in charge. When it likely becomes a Liberal-run Senate after the 1916 elections, a Liberal should be in charge (a la the Truman Committee).
If Hughes balks at that, tell him too bad and set the committee up anyway and subpoena everyone in the "White House." If they don't co-operate, you shout from the mountaintops "Look! What is this administration hiding that they won't cooperate with us?" over and over and over again. That's how you set a narrative. Instead, by putting a Liberal in charge you defang the political impact going into an election year because the narrative now is "hey, it can't be that bad, one of ours in charge, so all these investigations are a bipartisan effort!" and Liberals can use that veneer of bipartisanship to also claim credit on the committee's finding. After all, it is named after one of their guys, so Democrats can't run on "corrupt Liberals" because Liberals can rightly claim that they also helped expose the corruption. So you've removed that tool from the toolbox in 1916.
Would'nt Lafollette later switch to Dems?
How when Laffollette switches to Dems and it becomes a monoparty effort?
Again .... Look above..
Lafollete cannot stay Liberals. How can you expect a man who ran on a 3rd party against popular Republicans in their hayday just for Progressivism to stay in the centre-right party?
Because while we here in 2023 OTL know that LaFollette is likely switching ITTL, people in the Cincoverse in mid-1915 don't know that. Furthermore they certainly can't assume that.
Who Cares? People can change mind by Nov 1916 when they see Lafollete switching to Dems. The only point to care is that if the switch makes Dems more pouplar in 1916.
No one cares about mid 1915.
I think Lafollette will switch to Dems by 1916 elections and Dems can use the corruption issue. Only point is to care about Nov 1916 not Summer 1915(apart from GAW)