Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)

[KingSweden24]

Prologue​

Cinco de Mayo is an extremely long timeline - 1,750 threadmarks, eight posts shy of breaching the 500 page thread limit, and god knows how many tens of thousands of words. If you're joining the adventure for the first time, what follows in the Prologue can serve as covering the events of the past fifty-three years, from the May 5th that gives our story its name to the May 5th that closes the original timeline out. If you've been along for the ride, regard this as a recap - I sure know it'll be good to refresh my own memory on what has happened, so far.

 

[KingSweden24]

Prologue - A Monday in May​

Few would have thought that the engagement between the invading French forces of Napoleon III and the Mexican armies associated with the anticlericalist revolutionary Bentio Juarez at Puebla on May 5th, 1862 would have much impact up to present day, but indeed it did - the French quickly dispatched the Mexican battalions and rapidly advanced on Mexico City, capturing it and scattering the Liberals to every far corner of Mexico. This was the impetus needed for the junta of conservative Mexican rebels fighting against Juarez to invite Maximilian von Habsburg, an Austrian archduke and younger brother of Emperor Franz Josef I, to take a new crown as the head of the Second Mexican Empire under the name Maximilian I of Mexico.

The events in Mexico before long would have a major impact beyond her borders. The successful campaigns by the Confederate States army against the United States in Maryland and Kentucky led directly to France, now with a strong foothold south of the Rio Bravo, to declare in tandem with Mexico its recognition of the Confederacy late in 1862, forcing the hand of the United Kingdom and leading to the Treaty of Havana in mid-1863, in which the United States begrudgingly recognized the Confederate independence and allowed for the secession of Kentucky and the Indian Territory into Confederate hands in return for unfettered access to the Mississippi River and Chesapeake Bay watersheds, though it was not lost on anyone signing the treaty that it curiously contained an expiration date of fifty years hence - though at the time, everyone present presumed that diplomats would in time sort out the matter amongst themselves. French forces, meanwhile, were steeled from their experience in Mexico and returned back to Europe within a few years after the death of Juarez in battle and Maximilian's increasing comfort on the throne. When Prussia successfully went to war with Denmark and then Austria to add German-speaking territories to her domains, France was thus confident in her ability to affect the balance of power; when war came in 1867 over the question of France's purchase of Luxembourg, opposed vehemently by Berlin, the French were badly disappointed by the tactical and technological superiority of the enemy, who drove Napoleon III's forces out of Luxembourg, captured Thionville and Metz and threatened to march on Verdun before a peace treaty transferring Luxembourg into Prussian hands along with the protectorate of Cambodia was hashed out, followed shortly thereafter by the declaration of the German Empire in January of 1868, inaugurating a new and unfamiliar Europe in the wake of the Unification Wars that built modern Germany and Italy.

Maximilian secured his hold over Mexico in part by aligning himself closely with Confederate interests, even allowing to great controversy an incursion into the north by former Confederate general-cum-mercenary Nathan Bedford Forrest, who destroyed the last remnants of the juarista rebellion but largely eroded Mexican sympathies for Richmond in doing so, further worsening matters when he was elected President of the CSA in an orgy of paramilitary violence just a year later thanks to this renown. With a pacified country, Maximilian set about with a developmentalist program known as the Plan Nacional which built schools, railroads and industries while encouraging mass European immigration and the assembly of a grand Mexican Navy; though almost all of the programs within this plan fell well short of Maximilian's initially lofty expectations, it nonetheless proved a declaration of his regime's ambitions to modernize and centralize the Mexican state, spearheaded curiously enough by the once-rebel, still-federalist Santiago Vidaurri, who steered Mexican foreign policy in a pro-Confederate position over most of the 1870s until his death in 1878.

This choice of cozying up with the Confederates was not necessarily intuitive; the Americans bounced back from the severe postwar economic depression with a debt-fueled railroad boom during the Presidency of Horatio Seymour, who himself pursued a program of reconciliation with Richmond and returned to the ambitious territorial expansionism of prewar Democrats in leasing the Danish West Indies and shortly before his Presidency ended securing the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Nonetheless, a railroad bubble that was still felt by too few people and constant fighting with Congress saw Seymour ejected for Abraham Lincoln's former Treasury Secretary, Salmon P. Chase, who in his single term in office pursued one of the most aggressive domestic agendas in history, managing to formally abolish slavery across the United States with the 13th Amendment and restore the National Bank while financing one of the largest new navies in world history, but also presiding over a horrific economic crisis in the Panic of 1870 which reverberated across the Atlantic and helped trigger in Europe and North America what is now known as the Great Depression.

This was particularly bad news for the debt-addled Confederacy, which just as the Panic occurred was starting to look towards Cuba for potential territorial expansion, and in 1872 chose to invade to "support" a pseudo-regime of West Cuban planters that wanted to maintain slavery. These planters were only in revolt in the first place due to a law abolishing slavery across the Spanish Empire passed that year by the Cortes formed out of Spain's Gloriosa, a revolution throwing out the Bourbons in 1868 and inviting in the moderate, German and fairly apolitical Leopold von Hohenzollern as a new King two years later, once France could no longer credibly protest. This was a massive mistake on the part of the Confederacy - President Forrest elected to lead the expedition himself, on which he would die of yellow fever along with hundreds of his men, and the Confederate forces were cut off from resupply with the sinking of nearly their entire navy by the Spanish, ending any and all kind of foreign adventurism by the CSA for close to three decades and focusing Richmond's energies inwards instead. The episode, along with crushing the ultra-reactionary Carlist insurgency in the Basque Country and eventually defeating the Cuban rebels and incorporating the Caribbean colonies as full provinces, secured Hohenzollern rule in Spain alongside the liberal but fairly corrupt system of caciquismo run by the long-serving Prime Minister, Francisco Serrano.

The 1870s thus reached their midpoint as a time of transition and consolidation - a new Spanish dynasty enthroned, the collapse of the Republican Party in the United States with the decisive defeats in the 1870 midterms and then the triumph of New York's young Democratic Governor, John Thompson Hoffman in the 1872 Presidential election, the Confederacy struggling to pull itself out of international humiliation and a deep economic depression, and then the most significant event of them all: the abdication of Napoleon III on the day of his son's 18th birthday and his death a year later, auguring the reign of Napoleon IV, the virile young symbol of France's great golden age of the late 19th century...

 

[KingSweden24]

Prologue - Questions, Questions​

Since 1815, the United Kingdom had ushered in what had become known as the Pax Britannica, an era of broad peace around the world underwritten by the undisputed mastery of global sea power by the Royal Navy and London's role as the beating heart of world finance. By the late 1860s, however, the cracks in Britain's armor were becoming apparent. Its participation in the Mexican Intervention had seen them inadvertently setting up the domination of Mexico (at least for the 1860s) by France and the independence of the CSA and lasting enmity of the United States, and while British diplomacy had helped end the Third Unification War between France and Prussia the subsequent peace treaty nonetheless ended with consolidated, powerful new states in central Europe in Germany and Italy that upended the post-Vienna world order, in part due to the massive hegemonic potential of Germany and the October 1867 destruction of the Sistine Chapel and flight to Malta of Pope Pius IX, creating a difficult diplomatic situation for Protestant Britain hosting in exile the chief of the Catholic faith.

This set of circumstances occurred simultaneously to a remarkable deterioration of British traditional prestige at home in short order. The assassination of Prince Alfred in Sydney in 1868 by an Irish nationalist badly inflamed Hibernophobic public sentiment across the Empire, most notably in Canada, which had longstanding fears of the United States using Irish-American auxiliaries as a cutout for annexationist plans, cementing an Anglican-chauvinist hierarchy in particular in Toronto and Halifax dominated by the Anglophilic, imperialist Orange Order of Canada, a sister organization to the original lodges of Ulster. These events occurred in tandem with the failure of the Second Reform Act back in Britain, which would have greatly expanded the franchise for the House of Commons, ending the career of its chief proponent Benjamin Disraeli and leading, over the course of a rotating cast of Prime Ministers over the next several years, to the ascendancy of a firmly conservative bloc of landed nobles around the Earl of Carnarvon, whose four-year government would come to be regarded as a disaster and emblematic of Tory misrule, particularly thanks to its hostility to the working class during the severe economic conditions of the 1870s but also thanks to its bungling of two of the most important issues of the time: the Eastern Question of the Ottomans and Near East, as well as Britain's role in South Africa; these issues were not helped by the sudden death of Prince Albert Edward, the heir to the throne, of typhoid fever along with his friend the Dutch King, seeing two of the Queen's sons dead in short order and opening the question of how stable the monarchy indeed was with all the work Victoria had done to repair its prestige after the debacles of the Regency Era.

Despite post-Panic doldrums of the 1870s, though, the leadership vacuum left by Britain did not destabilize the world as many feared, and indeed the decade could be seen as a time of internal upheaval and national introspection after the map-changing chaos of the 1860s under a veneer of decaying conservatism. Mexican institutions became cemented and indeed the story of the country was one of tremendous success as it enjoyed unprecedented political stability after nearly thirty years of constant conflict and civil war, though anger from radical republican organizations culminated in twin riots on the Zocalo of the city center, the second of which saw an attempted assassination of the Imperial Family, from which thankfully none of Maximilian's family died but it did leave his eldest son and heir, Louis Maximilian, badly wounded, with his left eye blinded and severe scarring on that side of his head. As for the United States, in the aftermath of the Panic and the collapse of the Republican Party into its more radical faction and a more conservative breakaway Liberal Party, the Democrats came to dominate the decade, but remained split between its traditional Jacksonian small-government faction and newer, younger ambitious reformers who were intrigued by the growing elements of the nascent labor movement across the country. This divide was a factor in the fall of President Hoffman from grace as the corruption of his political allies in New York, such as "Boss" William Tweed, became a political liability, and resulted in the election of the staunchly conservative Thomas Hendricks as President; though little of note occurred in his otherwise placid and peaceful term, he would be the last proper Jackson-Douglas Democrat elected as the party in the two ensuing decades radically and dramatically shifted from being the party of the American traditionalist right to the party of its progressive left.

The lull of world affairs of the mid-1870s could not last forever, though; nudged on by some of Carnarvon's creatures in the Colonial Office, Britain got into an ill-advised war with the native kingdoms and Boer Republics of South Africa in the 1877-78 Basuto War, which ended in humiliation - the first ever major European Empire by a native force, and would conclude with an unsteady state of affairs in that corner of Africa for years to come that suddenly unsettled British affairs in its colonial empire greatly. This was exacerbated by France's complete purchase of the Suez Canal in 1875 under Britain's nose, meaning that the world's most important waterway was now in French hands entirely, dramatically changing the strategic considerations of the British position in Africa and the Indian Ocean.

This was, in part, a factor in Britain's muddled response to the eruption of crisis in the Balkans in the autumn of 1877 when uprisings in Serbia and Bosnia triggered a response from Russia and the Russo-Turkish War erupted. Unlike in previous iterations of conflict between St. Petersburg and Constantinople, this time the Ottomans were prepared and required no foreign assistance (not that much would have been forthcoming, anyways) and were able to entrap and defeat the Russians at Plevna in a decisive battle where Tsar Alexander II himself was captured in the field and his army cut off from reinforcements. The subsequent Berlin Conference in early 1878 was intended to thus serve as something of a second Vienna, only this time underscoring how important Otto von Bismarck and the German Empire were to European security. In the seminal treaties that followed, the Ottomans agreed to recognize the de facto independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania as de jure but other than that were able to escape without any territorial concessions and the Constitution of 1876 that provided for some level of parliamentary representation in the Ottoman realms was able to survive.

The Treaty of Berlin marked the apex of Germany's ascent to world power and the triumph of Bismarck's project to place it as the central power of Europe both geographically and diplomatically, but also an important hingepoint in history. Germany had already drawn a response in geopolitics - the three losers of the Unification Wars in France, Austria and Denmark cobbled together a secret alliance that would come to be known as the Iron Triangle, and it had to now rely on Italy as its chief ally both due to them sharing the distinction of having risen at the expense of Paris and Vienna but also because following the Berlin Conference the previously Germanophilic Russia began the long and steady process of turning her eyes away from Europe and instead focus more wholeheartedly on consolidating her Empire in Central and East Asia.

It also occurred at the conclusion of what can be seen as an era of traditionalist 19th century conservatism associated with Metternich's Europe and the reaction that crushed the spring of 1848 thirty years prior, and was thought to have been triumphant in the victories of the Second Mexican Empire and agrarian, slaveholding Confederate States. The Tories were trounced in a landslide in the United Kingdom by the Liberals under Spencer Cavendish, the Lord Hartington, that would usher in a modernizing period of reform with contours recognizable to Liberals of the 20th century; two years later, the Liberals of the United States won a narrow election to take control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, ending the Jacksonian party system that had persisted for fifty years. Even in France, the daring and ambitious young Napoleon IV, in tandem with his marriage to Maria Pilar de Bourbon of the fallen Spanish dynasty, rolled out a new direction for conservative rule in the National Contract that provided some state support for indigency and unemployment with the understanding that it was centered in loyalty to Church and Crown.

Of course, perhaps nothing emphasized this turning of the tide quite like the sudden and shocking assassination of Wilhelm I in Berlin in June of 1878, bring his long-ambitious heir and only son Friedrich III to the throne along with his radically liberal British-born wife Victoria, namesake of her mother, potentially injecting Anglophile reform and modernization into the staid Prussian court. On both sides of the Atlantic, a new liberal ascendancy had arrived...

 

[KingSweden24]

Prologue - La Decade d'Or​

While violent conflicts paired with mass social upheaval in the 1910s on both sides of the Atlantic would cause a great deal of historiography, particularly of the conservative persuasion, to look back at the entire Belle Epoque period as a sort of lost golden age, perhaps no stretch of said time so encapsulated the ambitions and optimism of that generation quite like the 1880s. In the United Kingdom and United States, it was a time of ascendancy for a more muscular type of classical liberalism that took its mantra of reform and modernization quite seriously, though the grand visions Liberal parties on both sides of the Atlantic started the decade with would end more as unfulfilled promises by its conclusion.

The 1880s were both a time of American hegemony establishing itself in the Western Hemisphere and revealing how fragile it was and how far it yet had to go. The election of James G. Blaine as President in 1880 as candidate of the young Liberal Party marked the end of the Second, or Jacksonian, Party System of the United States and the inauguration of what came to be seen as its direct replacement, the Liberal Dynasty, which depending on whom one asked and how one balanced control of Congress against control of the Presidency as being more important would last for somewhere between twenty-five to forty years. Liberal ambitions at home balanced Whiggish support for internal improvements with classically liberal commitments to free trade in the form of reciprocity treaties, which opened markets to the goods of the United States without overly exposing American manufacturing interests to competition in turn; the Liberals would also (not without controversy) pass civil service reform and greatly expand the role of the bureaucracy as well as the Navy, a hard turn from the small-government ethos of the Democrats. When paired with a strong economy after a half-decade of depression followed by another half-decade of middling recovery, their reward was for a massive landslide reelection for Blaine; however, his second term would be far less glittering than his first.

One priority of the Blaine years, spearheaded by his young but ambitious Secretary of State John Hay, was a process known as Continentalism, in which North and South America would mark their differences from the squabbling of Europe through cooperation, diplomacy and reciprocity (unspoken in all this of course was the central, decisively dominant position in this arrangement the United States would reserve for herself). This was initially not entirely unsuccessful; the Pan-American Congress was held for the first time, and though the more utopian visions of the day did not win out, Blaine's transformation from a xenophobic protectionist to a committed internationalist was complete, and the Liberals shifted to a firmly Anglophile position from then on. The effort to promote peace in the Americas was, initially, also helped by the ascendance of James Longstreet, a former Confederate General and Governor of Virginia who won the violent election of 1879 and immediately set about formalizing party structures through his remade Confederate Democratic Party and building a vast patronage network that by 1883 essentially controlled every aspect of the Confederate government apparatus, from the Presidency down to county clerk positions. This Democratic ascendancy was built in part on building an alliance between the planter oligarchy and the middle classes, in part on constitutional reforms that allowed the Confederacy to invest in internal improvements and a brown-water navy to defend her vast rivers, and in part on crushing the paramilitary groups that had plagued Dixie's politics since secession. Longstreet made his policy of ushering in a Reconciliation Era with the United States a priority, and in an ironic twist of fate, Hay - who had once been Abraham Lincoln's private secretary - oversaw as chief diplomat the cementing of possibly the most cooperative hour of relations across the Ohio in the fifty years between the War of Secession and the Great American War.

Reconciliation with the Longstreet-era Confederacy was one of the few unqualified successes of the Contintentalist project. The increasing centralization of power in Mexico City led to deep resentment in the Mexican North, particularly amongst local caudillos who chafed at any erosion of their day-to-day power. The bubbling feud between the capital and the provinces finally erupted in violence, first with the 1880 assassination of Prime Minister Tomas Mejia and then in 1882 with the Revolt of the Caudillos, a conflict in which several regionalist caudillos across the North, West and South of Mexico raised arms in Mexico's first civil war after fifteen years of peace and prosperity. The war was a savage one, seeing tens of thousands killed during its three years, but rebels were successfully beaten off in epochal battles at Guadalajara and Irapuato, at the latter by famed general Miguel Miramon, and by 1885 the North had been successfully pacified and many of the caudillos pacified and reintegrated this time into national politics - a decision which would come to bite Mexico before too long, as Northern landowners soon became one of the most dominant forces in the Mexican parliament. Beyond the chaos in Latin America's ascendant power, the emergence of Brazil was a southern hegemon seemed guaranteed with the death of Pedro II and the transition to a regency over his grandson, Pedro III, which nonetheless sparked deep internal disagreements that threatened to destabilize the country between various factions of monarchist and republican conservatives, and the fallout of the Saltpeter War of 1879-80 between Chile, Peru and Bolivia culminated in the technologically advanced Chilean Navy forcing a standoff with the United States Navy over a brief peacekeeping intervention in Panama, which erupted into the brief and bizarre Chilean-American War of 1885, where Chile managed to credibly fight to a draw (particularly in brutal battles in the Drake Passage at the heart of the Southern Hemisphere's July winter) and badly harass American shipping. The subsequent peace treaty, negotiated largely by Britain, left both sides feeling badly resentful - Chile at having concessions imposed on it including reparations and American access to its raw goods, the United States at having been stung by what they considered a miniscule opponent - and their contest for naval superiority in the Pacific ongoing.

In Britain, meanwhile, the Liberal government of Lord Hartington positioned itself more as a government of the reformist left than the center to center-right, as in America, passing a massive overhaul of the British franchise that greatly expanded the voter base and reformed parliamentary constituencies to make rural areas less immediately powerful; a number of other modernizing innovations were pursued there, as well. The events that would most define the Hartington era, however, was the continued escalation of the Irish Home Rule movement, which by the early 1880s had plunged much of the island into violence and invited violence against Irish nationalists abroad and sympathetic socialists at home, and also the Egyptian Revolution in 1882, in which the Egyptian Colonel Ahmed Urabi launched an attempted coup against the ruling Khedivate that was subservient on paper to the Ottomans but in practice a vassal of the French and British. The overly-aggressive British intervention in Alexandria, coupled with the Ottomans negotiating directly with the French, left British policy flatfooted and resulted in the re-absorption of authority in Egypt by the Ottomans with French assistance, essentially turning the Eastern Mediterranean into a Franco-Ottoman lake. While the Berlin Congress of 1885 on the matter of Africa established straightforward spheres of influence in the Dark Continent for European powers, the entire period 1882-85 was seen as a continuation of British influence's sharp decline, and into the void - and part of creating said void in the first place - came France, arguably the country with the strongest 1880s of them all.

The French position at the start of the decade had been strong and getting stronger as it was. The National Contract of Napoleon IV had endeared him to the country's working class and Bonapartist prestige was at its highest perhaps ever; the autocratic but competent regime of Francois Bazaine and Patrice McMahon had dramatically developed the country's rail system and access to hard metals from Mexico had created a well-financed banking sector, perhaps best embodied in Marseille's Credit Maritime which provided the capital for much of France's overseas adventurism. After a war scare with Spain in 1879 triggered by loose lips from the German-born Spanish crown prince had subsided, France was able to enjoy a position of not fearing her immediate neighbors too much for the remaining decade, with good relations with Italy, British strategic incoherence and an inward-turn and rising anti-militarism in Germany starting in late 1883 after the failed Waldersee Putsch, an inept attempt at a military coup against Kaiser Friedrich after Bismarck's sacking that November. This gave France the ability to focus on consolidating her overseas empire, both formal and informal, and this led to her interests in expanding her Asian presence. In a series of campaigns, France was able to violently suppress and consolidate its holding over Tonkin, which when combined with her increasing support for Sinophobic elements in the semi-protectorate of Korea, triggered the Sino-French War between 1884-85. After destroying the Chinese fleet at Ha Long Bay in Tonkin and then upon the high seas in the Formosa Straits, France was able to defeat the Chinese on land in the southern hinterlands and Korea, and also capture Formosa. The resulting peace treaty was a humiliation for Qing China, which their ability to demand tribute from Korea and Tonkin eliminated, and the islands of Hainan and Formosa ceded to France outright as territorial conquests; a lengthy period of military and social reform spearheaded by the teenaged Guangxu Emperor began shortly thereafter, which started seeing some tentative results by the end of the decade but earned him the enmity of powerful court conservatives, most prominently the Dowager Empress Cixi.

France thus by decade's end, especially after Germany further embarrassed itself in a brief gunboat war with the United States over Samoa, looked to be the most ascendant power in Europe, a state vigorously promoting a paternalist brand of welfare conservatism tied strongly to Catholic values and royalist hierarchy, and as Britain resolved to review its strategic posture, France increasingly came to be seen as enemy number one, both on land and at sea, driving a minor rapprochement with Germany, especially as it looked like the liberal Friedrich would never fully recover from his severe bout of throat cancer in 1887-88. The "Golden Decade" of France and elsewhere, then, despite its strong economy, technological innovations and chauvinistic imperialist mien, papered over a number of issues bubbling under the surface. Publid discontent with elected officialdom was growing and politics were growing more complex; in the United States, labor strikes throughout the summer of 1886 proved that labor groups such as the Knights of Labor had potential staying power, especially as the soft-socialist Henry George was elected Mayor of New York, while in the Confederacy, the bourgeoise National Reform League and working-class National Farmer and Laborer Party provided direct support for pushing back against the machine politics of the Longstreet Consensus.

Despite its reputation as a time of plenty and peace, the decade thus ended on an uncertain note, especially with what was to come. American politics were unsettled by the sudden death of President Blaine of stress and a lengthy struggle with Bright's disease, throwing the constitutional succession into question and helping lead to the election of proto-populist Democrat George Custer, a former celebrity cavalry officer and author; in the Confederacy, Longstreet's successor Lucius Q.C. Lamar began countenancing increasingly autocratic, even violent, methods to avoid especially the NFLP challenging the Democratic hierarchy. Europeans were no more settled; British Prime Minister Stafford Northcote died and thrust his Conservative Party into chaos and infighting, while the passing of Tsar Alexander II five years after being badly injured in an assassination attempt brought his much more conservative son Alexander III to power instead. But, as exemplified by the highly-successful 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris that featured the daunting Tour Eiffel as its centerpiece, it was nonetheless a time associated with hope and growth, where world-changing marvels unthinkable even just ten years earlier were seemingly increasingly commonplace, and a world where the Emperor of France could ice skate beneath the great iron awnings of the world's tallest structure seemed a world where anything was possible... [1]

[1] This remains among my favorite chapters of Cinco de Mayo, in particular as it closes a decade and "Part"

 

[KingSweden24]

Prologue - Twilight of a Century​

The overwhelming optimism with which the 1880s had ended came to an abrupt and ugly end almost as soon as the new decade had begun. The Russian influenza pandemic roared to life in January and February of 1890, rapidly moving throughout Europe and before long to the United States and the rest of the Americas. It was, at that point in time, one of the worst outbreaks of influenza in recorded history, perhaps famous in particular for the prominent figures whose lives it took - the British statesman Lord Salisbury, the Queen of Spain, and the eldest two sons of Alexander III of Russia. Worse, the spider's web of massive European loans to developing foreign countries ground to a massive halt with the Paris Bourse Crash that same February, partly out of fears of the spiking wave of flu cases. [1] With the Bourse closed for nearly a week, the French banking system virtually collapsed overnight as soon as it reopened, triggering a similar bank run and crash in tandem in London, where Barings Bank was already spiraling into a crisis due to its investments in Argentina, which would see a total economic collapse concluding in the Revolution of the Park which brought the radical and progressive Civic Union of Leandro Alem to power. Collectively, this would be the worst banking panic in history up to that point, dwarfed only by the 2002 crisis a century later.

These twin gut punches to the world economy - first the nasty flu that would linger deep into 1893, and then the collapse of the world's two largest financial centers - served as fuel on the populist fire growing around the world. Unlike 1870 - from which Britain had arguably still not recovered when the even-worse Panic of 1890 struck - the labor movement had consolidated itself as a genuine force by the last decade of the 19th century, and agrarian agitation by increasingly destitute farmers ruined by the farm credit crisis as well as poor harvests combined to erupt in a massive social upheaval that would dramatically change politics all over the globe. Incumbent governments - the Tories in the UK, Democrats in the United States, National Liberals in Spain, the Autonomists in Argentina - were battered by their oppositions throughout the first years of the decade, and political violence emerged as a potent tool of the lower classes, first and foremost in America, where George Custer became the first President to be assassinated when he was gunned down by the Native American son of a woman his men had killed twenty years prior at a Washington train station.

The burst of radicalism onto the political scene manifested itself in many different ways. Most prominently, in Britain it led to the rise of Joseph Chamberlain, a man whose political career had largely thought to be over by the late 1880s after an ascendancy in the Hartington years but who came to stand as the central figure of the radical wing of the British Liberal Party. Upon his appointment as Prime Minister in 1892, he immediately began an aggressive program of reform that overshadowed the more piecemeal approach taken by Hartington a decade earlier, managing through his polarizing campaigns with the assertive and sophisticated internal party pressure organization the National Liberal Federation to pass a small-scale land reform, universal manhood suffrage, and the early inklings of the British welfare state; at the helm of the Liberals, Chamberlain won landslide elections in 1894 and 1899 that served to essentially permanently make the Commons the superior House of Parliament. His time in office also would see the expansion of the British presence in Uganda and Nigeria, and despite not solving much of the fundamental grievances of Ireland or colonial India during his fourteen years of consecutive office at 10 Downing Street, it was nonetheless seen as a time of peace, recovering wages and newly confident British imperialism behind the muscular, cocksure position of Chamberlain.

This was not to say that Chamberlain's tenure was entirely without controversy or conflict. He had entered office at the same time that Albert Victor had infamously renounced his succession rights to marry his love, Helene of Orleans, because she was forbidden by both her father and the Pope to convert to Anglicanism; a year later, Victoria passed away aged 74 shortly after the marriage of her grandson and heir, George V. His first year was also dominated by fears of war with France, or Germany, or both - the Siam Crisis over French attempts to invade the Lao Highlands of northern Siam had seen the French Navy park itself within cannon distance of Bangkok and Germany, Siam's chief ally and patron from Europe, respond with fleet response of its own. The Treaty of Madrid that December, regarded as Chamberlain's finest diplomatic work, largely cooled the tensions but the episode revealed the extent to which European powers would begin having to not just pay great attention to what happened in Asia, but the ways in which they could be dragged into conflicts of their own by it.

The vast social changes of the 1890s revealed how quickly those who just years before had seemed like innovative and forward-thinking men now appeared anachronistic fossils. After returning to power in 1892 behind an uninspired but straightforward campaign largely on reassuring competence from former Secretary of State Hay, the Liberals in the United States found that they had gone from being the modernizing, reformist aspirants of the Blaine years to an increasingly tired defender of an increasingly unpopular laissez-faire status quo which their wealthy, WASPy party apparatus in New England seemed to typify and embody, particularly the brash, cunning and ambitious Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. The Hay administration's interests, thanks largely to the aloof President atop it, was preoccupied primarily with foreign matters, and so in the 1890s the People's Party burst onto the scene in the American West, demanding vast new regulations of the economy to protect farmers and other working men. For a moment, it appeared that they could perhaps eclipse the Democratic Party - vote-splitting certainly had an impact in buffing up the otherwise-dwindling Liberal Congressional majorities of the time - but instead they were slowly over the 1890s instead absorbed state-by-state into Jackson's baby, with the Democrats by the end of the decade having remarkably pivoted clear across the political spectrum from the party of the old-fashioned Jacksonian small-government ethos to advocating for a more muscular role in regulating economic affairs, particularly going after the much-hated trusts that the Hoar Anti-Trust Act of 1892 had failed to fully quell. This shift was embodied in both politics and media, with the symbiotic rise and partnership of the wealthy businessman William Randolph Hearst to Governor of New York on the backs of an expansive, pro-labor populist platform using the "yellow press" newspapers of bombastic news baron Theodore Roosevelt as his chief advocate and bullhorn.

The Hay years in the United States were associated largely with the recovery from the early 1890s depression and, at least in the view of Liberal bosses, a return to the staid and sunny optimism of the Blaine era, with the 1896 reelection campaign largely trying, with a fair deal of success, to ape and mimic Blaine's own triumph in '84. However, times had changed, both at home and abroad. Despite Liberals being keen to leverage the technological, cultural and architectural marvel that was the seminal, era-defining 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the city just a year later was struck by the Pullman Strike, the largest mass strike in American history that ground Illinois to a halt and inspired the nascent Socialist Party for decades to come. Foreign relations, despite Hay's experience at the helm, were no more smooth in the more complicated 1890s; despite Mexico's remarkable recovery from its civil war and the early 1890s depression under the Premierships of Felix Zuloaga and Miramon, rivalries with the Confederacy and Mexico over Central American markets and the development of a canal across Nicaragua were starting to bubble up, particularly with John Tyler Morgan, a more thuggishly uncooperative Confederate President, now at the helm after the controversial process in which he was essentially foisted upon Democrats at the 1891 convention in Nashville by party bigwigs including Longstreet. The Continentalist program of Blaine and Hay in the Americas was starting to unravel, though Hay would not live to see it collapse - indeed, he would not live to see the decade out, felled by an Italian anarchist's bullet in an assassination inspired by the stabbing of the Prince of Orleans in Geneva, the bombing death of Austrian crown prince Rudolf and his wife in Budapest by a Hungarian nationalist, and most immediately the murder of Umberto I of Italy in Milan. America closed the 1890s largely how it had started them - with the country in stunned shock as a President was killed.

Europe was no stranger to the rise of mass politics either, but it varied in how it approached them. In Germany, after the death of Friedrich from resurgent cancer, his heir Heinrich I (his elder brother having died of a boating accident in 1880) made efforts to continue his father's liberal reforms while rebuilding his relationship with Prussia's conservative landed nobility, and as with all things German it managed to be both a failure and a success simultaneously, depending on one's perspective. Belgium took a markedly different approach - following the assassination of his father in 1888 by a socialist, King Leopold III had emerged as possibly Europe's most reactionary monarch outside of Russia in addition to being regarded as a cad personally, and he encouraged his sons to largely take after him and gave them a front-row seat to what a "parliamentary autocracy" could indeed look like with his oppressive practices and use of parliamentary majorities to quash his opposition. [2] French policymakers were certainly taking notes; having risen up in the ranks militarily and in the Cabinet over the preceding decade, Georges Boulanger, Minister of Defense, had accumulated enough power and influence to essentially have his own parliamentary bloc in his Ligue des Patriotes to act as a shadow Premier and eminence grise, and after the death of his ally Felix Faure of a heart attack whilst in the middle of receiving fellatio [3], he finally achieved the top spot with a growing and hard-edged right-wing governing bloc in the rubberstamp Corps legislatif behind him, to the point that it caused even Napoleon IV some consternation.

As Siam had revealed, though, it was in Asia that Europe's attention really belonged, as the aftershocks of the Sino-French War continued to ripple out. The reforms of a Japan that had no intention of being treated like China were beginning to cause some consternation for European policymakers, but the creakiness of Qing China finally saw its breakdown in the Tiananmen Putsch in which military officers loyal to Cixi undid the Hundred Weeks' Reforms, imprisoned and slaughtered reformists by the thousands and forced hundreds more into exile, and placed the Guangxu Emperor under house arrest even though his powers were not curtailed formally. This conservative counterreaction by the most ardently traditional elements of the Manchu court came at a time when China was already destabilizing rapidly due to poor harvests and resentments in villages over Western extraterritoriality and the mass conversion of Chinese peasants to Christianity by European and American missionaries, and in the last months of 1899 a violent rebellion rose up across much of northern China, concentrated at first in Shandong but then spreading slowly outwards.

At first, this grassroots uprising did not cause Europeans much alarm - they were more distraught by the events at Tiananmen the previous year - but it should have. Spain had already discovered the ferocity with which Asian peoples would fight to drive European influence from their lands as they dealt with an unstoppable insurgency in the Philippines that had failed to capture Manila thanks only to the brutal and inhumane tactics of the colony's new Captain-General, the grim Valeriano Weyler, who had pivoted from killing Carlists and anarchists to now rounding up Filipinos by the hundreds of thousands to place them in reconcentrados - concentration camps. What started as an insurrection in the Philippines over resentment at the powers of the monastic orders ordained by Spain to help govern it would before long have an unintentional mimic on the mainland, as the dawn of the new century would bring with it a sun tinged red with the blood of millions as China became the center of the world's attention for the age of imperialism's most infamous colonial conflict...

[1] I can distinctly remember how eerie it felt writing about all this back in early 2021... art imitating life, as it were
[2] For those new to the Cincoverse, "Evil Belgium" is probably the OG absurd meme for this timeline that we've just kept running with
[3] Again, true story, and Peak French

 

[KingSweden24]

Prologue - New Century, New Problems​

The 20th century dawned with a sense of trepidation for many, fearful of the massive cultural, technological and economic changes rolling across the world; the phenomenon of this fairly widespread sentiment of queasy dread mixed with cautious optimism that denoted the transition from one century to another came to be known later as the fin de siecle, and there was perhaps reason for people to be worried about what was to come with the dawn of a new century.

No sooner had the 1900s begun than they were marked with extraordinary bloodshed; in China, the Boxer Rebellion against Western influences, in particular the conversion of Chinese to Christianity, had gained such steam that entire provinces across the North of China were utterly lawless, and rather than attempt to put down the revolt, the Qing government controlled by the Dowager Empress Cixi instead not only indulged the Boxers but began encouraging their violent outbursts against Westerners, finally endorsing their cause in the late spring. This ended with the Siege of the Peking Legations, in which thousands of Boxers attacked defenseless foreigners in the quarter of Peking where they resided and, after the makeshift defenses failed, massacred them nearly to a man. When a British expedition to free them failed and was brutally slaughtered in the field, seven European countries - Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain - along with Japan and the United States formed the Nine Nation Alliance to forcibly retaliate. This Boxer Intervention was a difficult proposition; seizing the port city of Tientsin was exceedingly difficult and the first instances of trench warfare were observed in the Zhihli Province of China over the next year as the Alliance attempted to press towards Peking but were frequently pushed back both by Boxers as well as the professional forces of the Chinese state. In a particularly infamous episode, British General Lord Charles Gordon was surrounded with his men in Tientsin and they were all killed; not until the next spring would the Alliance finally press their way in a bloody campaign in which entire Chinese villages were put to the sword to Peking, which fell in June of 1901 with tens of thousands of casualties, many civilian - including the Guangxu Emperor, under suspicious circumstances, and became an infamous episode of imperialist wanton murder, rape and looting known now as the Sack of Peking.

The Boxer War was a rallying moment across Europe, providing an hour of unprecedented cooperation overseas amongst the imperial powers, and particularly in Great Britain had a profound effect as Gordon was mourned as a martyr and Chamberlain's government stumbled over its perceived failure to defend him; in Canada, the debate over whether to participate formally in the expedition reopened wounds on the question of nationalism, and to Australia it would suggest, as would events a few years later, that their neighborhood was considerably more dangerous than they thought and Britain's ability to defend them may be limited. This spirit of unity in the face of the yellow peril, as the particularly nasty and xenophobic variety of political racism directed at fears of a rising and aggressive Asia came to known, did not last long. Almost as soon as Peking fell, disagreements about the future of China erupted amongst the various powers, and soon the Alliance splintered into smaller cliques pursuing their own interests. A group of conservative but ethnically Han court mandarins and provincial governors consolidated under Zhang Zidong had formed a collective mutual defense against both the Boxers and foreign intervention during the war in the wealthy and peaceful Southeast and with the fall of Peking and, with it, likely the Qing authority declared a Republic of China with its capital in Hankow; a quartet of Germany, the United States, Italy and Spain recognized them as the legitimate government of China and signed a peace with them that would earn them concessions such as treaty ports and monetary restitution but allow them to cease in the bubbling conflict in the north that was rapidly turning to low-intensity civil war for British and Japanese soldiers. Russia would be next; having focused during the Boxer War on pushing down through Manchuria, it struck a deal with a returning Manchurian Prince, Zaifeng, to recognize him as the new Emperor with his seat in Peking even as the British scrambled to find any viable Ming heir they could stick on the throne instead, in return for territorial adjustments in favor of Russia and its essential vassalization of Manchuria proper as a pseudo-protectorate, while not denying Russia's suzerainty over newly-independent Turkestan and Mongolia. With the writing on the wall, Japan, France and Austria followed suit in order to score themselves concessions in Shandong, and Britain was left holding the bag, humiliated and furious, having to concede to the terms on the ground after close to a century of having been used to dictating them themselves.

This gargantuan and embarrassing setback for Britain in China was just one of many major European debacles of the Great Powers in the early 1900s. Chamberlain nearly gambled away his government on an election called over "tariff reform," in other words a plan to introduce mild protectionism as a step towards a more fully united Empire that bordered on federation, but he lost his majority and until the stroke that ended his Premiership in 1906 was a weakened shadow of the titanic figure he had been who defined the 1890s. In contrast to its relative successes in China and elsewhere in the Orient, Germany's domestic politics remained as incoherent as ever between its fluid parliamentary factions and its flimsy constitutional construct, and Heinrich I was eventually forced to sack his government and appoint the rigid, conservative and competent Maximilian Egon II, Prince von Furstenburg, as his Chancellor to knock heads on both right and let together to build some kind of unified governmental approach to managing the chaotic politics of the Reich. Russia, while enjoying a tremendous coup that landed in its lap with its advances in the East, nonetheless continued to be a severe underperformer industrially and socially and as the health of Alexander III declined in his advancing age, so did the ability of his various "troikas" of favored court officials to manage the restive country's complex economic and cultural fabric.

Perhaps no country in Europe had as debilitating of an early 1900s as Spain, however. It had always been a peripheral participant in the Chinese conflict and evacuated to return its attention to the Philippines long before the three-way internal conflict between the Republic, the new Qing regime in Peking and Cixi's Loyalist in Xi'an began squaring off against one another. Despite Weyler's best efforts, the war had started to turn against Madrid again, and new Spanish leadership decided to take a remarkably unilateral approach in dealing with suspected Japanese arms smugglers that triggered an all-out war with Japan, as Tokyo responded with indignation at the execution of a Japanese merchant crew and sent their navy south to attempt to sink the Spanish Oriental Fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay. While doling out a fair deal of damage, Spanish submarines - in which the country was and remains a leader - were able to force the Japanese to retreat, but Japanese support for the revolutionaries led by Andres Bonifacio nonetheless helped turn the tide in the war in Luzon as Japanese soldiers fought alongside Filipino rebels to near the outskirts of Manila, and in one of the most decisive and widely studied naval defeats in history, the Spanish fleet in pursuit of the enemy was sunk almost in its entirety at Yaeyama. Only an intervention of Britain, France and Germany prevented the Philippines falling wholesale to Japan, an insult Japan would not soon forget, but in Spain the damage was done - the country cycled through several National Liberal governments in quick succession and the Conservative cabinet elected to replace them headed by Antonio Maura was not much better and handling the shocking loss of prestige seen as presaging the end of the Spanish Empire and its pursuant economic depression.

To an outside observer, the Americas seemed wholly occupied with their own internal matters for the first half of the first decade of the last century of the second millennium. Brazil's Emperor was assassinated in the first days of 1900 five years after defeating a putsch by his cousin, and was replaced by his brother the pious but deferential Luis I, who was reluctant to challenge the increasing influence of right-wing ideologues in the Army and relied on his familial supporters in the Navy to counterbalance them. While both republican regimes, Argentina and Chile continued to dramatically diverge in their paths as the former continued to sprint towards its progressive, radically secular and labor-friendly future under the civic religion of Leandro Alem's worldview, while the latter's decaying oligarchy of urbane liberals and landed gentry conservatives collaborated to crush political opposition and relied on increasingly violent methods to keep the radicalized working class at bay, and that was merely at home - Chile continued its policy of aggressive saber-rattling against not only Argentina but the United States, intervening in the efforts of Ecuador to sell its Galapagos Islands as a naval base to Washinton, while tacitly accepting the French intervention in Colombia's 1899-01 civil war and the subsequent puppetization of Bogota, thus bringing it into the French alignment and supporting France's Panama Canal.

Canals indeed became something of a theme in the Western Hemisphere, as the United States finally passed its Nicaragua Canal Treaty to allow its project competing with the flailing French dig in Panama to go ahead, supported by Washington's thuggish Liberal client in Managua, Jose Santos Zelaya. [1] The Canal Treaty was perhaps one of the few genuine achievements accomplished by the otherwise mediocre and forgettable American President Joseph Foraker, who had ascended to the office by way of his predecessor Hay's assassination and subsequently lost both Houses of Congress as he was reelected by the skin of his teeth in 1900 and then saw one of the worst landslides in American history further wipe out Liberal delegations in the midterms of 1902, and this was even before the Panic of 1904 was triggered by a speculative boom in railroad securities and other stocks exacerbated by a Supreme Court decision interpreting antitrust law narrowly. The economic calamities of the early 1900s saw the job of ending Liberal control in Washington finished off by Hearst, who was elected in a landslide along with supermajorities in Congress in 1904 and immediately went to work on a robust progressive program that included the enshrining of labor rights, regulation of banks and securities brokerages, and amongst a whole host of other initiatives a constitutional amendment for the direct election of Senators, implemented in time for 1908, which he won by an even greater margin. The Progressive Era had officially arrived in the United States, and the relationship between citizens and their government would forever be altered.

The Canal and concerns in Central America would occupy a fair deal of Hearst's attention when he was not ushering through, with the help of his Congressional allies and friendly Governors, his grand Fair Deal program; American influence in Nicaragua as well as Costa Rica was not received well by Mexican and Confederate officialdom who viewed the area as their sphere of influence, particularly Richmond which supported the authoritarian dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera in the Union of Centroamerica, quietly encouraged Standard Fruit of New Orleans to do everything it could to limit American economic suzerainty in the region, causing a number of incidents including the hijacking of a boat on the high seas and a tense standoff on the coast of Santo Domingo. Hearst's first term would thus be defined abroad by an increasingly aggressive Confederacy and deteriorating relations, in large part the cause of the pugilistic Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, who having seen his ambitions for the Confederate Presidency thwarted instead pursued power from the Senate and made it his mission to cement all of the Caribbean as Richmond's backyard. With the liberal but extremely unpopular Jose Limantour government in Mexico faltering by the middle of the decade and the rise of the powerful landed interests in the North, particularly the firmly pro-Confederate Creel-Terrazas Clique, the contours of an alliance against America began to take shape, and the interplay between these allies and the United States would within the decade plunge the Hemisphere into its grand conflagration...

[1] As I've mentioned before, Zelaya iOTL was very distinctly not a friend to the US, who spent a lot of money and political capital trying to get rid of him.

 

[KingSweden24]

Prologue - The Fraying Thread​

The twelve months from January 1905 to January of 1906 was an almost unprecedented year of turnover within European royalty, one which would begin to destabilize the Concert of Powers even as the continent shifted more firmly to a model of Parliamentarianism. Denmark's Christian IX passed away as the dean of European royalty and the Empress Elisabeth of Austria died too, ending her long and strange marriage to the Austrian Emperor who was hopelessly, madly devoted to her even as she seldom reciprocated. It was three deaths, all within six months of each other, that would shape Europe moving forward though.

First of course was Crown Prince Gustaf of Sweden, whose assassination in Norway at the height of negotiations and elections to exit the Union of Sweden-Norway badly inflamed tensions and triggered the brief War of 1905, in which the large, wealthier and better-equipped Swedes invaded Norway and won a decisive victory despite encountering credible and creditable resistance along the Glomma as they pushed towards the capital at Christiania; the affair short-circuited the push towards liberal parliamentarianism in both states and reimposed not just Swedish authority in Norway but royal influence (though a far cry from absolutism, whose days were over in Scandinavia) over government in both sides of the border even as Norway was tentatively granted new privileges. When Gustaf V Adolf came to power upon his grandfather's death in December of 1907, it was as a young man deeply shaped by his father's murder and the three-month war to crush Norwegian resistance, and as a King perhaps more profoundly skeptical of modernizing liberalism than any other in Europe.

The second to go was Spain's Leopold I, who finally succumbed after years of decline and in his place appeared his son Charles Joseph I, who was like his Swedish counterpart fairly hostile to mass democracy but not so bold as to eliminate parliamentarianism entirely; what may have happened had the Spanish right not been utterly inept in its five-year hold on power is an open question, but the 1910 elections in Spain delivered a renewed National Liberal government under Jose Canalejas that moved with rapid speed to modernize Spain's most decrepit institutions and reinvigorate liberal governance and popular support for the establishment, even once-tepid opinions towards the King, who in time came to begrudgingly respect his statesman Prime Minister.

The third and most important passing though was at the end of 1905, when Napoleon IV finally died after a long pulmonary disease aged only 49. His steady hand for three decades gone, and at such a young age, was profoundly negative for France and her neighbors. With him went a commitment to the policy of the Great Detente upon the European continent, particularly between Paris and Berlin; with him also went a French reputation for competent rule and pragmatism, as his son Napoleon V rapidly showed himself more interested in prayer and consulting with archbishops than statecraft (or even his Bavarian-born wife, Helmtrud, who before long struck up a torrid affair with her chief bodyguard at her private villa in Annecy, Lieutenant Charles de Gaulle) and the indecisive but demagogic Georges Boulanger soon found himself outflanked in ambition by his protege Raymond Poincare, who wasted no time charting a considerably more aggressive course both home and abroad mere moments after Boulanger's body was cold following his February 1912 death by engaging in ill-advised brinkmanship over, of all things, the succession in Monaco.

The Monegasque Succession Crisis was one of several of the Revolutions of 1912, which were not entirely actually revolutions but rather massive social upheavals that suggested that the old status quo could no longer be sustainable across much of the Western world. In Britain, the so-called Great Unrest struck at both Ireland, now a flashpoint again as demands for Home Rule rose under the dogged leadership of John Redmond, and in industrial cities such as Liverpool or Birmingham, flummoxing the government of Richard Haldane as it struggled to juggle a weak minority government having taken power back from an inept gang of Tories. Social democrats advanced in elections across the continent, zealous liberals took power in the Ottoman Empire, Hungarian nationalists won elections and threatened to totally destabilize Austrian stability as Vienna was forced to intervene in a bizarre, farcical civil war in neighboring Serbia, and Russia's young new Tsar Michael II was forced to introduce an authoritarian constitution that nonetheless formalized modern systems of governance and delineated some rights reserved to the people. Most notably in China, wreaked by years of civil war between Qing loyalists and the Republican oligarchs that had destroyed much of the Central Plain, the First Republic collapsed after a coup by General Li Yuanhong and introduced that country's first-ever written constitution, conceived largely by former Imperial confidant Liang Qichao, though it was a constitution largely on paper; rule remained arbitrary based on local governors, nowhere more the case than in little Yunnan in the country's south, where French-backed warlords soon had total control of the province's levers of power and looked with intrigue to its vast poppy fields.

On the surface, then, the years before the eruptions of 1912 - which were punctuated by an explosion of violence in Ireland as the Haldane Liberals introduced the first Home Rule act, less Redmond bring down their government, just as Lord Hardinge, India's Viceroy, was killed in a bomb attack by the separatist Ghadar Movement - seemed placid at first yet were anything but. 1912 thus marked the turning point, where the long 19th century seemed to come puttering to an end, and the world seemed to take in a deep, nervous breath.

And that was just in Europe and Asia.

 

[KingSweden24]

Prologue - Bound for Bloodshed​

It was not a novel thought that the United States' unprecedented demographic, industrial and even territorial growth was creating a juggernaut that would dominate its hemisphere politically and economically, and thus required a joint response from its neighbors; some form of that idea dated back to the Pan-American Congress of 1893, held on the sidelines of the Columbian Exposition that year. But it was not until the late 1900s and early 1910s that that idea both took on an ideological shape and also began to formalize into a genuine power structure that eventually triggered the Great American War in September of 1913. Mexican Foreign, and later Prime, Minister Joaquan Baranda had proposed as early as 1900 the necessity of a "Bloc of the South" to resist a more muscular Continentalism from Washington; this idea would germinate and slowly put down roots across the lands south of the Ohio River over the next decade.

The powers that eventually consolidated into the informal Bloc Sud were perhaps not entirely without a point; the industrial capacity of the United States was growing rapidly and favorable demographics combined with mass immigration left them both a huge labor pool and an increasing consumer market. While Washington had long underfunded its Army, its Navy was emerging as one of the largest in the world in quick order and had already helped trigger a naval arms race with Mexico and the CSA in tandem with a parallel naval arms race in the Southern Cone between the ABC Powers. It was not merely economics that panicked the rest of the Americas, though that was a hugely important factor (particularly in Mexico, where American companies and individual investors were rapidly increasing their control of Mexican resources, particularly oil) - it was also in part ideology. The Democratic administration of William Randolph Hearst was avowedly progressive, supportive of mass democracy, labor rights and the regulation of the oligarchy; the opposition Liberals, for their part, were committed to the aggressive imposition of Continentalism as an geostrategic and economic strategy and the home of the most avowed enemies of the institution of chattel slavery in America. Combined, the American political system, while certainly fluid and with considerable internal differences, nonetheless on external matters seemed fairly unified around the country's values guiding its behavior abroad [1] and those values were increasingly anathema to the oligarchic leadership of the Confederacy, Chile, Mexico and Brazil, the first and last of which were two of the last chattel slave economies on earth and the latter two of which were firmly conservative Catholic monarchies.

Historiography of the time largely, and understandably, places most of the blame for the escalation of tensions on the Bloc Sud, though a closer look at the events of 1907-13 can help suggest why, exactly, tensions erupted the way they did. In South America, the 19th century social structure of Chile and Brazil was rapidly fraying under pressure from new immigrants and working class agitation, and in between the two of them emerged the activist, radical government of Argentina, whose pro-labor, urbanizing, secularist mien seemed directly aimed at exporting its soft-revolutionary policy abroad, especially as countries like Uruguay and Paraguay soon elected in the wake of bloody internal conflicts progressive governments of their own closely aligned with "Alemism." Argentina's political culture, which had overrun a stagnant and reactionary elite in short order in the early 1890s, struck Santiago and Rio de Janeiro as simply an updated and more intense version of what Hearst was selling, and the logical endpoint of the ideals of the American Revolution. In Brazil, men surrounding General Hermes da Fonseca and his chief civilian ally, Prime Minister Pinheiro Machado, came increasingly to view this struggle in religious terms, of a crusade against secularism being needed to purge South America of the progressive scourge. Thus when American Secretary of State Lindley Garrison signed America's first genuine co-equal treaty of alliance with Argentina in 1911, it seemed clear that a progressive, secular and democratic "Axis" was forming down the center of the Americas with Washington and Buenos Aires as its wheels and the Nicaragua Canal as its spoke. [2] The Canal was an immediate point of panic to Mexico, too; its Tehuantepec Railroad would become immediately worthless upon its completion and threaten the Mexican economy, and allow both of its coasts to be potentially blockaded by the United States in the future with Nicaragua as its pivot point - and that was before getting into the longstanding disputes between Mexico and the "sister republics" to her north about Centroamerica and to whom it sat in a sphere of influence.

It was the Confederacy more than anyone else that viewed the struggle with Washington increasingly not in terms of two powers trying to settle a dispute over spheres of interest and mutual benefits, as it had been in the 1890s, but as an existential crisis both in the perpetuation of its oligarchic political system and its slave-fueled racial caste society. This was driven by two separate factors - the rise of Tillmanism as the voice of both the yeoman farmer and increasingly the urban working class in all the small factory towns across the Confederacy, and said urbanization already beginning to challenge and erode the hierarchy of the planter class which resulted in a schism within the ruling Democratic Party in which Tillman initially seemed to come out ahead, and in control, after conservative elites exited the party rather than be purged internally but which destabilized the Longstreet Machine and meant that in foreign affairs Tillman and his chief protege, Joseph Johnston, could never be seen as giving any quarter to the hated Yankee, resulting in one of the biggest self-inflicted wounds in diplomatic history - Tillman's decision, riding high after "winning" the schism, to sink in the closing days of 1908 the Bliss-Blackburn Compromise which would have renewed the 1863 Treaty of Havana ahead of its expiration in just four and a half years and settle the questions inherent in it.

To say that Hearst and the rest of the United States was taken aback by this volte face would be an understatement; tensions spiked dramatically thereafter, with newspapers convinced that Hearst was about to declare war on the Confederacy in the summer of 1910, during what came to be known as the Kidnap Crisis. Evidence emerged that a ring of men in northern Kentucky were kidnapping Black Americans and selling them south, and while there was no evidence of Confederate government involvement or even awareness of this, the affair nonetheless brought relations to a new nadir and forced Hearst to remilitarize the Ohio River, placing gunboats along it and bringing the countries to the brink of war; following continued intransigence from Richmond over a compromise on the Havana provisions and dismissiveness over the Kidnap Crisis, Hearst with nearly lockstep Congressional support instituted aggressive tariffs against the Confederacy when a new compromise on the Havana provisions proved elusive, pushing both countries into recession but showing that the United States had completely run out of patience with "little sister" to the south and that it would not take much more to put Washington in a position where they went from economic warfare to the physical variety.

As this was occurring, Mexico's political system was going through its own upheaval; the Union Popular, a similar agrarian-traditionalist ruling outfit to the Confederate Democrats, collapsed virtually at the same time as their counterparts in Richmond in 1907, seeing an Argentine-style radical outfit in the Union Radical dramatically grow its ranks under the leadership of Francisco Madero and paralleled by former UP dissidents representing the moderate urban bourgeoisie thought to be associated with powerful General Bernardo Reyes, who quite crucially was in favor of improved relations with Washington at Richmond's expense. A brief trade war with the United States plunged Mexico into a deep economic crisis that saw Madero elected in early 1911; however, Madero's fellow travelers in the UR were a great deal more revolutionary than their putative leader, who himself hailed from the Northern landowning class, and his appointment of soft-syndicalist Cabinet members in addition to midde-class reformers more in his own mold rapidly polarized Mexican society in addition to making his own Cabinet virtually ungovernable when he tried to take a more moderate, cautious approach. His efforts to thread the needle failed almost entirely with two autumns of massive industrial strikes punctuated by the eruption of a peasant revolt in Oaxaca led by Emiliano Zapata demanding land reform his unwieldy coalition was split on; conservatives smelled blood in the water, and by March of 1913 his government collapsed entirely and the Oligarcas were back with a vengeance, this time hiding behind the moderated facade of Francisco Leon de la Barra.

Hearst, concerned by the knife's-edge tensions with the Confederacy as well as severe labor agitation across the United States as part of the broader revolutionary atmosphere of 1912, made the controversial choice to pursue a third term as President despite misgivings from many of his co-partisans (that he was the youngest President in history and was anxious about what a post-Presidential career might look like was certainly a factor, as was the number of precedents he had already broken in reshaping American society). Despite a barnstorming campaign, Hearst was narrowly defeated in his historic campaign by Liberal nominee Charles Evans Hughes, himself also a former Governor of New York, who entered the White House with a divided Congress and dark storm clouds on the horizon.

Thus Hearst's leaving the Presidency in March of 1913 can be seen as an inflection point, as Mexico and Uruguay plunged into crisis not long thereafter, and the poor timing of an administration change so soon before the Treaty of Havana expired despite the efforts of Garrison to secure a deal in the dying hours of the Hearst Presidency. 1912 would close with the Americas on the brink...

[1] Unless you're a Chinese Boxer of Central American fruit plantation worker, in which case, tough luck
[2] A tortured, purple metaphor, but #sorrynotsorry

 

[KingSweden24]

Prologue - The End of the Fuse​

The half-century since the Treaty of Havana had seen the new North American order brought about by the annunciation of the Second Mexican Empire and the secession of the Confederate States consolidated; the Treaty's expiration on July 1, 1913, would see that order unwound with an orgy of violence unseen since the Napoleonic Wars and indeed in many ways unprecedented in history.

This was not to say that no effort was taken to stop the horrors that were to come. The British made a game attempt to intervene late and organized the Niagara Conference, in part in hopes to find a permanent settlement but more realistically to get all parties to agree by Havana's provisions indefinitely until a new compromise could be reached. Building off of the work done by Garrison, the Hughes administration attempted to reach an amicable settlement, but were rebuffed by the hardline Confederate chief diplomat Michael Hoke Smith, and days after the Conference concluded, Havana expired formally and it was now open season for revenue agents to harass American shipping on the Mississippi and Chesapeake bays. Whatever small recovery from the 1910-11 recession had begun in the United States rapidly ended, and the ensuing inflation crisis and humiliation at being spurned at Niagara stiffened American spines, from the White House on down. The time for compromise was over.

This was the biggest domino to fall, but the pieces were in place for chaos already. The Madero government's fall in Mexico and an ensuing spike in political violence triggered a run on Mexican investments by nervous foreigners, tipping Mexico's economy back into depression and suggesting to hardliners in Mexico City that the Americans were trying to force a firesale to snap up Mexico's assets on the cheap and re-initiate the trade war; this point of view split the Mexican elite down the middle, with many civilian conservatives increasingly pushing Richmond to take a stronger stance while the royalty, especially the heir Louis Maximilian, and much of the military was a fair deal more skeptical. It was out of this chaotic spring that Mexico's military commitments to the Confederacy were formalized. In South America, meanwhile, the Brazilian-backed Blancos in Uruguay had launched a massive uprising across the north of that country and were credibly marching on the capital; at the behest of the government in Montevideo, Argentina dispatched a small expeditionary force across the Rio de la Plata do protect the legitimate elected government, angering Brazil.

The summer of mounting crisis seemed to have no immediate resolution other than war, even if that was what everyone wanted to avoid, particularly in Britain, which was nonetheless occupied by its own spiraling crises. Despite having brokered amicable medium-term solutions to both the Monegasque and Serbian questions that spring at the Congress of Budapest, London was consumed by a burgeoning crisis in Ireland, where the Home Rule Act being pondered by the Haldane government had seen the Ulster Volunteer Force formed to defend the interests of Protestant-majority Ulster against what they perceived would be an Irish Catholic tyranny in the event of some kind of devolved assembly in Dublin being formed. That the Liberals themselves were divided on how to handle Ireland did not help matters; the final passage of the Government of Ireland Act 1914 despite months of protests and rioting saw several Army officers sympathetic to Loyalist concerns in the Curragh Mutiny refuse to fight the UVF directly, essentially ending the Haldane government then and there but failing to empower the new Tory regime of Hugh Cecil with a majority that could solve the crisis, especially after Ireland as a whole plunged into low-scale civil war over that ensuing summer. Ireland's woes distracted Britain from mounting problems in India after the death of Lord Hardinge, too - the Ishii Maru Incident in Vancouver, where Punjabi Indians on a boat were denied entry to Canada and then several of them were murdered, inflamed public opinion in the Subcontinent and in the first months of 1915 saw the Punjab Mutiny break out as directed by the Ghadarites, with tens of thousands of Punjabi rioters being joined by Indian Army units to quickly seize hold of cities such as Amritsar, Lahore and Rawalpindi and thus directly and credibly threaten British rule in India for the first time since 1857.

The fuse finally reached its end in the Americas in late July of 1913, though, when the Arcadia - a merchant vessel on the Mississippi - was seized and its captain shot by revenue agents. In the tense weeks immediately after the expiry of the Treaty of Havana, something like this was certainly inevitable and expected, and it was the last straw for the White House, which delivered an ultimatum with clear threat of force to Richmond. As Confederate politicians debated their response, President Johnston died suddenly of pneumonia, and mere days later the Speaker of the House John Sharp Williams was assassinated during a speech that his killer regarded as insufficiently belligerent. The unprepared new President, Ellison D. "Cotton Ed" Smith, sided instantly with war hawks around him and devised a plan to attack the United States before the Confederacy was attacked first, refusing to countenance the wound to precious Dixie pride that backing down at this moment would be. On the morning of September 9th, 1913, the Confederate Navy attacked the US Navy in dock at Baltimore at the same time that a declaration of war was delivered along with an offensive into Maryland; President Hughes was eating breakfast as shells started landing on the White House lawn, and he was barely evacuated to Philadelphia in time.

The long-predicted but previously eagerly-avoided Great American War thus opened with the United States on her back heels, a decade of Army expansions under multiple Presidencies nonetheless still leaving the country exposed. The Confederate Army looted Washington and occupied Baltimore, carrying out a great deal of atrocities, but their advances were arrested at the Susquehanna and the United States spent most of 1914 pressing them back across the Potomac into Northern Virginia on a stupendously bloody Eastern Front. In the West, things went somewhat better for the United States; they quickly captured the oilfields of the northeastern Indian Territory, established a beachhead in northern Kentucky that was dramatically expanded in February 1914 Kentucky River Offensive, and out in the Southwest, General John "Black Jack" Pershing marched rapidly through Yuma to Tucson and then to the Confederate-Mexican agglomeration of Los Pasos upon the Rio Bravo River.

Brazil was able to push deep into Argentina after throwing their enemy out of Uruguay, but an attempt to knock Buenos Aires out of the war was stopped navally at the Battle of the River Plate and Brazilian offensives always ran up against the Parana River, which was nearly uncrossable; they had little help from their Chilean allies, who within weeks of the war starting had to contend with the United States pulling in their old foes from decades ago of Bolivia and Peru. The United States, while more hesitant to anger European powers in the Atlantic, wasted little time establishing themselves in the Pacific, rapidly making moves to defend Nicaragua from a joint Mexican-Centroamerican offensive and destroying most of the Chilean Navy at the Battle of the Desventuradas in April 1914.

From that point on, the spring of 1914, the strategic table was largely set; the United States would have to grind down its enemies piece by piece, utilizing its considerable economic and demographic advantages as industrial war made its debut. Gas warfare, aerial bombardment, setpiece battles between dreadnoughts - all the capabilities of total national war were laid bare for the world to see. The Americans saw for the next year successes in fits and starts: they achieved a breakthrough in Kentucky and at Memphis only to be stopped at a vast series of defenses in Middle Tennessee that set up the Siege of Nashville for ten months, and their first attempt to land in Chile was repulsed, while Pershing's mission to circumvent Los Pasos' defenses and knock Mexico out of the war came to depend on local brigands such as Pancho Villa.

But in the end, the erosion of the Bloc Sud escalated into early 1915. Chile came first, as a political crisis saw its leadership resign with the news of American-Peruvian landings in Antofagasta and Iquique, and the ensuing chaos would see three new Presidents in the course of as many months and a conservative redoubt formed in the south of the country as the liberal successor government agreed to a peace deal with the Axis. Mexico, with Pershing's armies approaching Chihuahua and a massive, sophisticated uprising of syndicalist labor unions in the Revolt of the Red Battalions, began to wonder why exactly it was still fighting this war. Brazil had little success in crossing the Parana and seemed to have reached the limits of what it could achieve, having successfully pushed Argentina from Uruguay, and voices to pocket this strategic victory and go home grew louder and louder in Rio de Janeiro.

But it was the Confederacy that would suffer worst in the spring of 1915, as the vengeful Americans scored their two largest victories within hours of each other. On May 5, 1915, the final breakthrough at Nashville occurred, securing the end of a major defensible point and former industrial hub for the enemy; meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, the United States finally put an end to the CSN's commerce raiding campaign in the Caribbean at the Battle of Hilton Head, where most of the Confederate Navy was cornered and sunk in a coup de main within sight of the South Carolina coast, essentially ending their ability to defend their ports any longer no matter what European powers might think. The high tide of the Bloc Sud had come and gone - the war's inevitable conclusion was now simply a matter of time.

End of "Prologue"​

 

[KingSweden24]

Part X: The Eye of the Hurricane​

"...war did not end on May 5th, 1915, unfortunately for the hundreds of thousands of souls still to perish - but the war, for all intents and purposes, was from there on out over but for the fighting..."

 

[KingSweden24]

"...while not dissimilar to the broader reactionary movement that defined the Catholic Bloc Sud's opposition to the United States and, perhaps to an even greater extent, the culturally and religiously similar Argentina that was viewed as a cousin who had "gone astray," has some important differences.

It has been noted quite frequently by historians of the Great American War the awkwardness with which the Confederate States of America fit with her allies. She was not a monarchy, quite the opposite, nor was Dixie a centralized state, with her powerful state legislatures and governors who though much less contemptuous of Richmond's authority by the 1910s still were regarded as in many ways supreme. Though Confederate citizens were on the whole deeply devout Christians, they were overwhelmingly Protestant outside of the Acadian Catholic belt of southern Louisiana, and though lacking the demographic anxieties about Catholicism that plagued Canadian Anglicans and even a great many American Protestants (particularly in New England), most of its society regarded Roman Catholicism, and thus by proxy their staunchly Catholic Mexican and Brazilian allies, with skepticism if not genuinely-held suspicion.

As is generally typical of American historiography, there is a certain navel-gazing and delusional exceptionalism when it comes to the Great American War and its aftermath that defined until recent decades scholarship on the subject. In the traditional American account, one embraced across the ideological, political and pedagogical spectrum, the Bloc Sud was part of a loose conspiracy by conservative elements panicking about the rise of America's dynamic, industrial economy and progressive worldview that collaborated to defeat it before they had no chance to resist it and saw "American values" exported into their staid, socially and financially backwards countries. [1] Said line of thinking continues on to suggest that the rise of the United States to dominate its hemisphere as its rightful backyard for the next century was inevitable, and the frequent tensions and occasional conflicts between her and her neighbors from 1917 to the present day are simply "aftershocks" of the defeated failing to reconcile themselves to their rightful place, and that the question was settled with the blood spilled in the war. This chauvinistic point of view around the United States' peaceful and then violent rise reserves its particular contempt for the Confederacy, which it holds beyond all others responsible as the Eve that tempted with the apple of war the Adams of Mexico and Brazil.

Scholarship around the anxieties of the Mexican and Brazilian aristocracies and church hierarchies, and a better appreciation in the American academy for the social issues of their Latin neighbors preceding the war, has helped this singular and exceptionalist point of view step aside for a more nuanced understanding of Latin resistance to American soft imperialism along its much-referenced "Axis of Liberty" from the Arctic to Antarctic. But the view of the Confederacy as uniquely responsible for the war itself has not died, thanks in part to the longstanding ebb and flow of tension between the two countries and, in part, a newer appreciation of Dixie's intellectual project.

One cannot understand the Confederate path to war without understanding the context of its secession in the first place; its entire society was built top-to-bottom on a peculiar institution, that of chattel slavery and a hierarchy dependent on its preservation. White Anglo-Americans in both the United States and Canada were certainly no strangers to racial and cultural resentment (in the latter, particularly when it came to contesting control of the country's institutions with the Catholic Quebecois minority) but they did not structure their entire worldview around a uniquely pernicious example of white supremacy as the keystone of their culture and nationhood. Indeed, a great many Confederates went much further than that - the works of the sociologist George Fitzhugh, who suggested in the 1850s [2] a slave society that did not purely rely on racial castes, had a great many admirers and this trickled through to the contempt in which many of the planter oligarchy held the poor White citizenry of the country, on whose labor their society relied on just as much as the Negro slave and whom they gladly fed into the Yankee cannons while they remained behind on their estates.

What the Confederacy represented from top-to-bottom, then, in its politics and culture was a world of strict hierarchies, a rigid place where the lessors knew who their betters were and power was reserved for the worthy few. Its political anxiety should be understood perhaps not exclusively but largely through this lens; everything about the Confederate States was organized in 1913 around this worldview. Even internally, the idea that this might be challenged somehow drove much of the political disputes. The "National Consensus" of the oligarchy viewed Tillman's smallholders and emerging labor-farmer coalition as forgetting their place, while Tillman - a wealthy planter himself - saw the elite has having foregone their perch at the top of the hierarchy through corruption and mismanagement. To both, however, the egalitarian liberal ideal of the United States was not just appalling but a direct threat to their order. It simply could not be possible that a Black man could integrate himself with broader society and be a functional part of it; while in the United States the ideal of pluralist civic nationalism presented by Democrats and the push for the assimilation of immigrants into an American super-culture by Liberals were a key point of contention if not the biggest difference between the parties' cultural worldviews, to the Confederate eye they were virtually indistinguishable affronts to the natural racial, patriarchal and societal order which the Confederacy was founded upon and, as the war crept closer, saw itself as being the only state on Earth willing to still defend. The siege mentality, the impossibility of compromise, the almost rabid enthusiasm to march off to die in the first months of the war - everything flowed from a culture that took it as a given that they were the lonely noble heroes of the Anglo-Saxon race standing against the hordes.

And then, the collapse of the Nashville defense and the sinking of the Confederate Navy at Hilton Head occurred virtually simultaneously, and not just a whole government and army but an entire society stared collectively into the abyss together, with everyone collectively thinking the same thing that would define the postwar Confederacy up to present day:

"What if we lose everything? What becomes of us? What if the Negro turns around upon us to seek vengeance for what we have done to them for centuries? What if we were wrong? And what does it say about us if we are?:..." [3]

- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy

[1] While I and I'm sure many of this story's readers would rather live in ITTL's United States for a variety of reasons (most of them involving "No South"), in seeking to avoid a pure wank it bears mentioning that this alt-USA is not unequivocally a "good guy," and there are very solid reasons for her neighbors to dislike her for this fairly chauvinistic attitude that winning the GAW will only seek to make much worse.
[2] I wanted to lead off with this because it was A) fresh in my mind due to B) an interesting conversation @dcharleos and @SWS were having about Fitzhugh's particularly horrifying brand of Confederate proto-fascism as early as the 1850s over in the former's brand new "Nothing to Apologize For" TL, which I look forward to seeing develop
[3] As with anybody who wants to avoid unflattering answers to difficult questions, I'm sure postwar Confederates will handle the aftermath of the complete uprooting and collapse of their society both economically and culturally with thought and care /s

 

[KingSweden24]

"...that the Mexican Navy had not been there, too, but Maximilian cringed at the realization that two of the three dreadnoughts assigned to Mexico's east coast were exposed in squadrons at the Florida and Yucatan Straits to potential attack from the Atlantic or central Caribbean; just as Mexico had developed the fleet he and his adoptive son Prince Salvador de Iturbide had spent their whole lives trying to bring to fruition, it was at high risk of ending up at the bottom of the Gulf. [1]

Maximilian's background a lifetime earlier in the Austrian Navy and the immediate exposure of his prized armada made Hilton Head hit much harder for home for him, but it was not the only bit of bad news that weighed on the Chapultepec over the course of May 1915. The Confederate position around the industrial city of Nashville had collapsed as well after a ten-month siege that had seen tens of thousands of men killed or wounded, badly kneecapping their army, and as Chile tottered on the edge of civil war they had struck an armistice, thus fully granting the United States supremacy over the Pacific at last and allowing them to concentrate their attention to a much closer neighbor - Mexico. With the peasant uprisings that were starting to reach the size of the Revolt of the Caudillos now burning in the North and South, in both directions threatening supply lines to Los Pasos or Ciudad Guatemala and potentially posing a major risk to the ability of Mexican forces in both theaters to sustain the campaigns.

This was the context of the Mayo Negro, or "Black May," in which Mexican leadership were forced to contemplate difficult choices in the wake of the Red Battalions and then the massive strategic setbacks for the Bloc Sud. The immediate consequence was the effective and permanent isolation of the most aggressive hawks, who only had the fact that spies in Pancho Villa's camps suggested that the dogged American General Pershing had been recalled to the United States to point to as any kind of optimistic development. Admiral Prince Salvador remained at sea where he belonged but his half-brother Agustin was essentially sidelined from then on, disinvited from most of Maximilian's family councils at the Chapultepec. This was repeated within the civilian administration as well; Enrique Creel's influence within the Cabinet evaporated overnight, and his hatchet man Olegaria Molina was put out to pasture and asked to go resolve the growing insurgency in his home department of the Yucatan before it could link up with Zapata's rebellion.

Louis Maximilian, always the staunchest skeptic of the war within the royal family, wanted to go further than that. He urged his father to make an example of the "chickenhawks" in Cabinet by sacking the entire government and replacing it with a caretaker Cabinet to negotiate an immediate armistice and exit from the war. In front of his stunned teenage sons Carlos (the future Charles I) and Agustin, he dove into an angry, red-faced tirade, for the first time in Maximilian's presence losing his temper. His only surviving son and heir roared that his father's desire to appear apolitical at the hour "in which Mexico needed the stern hand of the Padre de Patria rather than the empty lies of Creel and his charlatans" had given the Confederophile faction of the Cabinet enough strength to bully the moderates and soft-skeptics into going to war immediately after the Sack of Washington rather than waiting and assessing Mexico's best option, especially as war was declared a mere six months after the shocking collapse of Madero's government when the Empire's foundation had seemed unsteadier than it had in three decades. According to Louis Maximilian, the Zapatista and Villista rebellions and the Red Battalions were only the beginning, and if the Empire collapsed it would end with the whole family in exile or "shown the same grace as Louis XVI", and could be traced back to the Emperor's indecisiveness. Maximilian was taken aback; in forty-seven years of life, his son had never dared speak to him that way. At first, he was unsure what even to say, completely at a loss for words, but Louis Maximilian gave him a straightforward opening. After venting his anger at his octogenarian father, the crown prince calmed down and continued by suggesting that one mistake did not need to beget another, and that there was still a difficult but feasible way out: sack the Cabinet, and do it soon, to make it absolutely abundantly clear that the Emperor was fulfilling his role as the guarantor of the Empire.

What Louis Maximilian was proposing was, on paper, entirely within the parameters of the Century Constitution. As discussed in Chapter 24, the organizing document of the Second Empire outlined clear powers for the sovereign, considerably more than in many European constitutional monarchies. On paper, the decision to appoint or dismiss a government was not just a formality reserved to the Emperor, but his (and it was indeed his) prerogative entirely and exclusively. [2] In practice, Maximilian had intentionally created the precedent that the Prime Minister should at least in some capacity rely upon the confidence of the Assembly to sustain its ability to promulgate laws, or at the very minimum not waste all its time fighting with an oppositional and intransigent parliament. So while the proposal was legally and constitutionally airtight, politically it went against the spirit of what Maximilian had hoped to achieve with his granting of a more liberal and democratic constitution at the turn of the century, and his dithering started up again. It was not only the act itself that was dangerous but who it was directed against. The government of Leon de la Barra, while not as aggressively reactionary as Creel's, was nonetheless one of the traditional, agrarian, Catholic conservative strain of Mexican political life that was responsible for the existence of the Empire in the first place. Maximilian had stuck to his principles in anointing Madero as the Assembly's choice, angering the Right, and upon the self-immolation of Maderismo had threatened to radicalize the Left further by appointing the caretaker cabinet of Leon de la Barra that was now dominated by its conservatives and had led the country into war. What would throwing out El Puro's government do to Mexican politics? Could the Empire survive it?

At the same time, upon careful consideration, Maximilian had to acknowledge that much as his son had offended him, he had a point, it was just a question of how to thread an exquisitely difficult and dangerous needle. Madero had left into a self-imposed exile out of the country and, at any rate, had shown in even less difficult circumstances he had little credibility with the public or with parliamentarians. That was essentially the only statesman available on the Left, for after the Red Battalions the Bloc Democratico had eaten itself alive, its hardliners dead or in exile and its moderates dissipated into various new factions. The movement that had once seen likely to supplant the Mexican establishment and usher in a revolutionary new era - perhaps even a republican one! - had gambled entirely wrong. But the Right behind Creel had been the most aggressive advocates of the war and it was plain their credibility was gone as well, and Leon de la Barra's with it.

Who then was left? To Louis Maximilian, the answer seemed obvious - Bernardo Reyes, long a close personal friend and confidant who had very carefully built up a considerable amount of influence behind the scenes with the heir and his wife politically and socially. The choice was not entirely unconventional, either. Politically-minded generals loyal to the Emperor had made able Prime Ministers in the past, as Maximilian's long friendship and partnership with Miguel Miramon attested to. Above and beyond that, unlike Miramon who had been a creature of the pre-Imperial conservatism largely kept afloat in politics by his own infamy, longevity and the Emperor's patronage [3], Reyes had found an important niche for himself as a muscular representative of the urban bourgeoisie and middle classes his main base rather than the landed aristocracy, but still had populist credibility with laborers in farms and factories, though the violent response to the Red Battalions had damaged that a bit.

Maximilian was less sure. Reyes brought with him his own political bloc that was represented in Cabinet and had never been a stranger to ambition, and having him dominating both the military and the civilian sides of government worried Maximilian about what Reyes would ponder doing once he had passed on, which at his age could happen at any time. That being said, Reyes did represent the only bloc of Mexican politics with any remaining popular legitimacy, the quieter and more brittle but broad center that was starting to turn on the war but had been militantly opposed to the Red Battalions and their abortive national strike. From the Bloc Independiente could come somebody else to lead the charge moving forward, and one man from the Bloc Independiente sat in Leon de la Barra's Cabinet already and could be easily asked to slide over into the biggest seat: the competent and capable Industry Minister Francisco Carbajal.

The choice was not without some controversy, not least in how it was handled. Carbajal was an otherwise non-entity politically chosen almost entirely because he got on well with Reyes and had not angered any major faction, but until May 21, 1915, when he was called to the Chapultepec he had been nobody's idea of a Prime Minister, not even to himself. Leon de la Barra had not been surprised that he was given the sack after two years in charge with the way the war was going but he was genuinely shocked that Carbajal of all people was his choice, and the Mexican public largely shared the reaction of "Who?" upon the choice. But the choice was made, and Carbajal did not significantly reshuffle the Cabinet, keeping both Reyes and Lascurain in their current positions. Mexico had at least some new leadership at the helm; the question was now simply what direction the obscure new Prime Minister would sail the ship of state..."

- Maximilian of Mexico

[1] Seeing as the Battle of Puebla in 1862 was just another victory in Lorencez's ongoing march to Mexico City and it occurred before the crown was even offered to him, Max is not pondering, as we all here on Earth-1 are, the irony of all this happening on the same day that secured him his Empire on Earth-5 (Earth-Cinco? )
[2] Obviously this is in theory how every constitutional monarchy back then worked.
[3] And weird maybe-cuckolding love triangle with Carlota - throwback to early in the last thread!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...apparent. Dreadnoughts were expensive to build and expensive to maintain, the shiny fast new battlecruisers becoming increasingly popular in European admiralties even more so. Late 1915 and early 1916 was when many countries were due to budget for another round of naval construction, and the speed with which Chile and the Confederacy had seen their mighty dreadnoughts sent off to the deep but still forced to carry the debt on them left countries like Italy, sandwiched between the not-insubstantial French and Austrian navies, aghast.

Beyond the financial implications of the nature of dreadnought warfare, though, the Battle of Hilton Head and to a lesser extent the collapse at Nashville essentially ended for the Confederacy any hope of increased European support. Britain, despite professing her neutrality and continuing to supply the Confederacy with trade, had begun to be seen as clearly favoring the United States, in no small part because of British dependency on American and Argentinean agricultural imports [1] but also because the raw goods which they imported from the Confederacy had, other than increasingly inexpensive cotton that could be sourced from Egypt, India or elsewhere instead, effectively dried up as they were hurried instead to Dixie's factories across its emerging industrial belt stretching from Birmingham to Atlanta and through the South Carolina Upcountry. [2] It was also simply the fact that while a right-wing government had taken power in Britain the spring before, it was an extraordinarily weak one, and occupied with an ongoing insurgency in Ireland and one that had just erupted that February in India; sympathetic to the interests of a landed class as the government of Hugh Cecil may have been, they were more sympathetic to the idea of everybody in the war hashing out their differences and bringing the calamity that was starting to be felt in European banks and brokerages to an end.

Britain's rule of the seas meant that her opinion mattered more than the rest of Europe's collectively, but even there the Confederacy was out of luck. Russia was utterly disinterested in a war that had zero effect on her spheres of interest and despite her autocratic Tsarist government had always taken pride in good relations with the United States dating back to before the Treaty of Havana. Germany's minority interest in the Nicaragua Canal had always made the idea of the Kaiser siding with the Confederacy and, more importantly, her Mexican-Brazilian allies a nonstarter, and her support for the United States had become more and more overt over the last six months as German fears of Confederate interference in the Caribbean with her interests had led to a dramatic expansion of German submarine and frigate patrols out of Aruba. Even France, long a good friend to Richmond, was starting to distance herself diplomatically, choosing instead to focus on expanding her position at Martinique and Panama.

The destruction of the Confederate fleet now also meant that the United States Navy, once it had returned to combat duty after post-Hilton Head repairs, could essentially attack Confederate ports at will and shut them down. In the justifications of Root's otherwise Anglophile State Department, was not in explicit violation of the terms Britain had spelled out in 1913 in its Crewe Note; it was not a "blockade" to destroy dock facilities or put Marines ashore to seize strategic harbors, it simply made it profoundly difficult for the "neutral trade" Britain was sworn to protect to actually reach Confederate markets. Suffice to say that London did not see it that way, but a Confederacy unable to defend its own shores and a United States Navy still unwilling to board or seize neutral shipping was enough of a compromise position that there was no appetite for pressing the matter.

After Black May, the Confederacy was essentially and definitively on her own..."

- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100

[1] More on this later
[2] There's of course the Virginia Belt of Richmond-Lynchburg-Petersburg-Hampton Roads, but Charlotte was not particularly industrial at this point in time and the Durham area was still mostly tobacco and textiles. Nashville was an extremely important industrial center, as well as transportation node, but the siege forced a lot of its production to be moved South, so the defeat there is less about all its kit falling into Union hands and more about the time, blood and treasure spent defending it and the initiative and maneuverability its position affords the US that can now choose her next offensives carefully.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...culturally similar but geographically extremely different from the other Nordic countries. Denmark was not a country of imposing fjords, solemn mountains, or sprawling old-growth forests, but rather an extension of the European North Sea and Baltic coastlines north, both on Jutland and the islands of the Danish Archipelago that sat strategically at the mouth of the Baltic Sea. Denmark was open and flat, with some hilly terrain in its west along the tidal flats that extended from the Frisian coast but otherwise a far cry from the landscapes typically associated with their Scandinavian cousins.

This was also the biggest influence upon Danish culture and economics; they had always been much more of the continent and thus, up until the evaporation of the Kalmar Union and their loss of Norway in 1815, the most powerful and wealthy of the Nordic states. The position of Copenhagen upon the Oresund, the greatest of the Danish Straits, meant that it was a critical entrepot for centuries for trade between the North Sea (in particular Britain and Hanseatic Hamburg) and Baltic ports, by the mid-1910s particularly raw goods exports from Prussia and the Russian Empire even further east such as grains, timber and kerosene. Unlike protectionist, insular Sweden or poor, trade-dependent Norway, Denmark was often able to have the best of both worlds, with a vibrant merchant class but also a culture of influential smallholding farmers that had helped transition Denmark to the most liberal of the Northern European states, with absolutism abolished in 1848 and parliamentary supremacy largely enshrined as precedent by 1905, the same year that Sweden and Norway went to war over the rights of the King in both kingdoms' affairs. Though its industry was small, it was increasingly sophisticated, and as an agricultural exporter Denmark had a reputation for products of the highest quality.

It was also a country, in foreign policy terms, divided against itself, which left it a complicated actor in the escalating tensions between the various European powers in the half-decade preceding the Central European War. In 1875 Denmark had signed a mutual defense treaty in secret with Austria and France, the other two countries that had been defeated and seen territorial concessions to Germany in the previous decade and where revanchism on that point was still a core component of the national interest; for the Danes, it was the hereditary Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein that had been stripped from the House of Glucksburg, and a substantial Danish minority lived in German territory just over the border. The desire to retain all of Schleswig (supermajority German Holstein was accepted as a lost cause), while hardly the dominating question of the day for little Denmark, was nonetheless a live one and a major factor in nationalist sentiment. It was also the case that as inhabitants of a flat, small and low-lying country, defense was always a concern, and while the Royal Danish Navy was impressive for the size of the country, its army had always been fairly miniature.

This had thus been at the heart of the great disconnect of Danish strategic thinking vis a vis its politics and culture for forty years, then. The "Iron Triangle" of states around Germany (and, applicable to France and Austria but not Denmark, Italy) to act as a check on the new rising powers' ambitions had made a world of sense in the murky context of the 1870s in which France and Austria sought to reestablish their credibility, with a treaty that was formally secret but essentially everybody in European diplomatic circles knew existed in some form or another. The treaty required renewal every 10 years, and every 10 years France and Austria renewed it with each other without debate, but that was not the case in Denmark, where the strategic alignment became increasingly contentious. The Iron Triangle was, after all, not just a reflection of military strategy but one of culture as well. Germany and Italy were formally secular, rising nationalist powers and France and Austria were devotedly Catholic monarchies still at odds with Italy over the treatment of the Church in Rome, and the latter was vehemently anti-nationalist in outlook. Little liberal and Lutheran Denmark, then, was an odd fit with the two of them, an attachment born only of tradition from 1875 and fading nationalist anger over the loss of Danish irredenta in Schleswig. This dichotomy did not go unnoticed in Danish politics, either.

The renewal of the treaty had been controversial as early as its first time in 1885; though the assassination of conservative Prime Minister Jacob Hagerup that year is not thought to have been related to it, that cannot be ruled out. By 1915, it was an open question if the renewal would occur, even if the debate was held largely behind closed doors. The Danish public, while reserved and somewhat socially conservative, were like their Norwegian "cousins" a fairly Anglophile people, enamored with the half-Danish George V who had a soft spot for Copenhagen and visited his cousin Christian X often, and by 1915 the longstanding rift between London and Paris had begun to widen both over colonial policy in Africa and the Far East as well as British frustrations with French support for the conservative "Bloc Sud" alliance in the Great American War. While Russophilia was not a particularly publicly held point of view either, it was the case that Russia's government tended to be favorable towards Denmark - the Tsar, Michael II, was himself partly of Danish descent through his grandmother - and their relations with both France and Austria were in decline over matters not only in the Balkans but in the Orient as well. Culturally, Danes were most similar to Germans, who shared their faith and their attachment to the North and Baltic Seas, and trade between Denmark and Germany had quadrupled in the decade since the last renewal of the Iron Triangle, and the hegemonic rise of the German economy in Central Europe augured a new age of cosmopolitan wealth and partnership.

That was, at least, the position of Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius, of the Radikale Venstre Party that at that time dominated Danish politics as a liberalizing force, and Scavenius was very influential as the head of a growing - numerically and vocally - Germanophile party in the Folketing. The circumstances had thus never seemed riper for a dramatic change in Danish strategic thinking: Germany desired a closer relationship, Denmark was economically more reliant upon Germany as well as the British and the Russians, and the likelihood of Schleswig ever being Danish again was extremely low. But logic did not always carry in the thought processes attached to European power politics of the 1910s.

The mid-1910s were an extraordinarily emotional hour for Danish nationalists, who were overrepresented in elite intellectual circles that carried influence with the leadership of all the major parties from Hoyre on the right to Radikale on the left, at least in comparison to their share of the otherwise apathetic mass electorate. 1915 marked a century since the Congress of Vienna and end of the Napoleonic Wars, which was widely commemorated and discussed across Europe, leaning heavily on a thematic focus on how defeating and defanging Napoleonic France - and her allies, including Denmark - had ushered in an unprecedented century of peace in Europe save for the brief 1864-67 interregnum of wars that unified Germany and Italy. This is of course a remarkably oversimplified version of European history in the Concert era, ignoring pointedly the upheavals of 1830 and 1848 as well as wars in the East, but it was the narrative that European academics and politicians congratulated themselves with at the centennial.

Of course, Danish memories of Vienna were considerably cooler, as they were held responsible for their alliance with Napoleon’s France and stripped of Norway, an integral part of the realm for centuries. The remarkable burst of pro-Congress of Vienna sentiment in elite European circles in 1915 was thus deeply offensive to Danish intellectuals, especially on the heels of the previous autumn having to note that it had been a half century since the loss of Schleswig. This emotive hour thus worked at crosswinds with the otherwise considerable incentives for Denmark’s revised approach to its security; an emotional attachment to France as a fellow “victim” of the Congress of Vienna made cold logical revisionism around the Iron Triangle a tougher sell.

It was also the case that, as the Iron Triangle was formally a secret (albeit an open one), this was a debate exclusively conducted behind closed doors in Danish elite circles of governance. King Christian X was authoritarian (though not autocratic) and like many in Radikale placed high value on traditional models of authority and social hierarchies, and thus his opinion held great sway despite his declining formal power - and despite being a firm Anglophile who was at best ambivalent about France and its muscular political Catholicism, Christian X was a devoted Germanophobe and shared in the sentiment of Danish nationalist thought that the First Unification War (Second Schleswig War in Danish historiography) was a national trauma for which the Prussian government could not be forgiven. An alliance with Germany was thus, for the Danish royalty, out of the question.

The unlikely ally of the King on this question was Prime Minister Kurt Zahle, who was a pacifist who had come to power on a platform of reduced military spending (which he was unable to achieve, but nonetheless remained committed to). Zahle’s pacifism was, ironically, contingent on a security umbrella underwritten by another, bigger power. Denmark had learned in the trauma of 1864 that war was no longer a viable political tool and that it was a European minnow, and needed strength in friends; Danes also felt considerable resentment at Sweden, which it felt had abandoned Scandinavism in the 1860s out of cowardice and then had crushed Norwegian nationalism. It became an article of faith in Danish strategic thinking that Sweden’s long-standing formal neutrality could be assured only if Denmark stood between them and Germany as part of an alliance network; the flaws in this thinking are apparent just from looking at a map, but again, the question of Danish security was grounded more in emotion and the nationalist project than logic. As Denmark’s closest trade partners Britain and Russia were unlikely to sign a formal alliance with Copenhagen (in no small part because as traditional rivals, one of Britain or Russia would take grievous offense if the other entered alliance with Denmark), that left France as guarantor of Danish safety.

And so, despite the incentives - indeed imperatives - for Denmark having dramatically changed since 1875, emotional nationalism and elite inertia, along with a King welcoming French diplomatic courting, saw the Iron Triangle renewed once again. The impacts of this on Denmark were profound, and indeed Scavenius being one of the few voices against it (he had to be sacked as Foreign Minister in protest for the treaty to be renewed) set him up well for a postwar career of dominating Danish politics…”

- The Central European War

(So this update is inspired in part by @Zulfurium and his wonderful ADiJ, which has great detail on contemporary Denmark around this time. What were really trying to cover here is the strategic context of Denmark as war creeps closer…)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...country dependent on national mythology as much as it was day-to-day realities.

This was the way in which Heinrich was much more his father's son than even Waldemar, who had always taken after his British mother and in many ways was "the most English German one could imagine," as Duchess Charlotte often put it. Heinrich cared deeply for Germany but set himself apart from his grandfather in that he viewed his role as fundamentally German rather than as a Prussian who happened to also hold a German crown. Wilhelm I had been reluctant to take the German crown; Friedrich had been humbled by its significance but unable to see through his plans to Anglicize the Reich's politics. Heinrich, by contrast, was an enthusiast of the German project and saw in it boundless potential, and along with his Naval career, this point of view made him by far the least traditionally Prussian Kaiser yet.

The 1914 Olympics had been but part of this effort. The ideal at the core of what Heinrich and Furstenburg sought to accomplish was to achieve German greatness through unity, of forging and developing a unified German national and imperial identity and shared cultural experience rather than viewing the Empire as a cobbled-together network of statelets and kingdoms with the Prussians sitting on top. Regional variations would of course exist - to oversimply, Munich was a very different city from Hamburg, and Konigsberg little like Dusseldorf - but Heinrich by the middle of the second decade of the 20th century had, in his advancing middle age, become attracted to the concept of the German people as "Ein Volk", one people, united by their collective Germanness, rather than divided by their identities as Prussians or Bavarians or Saxons, or by their faith into Lutherans, Catholics, Calvinists, or Jews.

In a great deal of ways, then, Heinrich was simply looking back to the liberal nationalism that had failed in 1848 only to achieve a muddled victory twenty years later behind the banner of the Prussian eagle with Bismarck's unification of the Reich in the wars of 1864-67. That great outpouring of revolutionary sentiment had, of course, had a very different idea of where German nationhood would go and what it would deliver than what they eventually received, but Friedrich had always sympathized at least with the notion of a German liberal nationalism and his son had picked up on a great deal of it, too. That being said, the Kaiser was not the avatar of 1848, far from it - especially not with the conservative Furstenburg in charge of his government.

Rather, what Heinrich saw as his chief project for the decade represented was a synthesis of the more thuggish conservative nationalism of the Volkisch movement and the worldview of the National Liberal Party that was entranced by industrialism, commerce and invention. The transition from Wilhelm to Friedrich should absolutely be viewed in its context as a transition from 19th century traditional conservatism to 19th century classical liberalism, and Heinrich's inheritance was a transition to early 20th century paternalist conservatism in, ironically enough, the mold of France. Furstenburg was not just ideologically but culturally the perfect fellow traveler for this purpose. He was a Prussian noble but a Catholic, and his wealth was drawn from holdings in the South German kingdoms ranging from not only timber lands but also his breweries and glass factories. He was an eager investor and unlike much of the Prussian Herrenhaus saw the bustling commercialism of Western Germany from the Main to the mouth of the Elbe at Hamburg as the future of an industrial powerhouse that would dominate the continent from her position in its center, much like the Kaiser.

It was here that Heinrich and Furstenburg agreed that the junker class was increasingly part of the problem, and one of the reasons why both were so keen to move towards a more muscular notion of Germanness was that it would end not only internal resentments towards the Prussian crown but also the influence of "the anachronists" of the East Elbian persuasion. Kaiser and Chancellor both had by 1915 come around to a firm view that the Russophile landowners with their bloated, inefficient and tariff-subsidized estates and obsession with Teutonic notions of eastward dominance were living in not the 19th century but the 18th, when Prussia made her first rise from small duchy to military powerhouse. Junkerism looked inwards and was obsessed with the rights of the nobility in a recent and distant chivalric past; Heinrich's Volkism looked to the future, of a Germany that was the wealthiest and most secure state in Europe from the top down.

It is thus important to note that this dispute was largely one of two strands of conservative intellectual thinking - it just so happened that the one clearly supported by Heinrich and Furstenburg could also appeal straightforwardly to liberals of both the nationalist and progressive schools as well as moderate social democrats, whilst the East Elbian conservatives had only ethnic minorities whom they despised as potential opponents to this policy of Volkism. The representative arithmetic of the Reichstag and Furstenburg's dominance of the Bundesrat a decade into his time as Chancellor made it easy to press ahead with reforms to isolate the junkers, while in his role as Minister-President of Prussia he was constantly flummoxed by outraged junkers in the Herrenhaus who made it their mission to use that body as their last redoubt of resistance.

On many issues and occasions, the junkers thus lost when they were pitted against Germany as a whole. Their attempts to stop the creation of the Oder-Rhine Canal that would link the two western and eastern halves of Germany had finally failed and the waterway's initial construction was inaugurated in 1915 [1]. While laws became increasingly difficult to pass in Prussia in a cold war between Kaiser and landowner, Heinrich's commitment to all of Germany endeared him to parts of the country that generally distrusted Prussians. Furstenburg could not simply abolish Prussian state instruments but he could let them wither on the vine in comparison to his nurturing of their pan-German counterparts. The practice of every kingdom sending formal envoys to one another's capitals within the Empire ended, with the powers of the Reichstag and Bundesrat growing in influence despite the lack of an explicit and provocative constitutional reform as Friedrich had attempted and failed to push forward with multiple times. Germany's sclerotic, chaotic system of governance had gone away, but as it approached it's half century anniversary, the more modest and incremental unity pushed by Heinrich seemed to be winning out..."

- Heinrich: The Life and Legacy of Germany's Goldkaiser

[1] For whatever reason - the book on Kaiser Wilhelm I read didn't get into details - the junkers were violently opposed to the creation of a Oder-Rhine Canal. Not sure why, but here they lose.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...given considerably more attention and import outside of Germany than within it, in part thanks to the sharp rise of Germanophobia in Russia and the United Kingdom after the Central European War left the Reich as the master of continental Europe. The reality was that the Volkisch strain of early 20th century German nationalism was a heterogenous collection of loosely-affiliated ideas and organizations on its best day; more often, it was an incoherent mess.

The most sophisticated and important organ of German chauvinism was the Alldeutscher Verband, or Pan-German League, a pressure group with relatively low formal numbers compared to its leveraged influence via its deep connections to the Agrarian League and other conservative outfits preeminent in the rural, agricultural and fervently traditionalist "East Elbia," the Prussian lands east of the River Elbe. The ADV was no minor outfit, to be sure. It was after all the fifth-largest party in the Reichstag in the mid-1910s with 27 seats at the 1913 elections, nearly as large as the traditional East Elbia-based Conservatives. Nonetheless, its calls for German "racial hygiene," the unification of German-speaking Austria by force into the Reich and the deportation of all Poles and Slavs from German lands and its more rabidly anti-Semitic notions of German nationhood placed a hard ceiling on its potential support in Germany's more cosmopolitan West and in densely industrialized Saxony, and it struggled to capture the attention of the government of Prince Furstenburg, who instead was focused on maintaining his clientelist "rotation" of major anti-Socialist parties rather than pursuing esoteric notions of hard-right nationalism.

Indeed, German nationalism had always in the 19th century been something of a liberal project, and Social Democrats were as much keen to promote a singular German identity - all the easier to soothe over the regional, cultural and confessional differences of the German working class that way! - as were the National Liberals whose conservative brand of liberalism was once more ascendant in the wake of the 1914 Olympics. This meant that the most sharp-edged elements of the nationalist camp were competing against strains of German sensibilities more grounded in liberal romanticism and against a particularistic conservatism that emphasized either Prussian chauvinism or Bavarian insularism, and left the far-right strangely and quaintly left to dabble in bizarre pursuits such as the occultism bordering on Germanic paganism for which the Germanenorden became infamous after a series of newspaper exposes in 1915. [1]

That being said, it is not so much that the ADV and other pressure organizations were completely irrelevant compared to the outsized attention British scholarship afforded them in the mid-20th century, but rather that their emergence speaks to something broader going on in German society: a general debate, around the fifty-year mark of the Unification, about what it meant to German and what the nature of that national project was. They were simply participants, unusually extreme ones, in a broader cultural and intellectual debate on a subject that had vexed Europe since the Napoleonic Wars: Was ist Deutschland?

The reality was that while the neo-pagans and petite bourgeoisie of well-educated reactionaries in ADV may have been a loud minority, the thinking from which they emerged was not invented of whole cloth. There was a very real sense amongst the East Elbian Prussian elites that composed the hierarchy of the German military that the traditional, old-fashioned patriarchal and semi-feudal hierarchy to which they were heirs was vanishing before their eyes. They were the inheritors of the Ostsiedlung of the Middle Ages, steeped in the legends of the Teutonic Knights who had been the tip of the spear of civilizing Christianity - Germanic civilizing Christianity - and saw in their own devotion to order, authority and discipline a facsimile of the monastic chivalry that had driven paganism from the shores of the Baltic Sea for good.

It was out of this tradition that a theme of German mutual struggle, the Nationalkampf, was first noticed. It was posited by a variety of not just right-wing intellectuals but liberal and even socialist ones that the theme of the German experience was collective unity in the face of hardship, and that this often occurred in increments of fifty years, later called the "Saeculum Theory" despite its improper use of the term and erroneously ascribed to Center Party politicain Matthias Erzberger, who disavowed it. The idea looked back to the frequency of wars in Germany starting with the Liberation Wars against Napoleon and the Unification Wars of Bismarck as the fundamental building blocks of the German state, in which every generation had a new struggle that would gradually move Germany forward towards its destiny. The wars that concluded with the nationalist crucible of the Battle of Leipzig had ended the Holy Roman Empire and defined Germany as an entity; the wars that ended with Napoleon III's armistice near Chalons had united Germany as a single state. Previous saeculums in this line of thinking stretched back to the establishment of Prussia as a great power under Friedrich Wilhelm III, and the Thirty Years War and violence of the Protestant Reformation before it. [2]

The thrust of this line of thinking, which while a distinct minority but increasingly influential in German defense planning, was that the rising opposition to German goals and ambitions by France and to a lesser extent Austria was another episode in the continuous struggle of the German nation against external enemies, in this case - once again - the Bonapartist foe in Paris. France had been the enemy in the 1810s "Wars of Liberation," in the 1860s "Wars of Unification," and to a new generation, they were the likeliest enemy in a potential 1910s "Wars of Consolidation." This thread, when pulled at, explains why German defense planning came to view French provocations as not diplomatic angst but deliberate steps towards war, and perhaps over-committed itself to seeking to provoke France in turn into a blunder - a deliberate strategy of preparedness, of "choosing the place and time of battle," as von Kluck phrased it, a policy that was of course too clever by half..."

- Path of Darkness: Europe's Illiberal Hour

[1] What I'm trying to get at here was that some of the right-wing outfits in Wilhelmine (Heinrichine?) Germany that dabbled in pan-German nationalism (including some of the ADV) were composed of massive and complete dorks, and it took the chaos of November 1918 and the alienation of the traditional Prussian elite in the military and nobility from Weimar democracy to paper over that these people were not taken particularly seriously before there was a giant credibility vacuum on the German right for them to step into. This is not to minimize race essentialism, anti-Semitism, etc in pre-WW1 Germany, just noting that the really out-there stuff was out-there, and that the casual racism and contempt for Jews in Germany was similar to sentiments held by much of the French, British, Italian and Austrian public too, especially amongst academia.
[2] I should note that the Sonderweg theory is absolute, complete, and total bullshit in my opinion and does not deserve time and energy to debate, but there was a distinct sense in German intellectual circles that their nationhood was in some ways defined by a struggle against external opponents, in part due to Germany's unique political history and the geographic realities of being surrounded by larger "traditional" European powers such as France and the Habsburg realms. I wouldn't go nearly so far as to call it a siege mentality, but the sense of being hemmed in and that unity came through shared struggle was noticed by Bismarck and perhaps even before him

 

[KingSweden24]

"...camaraderie of some of the best players of the day being on the same front lines as "the rest of us grunts;" this only further served to mythologize those who did not come back from the war, most famously 1913's National League statistical leaders Jake Daubert and Clifton "Cactus" Cravath, both lost on the fields of Middle Tennessee in the primes of their careers. The war had broken out just a month before the World Series was intended to start and while the leaders of both leagues on September 9th - the Athletics and Giants, respectively - were awarded their pennants, there would be no champion of baseball between the two leagues that autumn. Matters were worse the following year - no Major League games were officially played or sanctioned.

This was not without controversy. A number of commentators took the view that empty stadiums and no distractions from the horrors of war was bad for public morale, and that baseball was so key to the filament of the American culture that to cancel an entire season was unprecedented and unacceptable. Others made the opposite argument on the same premises - the Great American War was such an apocalyptic struggle that it needed America's full attention, and the cancellation of Major League Baseball underlined how serious the all-hands-on-deck approach to fighting the war society-wide was.

By the spring of 1915, though, a debate began again. The war was still raging but discussions about exhibitions began to trickle up. Two whole "years without baseball" seemed drastic. Finally, the American League announced in late May of 1915 that it would hold a dramatically curtailed season of 42 games, starting in August, in which each club would play a home-and-away three-game series against every other club in the AL. Days later, the NL owners were able to agree to such an arrangement as well. A variety of factors affected the decision to "bring baseball back" - the games were heavily marketed towards beleaguered factory workers as a way to relax after all their backbreaking work, soldiers on leave and discharged veterans attended for free with reserved front-row seats, [1] and that the majority of the proceeds of the games, either through gate receipts or rudimentary concessions [2], were to be donated to various relief organizations and war causes, in addition to the use of the games as a grand advertisement for buying United States government war bonds. This exhibitionary nature and its charitable allure persuaded enough owners to go along with it, and nobody wanted to be the owner accused of hoarding profits during a time of war when his colleagues were making sure to just break even. And thus, the abbreviated season of 1915 could be played, and the Red Sox, losers of the last World Series to be contested, defeated the crosstown Boston Braves 4-1 to win their first-ever World Series championship; Beantown ball fans still attest that the Sox winning in the dark of the Great American War and the "luck" of the city's large Irish fanbase is what has powered the club to its MLB-record 18 championships.

Of course, that is not to say that the home-and-away series season was not strange for all involved. The Sox, for instance, were missing the talented Confederate-born core of their 1912 American League Pennant-winning side, several of whom had perished at the Susquehanna, the Potomac, or at Nashville; stud Georgia-born Tigers center fielder Ty Cobb's leg had been blown off at the knee at the Battle of the Occoquan, ending his career just as it was reaching its apex. Several of the players were veterans who had been discharged due to injuries and were slow and hesitant at bat, running the bases or fielding, and the players were exclusively American or Canadian, with all Confederates banned from play, even ones who had not returned south to fight for their mother country, such as Joseph "Shoeless Joe" Jackson (this restriction would be lifted in 1917, though Jackson never quite forgave the American League for denying him the ability to play when he had consciously refused to bear arms against the United States). A great number of players in the shortened 1915 and 1916 seasons (in which thrice the number of games, a total of 126, were played) were not inexperienced rookies, most of whom would have been at the front, but rather aged veterans of the early 1900s and before, making the play in those years what spectators described as having a sloppy, haggard and off-kilter quality. Indeed, an entire generation of promising rising ballplayers were thought to have been lost alongside all the future lawyers, doctors, statesmen and artists who never returned home from the fields of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee or Georgia. For this reason, many historians lump the abbreviated 1915 edition in as part of the "Years Without Baseball" because there was indeed little quality baseball to be seen.

But, still, in August of 1915 there were fans in the seats and the crack of a bat on the field again. Baseball had, in some small way, returned, but it - and the nature of professional sports in American in general - had been changed irrevocably by the catastrophic disasters of the mid-1910s..."

- America's Pastime: Baseball and Why We Love it

[1] This kind of "do it for the troops" attitude strikes me as fundamentally American and recognizable to today's readers
[2] I have no idea to what extent concessions were sold at Major League ballparks in 1913, for the record

 

[KingSweden24]

"...though broadly lumped in with the general run of malaise and mediocrity that effected British politics sandwiched between Chamberlain the Father and Chamberlain the Son, it is no doubt that Cecil's ministry was the one most consumed by events rather than dictating them itself but also the one perhaps most temperamentally and ideologically ill-suited to address those events. The Cecil era is defined most broadly by the twin crises in Ireland and India, but a third "I" belongs alongside them - inflation, or in the parlance of the day, "insecurity."

This word was not used by the government but rather by the opposition leader Austen Chamberlain, who in the year since Haldane's government ended in tears had at last begun to find his stride and the confidence of his Liberal Party behind him. Chamberlain's similarities to his father largely began and ended with his partisan affiliation and their remarkable physical likeness. Where Joseph had been a dominant, aggressively ambitious figure, Austen's political life had been defined by his reluctance to take the mantle of leadership; his father had governed by attempting, with varying degrees of success, to impose his will and views on his party by using the NLF as his hammer, whereas Austen prided himself on being an urbane and gentlemanly figure who sought to lead by consensus. Joseph had represented, at least early on in his career, the sharpest leading edge of late 19th century radicalism; Austen by contrast was by the standards of 1915 a moderate if not genuinely instinctively conservative figure within the Liberal Party, embodied most clearly in his patronage of and friendship with Sir John Simon as his closest confidant. But in opposition to the Cecil years, at least, Austen revealed some of that Chamberlain doggedness and aggressiveness, while never quite the pugilistic bulldog orator that his father had been nonetheless firm in his condemnation of the National government. "In the past year," he declared to the Commons on May 20th, 1915, "the price of beef in Britain has increased by six times over; the price of pork has gone up four times, and the price of a loaf of bread three. In that same time, wages have stagnated, and even an honest working man who has received annual raises finds himself a great deal poorer in real terms than he would have but five years ago, in the midst of depression. The British worker today finds himself hounded not just by the specter of war in Ireland and unrest in India, but by a tremendous deal of insecurity of economy here at home. It must be the agenda of this government to fight not just for peace in Ireland and India but for security on British shores, or I would suggest the government do the honorable thing and resign!"

Austen Chamberlain was not wrong in the speech that suggested, for the first time since his father's stroke in 1906, that a figure possibly meeting the moment of crisis in Britain had arrived, though in fairness to the Cecil government there were a great deal of factors that made the price crisis of 1914-16 difficult to contain purely from Westminster. The crux of the problem was that the grain and meat imports from the Americas, in large part from the United States, Brazil and Argentina, had evaporated since the beginning of 1914. The Cecil government, while a great deal more sympathetic to the Confederate States than its predecessor had been, had nevertheless pursued the policy outlined in Lord Crewe's famous note to the belligerents making plain that Britain would react with extreme prejudice against any attempt to forestall neutral shipping across the Atlantic, but the needs of grain and meat at home for the bellies of hungry soldiers had slashed trans-Atlantic foodstuffs exports from countries fighting in the war by close to ninety-five percent. The skyrocketing prices of food in Britain since the start of hostilities in 1913 was on top of the sharp jump in the price of meat, fruit and bread beginning in early 1912 when Haldane had implemented the Imperial Preference tariff area, which had made Canadian and British farmers extraordinarily wealthy (indeed, the Canadian economy was in the midst of an unprecedented boom) but triggered a brief trade war with the United States and doubled prices from the 1910-11 level as it was.

The British economy in 1915, then, was in a strange flux. Britain was richer, fatter and better educated than ever before - her citizens had never enjoyed higher wages, better labor protections at work, and more plentiful goods to buy as tens of thousands entered the aspirational middle class. However, at the same time, the undergirding of the Empire seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and food, manufactured goods and housing had never been more expensive. The Cecil government made no moves to unwind the modest Liberal reforms of the late Chamberlain or Haldane eras, viewing such as political suicide, but yet also made no moves to directly alleviate the remarkable frustrations of the British working class even just a few years after the Great Unrest of 1911-13. Part of the issue was that Cecil himself was, as any of his biographers would attest, an opportunist. His opposition to Chamberlain's tariff reform in 1903 had not been based out of any commitment to free trade but rather opposition to Joseph Chamberlain, the man. Now with import preference for the Empire in place, Cecil found it more expedient to pander to the farm lobby, of both aristocratic estates overrepresented in the Lords and small freeholders, than challenge the status quo; he noted in his diaries that eliminating import preference would be unlikely to solve the matter of the escalating price issues since it was plain the issue was the war in the Americas.

So in the meantime, Britons bought food from continental Europe and Canada at considerably higher prices. Germany's heavily-subsidized and protected agricultural sector filled in some of the gap, but was quite expensive due to the price supports via tariffs that Berlin imposed to protect the wealthy nobility of the East Elbian estates. Russian grain flowed more freely but the inefficiency of Russian transport systems and the difficulty of feeding even Russian peasants meant that it was more of a trickle. Britons found that North Sea cod and other fish was a perfectly adequate temporary substitute for high quality red meat, importing in particular canned fish from Norway, but the lean years of the mid-1910s certainly emphasized the exposure which Britain had to the vagaries of global agricultural markets and the sensitivity the British diet had to food scarcity as a net importer of foodstuffs.

The British body politic, then, was exposed to fluctuating prices that were not easily addressed thanks in part to the growing Tory farm lobby and a smaller but no less potent lobby in Irish farmers who finally seemed to be reaping the rewards of land reform and whom both major parties, what with the war on in Ireland, seemed keen to appease. The incoherence of British tariff policy was ad hoc depending not on who was in power but on what the monthly prices seemed to be, and whether it was Cecil or Chamberlain ascendant one thing seemed clear - the free trade consensus was over, and a strange, difficult new time beckoned as food was not entirely scarce but also not particularly cheap for the otherwise increasingly comfortable British laborer..." [1]

- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924

[1] We'll be covering the impacts of this in Canada and Ireland soon

 

[KingSweden24]

"...halcyon time that even the most committed opponents of the National Policy and its Tory intellectuals had a hard time ignoring. The Canadian boomtimes of the mid-1910s were undeniable and, for once, fairly broadly felt. Late in life, Crerar was asked to discuss the various Prime Ministers of Canada and he surprised a great many with his favorable assessment of Leighton McCarthy, whom he considered Canada's most underrated head of government.

McCarthy in little time made his impact on Canadian politics felt both in personal style in public appearances and in the viper's nest of backroom party management, but by and large he was popular thanks to simply not doing anything to muck up the strong Canadian economy that by the time he reached the one-year mark of his government in September 1915 was pivoting from strength to strength. McCarthy had inherited his uncle Dalton's understanding that Toryism required public buy-in rather than simply being the noblesse oblige of the elite and thus viewed the Canadian project as marrying pride in the monarchy with a relevance for the Crown to everyday subjects. It was thus that he demoted reactionary autocrats like Howard Ferguson or Samuel Hughes to minor ministries where they could do little damage and nurtured the technocratic instincts of Sir Robert Borden, the Minister of Finance held-over from the Whitney years. McCarthy had been opposed to the creation of French schools in Ontario and Manitoba unless the community warranted them but having seen Whitney already achieve this policy largely unhindered at the national level regarded the matter settled and did little to antagonize the French community, indeed the Tories enjoyed strong relations with Francophone Canadians as they viewed them as a natural local ally against the Irish immigrant community, whom the Order vehemently disliked thanks to events in Ireland and whom the famously tribal Quebecois resented trying to take over their parish councils. McCarthy found more common cause with Bourassa than merely ganging up on the Irish; the populist instincts of the Prime Minister carried over to supporting the construction of new roads, telephone lines and other infrastructure in the province, and when the call came for Canadian soldiers to head to India to put down the Punjab Mutiny, McCarthy refused to countenance conscription, declaring, "We defend the Empire with the love of the Crown in our breast." The McCarthy government's more diversified and less cronyist approach to internal improvements (lots of small, cheap projects rather than a handful of expensive big ones) was not the extent of its better political instincts; the Prime Minister was a scion of a wealthy family of attorneys and thus hardly a union man or totem for the Prairie farmer, but he was nonetheless a great deal less hostile to the working class than his predecessors in the Conservative Party and in fact viewed them as a key pillar of a more paternalistic, mass politics conservatism.

That said, it is easy to overstate the impact that McCarthy's changed tone and eye for good press had on Canada at the time, for the real impetus for the country's growth was a combination of stagnant economic opportunities in Britain making emigration attractive for tens of thousands of young men and their families, [1] the National Policy protecting Canada's new industries from competition while Imperial Preference created 'safe' markets for Canadian goods for export, and most importantly the Great American War had so dried up the availability of exports from the United States and other belligerents, particularly raw goods and agricultural foodstuffs, that the massive remaining demand in Britain and elsewhere in Europe needed to be met by somewhere else, and Canada ably stepped up to the plate.

Crerar in his own diaries remarked that the summer and autumn of 1915 felt nearly unrecognizable from just three years earlier. An economic boom that had already slowly begun at the start of the decade was now in full swing; as thousands of workers swarmed to Canadian factories, ports and farms, there was the need for new houses, new shops, new everything. "Winnipeg, already one of the world's fastest-growing metropolises," Crerar commented, "today has the energy one associates with towns in the midst of a gold rush. One looks around the corner to see new storefronts and buildings popping up every day in neighborhoods that once were bucolic; one hears English spoken in a dozen accents from one end of the street to another."

Nonetheless, it gnawed at the back of his mind that this was not entirely sustainable. May of 1915 had seen the United States dole out two crippling victories over the Confederate States; the war may not have ended there, but it could go on another year or two at most, which meant that there was a decided endpoint for the boomtimes once American grain shipments could start up again. Canada's farmers, already subject to the severe boom-bust cycles of crop markets, needed to be prepared, and Crerar was already considering what the United Farmers movement could do to be ready..." [2]

- The People's Prime Minister: Thomas Crerar's Remarkable Canadian Life

[1] The rate of emigration to Canada and Australia in the early 1910s from GB was really high. WW1 put a kibosh on that, which was felt particularly hard Down Under. Here, the steady stream continues, which helps Canada in particular catch up to its OTL numbers a bit, and the hundreds of thousands of Britons lying dead in Flanders and Champagne by 1915 and beyond have somewhere else to go...
[2] If this all sounds like what befell Argentina IOTL then yes, you're absolutely right

 

[KingSweden24]

"...despite his pedigree, the State Department quite understandably did not exactly trust Adelbert Hay to stick to the script after his freelancing adventures at the start of the war and thus he was not one of the formal plenipotentiaries who would negotiate Chile's formal terms of unilateral, unqualified and unequivocal surrender. Some of this it turned out to be a largely internal feud within the State Department; Root, having been a junior member of the Blaine administration, viewed it as his personal duty to see to it that Chile was severely punished, and he was extremely leery of the glory of that mission being absorbed by the similarly-vengeful son of the man who had had his job as chief diplomat in 1885. Thirty years of compounding interest were about to come due.

Hughes had of course been a law student during the Chilean-American War and so had none of the genuinely personal contempt men of Root's generation of Liberal leaders held Chile in - as discussed in Chapter 17, he had had to be persuaded to pursue "Chile First" to begin with. The matter was thus deferred in part to Root and the South American allies, and an unlikely protagonist emerged on that front - Lindley Garrison, William Hearst's Secretary of State. Garrison's role in transferring the matter of the deteriorating relations with the Confederacy to the incoming Hughes administration is credited with leaving Root prepared ahead of the Niagara Conference and indeed Garrison and Root became informal friends who regarded each other with a healthy amount of respect and collegiality; the latter would consult Garrison on a great many matters, and praised his return to State in 1921 as "leaving the Republic in the best hands possible." Garrison was also, despite hailing from the more traditionally isolationist Democratic Party [1], one of the chief architects of the Axis, having brought the alliance with Argentina into force in 1911 which had set the stage for Hay's courting of Peru and Bolivia. As the contours of the push to force ruinous terms on Chile became more clear and accepted amongst the four victorious powers, he for that reason seemed a natural choice for leading the American peace delegation despite not being a Liberal. It helped that Speaker Clark and Senator Kern were adamant that, despite the Executive holding superiority in matters of foreign policy, they expected that the plenipotentiaries headed to South America be a bipartisan tandem.

Thus, after Hughes agreed that Root should not go himself, former Secretary of State Lindley Garrison and Assistant Secretary of State Henry Phillips - a Pennsylvanian Liberal career diplomat who had experience with Latin portfolios, having before the war served as Ambassador to Chile - set off for the first of many congresses that would determine a peace treaty to end hostilities bilaterally..."

- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes

"...Buenos Aires was too threatened by proximity to the front, Santiago too unstable, La Paz too remote, and Asuncion was sandwiched between two belligerent powers clinging desperately to armed neutrality. The submarine campaign in the Caribbean was too fresh to make anywhere in the Spanish Insular Provinces safe, and neither Colombia nor Venezuela were willing to host the treaty conference, while Guayaquil was too oppressively hot in summer and Quito's mountain air too thin. Lima thus made sense as the place for the peace terms to be imposed on the Chilean delegation that arrived hat in hand to learn just how bad it would be, both due to climactic reasons and that it was the capital of one of the victorious belligerents, its accessibility by sea, and that it was one of the classic centers of Spanish cultural power in the Americas.

The negotiations of the Treaty of Lima were in part hashed out beforehand in many senses; Peru, Bolivia and Argentina all had straightforward territorial designs and claims dating back to the early 1880s that they had secretly amongst themselves more or less agreed to. The Leguia brothers - Roberto, President of Peru, and Augusto, a predecessor in the same office and now his Foreign Secretary - had even drafted the map that would be implemented and received cursory approval of the Montes administration in Bolivia. Indeed, American Assistant Secretary of State Henry Phillips huffed upon arrival that he was unsure why exactly he had come, since "the Latins have already drawn up the treaty before our boat even arrived."

Nonetheless, the affair was important as a show of raw Axis power. The United States delegation arrived with battleship escort and an all-gun salute was held off the coast of Lima for cheering crowds to see. The Figueroa brothers, powerful figures in the new Chilean government, arrived in a fugue, seemingly embarrassed to be there, not realizing the political trap that their enemies back in Santiago had set for two men viewed as hapless, harmless and well-meaning weathervanes. The view amongst all four Axis powers at Lima was collectively that Chile was a rogue, dangerous power that had expanded geographically at the point of a sword at the expense of her neighbors and was unusually responsible for the deterioration of relations in the early 1910s in the region; indeed, former American Secretary of State Garrison went so far as to suggest that Chile's belligerence had pulled Mexico and Brazil into the war whereas otherwise they may have stayed neutral. This line of thinking, overwhelmingly prevalent at Lima, was ahistorical but straightforward - Chile had defenestrated Peru and Bolivia in 1879, with that show of force cowed Argentina into swallowing a territorial settlement that favored Santiago two years later, and then given the United States an embarrassing bloody nose on the world stage in 1885. The Axis was out for blood towards Chile in a way that was matched perhaps only by American hatred of the Confederacy, and blood it would have.

The United States extracted its price first, getting Chile to agree to a policy of unilateral free trade with all four powers that was non-renegotiable. Chile was also to pay the United States a thousand dollars, in gold or silver, per soldier killed on land or sea and pay the full cost of the vessels sunk or captured at Chimbote. After it handed over what little was left of its navy to Peru and Bolivia, it was forbidden from putting to sea any vessel exceeding two thousand long tons displacement for a period of ten years and any vessel exceeding five thousand long tons thereafter for a period of a ninety years, and in perpetuity its navy was never to exceed a cumulative gross long tonnage of twenty thousand tons. The hated Patco conglomerate used to invest in and hold influence over Chile's economy would be granted even greater powers over Chile's mining industry, fisheries, and logging; the repayments would be as high as a five hundred thousand dollars per year in war reparations over a period of twenty years, and Chile was to forever drop its diplomatic efforts to prevent the United States from purchasing the Galapagos Archipelago.

These claims alone were shockingly crippling, but just the beginning. Peru demanded all lost territories from the Saltpeter War, extending their southern province back south of the Rio Camarones to include desired Iquique, and also reparations of two hundred thousand dollars per year and a restriction on the Chilean Army as a "national guard" of only five thousand men with ten thousand in reserve, a provision Chile was able to negotiate up to twenty thousand and thirty thousand, respectively. Bolivia, having taken the worst losses in 1879 and with some of its previous lands in Argentine hands thanks to border settlements in ensuing years, demanded not only their irredenta of decades past but further land up to the 25th parallel and 50 degrees south, thus placing the small port of Taltal within their claims in addition to most of the Atacama.

Argentina went for the jugular. Represented by former President Alem's increasingly politically estranged nephew Hipolito Yrigoyen, who sought to make a name for himself ahead of upcoming Presidential elections, Buenos Aires demanded a reversion to the 1881 settlement that placed Tierra del Fuego entirely within Chilean hands. The vast tundras of the end of the Southern Cone were to become Argentine south of the Deseado River not just to the Atlantic but in the opposite direction, too, with Lake Buenos Aires and its western outlet, the Rio Baker, becoming the new frontier between the two countries west of the Andes. In one fell swoop, Argentina was now a bicoastal power - it made no financial claims upon Chile, in part because its leaders understood that there was probably little left to claim and because it also understood the value that all this land could potentially produce. In all, the treaty stripped Chile of close to a quarter of its territory - in direct violation of the spirit of the Pan-American Congresses, but alas those had never had the force of treaties - essentially placed its entire economic output towards the purpose of enriching its conquerors, and had also left the country defenselessly supine and at the mercy of the Axis should it fail to adhere to these terms. It was hard to think of a more deliberately punitive peace treaty in modern times, and if the Desventuradas or Grito de 18 de Enero had not marked the decisive end of the Old Republic, then Lima most certainly did.

The Figueroa brothers understood, quite plainly, that these terms would be political suicide back in Santiago but also that the Axis was out to humiliate Chile and cripple it permanently. Javier Angel, the more canny of the two, approached the British ambassador in Lima who had been a guest of honor at the proceedings to beg for his intervention; but with the Chilean Navy at the bottom of the ocean and public order looking likely to disintegrate whether Chile fought on, this time under partial enemy occupation, or chose to swallow the poison pill of the peace terms, Britain had little interest in defending her one-time client, with "Perfidious Albion" now entirely in on cultivating its relationships with Argentina and Peru.

Chile was thus left to be dismantled from north to south, stripped over her far north and far south and left with reparations that would take over a generation to pay. "We have become a Haiti with penguins," Emiliano Figueroa declared in despair as he and his brother sailed south again to the deaths of their political careers having affixed their names to a document understandably seen even amongst their allies in the Council of the Republic as high treason but which Chile had foisted upon it. Their country was broken, doomed to poverty and humiliated for the world to see, and now tottering on the edge of civil war almost as soon as the ink had dried on June 17, 1915.

But, as far as the other powers were concerned, Chile was out of the war and probably out of interfering in their foreign policy ambitions for good, too..." [2]

- War in the Cone

[1] The party foreign policies are quite scrambled up ITTL, compared to Wilsonian internationalism and the rigid isolationism of OTL's Republicans like Lodge...
[2] So here we see the USA indulge its dark side and worst instincts a bit (to say nothing of the firesale on Chilean land indulged by its allies!), and we'll have a Wiki update and then the reaction in Chile proper, which I felt deserved its own update.