85. The Hundred-Billion-Dollar Congress
“Within hours of his swearing-in, John Fountain summoned Congress for a special session. The purpose of this special session was clear to all: the passing of an amendment extending the franchise to women. Women’s suffrage had long been a political issue in the United States, but it had only become mainstream in the last decade, and Fountain had supported the suffragettes throughout his political career. In his private letters and memoir, Fountain expressed that, “of all that I have achieved or will achieve, nothing is more important than acknowledging the full citizenship and rights of women.” Under President Hepburn, Congress had debated such an amendment, but southern opposition and presidential indifference led to the proposal falling eleven votes shy of 2/3 in the House and four in the Senate.
By 1921, attitudes in Congress had shifted ever so slightly, and Fountain believed that the time was right to press the issue. Support was strongest in the House, where despite Southern Democrats voting largely as a bloc, the amendment passed 332-110, almost forty more votes than necessary. However, in the Senate, the south was better-represented, and there was a good chance the amendment would fall just short of the required 58 votes. While suffragettes deluged upper-southern and eastern Senators with letters, Fountain personally entered the debate. In an unprecedented move, Fountain spoke on the Senate floor [1], asking “is this the treatment due to one-half the population, our wives, mothers, daughters? Is it just to demand of them their sacrifice and suffering without affording them the rights and privileges of citizenship?”
On April 11th, the Senate voted 60-24 in favor of the sixteenth amendment, sending it to the states for ratification. Illinois and Wyoming were the first states to ratify, doing so within hours of receiving news of the amendment’s passage. Over the next four months, a total of 31 states, representing the entirety of the west and north, voted to ratify the amendment, with President Fountain’s home state of Auraria completing the ratification process on August 11th, becoming the 29th state to do so.
The amendment did have its legal challenges, as the Mississippi government sought to remove all women from the voter rolls because the state constitution still forbade women from voting. As the state’s lawyer’s argued, the federal constitution did not apply because it was superseded by the state constitution. In Mississippi v. Letlow, the Supreme Court ultimately held that the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause meant that the bill of rights and other amendments applied to the states as well as the federal government. While Fifth Amendment does not outright require state law to adhere to the bill of rights, the court held that it was “clearly implied,” although the matter would later be settled by amendment.”
-From STARING INTO THE ABYSS: AMERICA 1920-1940 by Greg Carey, published 2001
“Russia did not handle defeat well. The loss of Poland and Lithuania, combined with the lack of success in the Balkans, were a national humiliation. To distract from the failings of the government, Czar Nicholas II quietly permitted the funding of anti-Semitic newspapers. By turning the ire of the ultranationalists away from those actually responsible towards the age-old scapegoat of the Jews, the Czar hoped to unify the country behind him. It only took a few months for the first riots to begin, when in the city of Gomel, a mob accused a Jewish shopkeeper of murdering a Christian competitor and murdered the man’s entire family before storming through the Jewish quarter of the city.
The violence spread throughout the south of the Pale of Settlement, with anti-Semitic pogroms in Kishinev, Kerch, Odessa, Yekaterinoslav, Minsk, and over a dozen other cities and towns. Though the Czar condemned the pogroms in public, he was privately appreciative and only dismissed a few select officials to take the blame. The pogroms horrified the rest of the western world, with the harshest condemnation coming from the United Kingdom and the United States. When Czar Nicholas II and Tsesarevich Michael were assassinated by an anarchist in April 1921, the violence returned with fury. His successor, Alexander IV, was also a committed absolutist, but unlike his father was closely aligned with the Black Hundreds. Alexander IV was his father’s second son and had pursued a serious career in the army that introduced him to the hundredist ideology.
Thus, the new Czar appointed the hundredist Sergei Maklakov as Prime Minister. Immediately after this, the country was rocked by another wave of pogroms, but this time, the violence was directly encouraged by Maklakov, who exhorted the Russian people to “destroy the Jewish enemy… those who poison our children and our culture.” The 1921-1922 pogroms were the worst in Russian history, with almost 5,000 killed and nearly 100 million rubles in damages. Both Jews and “subversives” – anarchists, Societists, and liberals were also targeted. Worse, pogroms occurred in not only the Pale, but across European Russia as the people took out their fury at defeat on the Russian Jews. If the 1919-1920 pogroms had horrified Europe, these ones made Russia a pariah. Poland and Lithuania closed their borders, as the pogroms had caused many Jews to flee west.
Other European countries also refused to take in the refugees, as Austria’s right-wing parties stoked up hatred and a shell-shocked France was too unstable to even contemplate the possibility. While some went to the United States, it was the United Kingdom that stepped in to provide a haven for the persecuted Russian Jews. Under Austen Chamberlain, the Gwas Ngishu region of British East Africa had been established as a Jewish settlement, and by 1921 boasted a population of some 10,000 Jewish colonists [2]. Prime Minister Smith saw the Russian refugees as the perfect way to develop the region and build a permanent white presence in East Africa, and so he invited the refugees to come to Jewish Uganda. Prussia agreed to allow the use of its ports to transport the immigrants, and some 20,000 Jews made the journey in 1921, with another 70,000 going in 1922. By 1930, some 175,000 Jews [3] had settled in Gwas Ngishu, having established irrigated agriculture and permanent villages.
Meanwhile, the Jews that remained in Russia were subjected to frequent torment, as government oppression intensified under Maklakov’s rule. Property seizures became common, and much of the stolen wealth was put towards the Self-Strengthening program, Alexander IV’s massive crash-industrialization scheme to modernize the Russian economy and build a stronger military.
-From TURBULENCE: EUROPE 1919-1939 by Rebecca Gardner, published 2012
“Fountain’s legacy was ultimately defined not by his commendable efforts in women’s suffrage, nor his efforts in expanding trade with Japan, nor his role in the brief period of peace in Centroamerica. Instead, it was what his opponents denounced as profligate spending, and what his allies defended as necessary internal improvements, that have led to the characterization of Fountain in pop-history as a big-spending, hands-off leader. In actual truth, John Fountain was far from the tax-and-spend boogeyman that the Democrats tar every Whig president and presidential contender as.
Entering the presidency, Fountain’s top priority was stimulating the economy. As he declared in his inaugural address, “it’s time to get America back to work.” However, America’s woe at the time was not economic depression, but rather sluggishness. The European recession meant that exports were down, and the 1919 Kansas Flu [4] left lingering effects on industry and interstate commerce. While hemispheric markets made up most of the difference and unemployment only slightly increased, consumer confidence plummeted, and stores struggled to sell non-essential products. Fountain proposed a three-pronged plan to boost profits and get Americans spending again.
The first prong was simple: spend heavily on new canals, railroads, and interstate turnpikes to directly create new jobs and instill consumer confidence in the economy. Second, fight for new trade deals overseas, especially in the hemisphere, Korea, Japan, and China. These first two prongs had both been proven to work, the former under every Whig president from Henry Clay to William McGovern, the latter by Blaine, Elkins, and Weldon. The third prong, however, represented a new line of thought for Whig economists. Fountain proposed major regulatory reform for American businesses to make them more competitive and profitable. On the one hand, Fountain proposed deep tax cuts for corporations and small businesses alike, stricter anti-monopoly laws, and, most radically, subsidies [5].
President Fountain did not frame these as subsidies, instead referring to them as a “Federal Investment System.” The functionality remained the same as a subsidy: the United States government would appropriate sums of money for investment in private businesses to stimulate the growth of certain sectors of the economy. In particular, Fountain targeted the oil, telecommunications, and electrical sectors for “government-sponsored strengthening,” seeing oil and telephones in particular as valuable exports, and electricity as vital to national development in the future. Once the sixteenth amendment had been submitted to the states for ratification, Fountain, Speaker of the House Vance Matthews, and Senator Orville Hagerty began turning Fountain’s development program into legislation.
Named the Development Act, Fountain’s proposals caused a stir on the House floor. It was the most radical legislation since the thirteenth amendment, more so than even the Kemp-Roth Act. Elias Delany, the ranking member of the House Ways and Means committee, tore into the bill during debate as wasteful spending and federal overreach. However, thanks to Speaker Matthew’s whipping effort, the Whigs fell in line and the Development Act was narrowly voted out of committee on June 21st, 1921. In the broader House, conservative Whigs focused on the subsidies, and demanded their removal from the final bill. Fountain and Matthews refused to remove them from the bill altogether, but after negotiations with Senate leadership and the house holdouts, the subsidies were cut considerably, by nearly one-third.
This compromise was ultimately satisfactory, and the Development Act sailed through congress with only minimal obstructions. President Fountain signed it into law on September 14th, 1921. Having accomplished the third prong of his recovery plan, Fountain went on to sign a large internal improvements bill in November, before turning his attention towards foreign trade. After settling a deal to increase American commercial presence in Japan’s trade ports, Fountain’s State Department entered into negotiations with Korea and China. However, these trade deals did little to increase trade, as China’s industrial sector grew, hindering foreign trade efforts. While the subsidies would, ultimately, lead to some economic growth, economists have judged them insufficient. It would be the industrial policy of Howard Cameron, a decade later, that perfected Fountain’s ideas…”
-From WHITE MAN’S NATION: AMERICA 1881-1973 by Kenneth Thurman, published 2003
“The Development Act was not well received by the public. Newspapers and Democratic politicians denounced it as wasteful spending, and when the economy failed to significantly improve, the attacks grew louder. Though there was little in the way of a unified nationwide message for congressional candidates, most Democrats focused on the heavy government spending. Frequently mocked as the Hundred-Billion-Dollar Congress for its liberal spending, the 67th Congress was unpopular, especially with the increase in the national debt brought on by Fountain’s combination of tax cuts and subsidies.
In the midterm elections, the Whigs faced heavy losses. Backlash from the Development Act nearly cost Speaker Matthews his own seat, but while he clung on, Democrats gained 55 Whig seats, of which some 31 were defeated incumbents. The Democrats also reclaimed the Senate, winning seats in not only Whig strongholds like Minnesota and Maine, but also Fountain’s own home state of Auraria. The next two years promised little in the way of legislation, as the Democrats vowed to block any more “wasteful” spending.”
-From SOBER AND INDUSTRIOUS: A HISTORY OF THE WHIGS by Greg Carey, published 1986
“Even though the Whigs faced strong headwinds in 1922, Howard Cameron forged ahead with his plan to run for Governor of Michigan. Most potential Whig candidates chose to sit out the election, opening the door for Cameron to easily win the nomination. While the Kemp-aligned state party tried to block him at the convention, by 1922 Cameron had built a considerable network of influence in state politics and prevailed on the second ballot. In the general election, he faced Samuel Woodferry, a congressman and wealthy lawyer. Woodferry tried to tie Cameron to the unpopular President Fountain and found some success. After all, Cameron had campaigned heavily for him in 1920 and was a vocal supporter of his policies. Woodferry had expected Cameron to try and run from his association, but instead he leaned in. Cameron told audiences that subsidies were “good in theory,” and that “if properly done,” industries in Michigan would benefit immensely.
Such an argument would have failed in less of a Whiggish stronghold, but Cameron’s ability to both distance himself from the implementation of the policy and support the President and the idea found a receptive audience among industrial workers. He also attacked Woodferry for his association with the Free Trade League and corrupt ex-Detroit mayor James Schmidt. Cameron was obsessed with winning statewide office and pulled out all the stops. He campaigned tirelessly, but Woodferry seemed to hold the edge, despite Cameron’s efforts. Desperate to avenge his Senate loss, Cameron directed his campaign to “sink Woodferry” and find dirt on him. While Woodferry’s record was mostly clean, in 1916, he was a lead investor in Haverford Industries, which purchased the Detroit-based Huron Steel and proceeded to close two of its four plants, leaving almost 1,000 workers jobless. The race remained close throughout, but the scandal deeply damaged Woodferry’s campaign. On election day, turnout among factory workers was unusually high, and Cameron prevailed by the thin margin of 27,000 votes. Nevertheless, Howard Cameron had won, and was well on his way to the Presidency…”
-From THE DETROIT LION by John Philip Yates, published 2012
[1] Woodrow Wilson did this OTL.
[2] Jewish Uganda is here!
[3] Not sure about these numbers, though.
[4] It doesn’t spread to Europe and is less deadly than OTL, but nevertheless there is a mild pandemic TTL.
[5] And here we have American Dirigisme in its infancy.
