The Durango and Silverton will still exist, don't worry. As for what operates on it, no idea and that's a discussion for another day IMO.
The Three Amigos (Collaborative TL Between Joe Bonkers, TheMann, and isayyo2)
- Thread starter Joe Bonkers
- Start date
The Filipinos and The Amigos
"Our nation was born from a desire for freedom, built by those who sought to make a better life for the people they love and forged in the fires created by those who sought master position over others, men who now seek once again to steal the freedom of another people who have sacrificed much for the opportunity to choose their own destiny. Spain, it appears, is once again choosing to ignore the will of God and the strength, bravery and conviction of the people who seek freedom, and that state of affairs will hot be tolerated by America. Spain would be wise to heed our warning, as they should be well aware of what happened the last time they dared to steal the freedom of others."
Those were the tough words of President Rutherford B. Hayes in his speech to Congress on April 12, 1883, asking Congress for a formal declaration of War on Spain for the second time in less than a quarter of century. But what was different this time was that it was not in response to the Spanish support of Texas' aggression against the United States. This was a declaration that followed Spain's attempt to keep its colonies in the far-off Philippines, and they were about to discover that the changes to the Amigos, as vast as they had been in the years since Nathan Bedford Forrest's surrender in San Antonio, hadn't taken away the desire for paying Spain back for their past aggression, or had stifled the desires of the leaders of the Amigos and their populace for a greater role in the world. In the years after the North American War the energies that could be dedicated to such pursuits had been taken up in great degree by rebuilding and the settling of the western half of North America, but by 1883 those tasks were well on their way to completion, and there was a wide sense that it was time the Amigos started making their presence known in the world.
And the Spaniards once again gave them a beautiful opportunity.
Since the North American War, Spain had gone through a period of massive internal strife that led to a failed attempt to have an elected monarch, directly leading to the Bourbon Restoration of 1874. Spain's new government under King Alfonso XII made many changes to the government of Spain and it's remaining colonies, and while Madrid did make public statements about the retaking of Cuba and Puerto Rico these were never taken too seriously by Washington - though the years after the conflict had seen the United States Navy, the Armada de Mexico and (after it's founding in 1871) the Royal Canadian Navy begin growing their power-projection capabilities. This growth in naval power was somewhat paradoxically why Spain's boasting never got traction in America - indeed the New York Times wrote of this boasting in 1875 "If Spain wishes to be so foolish as to once again attack America, Washington should see to it that when Spaniards talk about Bourbon they only think about whiskey." Such sentiments were widespread in the Amigos - Mexico in particular had nothing good to say to Madrid, and the brazen attack by the Spaniards had had the effect of driving a mighty wedge between Spain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere which spoke Spanish, and little had been done by either side to warm up those relationships, even as post-Napoleon France went to considerable effort to improve its standing with the Amigos and was quite successful at it.
But it would be Spain's abysmal treatment of the Filipinos which would push the Amigos into fighting them once more.
The Bourbon Restoration had resulted in the re-appointment of Rafael de Izquierdo as Spain's governor in the islands, and his heavy hand ended up causing problems almost from the start - perhaps the biggest strategic mistake of all for the Spaniards was the regular deportation to Spain of many of the Philippines' most-important independence leaders to Europe, where upon many of which simply made their way to Mexico, which by 1880 had gathered a large Filipino community in the Western cities of Ciudad Obregon, Mazatlan, Acapulco and Guadalajara. This community made sure the Amigos knew of Spain's actions, but in all fairness the Filipinos didn't exactly have to work hard to stoke anti-Spanish sentiment - Rafael de Izquierdo did a quite good enough job of that on his own, as Mexico and Canada's objections to the execution of Catholic priests in the islands for "Subversive Activities" fell on deaf ears and the institution of human zoos both in the Philippines and Spain became the subject of countless sensationalist headlines in American newspapers. Spain pointedly ignored such criticism, even after French and German diplomats began to warn Spain that the Amigos were increasingly willing to engage in another armed conflict. London also spoke out against many of the actions in specifics, which got a better response in Ottawa than Washington or Mexico City but also had the effect of being a warning to Madrid of what London's response to such a conflict would be. Despite these criticisms Spain, desiring to keep the last pieces of what had been one of the world's great empires, was unwilling to budge an inch on its iron-fisted rule of the Philippines. Rafael de Izquierdo's successors weren't particularly more liberal than him despite the changing times, and such harshness both increased the Filipinos' desire for independence and the willingness of the Amigos to support them.
Starting in 1877, Mexico began providing the Filipino independence movements with financial support, something the Spanish weren't slow to pick up on but had few practical measures to stop this. They of course complained but Mexico City, while not openly admitting to arming the Filipinos, quite rudely brushed off the Spanish concerns on multiple occasions - indeed Mexican President Porfirio Diaz commented to General Lee in 1879 about the open material support to the Filipinos "They [Spaniards] need not worry about judgement from us, that is God's concern, but we have enormous respect for those in the Philippines trying to send the bastards back to Seville without their pride or their empire." Mexico was awash with such sentiments, and by the early 1880s many newspapers in the nation openly called on the Mexican Armada to sail to the Philippines and end Spain's colonial empire for good. While the United States and Canada were most certainly not as eager to start another war, they understood exactly where the sentiments came from, and had no objections to the Mexicans' actions. It didn't hurt matters that by the early 1880s Mexico's economic growth was such that they were investing all across South America, and with those investments came influence over a part of the world that had little sympathy for Madrid in any case. By early 1880 the Spanish oppression and the support of the Filipinos had made much of the country ungovernable, which led to direct calls for intervention. The Spanish were forced to deploy ever-larger numbers of troops to the islands to quell revolts, but these expensive efforts were largely in vain.
In February 1881 the pot finally boiled over in the Philippines, with the unrest exploding into open revolt. Within weeks of the revolt Mexico City begins shipping arms and ammunition to the Filipino rebels, something that results in the Filipinos gaining a number of key early victories in their war before the Spanish are able to begin holding off the Filipinos. The war devolves into a bitter stalemate, even as the press (particularly in Mexico and the southeastern United States) loudly call for intervention into the conflict. Mexico doesn't deny arming the Filipinos, but early calls for intervention don't have the desired effect....but it would soon become clear why.
Mexico City hadn't had many difficulties convincing many Filipino groups to fight the Spanish, but all felt that their efforts would be much more difficult to achieve without Washington's help - but things improved in this regard with Rutherford Hayes' ascension to the Presidency in March 1881. Hayes, a veteran of the fight against the Spanish (including his artillery unit fighting with distinction during the battle for Monterrey), was more than a little willing to fight back against the Spanish, remembering well why he had to be called to the colors in 1861. Since then, Hayes had been among the Republicans who had loudly supported the growth of American naval and foreign policy power, a growth that had continued almost unabated after the North American War, even as the Army's size had shrunk as a result of demobilization. The first four armored cruisers of the United States Navy had just entered into the United States Navy at the time, with these four ships - Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Denver, known colloquially as the ABCD ships - being easily the equal of anything the Spanish had, and it was a similar story with the Armada de Mexico, which by then boasted three armored cruisers of its own - Miguel Hidalgo, Francisco Javier Mina and Guadeloupe Victoria - and both had a sizable number of support ships capable of taking the fight to the Spanish. Hayes had little difficulty finding help in Canada as well, though his proposal of having the Royal Canadian Navy patrol the West Coast of North America, allowing the more-powerful American and Mexican navies to go to the Philippines, was only partially supported, as Canada's most-powerful Pacific fleet unit, armored cruiser Rainbow, would ultimately take an active part in the conflict. The United States Navy was itching to get into the fight, wanting to show off its own capabilities, and it was this, along with the Marines, that turned the corner for Washington. One fateful meeting between James G. Blaine and Deodato Arellano in Guadalajara in June 1882 laid the foundation for the American intervention, as Arellano could - and did - get the Filipino revolutionary movements to agree to a massive general uprising in February 1883, while Blaine was able to get Washington to plan to deploy the United States Navy to the Philippines.
Sure enough, on January 30, 1883, the Filipinos launched a massive offensive against the Spaniards, and eight days the United States Navy's Pacific Fleet and the Armada de Mexico's Second Squadron, the two joined by the HMCS Rainbow, arrived off Manila, with overall command in the hands of Mexican Vice Admiral Miguel Ángel Illescas aboard ARM Miguel Hidalgo. The Spanish, fully aware of the setup - they had something almost identical at Veracruz twenty-two years earlier - fought bravely in the first Battle of Manila Bay, but despite that the Amigos' warships had little difficulty defeating the Spanish Navy's units in Manila Bay, which was outnumbered four to one and made up of quite inferior vessels. The defeat of the Spanish Navy was followed by arrival of ships carrying weapons and supplies for the Filipinos, and two battalions of United States Marine Corps members, who were instrumental in clearing Manila and the areas around it of the Spanish. The landing of the Marines and the massive influx of extra supplies for the Filipinos were followed within two weeks by two full brigades of Mexican Army regulars, now equipped with all of the equipment of the modern armies of the time - smokeless powder ammunition, gatling guns, modern ammunition, mortars - and they proved far, far superior soldiers to the Spanish units. The Spanish quickly moved to counterattack, and on June 25-27, 1883, the Amigos' fleet faced off with the majority of the Spanish Pacific Squadron. The intense battle did see USS Denver and ARM Miguel Hidalgo damaged along with other ships damaged, but the Spanish were almost completely destroyed, with its flagship, armored cruiser Isla de Luzon being sunk after a brutal battle with the American and Spanish naval units. The defeat of the Spanish Navy's units in the Pacific led to a period where the American, Mexican and Canadian vessels provided large quantities of active support for the Filipinos, leading to a rapid drop in the Spanish fortunes.
The Spanish made a second attempt to drive the Amigos back off of the islands, culminating in the Second Battle of Manila Bay on October 4, 1883. This battle was led by brand-new battleship Pelayo, armored cruiser Emperador Carlos V and broadside ironclad Numancia, and while powerful the fleet was to run into an unfortunate surprise - the Americans had reinforcements, too, including battleships Maine and Indiana, and Mexico had managed to find additional help too - they had convinced Brazil to help join in the conflict, and eager to make a point, the Brazilians sent their own flagship, British-built battleship Riachuelo, to support Mexico City's efforts. One of the biggest naval battles since Trafalgar, the battle had much the same result - almost the entirety of the Spanish fleet was lost, including all three of its largest vessels. The massive firepower of Maine, Indiana and Riachuelo convinced Mexico to step up into the arena of true battleships, and the destruction of the Spanish Navy in the Philippines ended its time as a global naval power. The destruction of the Spanish Navy made reinforcement of its units on the islands impossible, and on January 26, 1884, the last Spanish units surrendered on the island of Luzon. Fully aware of the significance, the Filipinos formally declared their independence on May 5, 1884, twenty years to the day after the defeat of the Texans and Spanish in North America, a sign of respect from the Filipinos to the nations that had made possible its independence.
The result on the Amigos on the international stage was profound. Far from being increasingly-prosperous upstarts, the destruction of the Spanish Navy made the United States, Mexico and Canada into nations with a global reach and influence, and the presence of the Riachuelo was the culmination of over a decade of progress between Mexico City and Rio de Janiero, bridging the other language gap that existed in the Americas and making Brazil's presence as an increasingly-powerful nation visible to the Amigos. Spain's disdain for the North Americans only grew further, though Spain's young king, Alfonso XII, counseled against continuing to let old wounds fester after the conflict. Over the remainder of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, relations across the Atlantic between Spain and North America remained frosty, though France and Britain both found themselves becoming increasingly close with the Amigos over time. The Amigos returned home in triumph, and the Philippines began its own period of impressive economic and social growth. Having successfully established themselves, units of the Amigos' navies began to make more and more visits abroad in the years following 1884, growing a formidable reputation.
Back at home, the successful war only added to the massive social growth of the Gilded Age era that was blossoming following the end of Reconstruction. The Presidencies of Lee, Tilden and Hayes had led to a major growth in the economy across virtually the entire nation and had also resulted in a massive reform of the United States' civil service, as patronage appointments shrank dramatically (particularly during Lee's time in the White House, though Hayes and his successor, James Garfield, also pushed this to the forefront) and the United States' systems of governance became ever more professional and apolitical, a trend that was similar to that of Mexico and Canada. The country's prosperity and the countless examples of success by men of color had led to a massive reduction of racial bias, to such a degree that by the 1880s even the Chinese and Japanese of the West Coast were beginning to find their own economic and social success, particularly in San Francisco and in the Pacific Northwest. By 1885, America's great cities - and by that point the list of these was rapidly growing, with Los Angeles, Atlanta, Denver, Miami, Detroit, San Juan, Birmingham, Memphis and Kansas City rapidly rising to prominence, with Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Seattle and Salt Lake City joining them in the early 20th Century - were veritable mosaics of many different neighborhoods and districts, and an increasingly-large number of people were moving to the industrial centers, taking advantage of greater opportunities. The prosperity ultimately led to ever-better government services in North America, with the Hayes and Garfield administrations in particular pushing hard for much-improved education systems in America, feeling that an educated, informed populace would be the most conducive to the country being able to successfully face challenges.
"Our nation was born from a desire for freedom, built by those who sought to make a better life for the people they love and forged in the fires created by those who sought master position over others, men who now seek once again to steal the freedom of another people who have sacrificed much for the opportunity to choose their own destiny. Spain, it appears, is once again choosing to ignore the will of God and the strength, bravery and conviction of the people who seek freedom, and that state of affairs will hot be tolerated by America. Spain would be wise to heed our warning, as they should be well aware of what happened the last time they dared to steal the freedom of others."
Those were the tough words of President Rutherford B. Hayes in his speech to Congress on April 12, 1883, asking Congress for a formal declaration of War on Spain for the second time in less than a quarter of century. But what was different this time was that it was not in response to the Spanish support of Texas' aggression against the United States. This was a declaration that followed Spain's attempt to keep its colonies in the far-off Philippines, and they were about to discover that the changes to the Amigos, as vast as they had been in the years since Nathan Bedford Forrest's surrender in San Antonio, hadn't taken away the desire for paying Spain back for their past aggression, or had stifled the desires of the leaders of the Amigos and their populace for a greater role in the world. In the years after the North American War the energies that could be dedicated to such pursuits had been taken up in great degree by rebuilding and the settling of the western half of North America, but by 1883 those tasks were well on their way to completion, and there was a wide sense that it was time the Amigos started making their presence known in the world.
And the Spaniards once again gave them a beautiful opportunity.
Since the North American War, Spain had gone through a period of massive internal strife that led to a failed attempt to have an elected monarch, directly leading to the Bourbon Restoration of 1874. Spain's new government under King Alfonso XII made many changes to the government of Spain and it's remaining colonies, and while Madrid did make public statements about the retaking of Cuba and Puerto Rico these were never taken too seriously by Washington - though the years after the conflict had seen the United States Navy, the Armada de Mexico and (after it's founding in 1871) the Royal Canadian Navy begin growing their power-projection capabilities. This growth in naval power was somewhat paradoxically why Spain's boasting never got traction in America - indeed the New York Times wrote of this boasting in 1875 "If Spain wishes to be so foolish as to once again attack America, Washington should see to it that when Spaniards talk about Bourbon they only think about whiskey." Such sentiments were widespread in the Amigos - Mexico in particular had nothing good to say to Madrid, and the brazen attack by the Spaniards had had the effect of driving a mighty wedge between Spain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere which spoke Spanish, and little had been done by either side to warm up those relationships, even as post-Napoleon France went to considerable effort to improve its standing with the Amigos and was quite successful at it.
But it would be Spain's abysmal treatment of the Filipinos which would push the Amigos into fighting them once more.
The Bourbon Restoration had resulted in the re-appointment of Rafael de Izquierdo as Spain's governor in the islands, and his heavy hand ended up causing problems almost from the start - perhaps the biggest strategic mistake of all for the Spaniards was the regular deportation to Spain of many of the Philippines' most-important independence leaders to Europe, where upon many of which simply made their way to Mexico, which by 1880 had gathered a large Filipino community in the Western cities of Ciudad Obregon, Mazatlan, Acapulco and Guadalajara. This community made sure the Amigos knew of Spain's actions, but in all fairness the Filipinos didn't exactly have to work hard to stoke anti-Spanish sentiment - Rafael de Izquierdo did a quite good enough job of that on his own, as Mexico and Canada's objections to the execution of Catholic priests in the islands for "Subversive Activities" fell on deaf ears and the institution of human zoos both in the Philippines and Spain became the subject of countless sensationalist headlines in American newspapers. Spain pointedly ignored such criticism, even after French and German diplomats began to warn Spain that the Amigos were increasingly willing to engage in another armed conflict. London also spoke out against many of the actions in specifics, which got a better response in Ottawa than Washington or Mexico City but also had the effect of being a warning to Madrid of what London's response to such a conflict would be. Despite these criticisms Spain, desiring to keep the last pieces of what had been one of the world's great empires, was unwilling to budge an inch on its iron-fisted rule of the Philippines. Rafael de Izquierdo's successors weren't particularly more liberal than him despite the changing times, and such harshness both increased the Filipinos' desire for independence and the willingness of the Amigos to support them.
Starting in 1877, Mexico began providing the Filipino independence movements with financial support, something the Spanish weren't slow to pick up on but had few practical measures to stop this. They of course complained but Mexico City, while not openly admitting to arming the Filipinos, quite rudely brushed off the Spanish concerns on multiple occasions - indeed Mexican President Porfirio Diaz commented to General Lee in 1879 about the open material support to the Filipinos "They [Spaniards] need not worry about judgement from us, that is God's concern, but we have enormous respect for those in the Philippines trying to send the bastards back to Seville without their pride or their empire." Mexico was awash with such sentiments, and by the early 1880s many newspapers in the nation openly called on the Mexican Armada to sail to the Philippines and end Spain's colonial empire for good. While the United States and Canada were most certainly not as eager to start another war, they understood exactly where the sentiments came from, and had no objections to the Mexicans' actions. It didn't hurt matters that by the early 1880s Mexico's economic growth was such that they were investing all across South America, and with those investments came influence over a part of the world that had little sympathy for Madrid in any case. By early 1880 the Spanish oppression and the support of the Filipinos had made much of the country ungovernable, which led to direct calls for intervention. The Spanish were forced to deploy ever-larger numbers of troops to the islands to quell revolts, but these expensive efforts were largely in vain.
In February 1881 the pot finally boiled over in the Philippines, with the unrest exploding into open revolt. Within weeks of the revolt Mexico City begins shipping arms and ammunition to the Filipino rebels, something that results in the Filipinos gaining a number of key early victories in their war before the Spanish are able to begin holding off the Filipinos. The war devolves into a bitter stalemate, even as the press (particularly in Mexico and the southeastern United States) loudly call for intervention into the conflict. Mexico doesn't deny arming the Filipinos, but early calls for intervention don't have the desired effect....but it would soon become clear why.
Mexico City hadn't had many difficulties convincing many Filipino groups to fight the Spanish, but all felt that their efforts would be much more difficult to achieve without Washington's help - but things improved in this regard with Rutherford Hayes' ascension to the Presidency in March 1881. Hayes, a veteran of the fight against the Spanish (including his artillery unit fighting with distinction during the battle for Monterrey), was more than a little willing to fight back against the Spanish, remembering well why he had to be called to the colors in 1861. Since then, Hayes had been among the Republicans who had loudly supported the growth of American naval and foreign policy power, a growth that had continued almost unabated after the North American War, even as the Army's size had shrunk as a result of demobilization. The first four armored cruisers of the United States Navy had just entered into the United States Navy at the time, with these four ships - Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Denver, known colloquially as the ABCD ships - being easily the equal of anything the Spanish had, and it was a similar story with the Armada de Mexico, which by then boasted three armored cruisers of its own - Miguel Hidalgo, Francisco Javier Mina and Guadeloupe Victoria - and both had a sizable number of support ships capable of taking the fight to the Spanish. Hayes had little difficulty finding help in Canada as well, though his proposal of having the Royal Canadian Navy patrol the West Coast of North America, allowing the more-powerful American and Mexican navies to go to the Philippines, was only partially supported, as Canada's most-powerful Pacific fleet unit, armored cruiser Rainbow, would ultimately take an active part in the conflict. The United States Navy was itching to get into the fight, wanting to show off its own capabilities, and it was this, along with the Marines, that turned the corner for Washington. One fateful meeting between James G. Blaine and Deodato Arellano in Guadalajara in June 1882 laid the foundation for the American intervention, as Arellano could - and did - get the Filipino revolutionary movements to agree to a massive general uprising in February 1883, while Blaine was able to get Washington to plan to deploy the United States Navy to the Philippines.
Sure enough, on January 30, 1883, the Filipinos launched a massive offensive against the Spaniards, and eight days the United States Navy's Pacific Fleet and the Armada de Mexico's Second Squadron, the two joined by the HMCS Rainbow, arrived off Manila, with overall command in the hands of Mexican Vice Admiral Miguel Ángel Illescas aboard ARM Miguel Hidalgo. The Spanish, fully aware of the setup - they had something almost identical at Veracruz twenty-two years earlier - fought bravely in the first Battle of Manila Bay, but despite that the Amigos' warships had little difficulty defeating the Spanish Navy's units in Manila Bay, which was outnumbered four to one and made up of quite inferior vessels. The defeat of the Spanish Navy was followed by arrival of ships carrying weapons and supplies for the Filipinos, and two battalions of United States Marine Corps members, who were instrumental in clearing Manila and the areas around it of the Spanish. The landing of the Marines and the massive influx of extra supplies for the Filipinos were followed within two weeks by two full brigades of Mexican Army regulars, now equipped with all of the equipment of the modern armies of the time - smokeless powder ammunition, gatling guns, modern ammunition, mortars - and they proved far, far superior soldiers to the Spanish units. The Spanish quickly moved to counterattack, and on June 25-27, 1883, the Amigos' fleet faced off with the majority of the Spanish Pacific Squadron. The intense battle did see USS Denver and ARM Miguel Hidalgo damaged along with other ships damaged, but the Spanish were almost completely destroyed, with its flagship, armored cruiser Isla de Luzon being sunk after a brutal battle with the American and Spanish naval units. The defeat of the Spanish Navy's units in the Pacific led to a period where the American, Mexican and Canadian vessels provided large quantities of active support for the Filipinos, leading to a rapid drop in the Spanish fortunes.
The Spanish made a second attempt to drive the Amigos back off of the islands, culminating in the Second Battle of Manila Bay on October 4, 1883. This battle was led by brand-new battleship Pelayo, armored cruiser Emperador Carlos V and broadside ironclad Numancia, and while powerful the fleet was to run into an unfortunate surprise - the Americans had reinforcements, too, including battleships Maine and Indiana, and Mexico had managed to find additional help too - they had convinced Brazil to help join in the conflict, and eager to make a point, the Brazilians sent their own flagship, British-built battleship Riachuelo, to support Mexico City's efforts. One of the biggest naval battles since Trafalgar, the battle had much the same result - almost the entirety of the Spanish fleet was lost, including all three of its largest vessels. The massive firepower of Maine, Indiana and Riachuelo convinced Mexico to step up into the arena of true battleships, and the destruction of the Spanish Navy in the Philippines ended its time as a global naval power. The destruction of the Spanish Navy made reinforcement of its units on the islands impossible, and on January 26, 1884, the last Spanish units surrendered on the island of Luzon. Fully aware of the significance, the Filipinos formally declared their independence on May 5, 1884, twenty years to the day after the defeat of the Texans and Spanish in North America, a sign of respect from the Filipinos to the nations that had made possible its independence.
The result on the Amigos on the international stage was profound. Far from being increasingly-prosperous upstarts, the destruction of the Spanish Navy made the United States, Mexico and Canada into nations with a global reach and influence, and the presence of the Riachuelo was the culmination of over a decade of progress between Mexico City and Rio de Janiero, bridging the other language gap that existed in the Americas and making Brazil's presence as an increasingly-powerful nation visible to the Amigos. Spain's disdain for the North Americans only grew further, though Spain's young king, Alfonso XII, counseled against continuing to let old wounds fester after the conflict. Over the remainder of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, relations across the Atlantic between Spain and North America remained frosty, though France and Britain both found themselves becoming increasingly close with the Amigos over time. The Amigos returned home in triumph, and the Philippines began its own period of impressive economic and social growth. Having successfully established themselves, units of the Amigos' navies began to make more and more visits abroad in the years following 1884, growing a formidable reputation.
Back at home, the successful war only added to the massive social growth of the Gilded Age era that was blossoming following the end of Reconstruction. The Presidencies of Lee, Tilden and Hayes had led to a major growth in the economy across virtually the entire nation and had also resulted in a massive reform of the United States' civil service, as patronage appointments shrank dramatically (particularly during Lee's time in the White House, though Hayes and his successor, James Garfield, also pushed this to the forefront) and the United States' systems of governance became ever more professional and apolitical, a trend that was similar to that of Mexico and Canada. The country's prosperity and the countless examples of success by men of color had led to a massive reduction of racial bias, to such a degree that by the 1880s even the Chinese and Japanese of the West Coast were beginning to find their own economic and social success, particularly in San Francisco and in the Pacific Northwest. By 1885, America's great cities - and by that point the list of these was rapidly growing, with Los Angeles, Atlanta, Denver, Miami, Detroit, San Juan, Birmingham, Memphis and Kansas City rapidly rising to prominence, with Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Seattle and Salt Lake City joining them in the early 20th Century - were veritable mosaics of many different neighborhoods and districts, and an increasingly-large number of people were moving to the industrial centers, taking advantage of greater opportunities. The prosperity ultimately led to ever-better government services in North America, with the Hayes and Garfield administrations in particular pushing hard for much-improved education systems in America, feeling that an educated, informed populace would be the most conducive to the country being able to successfully face challenges.
Enter The Gilded Age
The Amigos' final destruction of the Spanish Empire and the independence of the Philippines on May 5, 1884 was another of the many moments of history that was being rapidly written by three nations that were rapidly maturing as societies even as their economies and standards of living improved dramatically in the latter years of the 19th Century. The Amigos in 1885 were entering into what was very much a new world, and many new technological advancements were soon to come. From electricity to automobiles to modern foods and medications to the expanding major cities of the Amigos and the first skyscrapers, the advancement of technology was right in line with the progress of its people, a line of progress that in the latter years of the 19th Century began to show many changes of its own.
The years between 1870 and 1885 had seen a growth in the development of the first unions, and the beginnings of the end of many unhappy practices of the past, such as child labor, the first regulations of which in the Amigos were passed by the Canadian Parliament in 1886 and rapidly followed by their contemporaries in Washington and Mexico City. The child labor regulations were part of plans in Canada for a greater system of public education whose roots went back to Sir Georges-Etienne Cartier and the legendary Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat, two men who while they were political enemies (and enemies isn't too strong a word in this case - they fought bitterly on many occasions) and Mowat's career was in no small part helped by anti-French-Canadian sentiments, did have some agreements on policy, of which education was one of them. Indeed, Canada would be the first part of the British Empire to mandate public grade schooling for all, beginning the development of its publicly-funded schools up to eighth grade in 1887. Mowat's efforts did ultimately write most of the rules on the relationship between Ottawa and the provinces, though Mowat's attempts to push Ottawa into irrelevance was more or less a failure, despite the establishing of health care and education as provincial responsibilities. Canada's efforts with education were followed with interest in many parts of the United States and Mexico as well, particularly as more than a few American and Mexican state governors followed Mowat's example of pushing for additional rights for their jurisdictions at the expense of the federal government. By 1900, while the decentralization efforts had had mixed results depending on the location, publicly-funded education was almost universal across the Amigos, and educators joined the field in vast numbers to take advantage of the new systems, rapidly improving the quality of education at all levels across the Amigos. Health care also saw improvements driven by both private interests and governments in the later years of the 19th Century, aiming to make people live longer through a more scientific approach to many aspects of health care, allowing the beginnings of the health care systems that developed in such dramatic fashion in the 20th Century.
Adult education exploded in use during the time as well as thousands of high schools and hundreds of engineering college and technical schools, with the American Morrill Land-Grant Acts, first passed in 1864, being used to spur on the development of many of these schools, particularly in the West and South. It was a similar story in Canada, as the Advanced Education Act of 1868 established a similar way of setting up such colleges and universities in Canada, with a combination of the two being developeed by Mexico, its introduction in 1871 being one of the signature achievements of Benito Juarez's second stint as Mexico's President. Thousands of libraries sprang up, many larger companies (seeking to improve the quality of their middle management) began paying for education for many of its higher-ranking employees and job training was encouraged by many in forward-thinking businesses. Railroads developed the first true scientific methods of operations, complete with clear chains of command, statistical reporting, standard time zones and explicit career tracks not merely for the white-collar managers but also for blue-collar workers in both skilled and unskilled jobs. It didn't take long for these methods to move into many other industries, with large-scale ones like steel, steamships, telegraph and telephone networks and utilities being among the first ones to follow suit, as well as many co-operatives in agricultural fields, of which by the 1880s there were literally thousands in the United States, concentrated in the Midwest, Great Plains and South.
The vast money that was poured into the Amigos' railroads, steel industry, textile, food processor and agricultural machinery industries soon swelled out into many other fields, including the growth of new industries such as telegraphs (and later telephones), automobiles and petroleum. The oil industry began with Pennsylvania in the 1860s, but after the discovery of the Spindletop oil field in Texas in 1901 and the Leduc oil field in Alberta in 1904 petroleum moved from its early beginnings supplying primarily kerosene into the supply of gasoline and fuel oil, demand for the former growing incredibly rapidly with the growth of the automobile industry in the 20th Century and the latter starting off through the expansion of the use of fuel oil to heat homes and power railroad locomotives. The first cars assembled in North America was completed in 1893, and in the years to come the demand for them outstripped supply, cars becoming truly universal items primarily with the development of the automobile assembly line by Henry Ford in 1913. The growth of automobiles and desires to clean up many elements of America's major cities led to major beautification efforts that began in the years after the North American War but which accelerated to ever-greater heights with the Gilded Age, with the National Mall in Washington and the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City being used as examples of what could be done, designs of roadways, parkways and walkways being expanded across the Americas in the years to come, and the City Beautiful movement, which began in the late 1880s, pushed things further and faster still. The development of tarred and concrete roadways in major cities across the Amigos in the 1880s was seen a way of dramatically cleaning up the environments of these cities, and most of the largest cities began developing the first modern sewer systems. By 1890 most Amigos' major cities had large amounts of roadways paved with asphalt, bricks, concrete or cobblestones (the latter common in older areas but almost unheard-of in more recent projects and the rapid development of modern sanitation systems began to be seen as a major public health benefit, though perhaps not one for the local waterways the sewers dumped into, though the development of modern sewage treatment plants that followed the growth of the sewer systems went a long way towards fixing this problem.
While in a great many ways the fantastic growth of the American railroad network in the 1845-1900 time period brought with it many of the advances of the time, it had a dark side in many places, particularly with regards to many of the railroad barons - men like Collis P. Huntington, Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, Edward Henry Herriman, William J. Palmer, William Cornelius Van Horne, José Yves Limantour, Leland Stanford, Bautista Aguinaldo, Alexander Kohana and Cyrus K. Holliday were both beloved and reviled by many, all of the above having played portions in the creation of vast railroad empires but all of them also seen as having created businesses that took advantage of their customers and the people they served. The result of these, despite the much-greater observation by Washington that followed in the later years of the 19th Century, still led to more than a few revolts and attempts by states to try to push down freight rates, which caused bouts of debate between the states and provinces and central governments. Though the federal governments in all three nations zealously guarded their power with regards to inter-state and inter-provincial commerce (as well as trade between the nations), they were not blind to the obvious possibilities that railroads could fight each other with undesirable results, and thus Washington, Ottawa and Mexico City weren't unwilling to regulate many aspects of the railroads' behaviors, forcing the railroads (and their leaders) to adopt more of a public conscience. By 1890, this had indeed taken most of the worst faults off of the actions of the railroads, and indeed by the end of the century many of the robber barons had shifted much of their attention towards the idea that their firms could be drivers for societal good, and many acted with this in mind, from ever-improving freight and passenger services to the development of utilities and the deeding of huge quantities of land to authorities for parks and development. Railroad stations in major cities became ever-greater designs, with the stations completed in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries like Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal in New York, Washington Union Station, Victoria Station in Montreal, Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal, Chicago Union Station, Pacific Central Station in San Francisco[1] and Michigan Central Terminal in Detroit setting new standards not just for size and function but also for being some of the most beautiful buildings of the time.
While many of the railroad barons begrudgingly became good public citizens, for many others, such as famed Wall Street financier J.P. Morgan and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, this was never much of an issue, and the famous (or infamous depending on the perspective) founder of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller, would also become one of the biggest philanthropists of the 19th and 20th Centuries. In Canada and Mexico, where there was much more of a social focus on the public good towards the highest-ranking members of society, there was little need to shame companies or individuals of wealth towards making their massive wealth work for the greater good - indeed, the Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian Northern Railway both were massive investors in the communities they served in Canada, and it said a lot that the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, which was much more financially hard-headed, ended up being nationalized out of bankruptcy by the Canadian government in 1902, which after the Canadian Northern suffered a similar fate in 1915 led to the creation of Canadian National Railways in 1918.[2] Mexico's wealthy class were almost entirely men who had been poor at the end of the North American War, and they had all the reason in the world to think highly of their countrymen, and leaders like Juan Abasto Galves, Ricardo Molina, Joaquin Hurtado Nunez, Cristofer Pereira, Luis Pareja Fernandez and Alejandra Gutierrez were only too happy to support their countrymen and the maturing of their nation. It was a similar story among people of color in America, with the likes of Booker T. Washington, Mary Ellen Pleasant, James Madison Bell, Benjamin Singleton, Frederick Douglass, John Robert Clifford, Katherine Brown, Victoria Thornton and Anthony Lucas Peterson being among those who were associated with the pushes for African-Americans to be looked upon as equals in their own nation, helped along by men like the legendary United States Senators John Lewis and Hiram Rhodes Revels who were proud and effective supporters of equality for African Americans, their efforts not hurt by the fact that many of the survivors of the war at all echelons - all the way up to Presidents Lee, Tilden and Hayes, as well as virtually all North American War general officers - had stories of the willingness of black Americans to build their own worlds and fight for their country. Indeed, by the end of the 19th Century the "Black Belt" communities of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Louisiana and Texas was home to millions of black Americans who were every bit as well off as their white counterparts - indeed these areas, among the worst for racially-biased conflict in the War, would become among the most ethnically heterogenous parts of North America by the end of the 19th Century, a story shared with Georgia, Alabama, Florida and the Carolinas.
With this wealth and many movements to the towns and cities of America came needs for transportation, and while steam locomotives worked fine for large trains and for many forms of farm machinery (though the development of the internal combustion engine in the 20th Century ultimately made the steam traction engines of the past all but extinct by World War II) the development of electricity as a part of modern life in the late 19th Century led to the rapid development of electrified transportation in most North American cities in the 1890s, replacing horse-drawn streetcars on the streets of major cities across the Amigos. Thomas Edison's pioneering of the development of direct-current electric power transmission was revolutionary but it wasn't long before George Westinghouse's development of alternating-current power rapidly overtook the market in electricity generation, with the work of Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla laying much of the groundwork of modern electricity, which by 1900 was well-established in all of the cities of the Amigos and was rapidly spreading out to the rural areas. Electric-powered streetcars led to the first subways in the Amigos in the early 20th Century, making possible greater movement of people in these cities than anything before it.
Vast growth in both skilled and unskilled labor combined with the expansion across the nation to make for a vast need for more people, and while North America's natural rate of population increase was rapid, it was combined with a massive wave of immigration that landed in all three nations, with the United States getting the largest amount of it but huge numbers of people landing in Mexico and Canada as well, with the United States passing the 100 million mark in 1901 both due this and due to natural increase. As the better living conditions and health care saw infant mortality in the Amigos absolutely plummet between 1875 and 1930, the population growth actually accelerated in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, even as the economic and population center of the United States shifted both West and also somewhat to the South, a trend pushed by the rapid growth of Miami, Birmingham and Atlanta as well as the Texas cities. As open land was in wide supply, thsoe who landed in the major cities had the benefit of being able to use the possibility of movement to push up wage demands, and by the late 19th Century the "wage slavery" that had been common in earlier parts of the Gilded Age was disappearing, even as the Panic of 1893 slowed the economic growth - though that Panic would ultimately be little more than a bump in the road towards greater prosperity, a bump that was in large part alleviated through the first North American Trade and Tarriff Agreements, reached for the first time in 1896. The growing together of the nations was despite the Canadians and Mexicans both being plenty wary of the possibility of American companies and leaders swamping their own home-grown champions, a situation that Washington was well aware of and understood the concerns from the other two nations about.
By 1900, relations between the three nations had become so close that for many the borders were little more than a place where some laws started and ended, and while each nation was very much proud of their heritage and accomplishments and nationalism was a major force in many regards, public bigotry was steadily eroding, particularly as the African, Native, Asian and Latin American communities were in the midst of not only creating their own economic prosperity but also many elements of their own culture.
The ragtime music of the 1880s was the beginnings of the world of Jazz music, a genre that would be in the 20th Century massively influenced by African Americans, while the tresillo, brought into American music lexicons after the annexation of Cuba during the North American War, led to the growth of African drumming traditions, long minimized in the United States, being revived in a major way, particularly in the music scenes of New Orleans (the birthplace of Jazz in most minds) and Miami but which spread far and wide quite quickly with the growth of railroads allowing ever-better transportation in the 19th and 20th Centuries. (Blues music was also created by African-Americans during roughly the same time period, with Blues music being most associated with the cities of Memphis, Nashville and Birmingham in the South.) Latino/Latina Americans also did much of their own musical traditions, while further north the increasingly self-aware French-Canadian community, its informal alliance with Native Canadians in opposition to the English-Canadian elite a critically important piece, pushed for the use of French as a language for daily life as well as one for cultural significance, one which grew to have major importance in Quebec and Atlantic Canada by the end of the 19th Century.
Styles of dress also followed many of the traditions of the new groups of people seeking influence in the Amigos, both as something to contribute to the nation as a whole and also a sign of their own community. By the late 19th Century, many of these styles were gaining increasing notoriety among whites in the Amigos, particularly those who lived in areas with large amounts of visible minority influence, such as Cuba, the Southeastern states, the northern Great Plains, Western Canada and California. From the adaption of the wild patterns of color and pattern into the more sombre clothing of the time (the styles and colors were different depending on the influence, of course, but they all contributed to the new styles) to the growth of lacrosse as a sport across Canada and northern parts of the United States (over time much of the lacrosse interest filtered down to ice hockey, which even today is by far Canada's most popular sport) and the growth of many other elements of Native American culture amongst the parts of the Amigos' societies where Native Americans were most common. The 1860-1900 period was also marked by the regrowth of many of the tribes' economic power through the use of co-operatives, many of which by the turn of the century had grown into immense enterprises, with the tribes of Western Canada being major investors in the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Sioux being almost entirely responsible for the construction all the way to the Pacific Ocean of the Milwaukee Road railroad, which completed its Minneapolis-Seattle Pacific Extension in 1892.
[1] This is the main passenger terminal for San Francisco, is a joint project between the Southern Pacific, Santa Fe and Rio Grande and included twin tunnels under San Francisco Bay so trains can come into the city from the East Bay and is opened in 1913
[2] Canadian National Railways was a sign of railroad interests from the nations to come, as CNR was by the 1950s the largest operator of railroad lines in the Americas and was followed by Consolidated Rail Corporation in the United States and Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Mexico in the 1970s, and the Canadian National's rivalry with the Canadian Pacific was the archetype used by similar competing public-private railroads around the world.
The Amigos' final destruction of the Spanish Empire and the independence of the Philippines on May 5, 1884 was another of the many moments of history that was being rapidly written by three nations that were rapidly maturing as societies even as their economies and standards of living improved dramatically in the latter years of the 19th Century. The Amigos in 1885 were entering into what was very much a new world, and many new technological advancements were soon to come. From electricity to automobiles to modern foods and medications to the expanding major cities of the Amigos and the first skyscrapers, the advancement of technology was right in line with the progress of its people, a line of progress that in the latter years of the 19th Century began to show many changes of its own.
The years between 1870 and 1885 had seen a growth in the development of the first unions, and the beginnings of the end of many unhappy practices of the past, such as child labor, the first regulations of which in the Amigos were passed by the Canadian Parliament in 1886 and rapidly followed by their contemporaries in Washington and Mexico City. The child labor regulations were part of plans in Canada for a greater system of public education whose roots went back to Sir Georges-Etienne Cartier and the legendary Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat, two men who while they were political enemies (and enemies isn't too strong a word in this case - they fought bitterly on many occasions) and Mowat's career was in no small part helped by anti-French-Canadian sentiments, did have some agreements on policy, of which education was one of them. Indeed, Canada would be the first part of the British Empire to mandate public grade schooling for all, beginning the development of its publicly-funded schools up to eighth grade in 1887. Mowat's efforts did ultimately write most of the rules on the relationship between Ottawa and the provinces, though Mowat's attempts to push Ottawa into irrelevance was more or less a failure, despite the establishing of health care and education as provincial responsibilities. Canada's efforts with education were followed with interest in many parts of the United States and Mexico as well, particularly as more than a few American and Mexican state governors followed Mowat's example of pushing for additional rights for their jurisdictions at the expense of the federal government. By 1900, while the decentralization efforts had had mixed results depending on the location, publicly-funded education was almost universal across the Amigos, and educators joined the field in vast numbers to take advantage of the new systems, rapidly improving the quality of education at all levels across the Amigos. Health care also saw improvements driven by both private interests and governments in the later years of the 19th Century, aiming to make people live longer through a more scientific approach to many aspects of health care, allowing the beginnings of the health care systems that developed in such dramatic fashion in the 20th Century.
Adult education exploded in use during the time as well as thousands of high schools and hundreds of engineering college and technical schools, with the American Morrill Land-Grant Acts, first passed in 1864, being used to spur on the development of many of these schools, particularly in the West and South. It was a similar story in Canada, as the Advanced Education Act of 1868 established a similar way of setting up such colleges and universities in Canada, with a combination of the two being developeed by Mexico, its introduction in 1871 being one of the signature achievements of Benito Juarez's second stint as Mexico's President. Thousands of libraries sprang up, many larger companies (seeking to improve the quality of their middle management) began paying for education for many of its higher-ranking employees and job training was encouraged by many in forward-thinking businesses. Railroads developed the first true scientific methods of operations, complete with clear chains of command, statistical reporting, standard time zones and explicit career tracks not merely for the white-collar managers but also for blue-collar workers in both skilled and unskilled jobs. It didn't take long for these methods to move into many other industries, with large-scale ones like steel, steamships, telegraph and telephone networks and utilities being among the first ones to follow suit, as well as many co-operatives in agricultural fields, of which by the 1880s there were literally thousands in the United States, concentrated in the Midwest, Great Plains and South.
The vast money that was poured into the Amigos' railroads, steel industry, textile, food processor and agricultural machinery industries soon swelled out into many other fields, including the growth of new industries such as telegraphs (and later telephones), automobiles and petroleum. The oil industry began with Pennsylvania in the 1860s, but after the discovery of the Spindletop oil field in Texas in 1901 and the Leduc oil field in Alberta in 1904 petroleum moved from its early beginnings supplying primarily kerosene into the supply of gasoline and fuel oil, demand for the former growing incredibly rapidly with the growth of the automobile industry in the 20th Century and the latter starting off through the expansion of the use of fuel oil to heat homes and power railroad locomotives. The first cars assembled in North America was completed in 1893, and in the years to come the demand for them outstripped supply, cars becoming truly universal items primarily with the development of the automobile assembly line by Henry Ford in 1913. The growth of automobiles and desires to clean up many elements of America's major cities led to major beautification efforts that began in the years after the North American War but which accelerated to ever-greater heights with the Gilded Age, with the National Mall in Washington and the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City being used as examples of what could be done, designs of roadways, parkways and walkways being expanded across the Americas in the years to come, and the City Beautiful movement, which began in the late 1880s, pushed things further and faster still. The development of tarred and concrete roadways in major cities across the Amigos in the 1880s was seen a way of dramatically cleaning up the environments of these cities, and most of the largest cities began developing the first modern sewer systems. By 1890 most Amigos' major cities had large amounts of roadways paved with asphalt, bricks, concrete or cobblestones (the latter common in older areas but almost unheard-of in more recent projects and the rapid development of modern sanitation systems began to be seen as a major public health benefit, though perhaps not one for the local waterways the sewers dumped into, though the development of modern sewage treatment plants that followed the growth of the sewer systems went a long way towards fixing this problem.
While in a great many ways the fantastic growth of the American railroad network in the 1845-1900 time period brought with it many of the advances of the time, it had a dark side in many places, particularly with regards to many of the railroad barons - men like Collis P. Huntington, Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, Edward Henry Herriman, William J. Palmer, William Cornelius Van Horne, José Yves Limantour, Leland Stanford, Bautista Aguinaldo, Alexander Kohana and Cyrus K. Holliday were both beloved and reviled by many, all of the above having played portions in the creation of vast railroad empires but all of them also seen as having created businesses that took advantage of their customers and the people they served. The result of these, despite the much-greater observation by Washington that followed in the later years of the 19th Century, still led to more than a few revolts and attempts by states to try to push down freight rates, which caused bouts of debate between the states and provinces and central governments. Though the federal governments in all three nations zealously guarded their power with regards to inter-state and inter-provincial commerce (as well as trade between the nations), they were not blind to the obvious possibilities that railroads could fight each other with undesirable results, and thus Washington, Ottawa and Mexico City weren't unwilling to regulate many aspects of the railroads' behaviors, forcing the railroads (and their leaders) to adopt more of a public conscience. By 1890, this had indeed taken most of the worst faults off of the actions of the railroads, and indeed by the end of the century many of the robber barons had shifted much of their attention towards the idea that their firms could be drivers for societal good, and many acted with this in mind, from ever-improving freight and passenger services to the development of utilities and the deeding of huge quantities of land to authorities for parks and development. Railroad stations in major cities became ever-greater designs, with the stations completed in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries like Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal in New York, Washington Union Station, Victoria Station in Montreal, Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal, Chicago Union Station, Pacific Central Station in San Francisco[1] and Michigan Central Terminal in Detroit setting new standards not just for size and function but also for being some of the most beautiful buildings of the time.
While many of the railroad barons begrudgingly became good public citizens, for many others, such as famed Wall Street financier J.P. Morgan and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, this was never much of an issue, and the famous (or infamous depending on the perspective) founder of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller, would also become one of the biggest philanthropists of the 19th and 20th Centuries. In Canada and Mexico, where there was much more of a social focus on the public good towards the highest-ranking members of society, there was little need to shame companies or individuals of wealth towards making their massive wealth work for the greater good - indeed, the Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian Northern Railway both were massive investors in the communities they served in Canada, and it said a lot that the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, which was much more financially hard-headed, ended up being nationalized out of bankruptcy by the Canadian government in 1902, which after the Canadian Northern suffered a similar fate in 1915 led to the creation of Canadian National Railways in 1918.[2] Mexico's wealthy class were almost entirely men who had been poor at the end of the North American War, and they had all the reason in the world to think highly of their countrymen, and leaders like Juan Abasto Galves, Ricardo Molina, Joaquin Hurtado Nunez, Cristofer Pereira, Luis Pareja Fernandez and Alejandra Gutierrez were only too happy to support their countrymen and the maturing of their nation. It was a similar story among people of color in America, with the likes of Booker T. Washington, Mary Ellen Pleasant, James Madison Bell, Benjamin Singleton, Frederick Douglass, John Robert Clifford, Katherine Brown, Victoria Thornton and Anthony Lucas Peterson being among those who were associated with the pushes for African-Americans to be looked upon as equals in their own nation, helped along by men like the legendary United States Senators John Lewis and Hiram Rhodes Revels who were proud and effective supporters of equality for African Americans, their efforts not hurt by the fact that many of the survivors of the war at all echelons - all the way up to Presidents Lee, Tilden and Hayes, as well as virtually all North American War general officers - had stories of the willingness of black Americans to build their own worlds and fight for their country. Indeed, by the end of the 19th Century the "Black Belt" communities of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Louisiana and Texas was home to millions of black Americans who were every bit as well off as their white counterparts - indeed these areas, among the worst for racially-biased conflict in the War, would become among the most ethnically heterogenous parts of North America by the end of the 19th Century, a story shared with Georgia, Alabama, Florida and the Carolinas.
With this wealth and many movements to the towns and cities of America came needs for transportation, and while steam locomotives worked fine for large trains and for many forms of farm machinery (though the development of the internal combustion engine in the 20th Century ultimately made the steam traction engines of the past all but extinct by World War II) the development of electricity as a part of modern life in the late 19th Century led to the rapid development of electrified transportation in most North American cities in the 1890s, replacing horse-drawn streetcars on the streets of major cities across the Amigos. Thomas Edison's pioneering of the development of direct-current electric power transmission was revolutionary but it wasn't long before George Westinghouse's development of alternating-current power rapidly overtook the market in electricity generation, with the work of Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla laying much of the groundwork of modern electricity, which by 1900 was well-established in all of the cities of the Amigos and was rapidly spreading out to the rural areas. Electric-powered streetcars led to the first subways in the Amigos in the early 20th Century, making possible greater movement of people in these cities than anything before it.
Vast growth in both skilled and unskilled labor combined with the expansion across the nation to make for a vast need for more people, and while North America's natural rate of population increase was rapid, it was combined with a massive wave of immigration that landed in all three nations, with the United States getting the largest amount of it but huge numbers of people landing in Mexico and Canada as well, with the United States passing the 100 million mark in 1901 both due this and due to natural increase. As the better living conditions and health care saw infant mortality in the Amigos absolutely plummet between 1875 and 1930, the population growth actually accelerated in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, even as the economic and population center of the United States shifted both West and also somewhat to the South, a trend pushed by the rapid growth of Miami, Birmingham and Atlanta as well as the Texas cities. As open land was in wide supply, thsoe who landed in the major cities had the benefit of being able to use the possibility of movement to push up wage demands, and by the late 19th Century the "wage slavery" that had been common in earlier parts of the Gilded Age was disappearing, even as the Panic of 1893 slowed the economic growth - though that Panic would ultimately be little more than a bump in the road towards greater prosperity, a bump that was in large part alleviated through the first North American Trade and Tarriff Agreements, reached for the first time in 1896. The growing together of the nations was despite the Canadians and Mexicans both being plenty wary of the possibility of American companies and leaders swamping their own home-grown champions, a situation that Washington was well aware of and understood the concerns from the other two nations about.
By 1900, relations between the three nations had become so close that for many the borders were little more than a place where some laws started and ended, and while each nation was very much proud of their heritage and accomplishments and nationalism was a major force in many regards, public bigotry was steadily eroding, particularly as the African, Native, Asian and Latin American communities were in the midst of not only creating their own economic prosperity but also many elements of their own culture.
The ragtime music of the 1880s was the beginnings of the world of Jazz music, a genre that would be in the 20th Century massively influenced by African Americans, while the tresillo, brought into American music lexicons after the annexation of Cuba during the North American War, led to the growth of African drumming traditions, long minimized in the United States, being revived in a major way, particularly in the music scenes of New Orleans (the birthplace of Jazz in most minds) and Miami but which spread far and wide quite quickly with the growth of railroads allowing ever-better transportation in the 19th and 20th Centuries. (Blues music was also created by African-Americans during roughly the same time period, with Blues music being most associated with the cities of Memphis, Nashville and Birmingham in the South.) Latino/Latina Americans also did much of their own musical traditions, while further north the increasingly self-aware French-Canadian community, its informal alliance with Native Canadians in opposition to the English-Canadian elite a critically important piece, pushed for the use of French as a language for daily life as well as one for cultural significance, one which grew to have major importance in Quebec and Atlantic Canada by the end of the 19th Century.
Styles of dress also followed many of the traditions of the new groups of people seeking influence in the Amigos, both as something to contribute to the nation as a whole and also a sign of their own community. By the late 19th Century, many of these styles were gaining increasing notoriety among whites in the Amigos, particularly those who lived in areas with large amounts of visible minority influence, such as Cuba, the Southeastern states, the northern Great Plains, Western Canada and California. From the adaption of the wild patterns of color and pattern into the more sombre clothing of the time (the styles and colors were different depending on the influence, of course, but they all contributed to the new styles) to the growth of lacrosse as a sport across Canada and northern parts of the United States (over time much of the lacrosse interest filtered down to ice hockey, which even today is by far Canada's most popular sport) and the growth of many other elements of Native American culture amongst the parts of the Amigos' societies where Native Americans were most common. The 1860-1900 period was also marked by the regrowth of many of the tribes' economic power through the use of co-operatives, many of which by the turn of the century had grown into immense enterprises, with the tribes of Western Canada being major investors in the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Sioux being almost entirely responsible for the construction all the way to the Pacific Ocean of the Milwaukee Road railroad, which completed its Minneapolis-Seattle Pacific Extension in 1892.
[1] This is the main passenger terminal for San Francisco, is a joint project between the Southern Pacific, Santa Fe and Rio Grande and included twin tunnels under San Francisco Bay so trains can come into the city from the East Bay and is opened in 1913
[2] Canadian National Railways was a sign of railroad interests from the nations to come, as CNR was by the 1950s the largest operator of railroad lines in the Americas and was followed by Consolidated Rail Corporation in the United States and Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Mexico in the 1970s, and the Canadian National's rivalry with the Canadian Pacific was the archetype used by similar competing public-private railroads around the world.
As the railroad industry grew exponentially in the late 1800s, it made a lot of people wealthy, some of whom were in a position to abuse their newfound wealth. Rail entrepreneurs like Cornelius Vanderbilt and James J. Hill, and financiers with close ties to the rail industry like J.P. Morgan, were in a position to utterly dominate the societies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with almost total control of land transportation. Left unchecked, this could have produced an enormous discrepancy in wealth between the haves and the have-nots, which could have led to the sort of backlash that was beginning to occur in the less open European societies around the same time and that there led to the beginnings of socialism.
In the United States, though, for all the commitment Americans had to the free-enterprise system and growth through personal initiative, there was a sense, dating back to the Quincy Adams and Clay administrations and their investments in canals in the name of “internal improvements,” that transportation systems in general constituted a sort of public trust. The easements, land grants, and property sales made to the railroads, and the support given to canals, steamship lines, and (obviously) public roadways, could not simply be for the purpose of the owner alone, to use as he saw fit; the owner also had an obligation to support the public by providing transportation facilities at a fair price, which in turn allowed and facilitated the growth of all other enterprises that relied on the transportation systems. Approaching transportation as a public trust would also, in the end, benefit the transportation owners more: fewer speculative railroads would be built which would bankrupt their prospective owners; the fact that rates remained reasonable would stimulate the growth of other industries using the rail system, which in turn would result in greater prosperity for all, including the railroad; and public pressure would result in consolidation of facilities (such as union passenger stations) for the sake of public convenience, which, again, would stimulate greater use of such facilities and thus help grow the communities they served.
However strongly some of the richest of the rich may have favored the former notion, the sense that the railroads must operate as a public trust remained strongly in the background of their activities, such that it worked to restrain the worst of their excesses. A scheme, for example, by a group of financiers led by Jay Gould to gain control of the Erie Railroad in the late 1860s and to water its stock as a means of milking the railroad for all its worth, was quickly thwarted when minority stockholders took the financiers to court, arguing that their schemes, by potentially creating a situation where the Erie would be financially restrained from serving its customers, were violating the public trust. Likewise, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son William, upon succeeding his father as president of the New York Central railroad, thought better during an 1882 interview with a newspaper reporter of insisting that the NYC should be run for the benefit of its stockholders alone and declaring “The public be damned!”
Nonetheless, the need for a more formalized assertion of the public trust was perceived, which led to the creation during the Garfield Administration of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and subsequently to the Hepburn and Sherman antitrust acts, to regulate the railroads and put a curb on the more outlandish activities of their owners. This was coupled with a general pressure from the public on the railroads to pool their resources where possible to create greater public conveniences like more union stations.
The stasis that thus emerged between private enterprise and public trust was embraced more readily by some than by others: Great Northern Railroad president James J. Hill, for example, was soon advocating for the public trust, while J.P. Morgan would grumble against it to the end of his days. But the idea soon took root in other industries as well, spreading from the United States to its Canadian and Mexican friends as well, and began to evolve into the sense that private enterprise was really a group endeavor and that the many who worked to make companies successful should benefit from that success in the same sense as those who led and financed the efforts. The seed of what came to be known as “cooperative capitalism” was planted in these early days of railroad regulation.
(By the way, for those who haven’t been paying attention – or even for those who have – here’s the U.S. presidential succession up to 1908:
1824-1832 John Quincy Adams
1832-1840 Henry Clay
1840-1848 Daniel Webster
1848-1852 Millard Fillmore
1852-1856 Franklin Pierce
1856-1860 James Buchanan
1860-1868 Abraham Lincoln
1868-1876 Robert E. Lee
1876-1880 Samuel Tilden
1880-1884 Rutherford Hayes
1884-1892 James Garfield
1892-1900 Grover Cleveland
1900-1908 William McKinley)
In the United States, though, for all the commitment Americans had to the free-enterprise system and growth through personal initiative, there was a sense, dating back to the Quincy Adams and Clay administrations and their investments in canals in the name of “internal improvements,” that transportation systems in general constituted a sort of public trust. The easements, land grants, and property sales made to the railroads, and the support given to canals, steamship lines, and (obviously) public roadways, could not simply be for the purpose of the owner alone, to use as he saw fit; the owner also had an obligation to support the public by providing transportation facilities at a fair price, which in turn allowed and facilitated the growth of all other enterprises that relied on the transportation systems. Approaching transportation as a public trust would also, in the end, benefit the transportation owners more: fewer speculative railroads would be built which would bankrupt their prospective owners; the fact that rates remained reasonable would stimulate the growth of other industries using the rail system, which in turn would result in greater prosperity for all, including the railroad; and public pressure would result in consolidation of facilities (such as union passenger stations) for the sake of public convenience, which, again, would stimulate greater use of such facilities and thus help grow the communities they served.
However strongly some of the richest of the rich may have favored the former notion, the sense that the railroads must operate as a public trust remained strongly in the background of their activities, such that it worked to restrain the worst of their excesses. A scheme, for example, by a group of financiers led by Jay Gould to gain control of the Erie Railroad in the late 1860s and to water its stock as a means of milking the railroad for all its worth, was quickly thwarted when minority stockholders took the financiers to court, arguing that their schemes, by potentially creating a situation where the Erie would be financially restrained from serving its customers, were violating the public trust. Likewise, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son William, upon succeeding his father as president of the New York Central railroad, thought better during an 1882 interview with a newspaper reporter of insisting that the NYC should be run for the benefit of its stockholders alone and declaring “The public be damned!”
Nonetheless, the need for a more formalized assertion of the public trust was perceived, which led to the creation during the Garfield Administration of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and subsequently to the Hepburn and Sherman antitrust acts, to regulate the railroads and put a curb on the more outlandish activities of their owners. This was coupled with a general pressure from the public on the railroads to pool their resources where possible to create greater public conveniences like more union stations.
The stasis that thus emerged between private enterprise and public trust was embraced more readily by some than by others: Great Northern Railroad president James J. Hill, for example, was soon advocating for the public trust, while J.P. Morgan would grumble against it to the end of his days. But the idea soon took root in other industries as well, spreading from the United States to its Canadian and Mexican friends as well, and began to evolve into the sense that private enterprise was really a group endeavor and that the many who worked to make companies successful should benefit from that success in the same sense as those who led and financed the efforts. The seed of what came to be known as “cooperative capitalism” was planted in these early days of railroad regulation.
(By the way, for those who haven’t been paying attention – or even for those who have – here’s the U.S. presidential succession up to 1908:
1824-1832 John Quincy Adams
1832-1840 Henry Clay
1840-1848 Daniel Webster
1848-1852 Millard Fillmore
1852-1856 Franklin Pierce
1856-1860 James Buchanan
1860-1868 Abraham Lincoln
1868-1876 Robert E. Lee
1876-1880 Samuel Tilden
1880-1884 Rutherford Hayes
1884-1892 James Garfield
1892-1900 Grover Cleveland
1900-1908 William McKinley)
Boers, Bullets, Gold and Greatness
By the end of the 19th Century the dramatic growth of the Amigos had pushed them into the world's geopolitics, and while their ending the Spanish Empire and the close relationships between them and the British (and a growing one between the Amigos and the French, which would continue to advance through the 19th Century and well into the 20th) had been noticed by the world's other powers (particularly the surging Germany) the nations still saw themselves as the heavyweights and supporters of the nations on their side of the Atlantic Ocean rather than intervenors in the machinations of Europe of the late Belle Époque, as many Americans, French Canadians and Mexicans had little love for the madness of the European powers, even as Canada's very-loyal English Canadian majority continued to loudly support the actions of London, particularly in its smaller colonial conflicts. The growth of the United States Navy, Armada de Mexico and the Royal Canadian Navy, characterized both by the increasing numbers of warships but also ones of ever-greater quality made for more power, and the regular trips by the end of the 19th Century to Europe, Australia and Japan by vessels of the Amigos showed that there was a possibility for them to act as real players in global affairs, which raised some expectations of it.
Historians often debate whether the successful support of the Filipinos' fight for their independence in 1883 or 1884 or whether America's loud statements about the Boer War in 1901 and 1902 is where their involvement in global affairs began, though the response of Washington to the War, which involved Britain's open invasion of the Orange Free State and South African Republic over the vast diamond and gold mines of the region, over the loud objections of both the Afrikaner population of the region and the black African tribes they had an uneasy existence with. While sources vary as to who was responsible for the conflict's beginnings - both sides to this day blame the other - the flashpoint over British-descent miners in the Transvaal regions of South Africa led to the two nascent republics laying siege to British colonial centers nearer to their borders, which in turn led to the British deploying a 180,000-strong army to South Africa to push the Boers back. Fully aware of their inability to fight back against such a large force, the Afrikaners fought back using guerilla tactics which proved extremely difficult for the British to handle due to large support for the Boers among the civilian population of the regions. This led to the British engaging in scorched Earth tactics and one of the first uses of large-scale concentration camps, places where tens of thousands died of disease, many of them women and children.
The Boer War caused a major political row in Canada, as Canada's loyal English-descent citizens favored the Canadian Army deploying directly to South Africa to the British, while French Canadians and Native Canadians overwhelmingly saw it as Britain's problem, leading to the near-fall of the government of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who favored a compromise of allowing the formation of Canadian volunteer units to go to South Africa. While these volunteer units fought with distinction in the battles of Paardeberg, Doornkop and Leilefontein, the deployment of them caused multiple riots in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, as French and Native Canadians alike felt the British Imperialism was a threat to the survival of their culture. These riots were suppressed, but the public objections to the war from Mexico City and displeased view of it from Washington led to additional headaches for Ottawa and, eventually, the withdrawal of their troops in the spring of 1902 - and by then, it was London very much on the defensive in world opinion.
The concentration camps created by the British were to become a major international incident, thanks above all else to the work of British welfare campaigner and activist Emily Hobhouse, whose photographs and reporting of the camps and their conditions made her globally famous and caused countless uproars across the world, even in Britain, but it was seen most in the Amigos. Only too aware of what the Texans and Spanish had tried to do during the North American War a generation earlier, the scenes portrayed by Hobhouse struck a massive nerve in America, to the point that both Mexico City and Washington were soon contending with loud waves of anti-British sentiment and even Ottawa was soon up to its neck in it, more than anything courtesy of countless I-told-you-so moments from French and Native Canadians, who used the work of Hobhouse and others as a tool to beat the Empire loyalists among Canada's government. Washington bluntly told the British that it would not support the actions of the British and considered their actions unfriendly, leading to early comments by some in London that the Americans needed to be taught a lesson of their own - but the Royal Navy, only too aware of the strength of the United States Navy and seeing the increasingly-powerful German High Seas Fleet as much more dangerous, cautioned against this and by 1902 felt in a strong enough position to push for peace terms with the Boers in discussions with its political masters in London. The political problems in Ottawa leading to the withdrawal of the Canadian units caused an uproar from Canada's Conservative party, but Laurier and the Liberals held their ground, fearing additional rioting and Washington's deep disdain. While the loyalists were incensed by this, Laurier and many of the Liberals saw maintaining better relations with Washington and Mexico City as being more important than fighting London's colonial wars, a viewpoint that London privately entirely understood.
Washington and Mexico City's disdain for the Boer War was perhaps the point of no return for the British stopping thinking themselves as invincible - while they were able and willing to push back against the Germans, the British Prime Ministers of the time, first Lord Salisbury and then Arthur Balfour, both felt that London needed to stay on good terms with Washington, fearing Germany and the Europeans more than their English-speaking brethren on the other side of the Atlantic and feeling that if Washington and London ever came to blows the Americans' giant economic power and vast natural resources would win the day in the end. While Britain's vast colonial empire meant they could - and did in South Africa - draw on huge reserves of manpower and resources, Canada's recalcitrance, as understandable as it was, was something that worried the British.
For Washington, however, the Boer War's aftermath was a chance to allow the British the chance to make good on their mistakes, and Washington strongly approved of the Treaty of Vereeniging which ended the conflict, as well as loudly pushing for investment in South Africa as a counterweight towards the past troubles - and in fairness, the unimaginable mineral wealth of the Witwatersrand was envied by all of the Amigos. Washington also saw Canada as being the example that Britain should strive for when looking at colonial development - not surprising considering two wars where the two had been allies - and felt that Britain could, and should, look at the Afrikaners as partners in their newest major colony, and Washington also loudly counseled against mistreatment of black Africans, which had been done by both sides during the war, a support that was not forgotten by black South Africans and would end up being critical in South Africa many years in the future. Mexico City was pretty much tied at the hip with the Americans in this regard, and was happy to support financially the interests of rebuilding in South Africa. The rift between the British and Afrikaners would last for many years to come, even as many of the best Boer soldiers would go on to be supporters of the British administrations and South Africa's place in the British Empire.
Within three years of the end of the conflict, though, came the discovery of the gold mines of Nevada in 1905. The Klondike Gold Rush of the very end of the 19th Century had been an important gold strike, but the analysis of the vast arsenic-rich pyrite deposits of north-central Nevada led to the discovery of small quantities of gold in the pyrite, which while more difficult to find - most of these contained just a quarter-ounce to half-ounce of gold per ton of ore - the size of the deposits of Nevada meant that it was entirely plausible that another Witwatersrand was located in northern Nevada. Commercial production in the area began in 1910 and with it came new people headed to the arid deserts of the region, the huge mineral deposits shaking the gold market in the world for the third time in thirty years. This massive growth in the United States' gold supply allowed Washington to pay back loans for gold that had been drawn on during the Panic of 1893, but it also led to the first "Future Funds". These funds, first seen in Nevada in 1912 and Ontario in 1914, were basically governments on state and national levels in the Amigos creating large-scale investments funds, as a way of having a cushion for the day when such natural resources had been depleted. These funds would grow popular in the United States and Mexico and basically universal in Canada, and while their greatest effects would not be felt for decades to come, the die had been cast. Indeed, the discovery of the Nevada deposits also ended the debates over bimetallism that had dominated the topic of monetary policy in the United States for three decades and more or less ended support for bimetallism, even as the growth of the use of silver in electrical components caused something of a price rebound for the mineral over time.
Indeed, the discovery of natural resources in the Amigos continued and if anything accelerated in the early 20th Century. From oil in Texas and Alberta, gold and silver in Nevada and Zacatecas, copper in Sonora, Utah, Arizona and Ontario, iron ore in Labrador and Minnesota, manganese in Hidalgo, nickel in Newfoundland, diamonds in northern Quebec and bauxite in Arkansas, all contributing to a massive industry that it seemed would only grow with time, all of this adding to the resources available to the great industrial conglomerates of the Amigos. And use it, they did - aluminum refining on a large scale began in Canada in 1905 and in the United States in 1907, and within a decade the Aluminum Company of Canada had begun mining for bauxite in Jamaica, which proved to be as highly-lucrative enterprise. Industrial jobs grew with major cities, and the technical advancements continued, with perhaps the greatest single one being the Wright Brothers' first powered flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903, and the number of automobiles available to the Amigos grew dramatically in the early years of the 20th Century. Even as aviation's history began - and thanks to the Wright Brothers' eagerness to show off their success, its use grew rather faster before the First World War in the Amigos than anywhere else - and that war dramatically accelerated the growth of aviation in a military sense, both in terms of the use of fighter aircraft and bomber aircraft, but also the use of Zeppelins for strategic bombing operations and patrols.
While Grover Cleveland and William McKinley had beaten back the challenge presented by William Jennings Bryan and the populists, but the pro-business Cleveland and McKinley administrations had been damaged by the push for greater public accountability for many large companies and private interests, a reality that was faced head-on by McKinley's Vice-President, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt with his election victory in 1908. Roosevelt, who had been the hand behind the shift leftward during McKinley's second term, with the idea of "Cooperative Capitalism", which had dated to the first attempts at regulating railroads twenty years before, becoming something that expanded dramatically during Roosevelt's time in office. Constitutional amendments to the United States and political changes in Canada and Mexico led to all of them enacting income taxes for the first time in late 1900s or early 1910s, as well as many elements of classic Progressive Era legislation - trust-busting, the creation of food and drug regulatory agencies, the beginnings of the women's suffrage movement, ensuring equal access to resources, ever-better systems of education, advancement of racial equality and, after 1914, the world's first unemployment and old-age insurance systems in the United States, as well as comprehensive and effective efforts to reduce corruption in the governments of all three nations. Roosevelt found allies in the form of Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier (until Laurier's defeat in 1911 elections, though his successor, Robert Borden, kept most of the Laurier's policies, most of which had proven very effective) and Mexican President Francisco Madero (who held the office from 1907 to 1913) and their respective governments, and indeed the Roosevelt-Laurier-Madero axis is widely considered to be one of the greatest trios of leaders in the history of the Amigos, right up with the Lincoln-Juarez-MacDonald trio of the North American War era. The growth of the Progressive Era had its own effects in Mexico and Canada as it did in the United States, but many of the over-arching needs and demands were common across the nations, as were many of the solutions.
Far from being against these, most of the major captains of industry were more than a little farsighted enough to see the possibilities, and the growth of the middle class of all three nations made them by the early 20th Century the single biggest drivers of economic growth, a fact recognized by all involved. Indeed, many of the greatest of the industry titans would benefit from the trust-busting - John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler at Standard Oil more than anyone else, they emerged from Standard's 1911 breakup as the richest men in human history - and many of them took to what they came to see as their new responsibilities with a will. From Rockefeller's lavish support of historically-black education institutions and financing of the turning of the University of Chicago into one of America's best universities to James J, Hill's lavish financial support for the Columbia Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915 to Henry Flagler's building of the Southern Oceanic Railway and the creation of the University of South Florida and its rise into one of the best universities in the country to Andrew Carnegie's "Gospels of Wealth" writings, establishment of several colleges and universities (including the Tuskegee Institute and Carnegie Mellon University) and numerous gifts towards education and culture (including perhaps most famously, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Peace Palace in The Hague in the Netherlands and Hall of the Creators in Toronto), the wealthiest men of the time gave vast sums of their wealth away to their favored interests, actions that in many cases (particularly Rockefeller and Carnegie) changed much of the public perception of them. Their rivals in Canada and Mexico matched them as much as they could, and in many cases came to create great respect for each other in the process. Carnegie changed railroad history in Canada when he strongly recommended to Borden the choice of Pennsylvania Railroad engineer Henry Thornton to run the new Canadian National Railways, and it worked to incredible fashion when Thornton built CNR into one of the world's most successful railroads between then and his death in 1948, and Rockefeller was a close confidant of Standard Petroleum of Mexico founder and oil magnate Luis Pareja Fernandez and was able to arrange financing for the expansion of oil exploration in Mexico, which would ultimately bear fruit in the Quesqui oil field, discovered in Tabasco state in May 1916.
By the end of the 19th Century the dramatic growth of the Amigos had pushed them into the world's geopolitics, and while their ending the Spanish Empire and the close relationships between them and the British (and a growing one between the Amigos and the French, which would continue to advance through the 19th Century and well into the 20th) had been noticed by the world's other powers (particularly the surging Germany) the nations still saw themselves as the heavyweights and supporters of the nations on their side of the Atlantic Ocean rather than intervenors in the machinations of Europe of the late Belle Époque, as many Americans, French Canadians and Mexicans had little love for the madness of the European powers, even as Canada's very-loyal English Canadian majority continued to loudly support the actions of London, particularly in its smaller colonial conflicts. The growth of the United States Navy, Armada de Mexico and the Royal Canadian Navy, characterized both by the increasing numbers of warships but also ones of ever-greater quality made for more power, and the regular trips by the end of the 19th Century to Europe, Australia and Japan by vessels of the Amigos showed that there was a possibility for them to act as real players in global affairs, which raised some expectations of it.
Historians often debate whether the successful support of the Filipinos' fight for their independence in 1883 or 1884 or whether America's loud statements about the Boer War in 1901 and 1902 is where their involvement in global affairs began, though the response of Washington to the War, which involved Britain's open invasion of the Orange Free State and South African Republic over the vast diamond and gold mines of the region, over the loud objections of both the Afrikaner population of the region and the black African tribes they had an uneasy existence with. While sources vary as to who was responsible for the conflict's beginnings - both sides to this day blame the other - the flashpoint over British-descent miners in the Transvaal regions of South Africa led to the two nascent republics laying siege to British colonial centers nearer to their borders, which in turn led to the British deploying a 180,000-strong army to South Africa to push the Boers back. Fully aware of their inability to fight back against such a large force, the Afrikaners fought back using guerilla tactics which proved extremely difficult for the British to handle due to large support for the Boers among the civilian population of the regions. This led to the British engaging in scorched Earth tactics and one of the first uses of large-scale concentration camps, places where tens of thousands died of disease, many of them women and children.
The Boer War caused a major political row in Canada, as Canada's loyal English-descent citizens favored the Canadian Army deploying directly to South Africa to the British, while French Canadians and Native Canadians overwhelmingly saw it as Britain's problem, leading to the near-fall of the government of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who favored a compromise of allowing the formation of Canadian volunteer units to go to South Africa. While these volunteer units fought with distinction in the battles of Paardeberg, Doornkop and Leilefontein, the deployment of them caused multiple riots in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, as French and Native Canadians alike felt the British Imperialism was a threat to the survival of their culture. These riots were suppressed, but the public objections to the war from Mexico City and displeased view of it from Washington led to additional headaches for Ottawa and, eventually, the withdrawal of their troops in the spring of 1902 - and by then, it was London very much on the defensive in world opinion.
The concentration camps created by the British were to become a major international incident, thanks above all else to the work of British welfare campaigner and activist Emily Hobhouse, whose photographs and reporting of the camps and their conditions made her globally famous and caused countless uproars across the world, even in Britain, but it was seen most in the Amigos. Only too aware of what the Texans and Spanish had tried to do during the North American War a generation earlier, the scenes portrayed by Hobhouse struck a massive nerve in America, to the point that both Mexico City and Washington were soon contending with loud waves of anti-British sentiment and even Ottawa was soon up to its neck in it, more than anything courtesy of countless I-told-you-so moments from French and Native Canadians, who used the work of Hobhouse and others as a tool to beat the Empire loyalists among Canada's government. Washington bluntly told the British that it would not support the actions of the British and considered their actions unfriendly, leading to early comments by some in London that the Americans needed to be taught a lesson of their own - but the Royal Navy, only too aware of the strength of the United States Navy and seeing the increasingly-powerful German High Seas Fleet as much more dangerous, cautioned against this and by 1902 felt in a strong enough position to push for peace terms with the Boers in discussions with its political masters in London. The political problems in Ottawa leading to the withdrawal of the Canadian units caused an uproar from Canada's Conservative party, but Laurier and the Liberals held their ground, fearing additional rioting and Washington's deep disdain. While the loyalists were incensed by this, Laurier and many of the Liberals saw maintaining better relations with Washington and Mexico City as being more important than fighting London's colonial wars, a viewpoint that London privately entirely understood.
Washington and Mexico City's disdain for the Boer War was perhaps the point of no return for the British stopping thinking themselves as invincible - while they were able and willing to push back against the Germans, the British Prime Ministers of the time, first Lord Salisbury and then Arthur Balfour, both felt that London needed to stay on good terms with Washington, fearing Germany and the Europeans more than their English-speaking brethren on the other side of the Atlantic and feeling that if Washington and London ever came to blows the Americans' giant economic power and vast natural resources would win the day in the end. While Britain's vast colonial empire meant they could - and did in South Africa - draw on huge reserves of manpower and resources, Canada's recalcitrance, as understandable as it was, was something that worried the British.
For Washington, however, the Boer War's aftermath was a chance to allow the British the chance to make good on their mistakes, and Washington strongly approved of the Treaty of Vereeniging which ended the conflict, as well as loudly pushing for investment in South Africa as a counterweight towards the past troubles - and in fairness, the unimaginable mineral wealth of the Witwatersrand was envied by all of the Amigos. Washington also saw Canada as being the example that Britain should strive for when looking at colonial development - not surprising considering two wars where the two had been allies - and felt that Britain could, and should, look at the Afrikaners as partners in their newest major colony, and Washington also loudly counseled against mistreatment of black Africans, which had been done by both sides during the war, a support that was not forgotten by black South Africans and would end up being critical in South Africa many years in the future. Mexico City was pretty much tied at the hip with the Americans in this regard, and was happy to support financially the interests of rebuilding in South Africa. The rift between the British and Afrikaners would last for many years to come, even as many of the best Boer soldiers would go on to be supporters of the British administrations and South Africa's place in the British Empire.
Within three years of the end of the conflict, though, came the discovery of the gold mines of Nevada in 1905. The Klondike Gold Rush of the very end of the 19th Century had been an important gold strike, but the analysis of the vast arsenic-rich pyrite deposits of north-central Nevada led to the discovery of small quantities of gold in the pyrite, which while more difficult to find - most of these contained just a quarter-ounce to half-ounce of gold per ton of ore - the size of the deposits of Nevada meant that it was entirely plausible that another Witwatersrand was located in northern Nevada. Commercial production in the area began in 1910 and with it came new people headed to the arid deserts of the region, the huge mineral deposits shaking the gold market in the world for the third time in thirty years. This massive growth in the United States' gold supply allowed Washington to pay back loans for gold that had been drawn on during the Panic of 1893, but it also led to the first "Future Funds". These funds, first seen in Nevada in 1912 and Ontario in 1914, were basically governments on state and national levels in the Amigos creating large-scale investments funds, as a way of having a cushion for the day when such natural resources had been depleted. These funds would grow popular in the United States and Mexico and basically universal in Canada, and while their greatest effects would not be felt for decades to come, the die had been cast. Indeed, the discovery of the Nevada deposits also ended the debates over bimetallism that had dominated the topic of monetary policy in the United States for three decades and more or less ended support for bimetallism, even as the growth of the use of silver in electrical components caused something of a price rebound for the mineral over time.
Indeed, the discovery of natural resources in the Amigos continued and if anything accelerated in the early 20th Century. From oil in Texas and Alberta, gold and silver in Nevada and Zacatecas, copper in Sonora, Utah, Arizona and Ontario, iron ore in Labrador and Minnesota, manganese in Hidalgo, nickel in Newfoundland, diamonds in northern Quebec and bauxite in Arkansas, all contributing to a massive industry that it seemed would only grow with time, all of this adding to the resources available to the great industrial conglomerates of the Amigos. And use it, they did - aluminum refining on a large scale began in Canada in 1905 and in the United States in 1907, and within a decade the Aluminum Company of Canada had begun mining for bauxite in Jamaica, which proved to be as highly-lucrative enterprise. Industrial jobs grew with major cities, and the technical advancements continued, with perhaps the greatest single one being the Wright Brothers' first powered flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903, and the number of automobiles available to the Amigos grew dramatically in the early years of the 20th Century. Even as aviation's history began - and thanks to the Wright Brothers' eagerness to show off their success, its use grew rather faster before the First World War in the Amigos than anywhere else - and that war dramatically accelerated the growth of aviation in a military sense, both in terms of the use of fighter aircraft and bomber aircraft, but also the use of Zeppelins for strategic bombing operations and patrols.
While Grover Cleveland and William McKinley had beaten back the challenge presented by William Jennings Bryan and the populists, but the pro-business Cleveland and McKinley administrations had been damaged by the push for greater public accountability for many large companies and private interests, a reality that was faced head-on by McKinley's Vice-President, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt with his election victory in 1908. Roosevelt, who had been the hand behind the shift leftward during McKinley's second term, with the idea of "Cooperative Capitalism", which had dated to the first attempts at regulating railroads twenty years before, becoming something that expanded dramatically during Roosevelt's time in office. Constitutional amendments to the United States and political changes in Canada and Mexico led to all of them enacting income taxes for the first time in late 1900s or early 1910s, as well as many elements of classic Progressive Era legislation - trust-busting, the creation of food and drug regulatory agencies, the beginnings of the women's suffrage movement, ensuring equal access to resources, ever-better systems of education, advancement of racial equality and, after 1914, the world's first unemployment and old-age insurance systems in the United States, as well as comprehensive and effective efforts to reduce corruption in the governments of all three nations. Roosevelt found allies in the form of Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier (until Laurier's defeat in 1911 elections, though his successor, Robert Borden, kept most of the Laurier's policies, most of which had proven very effective) and Mexican President Francisco Madero (who held the office from 1907 to 1913) and their respective governments, and indeed the Roosevelt-Laurier-Madero axis is widely considered to be one of the greatest trios of leaders in the history of the Amigos, right up with the Lincoln-Juarez-MacDonald trio of the North American War era. The growth of the Progressive Era had its own effects in Mexico and Canada as it did in the United States, but many of the over-arching needs and demands were common across the nations, as were many of the solutions.
Far from being against these, most of the major captains of industry were more than a little farsighted enough to see the possibilities, and the growth of the middle class of all three nations made them by the early 20th Century the single biggest drivers of economic growth, a fact recognized by all involved. Indeed, many of the greatest of the industry titans would benefit from the trust-busting - John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler at Standard Oil more than anyone else, they emerged from Standard's 1911 breakup as the richest men in human history - and many of them took to what they came to see as their new responsibilities with a will. From Rockefeller's lavish support of historically-black education institutions and financing of the turning of the University of Chicago into one of America's best universities to James J, Hill's lavish financial support for the Columbia Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915 to Henry Flagler's building of the Southern Oceanic Railway and the creation of the University of South Florida and its rise into one of the best universities in the country to Andrew Carnegie's "Gospels of Wealth" writings, establishment of several colleges and universities (including the Tuskegee Institute and Carnegie Mellon University) and numerous gifts towards education and culture (including perhaps most famously, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Peace Palace in The Hague in the Netherlands and Hall of the Creators in Toronto), the wealthiest men of the time gave vast sums of their wealth away to their favored interests, actions that in many cases (particularly Rockefeller and Carnegie) changed much of the public perception of them. Their rivals in Canada and Mexico matched them as much as they could, and in many cases came to create great respect for each other in the process. Carnegie changed railroad history in Canada when he strongly recommended to Borden the choice of Pennsylvania Railroad engineer Henry Thornton to run the new Canadian National Railways, and it worked to incredible fashion when Thornton built CNR into one of the world's most successful railroads between then and his death in 1948, and Rockefeller was a close confidant of Standard Petroleum of Mexico founder and oil magnate Luis Pareja Fernandez and was able to arrange financing for the expansion of oil exploration in Mexico, which would ultimately bear fruit in the Quesqui oil field, discovered in Tabasco state in May 1916.
Voyage of the Great White Fleet
Even as the war clouds began emerging in Europe in the early years of the 1910s, the Amigos roared into it on a wave of prosperity, driven along by its huge natural resources being turned into vast industries, which in turn provided employment and opportunities to millions. The prosperity of the Amigos had long swollen across the Western Hemisphere, as Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela saw vast growth of their own. Argentina spent much of the early years of the 20th Century turning some of the world's most productive farmland into a food-exporting effort, while the trajectories of Brazil and Chile were in many ways clones of the Amigos, and in many cases even connected directly to it through the use of the same investors, with investors throughout the Spanish-speaking Latin world all heading to Mexico City when they needed funds for their operations. All involved were also absolutely intent on stopping wars of colonialism from coming their way, and by 1910 there was lots of involvement of the nations of South America with the Amigos, with some high-profile moments, such as the tour of East Coast American ports by Brazilian battleships Sao Paulo and Minas Geraes in June to September 1912. However, the single greatest naval event was a masterstroke by Presidents Roosevelt and Madero and Prime Minister Laurier, that being the tour of the "Great White Fleet" around the world from late 1909 to early 1911.
The Great White Fleet was a creation of the trio of great leaders and while the original idea had been Roosevelt's, Madero and Laurier were keen on showing off what their own forces could do as well, and so the fleet that gathered in Norfolk, Virginia, in the fall of 1909 was of three nations and was impressive to say the least. Led by the United States' classes of Dreadnought battleships - the Wyoming, Florida, Delaware and South Carolina classes - as well as its Pittsburgh and Birmingham class armored cruisers, joined by Mexico's first three dreadnoughts, the Cuauhtémoc-class battleships, and two armored cruisers of the Mexican Navy, while four Canadian Terra Nova class armored cruisers and its new Town-class light cruiser Georges-Etienne Cartier also took part in the circumnavigation. The vessels had their hulls painted white in all cases, and elaborate decorating was done in all cases - the Mexicans in particular made great efforts to make their own vessels look worthy of such a display - and the ships and their crews went to considerable efforts to be respectful at all of their stops and at their visits, in many cases of bringing gifts with them for presentation to their hosts. They went to great effort to sail into ports in meticulously-practiced formations, and where they went the ships made a public relations splash. The Canadians made a point of developing their own new naval jack and ensign for the trip, recognizing the Union Jack's presence was likely to cause issues in place (despite this, the ships flew the flags with the Union Jack on visits to British-controlled territories and former colonies) but flew their own Red Ensign from their vessels.
The vessels began with a sailing around Latin America - the Panama Canal wouldn't open until spring 1911 - stopping in Havana, Kingston, Veracruz and Port of Spain on their way out of Caribbean. The fleet made high-profile visits to Rio de Janiero, Buenos Aires, Punta Arenas, Callao and Ciudad Obregon before arriving in San Diego, California, where the fleet docked into the new naval base there, arriving there on April 8, 1910. A short tour by the Mexicans and Canadians in May 1910 to the ports of the Salish Sea - Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham, Victoria and Vancouver - and to Prince Rupert, British Columbia before the fleet headed back to San Francisco to regroup for crossing the Pacific.
The Pacific crossing made for Pearl Harbor in Hawaii first, then on to Auckland, New Zealand, before visits to the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and then north first to Manila Bay in the Philippines - where the fleet was greeted by an estimated 75,000 Manila residents - and then to Kure and Yokohama in Japan and Vladivostok in Russia before backtracking to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore before going back to the Amigos' long-established base at Manila Bay. After a stay in the Philippines to refuel and refit, the fleet once again set sail, first for Colombo and then Bombay. After Bombay part of the fleet sailed south across the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar, Durban and Cape Town before heading for home via the Atlantic Ocean, while the rest of the fleet headed through the Suez Canal and to Athens and Constantinople, and then to Sicily and Civitavecchia in Italy and finally to Gibraltar before sailing back across the Atlantic, the fleet making one final stop in Halifax before making for home, gathering for a massive ceremonial arrival in New York on March 7, 1911.
The tour was one of the greatest events of the years before the Great War. The ships expanded relations with nations around the world, massively-improved the once-strained relations between Japan and the United States, directly resulted in the creation of the Royal Australian Navy and Royal New Zealand Navy in 1911 and captured the eyes of peoples across the world, showing off a truly grand display of the naval forces of the Amigos. There was many lessons learned by the navies themselves, which had effects for all three navies, not the least of which was a need for greater numbers of coaling stations and the need for the Amigos to have a much greater merchant marine and fleet of supply vessels. But perhaps the greatest effect of the circumnavigation of the world was the respect given to the fleet by foreign powers, a recognition that even more than in the defeat of the Spanish in 1883, the Amigos were truly among the world's naval powers. Canada, having sent its powerful cruisers along with the fleet, felt that it was time to move into the ranks of the world's capital ships, resulting in the building of their three Queen Elizabeth-class battleships in 1912-1915 and then their battlecruisers during World War II. Mexico's dreadnoughts were shown the same immense respect, and the fact that the Mexicans led the fleet into the port visits in Latin America (a sign of respect by the Americans) was seen by Mexicans as a sign of just how far their relationship with the United States of America had come in the previous half-century. The overall result was overwhelmingly positive, and it would lend itself well to what happened just a few years later....
Even as the war clouds began emerging in Europe in the early years of the 1910s, the Amigos roared into it on a wave of prosperity, driven along by its huge natural resources being turned into vast industries, which in turn provided employment and opportunities to millions. The prosperity of the Amigos had long swollen across the Western Hemisphere, as Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela saw vast growth of their own. Argentina spent much of the early years of the 20th Century turning some of the world's most productive farmland into a food-exporting effort, while the trajectories of Brazil and Chile were in many ways clones of the Amigos, and in many cases even connected directly to it through the use of the same investors, with investors throughout the Spanish-speaking Latin world all heading to Mexico City when they needed funds for their operations. All involved were also absolutely intent on stopping wars of colonialism from coming their way, and by 1910 there was lots of involvement of the nations of South America with the Amigos, with some high-profile moments, such as the tour of East Coast American ports by Brazilian battleships Sao Paulo and Minas Geraes in June to September 1912. However, the single greatest naval event was a masterstroke by Presidents Roosevelt and Madero and Prime Minister Laurier, that being the tour of the "Great White Fleet" around the world from late 1909 to early 1911.
The Great White Fleet was a creation of the trio of great leaders and while the original idea had been Roosevelt's, Madero and Laurier were keen on showing off what their own forces could do as well, and so the fleet that gathered in Norfolk, Virginia, in the fall of 1909 was of three nations and was impressive to say the least. Led by the United States' classes of Dreadnought battleships - the Wyoming, Florida, Delaware and South Carolina classes - as well as its Pittsburgh and Birmingham class armored cruisers, joined by Mexico's first three dreadnoughts, the Cuauhtémoc-class battleships, and two armored cruisers of the Mexican Navy, while four Canadian Terra Nova class armored cruisers and its new Town-class light cruiser Georges-Etienne Cartier also took part in the circumnavigation. The vessels had their hulls painted white in all cases, and elaborate decorating was done in all cases - the Mexicans in particular made great efforts to make their own vessels look worthy of such a display - and the ships and their crews went to considerable efforts to be respectful at all of their stops and at their visits, in many cases of bringing gifts with them for presentation to their hosts. They went to great effort to sail into ports in meticulously-practiced formations, and where they went the ships made a public relations splash. The Canadians made a point of developing their own new naval jack and ensign for the trip, recognizing the Union Jack's presence was likely to cause issues in place (despite this, the ships flew the flags with the Union Jack on visits to British-controlled territories and former colonies) but flew their own Red Ensign from their vessels.
The vessels began with a sailing around Latin America - the Panama Canal wouldn't open until spring 1911 - stopping in Havana, Kingston, Veracruz and Port of Spain on their way out of Caribbean. The fleet made high-profile visits to Rio de Janiero, Buenos Aires, Punta Arenas, Callao and Ciudad Obregon before arriving in San Diego, California, where the fleet docked into the new naval base there, arriving there on April 8, 1910. A short tour by the Mexicans and Canadians in May 1910 to the ports of the Salish Sea - Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham, Victoria and Vancouver - and to Prince Rupert, British Columbia before the fleet headed back to San Francisco to regroup for crossing the Pacific.
The Pacific crossing made for Pearl Harbor in Hawaii first, then on to Auckland, New Zealand, before visits to the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and then north first to Manila Bay in the Philippines - where the fleet was greeted by an estimated 75,000 Manila residents - and then to Kure and Yokohama in Japan and Vladivostok in Russia before backtracking to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore before going back to the Amigos' long-established base at Manila Bay. After a stay in the Philippines to refuel and refit, the fleet once again set sail, first for Colombo and then Bombay. After Bombay part of the fleet sailed south across the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar, Durban and Cape Town before heading for home via the Atlantic Ocean, while the rest of the fleet headed through the Suez Canal and to Athens and Constantinople, and then to Sicily and Civitavecchia in Italy and finally to Gibraltar before sailing back across the Atlantic, the fleet making one final stop in Halifax before making for home, gathering for a massive ceremonial arrival in New York on March 7, 1911.
The tour was one of the greatest events of the years before the Great War. The ships expanded relations with nations around the world, massively-improved the once-strained relations between Japan and the United States, directly resulted in the creation of the Royal Australian Navy and Royal New Zealand Navy in 1911 and captured the eyes of peoples across the world, showing off a truly grand display of the naval forces of the Amigos. There was many lessons learned by the navies themselves, which had effects for all three navies, not the least of which was a need for greater numbers of coaling stations and the need for the Amigos to have a much greater merchant marine and fleet of supply vessels. But perhaps the greatest effect of the circumnavigation of the world was the respect given to the fleet by foreign powers, a recognition that even more than in the defeat of the Spanish in 1883, the Amigos were truly among the world's naval powers. Canada, having sent its powerful cruisers along with the fleet, felt that it was time to move into the ranks of the world's capital ships, resulting in the building of their three Queen Elizabeth-class battleships in 1912-1915 and then their battlecruisers during World War II. Mexico's dreadnoughts were shown the same immense respect, and the fact that the Mexicans led the fleet into the port visits in Latin America (a sign of respect by the Americans) was seen by Mexicans as a sign of just how far their relationship with the United States of America had come in the previous half-century. The overall result was overwhelmingly positive, and it would lend itself well to what happened just a few years later....
The Life and Times of John Muir: Part One 1838-1900
John Muir, like many great Americans proceeding him, arrived in this country by ship. The son of Scottish immigrants and eldest son, John spent his childhood learning the New Testament and tending the land on the family's farm in Portage, Wisconsin. Reaching adulthood in 1856, John juggled his militia training, family farm duties, and classes at the University of Wisconsin. Muir developed a passion for botany and geology and studied ancient Greek to round out his education. It was at the university where he first read of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, gaining a deeper appreciation of the abolition movement before his time and the importance of preserving wilderness. John graduated in the Spring of 1861 as Lincoln was elected and Holdfasts began their planned rise up backed by Spain and France. Though a peaceful man, John Muir was enraged by the thought of slavery's return and joined the 7th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment in their Sharpshooter company. Here his love of the land truly flourished as he scouted ahead of the famed "Iron Brigade," foraging off the land and working in concert with Indian cavalry and auxiliaries. Armed with a Spencer Repeating Rifle and sketchbook, Muir took down many observations of the land around him in the Great Plains of Kansas and the hills of Tennessee. Muir was unfortunately wounded when probing the Texan's border and sent back to his hometown to recover; he was fortunate his younger two brothers were only on home guard service. Following the war, Muir wandered from state to state, taking odd jobs to cover lodging; Muir trekked southwards through Mexico till the tip of the Yucatan, picking up Spanish and a variety of creole languages before sailing to Havana. In Havana, he would further his study of Botany and languages for the next six months; finally, in the second half of 1868, Muir would sail for California. Stepping off in San Francisco, Muir would immediately head to the Yosemite Valley and begin a lifelong love. Muir would write at lengths for the decade on the importance of forest lands and the degradation we wrought on them. He brought public attention to the devastation of clear-cutting, with its side effects of town destroying mudslides and floods. Muir's visceral language and sketches were published nationally, warning the public of the over-exploitative nature of the post-war economy; he would promote Hemp as a viable and multipurpose timber and cotton alternative. By the end of the decade, the public would admonish the concept of clear-cutting with logging companies and railroads pushing ever northwards to Oregon and British Columbia.
After finding fame in the 70s, Muir would spend the 1880s as a family man with this 1880 marriage to Louisa Strentzel. Nesting on the Strentzel's 2,600-acre orchard in Martinez, Muir was just a 12-hour train ride and hike away from Yosemite. His trips to the mountains became infrequent with his duties to his wife, their vast orchard, and his two daughters, Wanda and Helen. The orchard, established by his father-in-law, was laid out in a traditional settler mindset, i.e., without consideration for the local biome. For the first time in many years, Muir was stationary at his orchard. This new family-oriented lifestyle allowed him to observe how farming actively fought against the natural order of things, with the monoculture cultivation of crops and active tilling of fallow fields. Throughout the decade, Muir would experiment with "harmonizing" his orchard with rows between his trees and grapevines were nitrogen-fixing legumes such as groundnut, peanut, clover, soy, and alfalfa. The final layer to his operation would see onsite beekeeping for pollination and pasturing of chickens and waterfowl for pest control. Though the complete orchard and farm system was more labor-intensive, the multiple product streams allowed for year-round profitability. The addition of nitrogen-fixing cover crops saved topsoil, retained moisture, and reduced fertilizer costs. Muir would continue to write weekly to San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, urging all farmers to grow nitrogen-fixing legumes rather than leaving fields fallow to build soil health and control dust. He continued to write about the beauty of our natural world and urged cities to continue their urban forestry programs for the mental well-being of their citizens. He was proud of his success against clear-cutting and educating the public about soil health, but Yosemite was still calling his name.
While trips to Yosemite in the 80s were few and far between, Muir did find himself spending more time among the powerbrokers across the Bay in San Francisco. The members of the Pacific Union, Olympic, and Bohemian clubs were all enamored with Muir's eccentricities, worldly knowledge, and passion for the natural world. At weekly dinners, Muir spoke at length on the conservation of America's resources and the preservation of natural beauty for the public to enjoy. He specifically cited the introduction of sheep into Yosemite's meadows, taking the vast grasslands down to their roots, the extensive deforestation on both coasts leaving behind a desert of tree stumps ripe for landslides, and finally, the hydraulic mining that permanently altered river courses and drastically harmed the Bays ecology in just 30 years. He would often compliment the rapid progress San Francisco had made to improve their citizens well beings, with urban forestry, paved roads, and sewers making San Francisco the most modern city on the west coast. Cable cars were replacing dung-dropping horse cars, and water treatment plants significantly reduced pollution reaching the bay. The Bohemian Club and its Northern redwood grove retreat are where Muir met his closest ally and friend, Robert Underwood Johnson. The two would spend the latter half of the 1880s writing to Congress for federal protection of the Yosemite Valley. The pair's lobbying found success as Yosemite National Park was established on October 1st, 1890, which Muir called one of the most incredible days of his life, witnessing the passage of the bill in Washington. Traveling by train, the pair would see the many changes in the Great Plains, with great stands of Kentucky Coffee and American Chestnut Trees acting as windbreaks and providing shade to herds of buffalo and steer. A plethora of crops was transported by steam barge and railroads with tracks shining brightly under the sun.
The 1890s would be a grand decade of progress, with the foundation of the Sierra Club hot on the heels after the Yosemite declaration. The club would be dedicated to the preservation of natural beauty within the America's and the conservation of her vast resources so that many generations of future Americans could enjoy those riches too. Nearly two years into the clubs' existence saw the passage of the 1891 Forest Reserve Act, placing millions of acres of forest land into federal hands. These timber reserves officially banned clear-cutting and expected the leasee to replant whatever was cut down. The club would quickly spread throughout the Amigo's, with the likes of Samuel Clemens, Gifford Pinochet, and Booker Washington bringing new chapters eastward. Muir and Johnson would find additional patronage at the Bohemian Club with E.H. Harriman, Collis Huntington and nephew Henry, and Theodore Roosevelt. Collis Huntington had just wrested complete control of the Southern Pacific in 1892, and his nephew Henry was brought out to act as his agent and SP's President de jure. Henry Huntington's fascination with street railways and electric transit caught the eye of Muir, who viewed clean electric transit as the next evolution of mobility. E.H. Harriman, a noted railroad man and patron of the natural world, was an early financier of the Sierra Club and sponsored many trips with Muir to Alaska and Japan. Theodore Roosevelt, a rising star in the Republican Party and avid outdoorsman, he immediately took a liking to Muir and would champion the Conservation Movement on the national stage. While Muir, Harriman, Roosevelt, and Huntington would be equally close and at odds for the next twenty years, their ability to compromise for the good of the nation would go down in history.
John Muir, like many great Americans proceeding him, arrived in this country by ship. The son of Scottish immigrants and eldest son, John spent his childhood learning the New Testament and tending the land on the family's farm in Portage, Wisconsin. Reaching adulthood in 1856, John juggled his militia training, family farm duties, and classes at the University of Wisconsin. Muir developed a passion for botany and geology and studied ancient Greek to round out his education. It was at the university where he first read of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, gaining a deeper appreciation of the abolition movement before his time and the importance of preserving wilderness. John graduated in the Spring of 1861 as Lincoln was elected and Holdfasts began their planned rise up backed by Spain and France. Though a peaceful man, John Muir was enraged by the thought of slavery's return and joined the 7th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment in their Sharpshooter company. Here his love of the land truly flourished as he scouted ahead of the famed "Iron Brigade," foraging off the land and working in concert with Indian cavalry and auxiliaries. Armed with a Spencer Repeating Rifle and sketchbook, Muir took down many observations of the land around him in the Great Plains of Kansas and the hills of Tennessee. Muir was unfortunately wounded when probing the Texan's border and sent back to his hometown to recover; he was fortunate his younger two brothers were only on home guard service. Following the war, Muir wandered from state to state, taking odd jobs to cover lodging; Muir trekked southwards through Mexico till the tip of the Yucatan, picking up Spanish and a variety of creole languages before sailing to Havana. In Havana, he would further his study of Botany and languages for the next six months; finally, in the second half of 1868, Muir would sail for California. Stepping off in San Francisco, Muir would immediately head to the Yosemite Valley and begin a lifelong love. Muir would write at lengths for the decade on the importance of forest lands and the degradation we wrought on them. He brought public attention to the devastation of clear-cutting, with its side effects of town destroying mudslides and floods. Muir's visceral language and sketches were published nationally, warning the public of the over-exploitative nature of the post-war economy; he would promote Hemp as a viable and multipurpose timber and cotton alternative. By the end of the decade, the public would admonish the concept of clear-cutting with logging companies and railroads pushing ever northwards to Oregon and British Columbia.
After finding fame in the 70s, Muir would spend the 1880s as a family man with this 1880 marriage to Louisa Strentzel. Nesting on the Strentzel's 2,600-acre orchard in Martinez, Muir was just a 12-hour train ride and hike away from Yosemite. His trips to the mountains became infrequent with his duties to his wife, their vast orchard, and his two daughters, Wanda and Helen. The orchard, established by his father-in-law, was laid out in a traditional settler mindset, i.e., without consideration for the local biome. For the first time in many years, Muir was stationary at his orchard. This new family-oriented lifestyle allowed him to observe how farming actively fought against the natural order of things, with the monoculture cultivation of crops and active tilling of fallow fields. Throughout the decade, Muir would experiment with "harmonizing" his orchard with rows between his trees and grapevines were nitrogen-fixing legumes such as groundnut, peanut, clover, soy, and alfalfa. The final layer to his operation would see onsite beekeeping for pollination and pasturing of chickens and waterfowl for pest control. Though the complete orchard and farm system was more labor-intensive, the multiple product streams allowed for year-round profitability. The addition of nitrogen-fixing cover crops saved topsoil, retained moisture, and reduced fertilizer costs. Muir would continue to write weekly to San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, urging all farmers to grow nitrogen-fixing legumes rather than leaving fields fallow to build soil health and control dust. He continued to write about the beauty of our natural world and urged cities to continue their urban forestry programs for the mental well-being of their citizens. He was proud of his success against clear-cutting and educating the public about soil health, but Yosemite was still calling his name.
While trips to Yosemite in the 80s were few and far between, Muir did find himself spending more time among the powerbrokers across the Bay in San Francisco. The members of the Pacific Union, Olympic, and Bohemian clubs were all enamored with Muir's eccentricities, worldly knowledge, and passion for the natural world. At weekly dinners, Muir spoke at length on the conservation of America's resources and the preservation of natural beauty for the public to enjoy. He specifically cited the introduction of sheep into Yosemite's meadows, taking the vast grasslands down to their roots, the extensive deforestation on both coasts leaving behind a desert of tree stumps ripe for landslides, and finally, the hydraulic mining that permanently altered river courses and drastically harmed the Bays ecology in just 30 years. He would often compliment the rapid progress San Francisco had made to improve their citizens well beings, with urban forestry, paved roads, and sewers making San Francisco the most modern city on the west coast. Cable cars were replacing dung-dropping horse cars, and water treatment plants significantly reduced pollution reaching the bay. The Bohemian Club and its Northern redwood grove retreat are where Muir met his closest ally and friend, Robert Underwood Johnson. The two would spend the latter half of the 1880s writing to Congress for federal protection of the Yosemite Valley. The pair's lobbying found success as Yosemite National Park was established on October 1st, 1890, which Muir called one of the most incredible days of his life, witnessing the passage of the bill in Washington. Traveling by train, the pair would see the many changes in the Great Plains, with great stands of Kentucky Coffee and American Chestnut Trees acting as windbreaks and providing shade to herds of buffalo and steer. A plethora of crops was transported by steam barge and railroads with tracks shining brightly under the sun.
The 1890s would be a grand decade of progress, with the foundation of the Sierra Club hot on the heels after the Yosemite declaration. The club would be dedicated to the preservation of natural beauty within the America's and the conservation of her vast resources so that many generations of future Americans could enjoy those riches too. Nearly two years into the clubs' existence saw the passage of the 1891 Forest Reserve Act, placing millions of acres of forest land into federal hands. These timber reserves officially banned clear-cutting and expected the leasee to replant whatever was cut down. The club would quickly spread throughout the Amigo's, with the likes of Samuel Clemens, Gifford Pinochet, and Booker Washington bringing new chapters eastward. Muir and Johnson would find additional patronage at the Bohemian Club with E.H. Harriman, Collis Huntington and nephew Henry, and Theodore Roosevelt. Collis Huntington had just wrested complete control of the Southern Pacific in 1892, and his nephew Henry was brought out to act as his agent and SP's President de jure. Henry Huntington's fascination with street railways and electric transit caught the eye of Muir, who viewed clean electric transit as the next evolution of mobility. E.H. Harriman, a noted railroad man and patron of the natural world, was an early financier of the Sierra Club and sponsored many trips with Muir to Alaska and Japan. Theodore Roosevelt, a rising star in the Republican Party and avid outdoorsman, he immediately took a liking to Muir and would champion the Conservation Movement on the national stage. While Muir, Harriman, Roosevelt, and Huntington would be equally close and at odds for the next twenty years, their ability to compromise for the good of the nation would go down in history.
The First World War
The rise of the Three Amigos had a relatively limited effect on European affairs up to 1914, as by and large the Western Hemisphere powers stayed clear of Europe's issues. After the North American War, Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw an opportunity to strike at a weakened France, and after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, a united Germany emerged. This so distorted Europe's power balance as to lead France into rapprochement with the British and Russians, while Germany allied itself with Austria-Hungary and Turkey, leading to the alliance structure that led to the outbreak of war in 1914, upon the assassination Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
The war started with strong actions from Germany - the Battle of Tannenberg, a major debacle for the Russians, and a seemingly successful Schlieffen Plan, under which invading German armies came close to scoring a decisive victory against France. However, the undoing of the Schlieffen Plan began with a seemingly minor incident, when a German general, Hans von Gronau, was stricken with a sudden case of dysentery. Gronau was delayed by a few days from taking command of the First Bavarian Reserve Army, which was guarding the right flank of Alexander von Kluck's German First Army, just east of Paris on the Marne River. By the time Gronau arrived, it was too late.
Without Gronau, the First Bavarian Reserve had remained scattered and disorganized, and a counterattack by the French Sixth Army broke through its lines. The French Sixth met up with the British Expeditionary Force counterattacking from the south, encircling the First Army. The commander of the German Second Army, Karl von Bulow, nervous throughout the past month about his right flank on which Kluck’s army was positioned, panicked when his right flank became exposed. Bulow wheeled to the southwest in an attempt to form a defensive line. Frantic cables arrived from the German commander in chief, Helmuth von Moltke, ordering Bulow to march westward to Kluck’s relief. But Bulow didn't move until it was too late for him to break through the Allied lines (he was later court-martialed for cowardice in the face of the enemy).
Kluck's First Army, cut off, was effectively destroyed attempting to break out back to the German lines. For each regiment, only about a company or so made it through, the rest casualties or taken prisoner. Kluck himself surrendered his command to French General Louis Franchet d'Esperey on September 16, once his troops had run out of ammunition.
The loss of the First Army reduced the Germans' immediately-available numbers to the point that they were unable to hold their position on the Aisne River in the face of the Allied counteroffensive that followed the Battle of the Marne. When French forces successfully crossed the Aisne, Moltke had no choice but to retreat to the line of the Meuse River. There the Germans successfully stopped and dug in, creating a trench line - but they were almost all the way back to their own border, with only a tiny bit of France and some of southeastern Belgium under occupation.
This series of events had tremendous effects on the morale of both sides - for all the world, the result of the fight was that the Germans had invaded France only to be given a very bloody nose and driven back to their starting point. German morale plummeted - and as a result the Germans grew more desperate, turning more aggressively (like a trapped animal) to expedients like the U-boat campaign, which in turn in May of 1915 would have dramatic effects in the United States and Mexico. By then their fellow Amigo, Canada, had greatly distinguished itself at a peninsula called Gallipoli.
The rise of the Three Amigos had a relatively limited effect on European affairs up to 1914, as by and large the Western Hemisphere powers stayed clear of Europe's issues. After the North American War, Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw an opportunity to strike at a weakened France, and after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, a united Germany emerged. This so distorted Europe's power balance as to lead France into rapprochement with the British and Russians, while Germany allied itself with Austria-Hungary and Turkey, leading to the alliance structure that led to the outbreak of war in 1914, upon the assassination Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
The war started with strong actions from Germany - the Battle of Tannenberg, a major debacle for the Russians, and a seemingly successful Schlieffen Plan, under which invading German armies came close to scoring a decisive victory against France. However, the undoing of the Schlieffen Plan began with a seemingly minor incident, when a German general, Hans von Gronau, was stricken with a sudden case of dysentery. Gronau was delayed by a few days from taking command of the First Bavarian Reserve Army, which was guarding the right flank of Alexander von Kluck's German First Army, just east of Paris on the Marne River. By the time Gronau arrived, it was too late.
Without Gronau, the First Bavarian Reserve had remained scattered and disorganized, and a counterattack by the French Sixth Army broke through its lines. The French Sixth met up with the British Expeditionary Force counterattacking from the south, encircling the First Army. The commander of the German Second Army, Karl von Bulow, nervous throughout the past month about his right flank on which Kluck’s army was positioned, panicked when his right flank became exposed. Bulow wheeled to the southwest in an attempt to form a defensive line. Frantic cables arrived from the German commander in chief, Helmuth von Moltke, ordering Bulow to march westward to Kluck’s relief. But Bulow didn't move until it was too late for him to break through the Allied lines (he was later court-martialed for cowardice in the face of the enemy).
Kluck's First Army, cut off, was effectively destroyed attempting to break out back to the German lines. For each regiment, only about a company or so made it through, the rest casualties or taken prisoner. Kluck himself surrendered his command to French General Louis Franchet d'Esperey on September 16, once his troops had run out of ammunition.
The loss of the First Army reduced the Germans' immediately-available numbers to the point that they were unable to hold their position on the Aisne River in the face of the Allied counteroffensive that followed the Battle of the Marne. When French forces successfully crossed the Aisne, Moltke had no choice but to retreat to the line of the Meuse River. There the Germans successfully stopped and dug in, creating a trench line - but they were almost all the way back to their own border, with only a tiny bit of France and some of southeastern Belgium under occupation.
This series of events had tremendous effects on the morale of both sides - for all the world, the result of the fight was that the Germans had invaded France only to be given a very bloody nose and driven back to their starting point. German morale plummeted - and as a result the Germans grew more desperate, turning more aggressively (like a trapped animal) to expedients like the U-boat campaign, which in turn in May of 1915 would have dramatic effects in the United States and Mexico. By then their fellow Amigo, Canada, had greatly distinguished itself at a peninsula called Gallipoli.
Last edited:
Canada, having entered the war along with Britain in August 1914, was the first of the Three Amigos to contribute in a significant way to the war effort. And the first major showing of Canadian arms came with the struggle of Gallipoli. Turkey had entered the war in October 1914, and the Allies had quickly decided that seizing the Straits must be a priority.
Allied morale was high after the victory at the Marne, and nowhere more so than among the Canadians. Nonetheless, the Allied powers almost called off the attack on the Straits after the initial naval assault, which resulted in the loss of a French battleship and two British cruisers to mines. But the Canadian theater commander, General Sir Samuel Steele; his deputy, Major General Arthur Currie; and the Canadian naval commander, Admiral Sir Charles Kingsmill, pressed hard for the resumption of the attack. A small fleet of Canadian minesweepers, escorted by destroyers, courageously entered the Straits on the night of March 25, 1915 and, though under fire from the Turkish guns, swept most of the mines, allowing for the resumption of the naval attack. And not long after, Allied troops landed at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula and at "ANZAC Cove" further north, to attempt to seize the ground and silence the Turkish guns.
The British troops, once ashore, hesitated in moving, but the Canadians who landed with them refused to countenance such dilly-dallying and quickly scaled the heights beyond the beach. They encountered little resistance; by the time the Turks were in place to counter them, the Canadians had already taken the high ground. They defended it stubbornly against the Turkish counterattack. Meanwhile, the Australians and New Zealanders, encouraged by the Canadians’ audacity, performed the even more prodigious feat of climbing the heights beyond "ANZAC Cove," which put them in the rear of the Turks. Those of the Turks who were not encircled were routed, with their commanding general, Kemal Pasha, killed in the fighting.
These events in turn emboldened Greek Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos to press - hard - for Greek entry into the war on the Allied side. The pro-German king, Constantine I, was deeply reluctant, but Venizelos insisted that Greece must not allow this opportunity to put the "Megali Idea" – the dreamed-of annexation of Turkish territories claimed by Greece, including the areas around the Straits - into action to go by. Venizelos finally convinced the reluctant king, and Greece entered the war on April 29, soon landing an army at Suvla Bay with the intention of marching inland to pursue the broken Turks toward Constantinople. With the capital under assault by the Greeks on land and with the Allied fleet - having finally broken through to the Sea of Marmara, and having sunk the Goeben and Breslau, the German heavy cruisers given to the Turkish navy - bombarding the capital, the Sultan's government fled inland to Ankara, leaving Constantinople to fall to the Allies on May 20. The Greeks, after securing the capital, moved across the Bosporus, to take the territory to the east and to begin marching toward Smyrna to the south.
The Russians had promised troops for the assault, but were unable to supply them, due to the German-Austrian offensive that broke through the Russian lines at Gorlice-Tarnow in Galicia and then swept across Poland and into the Ukraine. Although the Russians did invade Armenia, the most they could contribute to the Straits operation was to send their Black Sea fleet to bombard the Bosporus. The failure of Russia to secure its long-standing goal of taking Constantinople was yet another black mark against Tsar Nicholas II in the eyes of the Russians.
The successful offensive against the Russians boosted German morale somewhat, but the failure of the 1914 Schlieffen Plan offensive against France still haunted them, and the Germans, behaving like a trapped animal, lashed out wherever they could. Most ominously, they had introduced their fleet of U-boats into the waters around Britain to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare, with the goal of attempting to starve Britain into surrendering by torpedoing and sinking ships carrying vital supplies to the British Isles.
The U-boats were taking a frightful toll of British shipping by the spring of 1915, but the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign had also led to increasing antagonism with the United States and Mexico, who objected strenuously to the risk posed to the lives of their citizens traveling on Allied vessels. The close relationship with Canada, whose own vessels were subject to attack as one of the Allies, made the issue much more inflammatory in the other two Amigos than it might otherwise have been. President Theodore Roosevelt, in particular, stressed to his countrymen the notion that Germany’s actions were contemptuous toward the North American states and bordered on acts of war. Fury with German actions mounted throughout the fall of 1914 and the spring of 1915.
Then, early in May, the British liner Lusitania was sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat. Over a thousand lives were lost, among them 128 Americans and 36 Mexicans. President Roosevelt furiously demanded both an apology and an end to the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign. The response from Germany – the notorious “Zimmermann telegram,” after the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann – was so contemptuous that, after the war, some persons accused the British of having edited the thing to make it seem worse than it was. In fact, the German response was unedited: the Germans simply were really that clumsy and arrogant when attempting diplomacy. The gist of the telegram was that the Germans were sorry for what had happened, but that the travelers had put themselves at risk by sailing on a British vessel in the first place, and that Germany had no intention of restraining itself from the use of a “legitimate weapon of war.” Outrage in the United States and Mexico rose to a fever pitch, and on June 1, 1915, the United States Congress voted to declare war on Germany, with Mexico joining its two allies three days later. For the first time, all Three Amigos were involved in a European war. Declarations of war against Austria-Hungary and Turkey followed soon after.
With the American and Mexican entry into the war, Britain and France chose to avoid major offensives in the summer of 1915, deciding instead to wait for the North Americans to help bolster the strength of the Allies in the West. This allowed the British and French to send greater forces to the war against Turkey. A British force from India landed at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates and began advancing toward Baghdad. Another British force entered Palestine from Egypt. A British officer, T.E. Lawrence, acted as liaison with the Hashemite family in fomenting an Arab uprising in the Arabian peninsula. Finally, the French landed a brigade of marines near Alexandretta, taking that port and cutting the railway line there. This severed Turkish communications among all their fronts, since Alexandretta was the junction point of the Ottoman Empire’s minimal railroad system.
With their armies falling on five separate fronts, the Arabs in revolt, their capital in enemy hands, and all communication with the German ally lost, the Turks fought on as long as they could, but they were out of options. In November 1915 they formally requested an armistice.
Allied morale was high after the victory at the Marne, and nowhere more so than among the Canadians. Nonetheless, the Allied powers almost called off the attack on the Straits after the initial naval assault, which resulted in the loss of a French battleship and two British cruisers to mines. But the Canadian theater commander, General Sir Samuel Steele; his deputy, Major General Arthur Currie; and the Canadian naval commander, Admiral Sir Charles Kingsmill, pressed hard for the resumption of the attack. A small fleet of Canadian minesweepers, escorted by destroyers, courageously entered the Straits on the night of March 25, 1915 and, though under fire from the Turkish guns, swept most of the mines, allowing for the resumption of the naval attack. And not long after, Allied troops landed at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula and at "ANZAC Cove" further north, to attempt to seize the ground and silence the Turkish guns.
The British troops, once ashore, hesitated in moving, but the Canadians who landed with them refused to countenance such dilly-dallying and quickly scaled the heights beyond the beach. They encountered little resistance; by the time the Turks were in place to counter them, the Canadians had already taken the high ground. They defended it stubbornly against the Turkish counterattack. Meanwhile, the Australians and New Zealanders, encouraged by the Canadians’ audacity, performed the even more prodigious feat of climbing the heights beyond "ANZAC Cove," which put them in the rear of the Turks. Those of the Turks who were not encircled were routed, with their commanding general, Kemal Pasha, killed in the fighting.
These events in turn emboldened Greek Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos to press - hard - for Greek entry into the war on the Allied side. The pro-German king, Constantine I, was deeply reluctant, but Venizelos insisted that Greece must not allow this opportunity to put the "Megali Idea" – the dreamed-of annexation of Turkish territories claimed by Greece, including the areas around the Straits - into action to go by. Venizelos finally convinced the reluctant king, and Greece entered the war on April 29, soon landing an army at Suvla Bay with the intention of marching inland to pursue the broken Turks toward Constantinople. With the capital under assault by the Greeks on land and with the Allied fleet - having finally broken through to the Sea of Marmara, and having sunk the Goeben and Breslau, the German heavy cruisers given to the Turkish navy - bombarding the capital, the Sultan's government fled inland to Ankara, leaving Constantinople to fall to the Allies on May 20. The Greeks, after securing the capital, moved across the Bosporus, to take the territory to the east and to begin marching toward Smyrna to the south.
The Russians had promised troops for the assault, but were unable to supply them, due to the German-Austrian offensive that broke through the Russian lines at Gorlice-Tarnow in Galicia and then swept across Poland and into the Ukraine. Although the Russians did invade Armenia, the most they could contribute to the Straits operation was to send their Black Sea fleet to bombard the Bosporus. The failure of Russia to secure its long-standing goal of taking Constantinople was yet another black mark against Tsar Nicholas II in the eyes of the Russians.
The successful offensive against the Russians boosted German morale somewhat, but the failure of the 1914 Schlieffen Plan offensive against France still haunted them, and the Germans, behaving like a trapped animal, lashed out wherever they could. Most ominously, they had introduced their fleet of U-boats into the waters around Britain to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare, with the goal of attempting to starve Britain into surrendering by torpedoing and sinking ships carrying vital supplies to the British Isles.
The U-boats were taking a frightful toll of British shipping by the spring of 1915, but the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign had also led to increasing antagonism with the United States and Mexico, who objected strenuously to the risk posed to the lives of their citizens traveling on Allied vessels. The close relationship with Canada, whose own vessels were subject to attack as one of the Allies, made the issue much more inflammatory in the other two Amigos than it might otherwise have been. President Theodore Roosevelt, in particular, stressed to his countrymen the notion that Germany’s actions were contemptuous toward the North American states and bordered on acts of war. Fury with German actions mounted throughout the fall of 1914 and the spring of 1915.
Then, early in May, the British liner Lusitania was sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat. Over a thousand lives were lost, among them 128 Americans and 36 Mexicans. President Roosevelt furiously demanded both an apology and an end to the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign. The response from Germany – the notorious “Zimmermann telegram,” after the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann – was so contemptuous that, after the war, some persons accused the British of having edited the thing to make it seem worse than it was. In fact, the German response was unedited: the Germans simply were really that clumsy and arrogant when attempting diplomacy. The gist of the telegram was that the Germans were sorry for what had happened, but that the travelers had put themselves at risk by sailing on a British vessel in the first place, and that Germany had no intention of restraining itself from the use of a “legitimate weapon of war.” Outrage in the United States and Mexico rose to a fever pitch, and on June 1, 1915, the United States Congress voted to declare war on Germany, with Mexico joining its two allies three days later. For the first time, all Three Amigos were involved in a European war. Declarations of war against Austria-Hungary and Turkey followed soon after.
With the American and Mexican entry into the war, Britain and France chose to avoid major offensives in the summer of 1915, deciding instead to wait for the North Americans to help bolster the strength of the Allies in the West. This allowed the British and French to send greater forces to the war against Turkey. A British force from India landed at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates and began advancing toward Baghdad. Another British force entered Palestine from Egypt. A British officer, T.E. Lawrence, acted as liaison with the Hashemite family in fomenting an Arab uprising in the Arabian peninsula. Finally, the French landed a brigade of marines near Alexandretta, taking that port and cutting the railway line there. This severed Turkish communications among all their fronts, since Alexandretta was the junction point of the Ottoman Empire’s minimal railroad system.
With their armies falling on five separate fronts, the Arabs in revolt, their capital in enemy hands, and all communication with the German ally lost, the Turks fought on as long as they could, but they were out of options. In November 1915 they formally requested an armistice.
Last edited:
Even before Turkey's demise, the fall of Constantinople and the entry of Greece into the war had had major effects. Italy and Romania, both of whom coveted Austrian territory, were emboldened by the Allied victories to jump into the war on the Allied side, Italy in May of 1915 and Romania in August. Bulgaria had nothing to gain from entering the war on the Allied side, but remained neutral, with King Ferdinand resisting German overtures to enter the war on the side of the Central Powers (Greece, in cock-crowing mode and with its ambitions in the Straits being realized, demanded Bulgaria's Thracian coast as a bribe to stave off a Greek attack; Ferdinand grudgingly obliged.)
With Greek ports open to the Allies, resupply and reinforcement of the Serbian front proved much easier. Simultaneous with the offensive against the Russians in May, the Austrians had launched an offensive against Serbia, taking Belgrade for the second time but failing to knock Serbia out of the war, as the front line stalled into a stalemate some 40 miles south of Belgrade, with the Serbian government setting up a temporary capital in Nis.
On the Western Front, meanwhile, the Allies, with no need to clear the Germans out of occupied France or Belgium, remained relatively quiescent, awaiting the buildup of Three Amigos forces that would present the Germans with overwhelming numbers. Their casualties were high, but much lower than if they had been continually launching futile offensives, and morale remained high. The Germans launched periodic attacks - such as the hideous introduction of poison gas in April - but by and large appeared, at least in 1915, to have shifted their major attention to the Russians.
By late 1915, the American and Mexican expeditionary forces had begun to arrive in large numbers at last. The Americans joined the British, French and their Canadian friends on the Western Front, while the Mexicans, along with British and French contingents redeployed from Turkey, beefed up the Balkan front. The Serbians and their allies were able to link up with the Romanians on their right, who in turn were able to link up with the Russians on their right, forming a continuous Eastern Front stretching all the way from the Baltic to the Adriatic.
And there the war might have stalemated, for who knows how long, but for an utterly foolish action on the part of Austria-Hungary, almost as foolish as their starting the war in the first place. Historians still debate whether it was the aged Emperor Francis Joseph, perhaps approaching senility, who made the notorious Edict of January 5, 1916, or whether it originated with some bureaucrat in the Austrian interior ministry. But one thing is certain - the Edict was devastating in its effects.
The Edict followed several months of increasing propaganda activity from Serbia's clandestine actors - the same people behind the "Black Hand" terror group that had assassinated the Archduke - aimed at convincing the Croats and Slovenes that their future lay with a South Slav kingdom led by Serbia and not with the Empire. Slavic nationalist groups had responded not only there but among the Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles as well, and the growth of Slavic nationalist thinking was deemed by Vienna to be sapping the strength of the Empire.
So on January 5, the infamous Edict was issued, reversing centuries of Habsburg policy by declaring suppression of Slavic nationalism and a program of "Germanization," by force if necessary. Slavic newspapers were to be shut down, Slavic schools closed, expressions of nationalism ranging from flags to local costumes to be suppressed.
Nothing could have been worse for the Habsburgs than to tell the millions of their Slavic soldiers who had spent the last year and a half fighting and dying for the Empire that they were officially second-class citizens in their own country. Never before had the nationalist tides within the Empire been brought into such stark relief. Slavic soldiers responded, by tens of thousands, by deserting or surrendering to the enemy en masse. The Edict couldn't have backfired more completely if it had been intended to do so.
When it became clear to the Balkan command the extent of this disaster and of Austria-Hungary's inability to control it, the Mexican command in particular, led by General Victoriano Huerta and distinguished with such officers as “Pancho” Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Pablo Gonzalez Garza and Pascual Orozco, pushed hard to go over to the offensive as quickly as possible. The Mexican-led offensive was launched in April 1916, and the Austro-Hungarian Army virtually disintegrated. The Mexicans, within two weeks, had liberated Belgrade and were advancing into Bosnia.
By July, the Allies had reached the outskirts of Budapest, which prompted the Hungarian Parliament to declare all ties with Austria severed, in the hopes that the Allies would treat Hungary as an oppressed subject nation as well. The Allied response boiled down to "nice try," and on July 26 Hungary formally surrendered. Five days later, the ailing Emperor Francis Joseph, who would die in November, abdicated in favor of his nephew Karl. The new emperor lasted just long enough to ask for an armistice on August 10. The armistice with Austria recognized the independence of Austria's subject peoples and allowed free passage for Allied troops.
Meanwhile, on the Western Front, the Germans, hoping to force France to an armistice before the Americans could make their presence felt, launched an all-out offensive in February 1916 at the city of Verdun. The fortress city, to which the French attached outsized importance, fell in early March, creating a mood of panic in France until the new supreme commander, General Ferdinand Foch, published a declaration titled "They Shall Not Pass!" that revived the country's fighting spirit. Actually, it turned out to the American Expeditionary Force that played the critical role, stopping the German offensive west of Verdun in the thicknesses of the Argonne Forest.
Even as the German offensive ground to a halt, the Germans retained a glimmer of hope, but that would change on June 4-5, in the Battle of the North Sea. Admiral Reinhard Scheer finally, after years of being kept on a short leash by the Kaiser, sortied into the North Sea, hoping to bombard the British coast and draw the Allied fleets into battles where they could be defeated piecemeal. But the RN, already far larger than the High Seas Fleet, had been augmented by the large US fleet and the smaller but still formidable Canadian and Mexican fleets, and they succeeding in detecting his main force. The four fleets deployed so as to encircle Scheer and close every escape route back to Germany. The order of battle was set up as an ambush of the High Seas Fleet, with Admiral David Beatty's battlecruisers luring the Germans into a trap where the Grand Fleet, divided into multiple parts - the First Squadron under Admiral John Jellicoe, the Second Squadron under Admiral Cecil Burney, the Third (Battlecruiser) Squadron under Beatty, the Fourth (Cruiser) Squadron under Herbert Heath, the Fifth (American) Squadron under Vice Admiral Hugh Rodman and the Sixth (Atlantic) Squadron under Mexican Rear Admiral Gustavo Maass, pounced upon the Scheer’s fleet. The High Seas Fleet suffered a disaster that eclipsed Tsushima and, nearly, Trafalgar - only a handful of capital ships made it back to the German coast.
The loss of the High Seas Fleet created a panic in north Germany, which now feared a seaborne invasion. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill purposely stoked this fear by assembling supply and what appeared to be landing craft in southern English ports. The Allies had no such plans, but the Kaiser, over the objections of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, insisted on transferring ten divisions to guard the north German coast. Most of these came from the Western Front.
The Allies were now ready to attack along that front, with the Germans depleted, and with over the past year having learned how to use infiltration tactics to overcome the trenches, and with a newfangled weapon - the tank, along with vastly improved aircraft that for the first time could be used in ground support roles. The Allies attacked at three points: at St-Mihiel south of Verdun; at Bazeilles, near Sedan; and at Namur in southern Belgium. They broke through the German trenches at last. Although progress was slow, by the time of the armistice some units had crossed the German border and entered the Rhineland.
Still, Germany held out to the very end, placing their last hope on events unfolding in Russia.
The Russians had belatedly begun a 1916 offensive in support of their Western allies, but their progress was slower than anyone else, which was an embarrassment to Stavka. And they also ran into political problems. In Poland, much of the country had been occupied by a "Polish National Army," led by Jozef Pilsudski, a Polish revolutionary who had fled Russia a decade earlier and spent much of the prewar years forming a guerrilla army in Austria-Hungary with the intention of using it to help secure Polish independence. However, when the war had turned against the Central Powers, Pilsudski - whose primary goal was Polish independence, at all costs - turned on his former benefactors and had begun stockpiling to fight the Germans and Austrians. In the late spring of 1916, he sent a letter to Tsar Nicholas II, offering to bring his PNA into battle against the Germans in return for a Russian guarantee of postwar independence. The Tsar responded contemptuously, not only refusing to meet with Pilsudski but declaring that he would be hanged once Russia had won the war. Now, no one knew how the PNA would respond to the Russian advance - would they be welcomed as allies or fought against as enemies?
The Duma condemned the Tsar's actions, not because they favored Polish independence, by and large, but because they believed the Tsar should have dealt more wisely with Pilsudski and that he had hurt the Russian war effort. Now the Tsar - egged on by Rasputin, through Tsarina Alexandra - engaged in a war of words with the Duma, who on August 3 passed a series of resolutions demanding (as they so often had before) a Russian government responsible to the Duma and greater reforms, along with calls for an investigation into the Tsar's handling of the war effort. The Tsar, again egged on by Rasputin, declared the Duma dissolved on August 12.
But the Duma defied the dissolution order and continued to meet, and they issued an appeal to the Russian people, which was cabled nationwide. The people responded; riots broke out in Petrograd, Moscow and other cities, with, ominously, the army joining the protesters. The Tsar considered the possibility of marching to Petrograd to suppress the riots until his generals told him that he would be unable to find enough loyal troops - most of the army regarded him with contempt at best. He was persuaded to abdicate in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. However, Michael refused to take the throne unless it was offered him by the Duma - who were in no mood to make such an offer - and the Russian monarchy came to an end. The Duma declared Russia a republic and themselves formed a Provisional Government.
The Germans' last hope evaporated when the Provisional Government announced it would continue the fight to victory (making no comment on how it would deal with Pilsudski). The Kaiser stubbornly held out to the very end, until rioting erupted in Germany as well, forcing his abdication. The new German republican government signed the armistice, ending the war, on September 30, 1916.
With Greek ports open to the Allies, resupply and reinforcement of the Serbian front proved much easier. Simultaneous with the offensive against the Russians in May, the Austrians had launched an offensive against Serbia, taking Belgrade for the second time but failing to knock Serbia out of the war, as the front line stalled into a stalemate some 40 miles south of Belgrade, with the Serbian government setting up a temporary capital in Nis.
On the Western Front, meanwhile, the Allies, with no need to clear the Germans out of occupied France or Belgium, remained relatively quiescent, awaiting the buildup of Three Amigos forces that would present the Germans with overwhelming numbers. Their casualties were high, but much lower than if they had been continually launching futile offensives, and morale remained high. The Germans launched periodic attacks - such as the hideous introduction of poison gas in April - but by and large appeared, at least in 1915, to have shifted their major attention to the Russians.
By late 1915, the American and Mexican expeditionary forces had begun to arrive in large numbers at last. The Americans joined the British, French and their Canadian friends on the Western Front, while the Mexicans, along with British and French contingents redeployed from Turkey, beefed up the Balkan front. The Serbians and their allies were able to link up with the Romanians on their right, who in turn were able to link up with the Russians on their right, forming a continuous Eastern Front stretching all the way from the Baltic to the Adriatic.
And there the war might have stalemated, for who knows how long, but for an utterly foolish action on the part of Austria-Hungary, almost as foolish as their starting the war in the first place. Historians still debate whether it was the aged Emperor Francis Joseph, perhaps approaching senility, who made the notorious Edict of January 5, 1916, or whether it originated with some bureaucrat in the Austrian interior ministry. But one thing is certain - the Edict was devastating in its effects.
The Edict followed several months of increasing propaganda activity from Serbia's clandestine actors - the same people behind the "Black Hand" terror group that had assassinated the Archduke - aimed at convincing the Croats and Slovenes that their future lay with a South Slav kingdom led by Serbia and not with the Empire. Slavic nationalist groups had responded not only there but among the Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles as well, and the growth of Slavic nationalist thinking was deemed by Vienna to be sapping the strength of the Empire.
So on January 5, the infamous Edict was issued, reversing centuries of Habsburg policy by declaring suppression of Slavic nationalism and a program of "Germanization," by force if necessary. Slavic newspapers were to be shut down, Slavic schools closed, expressions of nationalism ranging from flags to local costumes to be suppressed.
Nothing could have been worse for the Habsburgs than to tell the millions of their Slavic soldiers who had spent the last year and a half fighting and dying for the Empire that they were officially second-class citizens in their own country. Never before had the nationalist tides within the Empire been brought into such stark relief. Slavic soldiers responded, by tens of thousands, by deserting or surrendering to the enemy en masse. The Edict couldn't have backfired more completely if it had been intended to do so.
When it became clear to the Balkan command the extent of this disaster and of Austria-Hungary's inability to control it, the Mexican command in particular, led by General Victoriano Huerta and distinguished with such officers as “Pancho” Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Pablo Gonzalez Garza and Pascual Orozco, pushed hard to go over to the offensive as quickly as possible. The Mexican-led offensive was launched in April 1916, and the Austro-Hungarian Army virtually disintegrated. The Mexicans, within two weeks, had liberated Belgrade and were advancing into Bosnia.
By July, the Allies had reached the outskirts of Budapest, which prompted the Hungarian Parliament to declare all ties with Austria severed, in the hopes that the Allies would treat Hungary as an oppressed subject nation as well. The Allied response boiled down to "nice try," and on July 26 Hungary formally surrendered. Five days later, the ailing Emperor Francis Joseph, who would die in November, abdicated in favor of his nephew Karl. The new emperor lasted just long enough to ask for an armistice on August 10. The armistice with Austria recognized the independence of Austria's subject peoples and allowed free passage for Allied troops.
Meanwhile, on the Western Front, the Germans, hoping to force France to an armistice before the Americans could make their presence felt, launched an all-out offensive in February 1916 at the city of Verdun. The fortress city, to which the French attached outsized importance, fell in early March, creating a mood of panic in France until the new supreme commander, General Ferdinand Foch, published a declaration titled "They Shall Not Pass!" that revived the country's fighting spirit. Actually, it turned out to the American Expeditionary Force that played the critical role, stopping the German offensive west of Verdun in the thicknesses of the Argonne Forest.
Even as the German offensive ground to a halt, the Germans retained a glimmer of hope, but that would change on June 4-5, in the Battle of the North Sea. Admiral Reinhard Scheer finally, after years of being kept on a short leash by the Kaiser, sortied into the North Sea, hoping to bombard the British coast and draw the Allied fleets into battles where they could be defeated piecemeal. But the RN, already far larger than the High Seas Fleet, had been augmented by the large US fleet and the smaller but still formidable Canadian and Mexican fleets, and they succeeding in detecting his main force. The four fleets deployed so as to encircle Scheer and close every escape route back to Germany. The order of battle was set up as an ambush of the High Seas Fleet, with Admiral David Beatty's battlecruisers luring the Germans into a trap where the Grand Fleet, divided into multiple parts - the First Squadron under Admiral John Jellicoe, the Second Squadron under Admiral Cecil Burney, the Third (Battlecruiser) Squadron under Beatty, the Fourth (Cruiser) Squadron under Herbert Heath, the Fifth (American) Squadron under Vice Admiral Hugh Rodman and the Sixth (Atlantic) Squadron under Mexican Rear Admiral Gustavo Maass, pounced upon the Scheer’s fleet. The High Seas Fleet suffered a disaster that eclipsed Tsushima and, nearly, Trafalgar - only a handful of capital ships made it back to the German coast.
The loss of the High Seas Fleet created a panic in north Germany, which now feared a seaborne invasion. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill purposely stoked this fear by assembling supply and what appeared to be landing craft in southern English ports. The Allies had no such plans, but the Kaiser, over the objections of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, insisted on transferring ten divisions to guard the north German coast. Most of these came from the Western Front.
The Allies were now ready to attack along that front, with the Germans depleted, and with over the past year having learned how to use infiltration tactics to overcome the trenches, and with a newfangled weapon - the tank, along with vastly improved aircraft that for the first time could be used in ground support roles. The Allies attacked at three points: at St-Mihiel south of Verdun; at Bazeilles, near Sedan; and at Namur in southern Belgium. They broke through the German trenches at last. Although progress was slow, by the time of the armistice some units had crossed the German border and entered the Rhineland.
Still, Germany held out to the very end, placing their last hope on events unfolding in Russia.
The Russians had belatedly begun a 1916 offensive in support of their Western allies, but their progress was slower than anyone else, which was an embarrassment to Stavka. And they also ran into political problems. In Poland, much of the country had been occupied by a "Polish National Army," led by Jozef Pilsudski, a Polish revolutionary who had fled Russia a decade earlier and spent much of the prewar years forming a guerrilla army in Austria-Hungary with the intention of using it to help secure Polish independence. However, when the war had turned against the Central Powers, Pilsudski - whose primary goal was Polish independence, at all costs - turned on his former benefactors and had begun stockpiling to fight the Germans and Austrians. In the late spring of 1916, he sent a letter to Tsar Nicholas II, offering to bring his PNA into battle against the Germans in return for a Russian guarantee of postwar independence. The Tsar responded contemptuously, not only refusing to meet with Pilsudski but declaring that he would be hanged once Russia had won the war. Now, no one knew how the PNA would respond to the Russian advance - would they be welcomed as allies or fought against as enemies?
The Duma condemned the Tsar's actions, not because they favored Polish independence, by and large, but because they believed the Tsar should have dealt more wisely with Pilsudski and that he had hurt the Russian war effort. Now the Tsar - egged on by Rasputin, through Tsarina Alexandra - engaged in a war of words with the Duma, who on August 3 passed a series of resolutions demanding (as they so often had before) a Russian government responsible to the Duma and greater reforms, along with calls for an investigation into the Tsar's handling of the war effort. The Tsar, again egged on by Rasputin, declared the Duma dissolved on August 12.
But the Duma defied the dissolution order and continued to meet, and they issued an appeal to the Russian people, which was cabled nationwide. The people responded; riots broke out in Petrograd, Moscow and other cities, with, ominously, the army joining the protesters. The Tsar considered the possibility of marching to Petrograd to suppress the riots until his generals told him that he would be unable to find enough loyal troops - most of the army regarded him with contempt at best. He was persuaded to abdicate in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. However, Michael refused to take the throne unless it was offered him by the Duma - who were in no mood to make such an offer - and the Russian monarchy came to an end. The Duma declared Russia a republic and themselves formed a Provisional Government.
The Germans' last hope evaporated when the Provisional Government announced it would continue the fight to victory (making no comment on how it would deal with Pilsudski). The Kaiser stubbornly held out to the very end, until rioting erupted in Germany as well, forcing his abdication. The new German republican government signed the armistice, ending the war, on September 30, 1916.
Even before the war was over, with victory in sight, US President Theodore Roosevelt announced he would follow tradition and not run for a third term. He had hoped that his protege, William Howard Taft, would succeed him. However, Taft proved to be a singularly uninspiring candidate and lost to former New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, who outlined in a campaign speech his "Fourteen Points" that he believed would secure a lasting peace.
By the time the peace conference convened in late November 1916, not only did America have a new president (Roosevelt decided to send Wilson with plenipotentiary powers to negotiate to Paris, believing that since Wilson's policies would go into effect soon, he should be the one to handle the peace negotiations), but Russia had fallen into the beginnings of civil war. The Provisional Government from the start had been seen by many as having little credibility, inasmuch as it was imposed more by circumstances than by legal processes, and it quickly faced challenges from both the left (the Workers’ Soviets, who came to be dominated by the Bolsheviks) and the right (monarchists led by General Lavr Kornilov who hoped for a restoration of the monarchy). Soon both factions broke into open fighting. The Bolsheviks would ultimately succeed, after the Provisional Government had come to be dominated by leftist Menshevik Alexander Kerensky, who foolishly sought their help in defeating the Kornilov faction. The rightists were crushed, but in the process the Provisional Government was so weakened by the Bolsheviks that it proved easy for them to take over. By that time not only Poland but the Baltic States, Finland, and Armenia had succeeded in securing their independence.
At the Paris peace conference, Russia had no formal representatives - or, rather, it had three groups: one from each faction. The Allies, unsure who should be regarded as the "legitimate" Russian government, refused to credential any of them, though they were allowed to sit in plenary sessions as "observers." Thus Russia was not formally represented at the Paris peace conference. The resentment this built in Russia would smolder in the years to come.
But that was as nothing compared to the resentment the Treaty of Versailles, signed by Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Turkey on April 9, 1917, would create in Germany. Wilson, for all his rhetoric about creating a lasting peace, made a fatal error. He was deeply intent on his pet project, the League of Nations. So intent was he on securing the League's presence in the treaty that - against the advice of his Canadian and Mexican counterparts - he allowed Britain and France to impose the punitive peace on Germany they had in mind. After all, he reasoned, the League in the future could renegotiate anything controversial. But the Germans didn't see it that way, and the loss of territory (especially to Poland), the crushing reparations payments, the restrictions on the German military, all helped stoke the idea that Germany should have continued fighting and that it was "stabbed in the back" by homegrown traitors. Thus was the stage set for the next war - exactly what Wilson said his League was intended to prevent.
For the more immediate present, the treaty also set the boundaries of the nations of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and codified the great territorial losses experienced by the now-fallen Ottoman Empire - Constantinople, the Asia Minor coast down to Smyrna and along the Black Sea, and all islands in the Aegean were ceded to Greece; Turkish Armenia was ceded to the new Armenian state; an independent Hashemite "Kingdom of Arabia" encompassing Mesopotamia and most of the Arabian peninsula was set up; the French took Syria and Lebanon, including Antioch and Alexandretta; and the British took Palestine and Transjordan.
By the time the peace conference convened in late November 1916, not only did America have a new president (Roosevelt decided to send Wilson with plenipotentiary powers to negotiate to Paris, believing that since Wilson's policies would go into effect soon, he should be the one to handle the peace negotiations), but Russia had fallen into the beginnings of civil war. The Provisional Government from the start had been seen by many as having little credibility, inasmuch as it was imposed more by circumstances than by legal processes, and it quickly faced challenges from both the left (the Workers’ Soviets, who came to be dominated by the Bolsheviks) and the right (monarchists led by General Lavr Kornilov who hoped for a restoration of the monarchy). Soon both factions broke into open fighting. The Bolsheviks would ultimately succeed, after the Provisional Government had come to be dominated by leftist Menshevik Alexander Kerensky, who foolishly sought their help in defeating the Kornilov faction. The rightists were crushed, but in the process the Provisional Government was so weakened by the Bolsheviks that it proved easy for them to take over. By that time not only Poland but the Baltic States, Finland, and Armenia had succeeded in securing their independence.
At the Paris peace conference, Russia had no formal representatives - or, rather, it had three groups: one from each faction. The Allies, unsure who should be regarded as the "legitimate" Russian government, refused to credential any of them, though they were allowed to sit in plenary sessions as "observers." Thus Russia was not formally represented at the Paris peace conference. The resentment this built in Russia would smolder in the years to come.
But that was as nothing compared to the resentment the Treaty of Versailles, signed by Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Turkey on April 9, 1917, would create in Germany. Wilson, for all his rhetoric about creating a lasting peace, made a fatal error. He was deeply intent on his pet project, the League of Nations. So intent was he on securing the League's presence in the treaty that - against the advice of his Canadian and Mexican counterparts - he allowed Britain and France to impose the punitive peace on Germany they had in mind. After all, he reasoned, the League in the future could renegotiate anything controversial. But the Germans didn't see it that way, and the loss of territory (especially to Poland), the crushing reparations payments, the restrictions on the German military, all helped stoke the idea that Germany should have continued fighting and that it was "stabbed in the back" by homegrown traitors. Thus was the stage set for the next war - exactly what Wilson said his League was intended to prevent.
For the more immediate present, the treaty also set the boundaries of the nations of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and codified the great territorial losses experienced by the now-fallen Ottoman Empire - Constantinople, the Asia Minor coast down to Smyrna and along the Black Sea, and all islands in the Aegean were ceded to Greece; Turkish Armenia was ceded to the new Armenian state; an independent Hashemite "Kingdom of Arabia" encompassing Mesopotamia and most of the Arabian peninsula was set up; the French took Syria and Lebanon, including Antioch and Alexandretta; and the British took Palestine and Transjordan.
Here's hoping viewers are still tuned in. We have been hashing out the postwar era a bit and should have updates soon.
Quick question. Does this station resemble any specific real ones from OTL?
Not particularly, but it's designed in such a way that it is approached from the southwest (by SP's Peninsula Corridor) and the northeast (by a tunnel under the Bay connecting to SP, WP and ATSF in Oakland and Emeryville). Most of the station is underground because of the tunnels under the Bay, and is electrified owing to the tunnels. It's meant as a transportation terminal for San Francisco and includes intercity and commuter trains, streetcars and buses and a direct connection to the Ferry Building and the docks, allowing the waterfront of San Francisco to have ferry services to other areas and allow the docking of passenger and cruise ships.
The Commonwealth's Rising
The victory over the Turks at Gallipoli and the successful naval campaign against the Turks showed the incredible abilities of the Commonwealth corps, both the Canadians who so audaciously risked everything to clear mines from the Bosporous and then clear the Turks off of the peninsula to the Australians and New Zealanders who did an even-more-incredible feat to the north at what would be called ANZAC Cove. It was one of the first signs to the world of what was already becoming well known in London and Washington - the countries born from the British Empire were both capable of being powers in their own and being loyal to the metropole which had created them in the first place. London, proud as they unquestionably were at this, were also all too aware that taking the Commonwealth nations for granted was sure to cause all kinds of problems for them down the road, and so in the years after the First World War the respect between London and its dominions - Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa at the time, but there would be many more in the future - grew, with London seeking to use their connections to help with Britain's colonial and economic goals.
Canada had been one of the first to bite in a big way, through the purchase of the three Queen Elizabeth-class battleships that Canada ordered from British shipyards in 1913. Canada's contribution to the Great White Fleet had been its impressive armored cruisers and its first Town-class light cruiser, and the moving into the world of capital ships by the Royal Canadian Navy had only been debated in whether to order British ships or American ones, as Washington was well aware that Canada was looking into capital ships and had offered to Ottawa a trio of the Pennsylvania-class battleships, but the faster speed and larger guns of the Queen Elizabeth class had been selling point. The Canadian vessels also had a key difference from the British ones in the use of Canadian-made boilers and steam turbines, the boilers being Robinson-Mackenzie units which operated at higher temperature and pressure than the Babcock and Wilcox and Yarrow units of the Royal Navy ships, a difference that required the use of American-designed Westinghouse steam turbines, which were also made by Westinghouse Canada's facilities in Toronto. The new powerplant improved the power of the battleships to 82,000 horsepower and gave the Canadian ships the speed that had been promised - indeed, later improvements would see the British ships gaining similarly-designed power plants. The result was the three Canadian battleships - Ontario, Quebec and Acadia - were among the fastest battleships in the world at the time of their commissioning in the fall of 1915, and over the following 30 years the ships proved capable flagships of the Navy. The success of these vessels - they arrived too late for the campaign against the Turks, but saw action in the Balkans and the Battle of the North Sea, and the Canadian ships proved as capable as any in the Royal Navy, and true to form the Canadian units (along with HMAS Australia, which was also present at the Battle of the North Sea) were genuinely respected by the Royal Navy and its personnel.
Australia ended up following the Canadians, though in a roundabout way. HMAS Australia, an Indefigatible-class battlecruiser, had by the end of the war become obsolete, and the Washington Naval Treaty's passing led to the desire of Australia to scrap the aged battlecruiser, but as part of the negotiations both Britain and Canada proposed that four of Britain's five incomplete Admiral-class battlecruisers be completed for the exclusive use of the colonies, with the Royal Canadian Navy proposing a "Commonwealth Pacific" fleet, where the Canadians would assist the Australians in their naval development - Ottawa went so far as to ask Australia if they would be willing to send two complete ships worth of crew to Canada's naval academy at Royal Roads in British Columbia, and that Canada would assist Australia in the development of their Navy, including shipyards capable of handling such large vessels. (Canada did, however, state that if they did this Britain would have to help foot the bill for the Admirals, though Ottawa would be pleasantly surprised when London did indeed do this without much fuss.) The Australians, surprised but happy nonetheless, got additional support from Washington, Mexico City and Manila, and belatedly from Tokyo as well, all of which expressed support for the idea of the Royal Australian Navy becoming a legitimate force. This did indeed result in this happening, and while the original HMAS Australia would be disposed of - it was scrapped in California in the United States in 1923 - the replacement HMAS Australia and its sister ship, HMAS Commonwealth, were indeed completed by the British and subsequently delivered to Canada's Pacific coast, and when the crews were ready from training at Royal Roads, the ships sailed to Australia, arriving in Sydney to great fanfare in May 1925.
For Canada, the Washington Naval Treaty's resulting in the two Admirals being transferred to them was initially a source of some concern over operating costs in Ottawa, but the development of an independent naval fleet had been a key goal of the Liberal governments under Laurier, and William Lyon Mackenzie King followed the example of Laurier and thus the two battlecruisers were indeed built for Canada. Named HMCS Vigilant and HMCS Victorious, the two ships were delivered to Canada in 1924, though the Canadians would be dismayed to find that the ships, though powerful and fast, were rather wet and had a highly-stressed structure, which resulted in the two ships being rebuilt extensively between 1935 and 1937. (The Australians got the same rebuilds in 1939, one at the Pacific Shipyards in British Columbia, the other in Australia.) The extensive fleet of heavy ships assembled by Canada by 1925 was seen by some in Canada as an extravagance, but among many others the ships were a sign of the maturity of the nation, and indeed they were a sign that the "Canadian Century" predicted by Laurier in 1896 was coming to pass. The expansion of the fleet also brought with it the expansion of the Esquimault, Halifax and Quebec City naval bases, as well as the beginnings of the Royal Canadian Air Force, which came into existence in April 1921, taking over units that had been part of the Royal Air Force during the Great War. Canada's growing industrial power and technological advancements were a sign of what was to come, and by the 1930s the Canadian armed forces were overwhelmingly making all of their own equipment or at least able to give it any overhauls needed for its use. Such a path was soon charted by Australia and New Zealand, to be followed by the other nations of the British Empire.
Indeed, as Britain's huge World War I costs began to bite and the massive growth in the world made Britain's pre-war economic advantage evaporate, the British Empire was forced to shift its work with its colonies and independent dominions from them being resource producers for the UK into being economic allies, particularly as all of the larger colonies and dominions - Canada, Australia and South Africa above the others, but New Zealand, India, Malaya, Cyprus and the British territories in the Caribbean were engaged in such development themselves, often helped along by the presence of the other dominions' wealth and connections - sought to develop industries and service sectors far beyond mere resource producers. Britain's allowing of the colonial administrators to work with the independent dominions - something long demanded by several of the dominions, including all of the 'Big Four' dominions - if anything shifted the goalposts further, somewhat to the displeasure at times of the Colonial Office in London. Despite, the growth of the post-war era in the Dominions was swift, and loyal to Britain's heritage as they were they sought to made sure it wasn't just them who benefitted.
For the Amigos, the connections that Ottawa nurtured with London were a benefit to Washington and Mexico City on countless occasions, as the Canadians proved themselves effective diplomats and dealmakers between the Europeans the Amigos, while Paris, having effectively been bailed out of failure in the Great War by the Americans, sought to increase their relationship with the Americans in the post-Great War period. This was welcomed by all three of the Amigos, which were continuing the development of immigration and newcomer support systems, with Canada particularly focusing on building new development in the Prairie Provinces (British Columbia was very much prospering by this point, and the steady integration of First Nations into the society of Canada only added to that) while Mexico was pushing for growth and advancement in some of its southern territories, particularly Honduras and El Salvador. The completion of railroads across this region in the 1880s and 1890s made transportation easier but had still long seen parts of southern Mexico (aside from Costa Rica, which was one of the richest places in Mexico by 1920) somewhat atrophy and only slowly develop, a situation Mexico was not keen on for a lot of reasons.
Indeed, Mexico in many ways was combining many of the best ideas of both of the Amigos. Their "Principle of Peoples" system, established as far back as Benito Juarez' Presidency, established all Mexicans as equals, including those in the territories it had conquered from the Santanistas, and while Mexico had initially been focused economically on the Valley of the Mexico and the great cities of the country's Altiplano, Mexico had pushed - hard - to make life better for all involved, with the development of industries and developments further south, and by the 20th Century Mexico's efforts were showing in the vast numbers of textile mills, fruit orchards, wineries, coffee and cotton farms mixed in with a growing number of oil refineries and mines, and in Central America the Mexicans began in 1912 a major plan to develop hydroelectric resources in the regions, with the first dam, the El Cajon Dam in Honduras, beginning the producing of electricity in 1918, its completion delayed by the Great War. These efforts would pay off handsomely over time, particularly as the hydroelectricity of the region resulted in Nicaragua being the center of an aluminum industry in Mexico, the bauxite imported from Jamaica and the electricity needed to make it coming from hydroelectricity.
The Caribbean changed dramatically between the wars, more than anything as a result of the growth of the influence of Mexico over the Latin American world and the financial issues Britain faced at the end of the First World War. With the massive economic growth in Florida, Cuba and Puerto Rico - taking three of the poorest American states and turning them into some of its richest over the 20th Century - led to major waves of immigration to the United States as a direct result of this, particularly from Haiti and the Dominican Republic and the other islands. While Germany's attempt before WWI to put Haiti on their side of global geopolitics had been an abject failure - their money ended up being a help to Haiti's development but didn't change its political stances - it had gotten the attention of the Amigos, and after World War I it was clear to the British that they desperately needed to reduce their expenditures on their colonial empire. The result was that in 1920 Britain began negotiating with Canada to transfer partial responsibility of the Caribbean territories to Ottawa. Initially London was initially asking for Canada to take over the job of protecting them, but Ottawa, not wanting to be tarred with the increasingly-negative reputation the colonial powers had in the Americas, was soon to make it clear to London that Canada had learned a bitter lesson supporting British colonial adventures in South Africa twenty years before and that if London wanted Ottawa's help, they would need to transfer whatever colonies to Canada, lock stock and barrel. Despite not expecting this, and aware of Canada's loyalty to the British during the Great War, decided to go for this, somewhat to Ottawa's surprise.
London's offer to transfer Caribbean territories to Ottawa was one of the biggest news stories of the year when it broke in March 1921, and it had strong opinions on all sides. Canadians, riding on a growing sense of nationalism that had come from their involvement in the Great War, were as a whole supportive of the idea, and the proposed Caribbean islands drove a wedge in the long-standing relationship between French Canadians and the First Nations - the former felt it was more of Ottawa involving themselves in somebody else's business, the latter was very supportive of the idea thinking it would lead to those islands being much better off as part of Canada than as British colonial possessions - but overall was found to be a positions Canadians supported. The Toronto Star, for example, said in a May 1921 editorial "If Canada is to become a colonial administrator, we owe it to ourselves to do it properly, to do all we can to assist the people of the Caribbean in the formation of their own societies and show ourselves and the world that the same people who fought with such passion for freedom in the Great War will show the same passion for the advancement of others in peacetime."
In the islands, the response was highly positive, even among colonial settlers but most of all among the many Black, Indian and Mestizo residents of the islands, who held the belief that Canada would be much less oppressive as a colonial power than the British had been, a viewpoint backed up by the Treaty of Orillia and other events of the early 20th Century that added to the view that Canada was a nation that respected all of its many varied peoples. Washington and Mexico City were also very supportive, especially the latter, Mexico holding the view that bringing all of the Caribbean islands under the flags of the Amigos or its residents was the best possible scenario for them and would all but end the possibility of colonial threats to any of the Amigos. Washington was more restrained, wanting to keep good alliances with Britain but also publicly supportive of Canada in this regard. It was a less-positive view in many other powers, particularly in Latin America (most of which advocated for complete independence for the islands) and Europe (which saw it as a case of the meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss) aside from France and the Netherlands, both of which had very good relations with the Canadians.
What turned the tide was the continuing problems for the UK in Ireland. Having been fighting a guerilla war since 1919, by 1921 the violence had reached the point of being untenable for London, particularly as the Irish population by then were quite clearly against rule from London, not helped by the notoriously ill-disciplined "Black and Tan" police auxillaries, and similarly untenable for the IRA, which was suffering issues acquiring needed arms and ammunition. What turned the tide towards peace was the speech by King George V, who was more than a little dissatisfied with the violence and dissatisfied with a speech made for him to give to the new Parliament of Northern Ireland. General Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa and a close friend of the King, proposed using the speech as an opportunity to appeal for an end to the violence. The King invited Smuts to provide his thoughts to him and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, which he did, and the ideas took hold, supported by both his majesty and the Prime Minister. The Speech led to the beginning of the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty were supported - loudly - by the Dominions, even as Canada's support of it created a massive wedge between the federal government and Ontario Premier Ernest Drury, who had gotten a not-inconsiderable support from the Orange Order and who wished for Canada to remain neutral. Both Ottawa and Washington offered to mediate a treaty, but in the end it proved unnecessary as the British and the Irish Republicans came to agreements in December 1921.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty stated complete independence for Ireland, but the British were able to get the Irish to agree to the idea of Ireland as a dominion, holding similar status to the "Big Four" dominions of the British Empire, but independent in all other aspects. Britain retained control of three Treaty Ports (though it would withdraw from these in 1933) and it allowed the Protestant-majority northeastern portion of the island to remain part of the United Kingdom if it chose to do so, which they did. An initial demand for Ireland to take a portion of the UK's debt was never enforced, and while ultimately a short civil conflict over the Treaty was fought in Ireland, Ireland's independece was recognized by the UK in 1922 and Ireland took its place as a dominion of the British Empire. While the Irish had little desire to involve themselves in Britain's conflicts (shown most clearly by early neutrality by Dublin in World War II), the relations between the two nations steadily improved with time.
Having succeeded in sorting out the Irish problems, London in 1922 dedicated itself to the question of the Caribbean colonies, and the loud support for them from Canada had shifted the goalposts further. Britain in 1922 planned out an agreement where the right to use the Royal Navy's base at Kingston in Jamaica and Port of Spain on Trinidad would be absolute but all authority on the islands would be turned over to the Canadians. Ottawa, aware of the commitments involved in this, began recruiting large numbers of colonial leaders-to-be and members of police forces and civil services in early 1922, in preparation for their takeover of the islands. On August 25, 1922, Britain and Canada agreed to the transfer of the Caribbean territories in a steady process, aiming to make the transfer as smooth for all involved as possible. The first members of the Caribbean Service of Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were deployed to the islands in the fall of 1922, and through the 1923-1925 period Canadians took over the jobs the British had been doing on the islands with leadership - but to the surprise of many of the islands and the British (but not the Canadians, who had planned this from the start) the Caribbean Service of Canada immediately began recruiting many islanders to be members of the civil services in positions the British had held, as well as reforming and dramatically improving police forces in the islands. By the early 1930s, the Caribbean Service of Canada had over 10,000 employees, the majority being islanders themselves, and Canada's efforts were making them more than a little popular in the islands.
It didn't hurt that the transfer of leadership was almost instantaneously followed by investment, and lots of it. As new jobs came to the islands and the wealth came with them, more than a few of wealth moved to sell to the Amigos. Whether it was petroleum from Trinidad, bauxite from Jamaica (which became aluminum itself starting in the late 1930s) or sugar, rum, fish or tropical woods from the other islands, the islands rapidly inserted themselves into the economic fabric of the Amigos, and the massive growth of tourism to the region in the 1920s (which slowed dramatically during the Depression only to come back on a vastly-bigger scale after World War II) began to make a new world for the islands, particularly as the wealth of metropolitan Canada dramatically increased the number of visitors to the new territories. Similarly, many islanders took advantage of the status within their new colonial leader and headed for the great cities of Canada's metropole, particularly to Toronto, Calgary and Halifax (which already had large black Canadian populations) to seek out new opportunities.
The victory over the Turks at Gallipoli and the successful naval campaign against the Turks showed the incredible abilities of the Commonwealth corps, both the Canadians who so audaciously risked everything to clear mines from the Bosporous and then clear the Turks off of the peninsula to the Australians and New Zealanders who did an even-more-incredible feat to the north at what would be called ANZAC Cove. It was one of the first signs to the world of what was already becoming well known in London and Washington - the countries born from the British Empire were both capable of being powers in their own and being loyal to the metropole which had created them in the first place. London, proud as they unquestionably were at this, were also all too aware that taking the Commonwealth nations for granted was sure to cause all kinds of problems for them down the road, and so in the years after the First World War the respect between London and its dominions - Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa at the time, but there would be many more in the future - grew, with London seeking to use their connections to help with Britain's colonial and economic goals.
Canada had been one of the first to bite in a big way, through the purchase of the three Queen Elizabeth-class battleships that Canada ordered from British shipyards in 1913. Canada's contribution to the Great White Fleet had been its impressive armored cruisers and its first Town-class light cruiser, and the moving into the world of capital ships by the Royal Canadian Navy had only been debated in whether to order British ships or American ones, as Washington was well aware that Canada was looking into capital ships and had offered to Ottawa a trio of the Pennsylvania-class battleships, but the faster speed and larger guns of the Queen Elizabeth class had been selling point. The Canadian vessels also had a key difference from the British ones in the use of Canadian-made boilers and steam turbines, the boilers being Robinson-Mackenzie units which operated at higher temperature and pressure than the Babcock and Wilcox and Yarrow units of the Royal Navy ships, a difference that required the use of American-designed Westinghouse steam turbines, which were also made by Westinghouse Canada's facilities in Toronto. The new powerplant improved the power of the battleships to 82,000 horsepower and gave the Canadian ships the speed that had been promised - indeed, later improvements would see the British ships gaining similarly-designed power plants. The result was the three Canadian battleships - Ontario, Quebec and Acadia - were among the fastest battleships in the world at the time of their commissioning in the fall of 1915, and over the following 30 years the ships proved capable flagships of the Navy. The success of these vessels - they arrived too late for the campaign against the Turks, but saw action in the Balkans and the Battle of the North Sea, and the Canadian ships proved as capable as any in the Royal Navy, and true to form the Canadian units (along with HMAS Australia, which was also present at the Battle of the North Sea) were genuinely respected by the Royal Navy and its personnel.
Australia ended up following the Canadians, though in a roundabout way. HMAS Australia, an Indefigatible-class battlecruiser, had by the end of the war become obsolete, and the Washington Naval Treaty's passing led to the desire of Australia to scrap the aged battlecruiser, but as part of the negotiations both Britain and Canada proposed that four of Britain's five incomplete Admiral-class battlecruisers be completed for the exclusive use of the colonies, with the Royal Canadian Navy proposing a "Commonwealth Pacific" fleet, where the Canadians would assist the Australians in their naval development - Ottawa went so far as to ask Australia if they would be willing to send two complete ships worth of crew to Canada's naval academy at Royal Roads in British Columbia, and that Canada would assist Australia in the development of their Navy, including shipyards capable of handling such large vessels. (Canada did, however, state that if they did this Britain would have to help foot the bill for the Admirals, though Ottawa would be pleasantly surprised when London did indeed do this without much fuss.) The Australians, surprised but happy nonetheless, got additional support from Washington, Mexico City and Manila, and belatedly from Tokyo as well, all of which expressed support for the idea of the Royal Australian Navy becoming a legitimate force. This did indeed result in this happening, and while the original HMAS Australia would be disposed of - it was scrapped in California in the United States in 1923 - the replacement HMAS Australia and its sister ship, HMAS Commonwealth, were indeed completed by the British and subsequently delivered to Canada's Pacific coast, and when the crews were ready from training at Royal Roads, the ships sailed to Australia, arriving in Sydney to great fanfare in May 1925.
For Canada, the Washington Naval Treaty's resulting in the two Admirals being transferred to them was initially a source of some concern over operating costs in Ottawa, but the development of an independent naval fleet had been a key goal of the Liberal governments under Laurier, and William Lyon Mackenzie King followed the example of Laurier and thus the two battlecruisers were indeed built for Canada. Named HMCS Vigilant and HMCS Victorious, the two ships were delivered to Canada in 1924, though the Canadians would be dismayed to find that the ships, though powerful and fast, were rather wet and had a highly-stressed structure, which resulted in the two ships being rebuilt extensively between 1935 and 1937. (The Australians got the same rebuilds in 1939, one at the Pacific Shipyards in British Columbia, the other in Australia.) The extensive fleet of heavy ships assembled by Canada by 1925 was seen by some in Canada as an extravagance, but among many others the ships were a sign of the maturity of the nation, and indeed they were a sign that the "Canadian Century" predicted by Laurier in 1896 was coming to pass. The expansion of the fleet also brought with it the expansion of the Esquimault, Halifax and Quebec City naval bases, as well as the beginnings of the Royal Canadian Air Force, which came into existence in April 1921, taking over units that had been part of the Royal Air Force during the Great War. Canada's growing industrial power and technological advancements were a sign of what was to come, and by the 1930s the Canadian armed forces were overwhelmingly making all of their own equipment or at least able to give it any overhauls needed for its use. Such a path was soon charted by Australia and New Zealand, to be followed by the other nations of the British Empire.
Indeed, as Britain's huge World War I costs began to bite and the massive growth in the world made Britain's pre-war economic advantage evaporate, the British Empire was forced to shift its work with its colonies and independent dominions from them being resource producers for the UK into being economic allies, particularly as all of the larger colonies and dominions - Canada, Australia and South Africa above the others, but New Zealand, India, Malaya, Cyprus and the British territories in the Caribbean were engaged in such development themselves, often helped along by the presence of the other dominions' wealth and connections - sought to develop industries and service sectors far beyond mere resource producers. Britain's allowing of the colonial administrators to work with the independent dominions - something long demanded by several of the dominions, including all of the 'Big Four' dominions - if anything shifted the goalposts further, somewhat to the displeasure at times of the Colonial Office in London. Despite, the growth of the post-war era in the Dominions was swift, and loyal to Britain's heritage as they were they sought to made sure it wasn't just them who benefitted.
For the Amigos, the connections that Ottawa nurtured with London were a benefit to Washington and Mexico City on countless occasions, as the Canadians proved themselves effective diplomats and dealmakers between the Europeans the Amigos, while Paris, having effectively been bailed out of failure in the Great War by the Americans, sought to increase their relationship with the Americans in the post-Great War period. This was welcomed by all three of the Amigos, which were continuing the development of immigration and newcomer support systems, with Canada particularly focusing on building new development in the Prairie Provinces (British Columbia was very much prospering by this point, and the steady integration of First Nations into the society of Canada only added to that) while Mexico was pushing for growth and advancement in some of its southern territories, particularly Honduras and El Salvador. The completion of railroads across this region in the 1880s and 1890s made transportation easier but had still long seen parts of southern Mexico (aside from Costa Rica, which was one of the richest places in Mexico by 1920) somewhat atrophy and only slowly develop, a situation Mexico was not keen on for a lot of reasons.
Indeed, Mexico in many ways was combining many of the best ideas of both of the Amigos. Their "Principle of Peoples" system, established as far back as Benito Juarez' Presidency, established all Mexicans as equals, including those in the territories it had conquered from the Santanistas, and while Mexico had initially been focused economically on the Valley of the Mexico and the great cities of the country's Altiplano, Mexico had pushed - hard - to make life better for all involved, with the development of industries and developments further south, and by the 20th Century Mexico's efforts were showing in the vast numbers of textile mills, fruit orchards, wineries, coffee and cotton farms mixed in with a growing number of oil refineries and mines, and in Central America the Mexicans began in 1912 a major plan to develop hydroelectric resources in the regions, with the first dam, the El Cajon Dam in Honduras, beginning the producing of electricity in 1918, its completion delayed by the Great War. These efforts would pay off handsomely over time, particularly as the hydroelectricity of the region resulted in Nicaragua being the center of an aluminum industry in Mexico, the bauxite imported from Jamaica and the electricity needed to make it coming from hydroelectricity.
The Caribbean changed dramatically between the wars, more than anything as a result of the growth of the influence of Mexico over the Latin American world and the financial issues Britain faced at the end of the First World War. With the massive economic growth in Florida, Cuba and Puerto Rico - taking three of the poorest American states and turning them into some of its richest over the 20th Century - led to major waves of immigration to the United States as a direct result of this, particularly from Haiti and the Dominican Republic and the other islands. While Germany's attempt before WWI to put Haiti on their side of global geopolitics had been an abject failure - their money ended up being a help to Haiti's development but didn't change its political stances - it had gotten the attention of the Amigos, and after World War I it was clear to the British that they desperately needed to reduce their expenditures on their colonial empire. The result was that in 1920 Britain began negotiating with Canada to transfer partial responsibility of the Caribbean territories to Ottawa. Initially London was initially asking for Canada to take over the job of protecting them, but Ottawa, not wanting to be tarred with the increasingly-negative reputation the colonial powers had in the Americas, was soon to make it clear to London that Canada had learned a bitter lesson supporting British colonial adventures in South Africa twenty years before and that if London wanted Ottawa's help, they would need to transfer whatever colonies to Canada, lock stock and barrel. Despite not expecting this, and aware of Canada's loyalty to the British during the Great War, decided to go for this, somewhat to Ottawa's surprise.
London's offer to transfer Caribbean territories to Ottawa was one of the biggest news stories of the year when it broke in March 1921, and it had strong opinions on all sides. Canadians, riding on a growing sense of nationalism that had come from their involvement in the Great War, were as a whole supportive of the idea, and the proposed Caribbean islands drove a wedge in the long-standing relationship between French Canadians and the First Nations - the former felt it was more of Ottawa involving themselves in somebody else's business, the latter was very supportive of the idea thinking it would lead to those islands being much better off as part of Canada than as British colonial possessions - but overall was found to be a positions Canadians supported. The Toronto Star, for example, said in a May 1921 editorial "If Canada is to become a colonial administrator, we owe it to ourselves to do it properly, to do all we can to assist the people of the Caribbean in the formation of their own societies and show ourselves and the world that the same people who fought with such passion for freedom in the Great War will show the same passion for the advancement of others in peacetime."
In the islands, the response was highly positive, even among colonial settlers but most of all among the many Black, Indian and Mestizo residents of the islands, who held the belief that Canada would be much less oppressive as a colonial power than the British had been, a viewpoint backed up by the Treaty of Orillia and other events of the early 20th Century that added to the view that Canada was a nation that respected all of its many varied peoples. Washington and Mexico City were also very supportive, especially the latter, Mexico holding the view that bringing all of the Caribbean islands under the flags of the Amigos or its residents was the best possible scenario for them and would all but end the possibility of colonial threats to any of the Amigos. Washington was more restrained, wanting to keep good alliances with Britain but also publicly supportive of Canada in this regard. It was a less-positive view in many other powers, particularly in Latin America (most of which advocated for complete independence for the islands) and Europe (which saw it as a case of the meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss) aside from France and the Netherlands, both of which had very good relations with the Canadians.
What turned the tide was the continuing problems for the UK in Ireland. Having been fighting a guerilla war since 1919, by 1921 the violence had reached the point of being untenable for London, particularly as the Irish population by then were quite clearly against rule from London, not helped by the notoriously ill-disciplined "Black and Tan" police auxillaries, and similarly untenable for the IRA, which was suffering issues acquiring needed arms and ammunition. What turned the tide towards peace was the speech by King George V, who was more than a little dissatisfied with the violence and dissatisfied with a speech made for him to give to the new Parliament of Northern Ireland. General Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa and a close friend of the King, proposed using the speech as an opportunity to appeal for an end to the violence. The King invited Smuts to provide his thoughts to him and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, which he did, and the ideas took hold, supported by both his majesty and the Prime Minister. The Speech led to the beginning of the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty were supported - loudly - by the Dominions, even as Canada's support of it created a massive wedge between the federal government and Ontario Premier Ernest Drury, who had gotten a not-inconsiderable support from the Orange Order and who wished for Canada to remain neutral. Both Ottawa and Washington offered to mediate a treaty, but in the end it proved unnecessary as the British and the Irish Republicans came to agreements in December 1921.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty stated complete independence for Ireland, but the British were able to get the Irish to agree to the idea of Ireland as a dominion, holding similar status to the "Big Four" dominions of the British Empire, but independent in all other aspects. Britain retained control of three Treaty Ports (though it would withdraw from these in 1933) and it allowed the Protestant-majority northeastern portion of the island to remain part of the United Kingdom if it chose to do so, which they did. An initial demand for Ireland to take a portion of the UK's debt was never enforced, and while ultimately a short civil conflict over the Treaty was fought in Ireland, Ireland's independece was recognized by the UK in 1922 and Ireland took its place as a dominion of the British Empire. While the Irish had little desire to involve themselves in Britain's conflicts (shown most clearly by early neutrality by Dublin in World War II), the relations between the two nations steadily improved with time.
Having succeeded in sorting out the Irish problems, London in 1922 dedicated itself to the question of the Caribbean colonies, and the loud support for them from Canada had shifted the goalposts further. Britain in 1922 planned out an agreement where the right to use the Royal Navy's base at Kingston in Jamaica and Port of Spain on Trinidad would be absolute but all authority on the islands would be turned over to the Canadians. Ottawa, aware of the commitments involved in this, began recruiting large numbers of colonial leaders-to-be and members of police forces and civil services in early 1922, in preparation for their takeover of the islands. On August 25, 1922, Britain and Canada agreed to the transfer of the Caribbean territories in a steady process, aiming to make the transfer as smooth for all involved as possible. The first members of the Caribbean Service of Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were deployed to the islands in the fall of 1922, and through the 1923-1925 period Canadians took over the jobs the British had been doing on the islands with leadership - but to the surprise of many of the islands and the British (but not the Canadians, who had planned this from the start) the Caribbean Service of Canada immediately began recruiting many islanders to be members of the civil services in positions the British had held, as well as reforming and dramatically improving police forces in the islands. By the early 1930s, the Caribbean Service of Canada had over 10,000 employees, the majority being islanders themselves, and Canada's efforts were making them more than a little popular in the islands.
It didn't hurt that the transfer of leadership was almost instantaneously followed by investment, and lots of it. As new jobs came to the islands and the wealth came with them, more than a few of wealth moved to sell to the Amigos. Whether it was petroleum from Trinidad, bauxite from Jamaica (which became aluminum itself starting in the late 1930s) or sugar, rum, fish or tropical woods from the other islands, the islands rapidly inserted themselves into the economic fabric of the Amigos, and the massive growth of tourism to the region in the 1920s (which slowed dramatically during the Depression only to come back on a vastly-bigger scale after World War II) began to make a new world for the islands, particularly as the wealth of metropolitan Canada dramatically increased the number of visitors to the new territories. Similarly, many islanders took advantage of the status within their new colonial leader and headed for the great cities of Canada's metropole, particularly to Toronto, Calgary and Halifax (which already had large black Canadian populations) to seek out new opportunities.