I think someone did a list a while ago. I don't think the Socialists tried running anyone until 1884 after Lincoln brouhht in the left wing of the Republicans and convinced them to actually stand for office and accept seats if they won. I imagine would have been their candidate in 84 for sake of the ballot.. and then it would have gone from there.
TL-191: Filling the Gaps
- Thread starter Craigo
- Start date
I have a question on my mind recently about native American boarding school and how TL191 US will did the same thing or not?
Would they still exist but a larger push to integration because of Remembrance ideology and nationalism is bigger in America or won't fund boarding schools because US think the native tribes are traitors and wouldn't be even bothered to integrate them in America society?
Would they still exist but a larger push to integration because of Remembrance ideology and nationalism is bigger in America or won't fund boarding schools because US think the native tribes are traitors and wouldn't be even bothered to integrate them in America society?
From what I remember in the books, the Union armies just crushed all the plains tribes and tribes in the southwest with numbers and firearms
I never understood why General MacArthur was never relieved in GWII. Even more stunning, he was given command of the U.S. army group that captured Richmond. I suppose he had decent support (either in the U.S. Congress or War Department), but the man was a walking disaster for his subordinates.
bguy
Donor
MacArthur was the general that held down Houston against a major armed rebellion for six years. That probably made him a national hero and thus likely made him politically untouchable. President LaFollette would have feared that if he sacked MacArthur, "the Hero of Houston", then MacArthur would instantly become a candidate for president in 1944 and go around claiming that the Socialists only relieved him as a shabby attempt to make him the scapegoat for their own incompetence and that his advance on Richmond only failed due to the Socialists underfunding the military in the 30s and then deliberately sabotaging his campaign (when the War Department vetoed his planned amphibious attack.) Those kind of attacks would carry a lot of weight given MacArthur's prior celebrated service (and the fact that the Socialist credibility on defense matters is pretty much zero after the Richmond Agreement), so LaFollette probably figured it was much safer just to keep MacArthur in a token command position while quietly starving his front of reinforcements so MacArthur can't launch any more failed attacks. (Which is why we don't see any major US offensives on the Virginia Front again until 1944 when the Confederates are starting to collapse.)
With everything going to Morrell in the west. Is that why Dowling was sent to Virginia after his service in Texas? Because it was more of a sideshow compared to the offenses in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia?
It's true MacArthur kept a lid on Houston (though I would argue Morrell had a huge hand in that), but his bad planning for the Virginia Campaign in 1942 would certainly wipe away his performance in the former. He was hauled before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War so his support in Congress was probably limited to hardline Democrats.
LaFollette keeping Mac in command due to potential political challenges is an interesting theory though. I recall an exchange from IATD between Dowling and Abell where the former questions the latter about Mac getting an army group command. Abell responded with something aking to "he's the man on the spot", indicating that the decision may have been out of the War Department's hands.
bguy
Donor
Agreed, but as the commanding general MacArthur probably still got most of the credit with the press and public. (And especially since Morrell isn't the type to seek favorable press attention on his own, so no one would really be pushing back against MacArthur's narrative.)
I'm sure the botched Virginia Campaign took some of the shine off MacArthur's star but IOTL there's a lot of precedent for politically connected generals being extremely difficult to get rid of even after they make serious mistakes (think FDR not sacking MacArthur after the loss of the Philippines, or Lincoln not being willing to sack McClellan until after the '62 midterms and not sacking Ben Butler after the Bermuda Hundreds Campaign), and I think the same forces would be at play in TL-191.
Roosevelt was pretty young when Custer died in OTL so he might just change his opinions. That is not that strange. And do we know much about Custer's life and speciality career between Southern Secession and First Great War? Perhaps he commits things which make impression to Roosevelt.
What soured his impression of Custer was an argument during the Second Mexican War. They fought about it at Custer's headquarters at the end of the First Great War.
Would anyone be interested in an alt U scenario of Clarence Potter running for the C.S. Presidency against a certain General Fulgencio Batista, who campaigns as a Whig?
I was also wondering if anyone has some thoughts as to how the C.S. Supreme Court would function compared to its U.S. counterpart?
I was also wondering if anyone has some thoughts as to how the C.S. Supreme Court would function compared to its U.S. counterpart?
Well, given Custer's close association with McClellan, and that the war ends before he has a chance to make his own name, TTL Custer is probably somewhere between "unpopular" and "unknown" when the war ends, and likely holds onto his army commission purely because so many officers went Confederate in 1860-61. What does TTL Custer have as of 1862? Close aid and friend to the idiot who lost the war, and that's it. No brigade command, nothing but that one incident where he charged into a river to show how deep it was (which lacks any of the mystique his personality gave it IOTL).
That might be why Custer is exiled to the plains to hunt border-hopping Indians rather than a more prestigious post. In TL-191, Custer is a "literally who?" for most of Roosevelt's young life.
The History of the Socialist Party
Part 1: 1862-1900
The Formation of the Socialist Party: Lincolnism, Greenbackism, Marxism, and Lassallism
Part 1: 1862-1900
The Formation of the Socialist Party: Lincolnism, Greenbackism, Marxism, and Lassallism
To find the origin of the Socialist Party, it is important not just to look at the union between Lincoln’s Republican left and Sorge’s Chicago Socialist Alliance, but rather at the rise in labor politics and agitation which characterized the period following the War of Secession. Out of the post-bellum Republican Party, the two most relevant tendencies that emerged out of that party destined for 16 years of permanent opposition were Greenbackism and radical Labor Republicanism. The former supported the wartime policy of printing non-gold backed paper money, “Greenbacks”, a policy which would benefit indebted farmers and workers, while the latter, a more visionary and radical group, sought to align the Republican Party against the “slavery of wage labor”, just as it had opposed the chattel slavery of the southern states.
At first, the Labor Republicans were supportive of a classical Jeffersonian vision of a free republic of property-owning self-sufficient free-willed farmers. The continuing process of industrial development however brought about a new perspective; of wage labor as a structural dependence to be done away with through collective action, in favor of a “cooperative commonwealth” of common ownership and free production. It was this tendency to which Abraham Lincoln became attached in his return to political action after the War of Secession.
The Greenbacks, meanwhile, were active in organizing the National Labor Union in 1863, an early attempt at a consolidated national federation of US trade unions. Though initially seeing significant successes, the NLU declined after the eight-hour statute it had campaigned for was passed by Congress and implemented through a reduction of wages. It would however foreshadow the later developments in labor activism that would follow.
Outside of the Republicans meanwhile, more radical and explicitly socialistic movements were emerging. The First International had moved its headquarters to New York City in 1872, though it was severely disorganized due to the conflict between the Marxists and Bakuninites within the organization. Two years later, Lassallean members of the International formed the Social Democratic Workingmen’s Party of North America (SDWPNA), the second socialist party in the world, and the first in the United States. Its primarily German-speaking membership was unable to achieve significant electoral success however, and the more Americanised socialists remained skeptical of their preference for parliamentary action; they themselves were aligned towards trade union action, though by the 1880s, with the International in a state of collapse, a turn towards electoral politics seemed more and more possible.
Lincoln’s split from the Republican Party therefore opened the doors to the unification of the radical left under a single political platform. The Labor Republicans dutifully followed Lincoln to the unification convention of January 1882, and with the Republicans in a state of political collapse, the Greenbacks soon followed. The Marxists and Lassalleans meanwhile, entering through organizations such as Friedrich Sorge’s Chicago Socialist Alliance and the SDWPNA, formed the left wing of the new party. Sorge himself had made a reputation as a firm anti-electoralist during the failed unification buzz of the 1870s, but Marx’s own increasing optimism for a workers’ party in the United States had softened him to the idea of electoral participation, even under a broader party. Each faction was itself transformed by participation; Lincoln’s “Marxist turn” near the end of his life by extension transformed the ex-Labor Republicans into a “political Marxist” group, taking their position in the center of the party, with the Greenbacks to their right and the International Marxists to their left.
The young party would see immediate success in the Congressional Elections of 1882. Of the 229 members of the house, it elected 13, primarily from western states. The most notable freshmen included Ernst Schmidt, a Forty-Eighter elected from Chicago, Thompson H. Murch, a former Greenbacker elected from Maine, and James B. Weaver, the Party’s candidate for President in 1888, elected from Iowa. On the heels of this initial success, the Party nominated an aging Lincoln for President in 1884. In his final grand political stand, the former President won 10.6% of the vote, a greater share than the Socialists’ sister party in Germany were receiving (though unlike the SPD, the Socialists were not an illegal party).
The Trade Union Struggle: Haymarket and the AFL
By the time of his death in 1885, Lincoln had left in place a Party in good health, ready to face the challenges of the following years. The english-language socialist press was growing rapidly, and twice in a row the Socialists had gained substantially in Congress. The post-war downturn of the 1880s had substantially benefited both the Party and the leftist elements outside of it, namely the Anarchists, and the Party’s relationship with labor organizations was strong.
The union movement had developed in part in parallel to the Socialist Party. By the mid-1880s, the main labor grouping was by this point the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions, which had by 1882 mostly absorbed the old Knights of Labor. Partially tied to the Socialist Party, the FOTLU was engulfed in internal debates emerging from the contradictions of its formation; namely industrial unionism versus craft unionism, skilled versus unskilled organization, and the question of affiliation with the Socialist Party. The “conservative” face of craft-unionist anti-affiliationism was Samuel Gompers, who had resolutely rejected socialism in the 1870s.
In October 1884, the FOTLU unanimously elected to demand the implementation of a universal eight-hour workday by May 1, 1886. As the chosen day approached, labor unions prepared for a general strike in support of the eight-hour day, supported politically by the Socialist Party. When the day arrived, over half a million workers struck for the eight-hour day. Tens of thousands marched in the streets of the US’ major cities, including 50,000 in Chicago, the center of the Socialist movement. Though the movement was initially peaceful, on May 4, an attempt by the police to disperse the rally ended in violence, as a homemade bomb was thrown into the advancing police, killing one and severely wounding several others. The police then opened fire on the crowd, which after briefly returning fire, quickly dispersed. Seven policemen and at least five workers were killed, with nearly a hundred workers wounded.
The aftermath of Haymarket saw both a harsh crackdown on union activity, as well as the rebounding, unification, and radicalisation of the labor movement. The prosecution of several labor radicals, both involved and uninvolved with the events at Haymarket, was regarded by the labor movement as a severe misscarriage of justice, while among conservatives, paranoia surrounding “bomb-throwing anarchists” became widespread. The Socialist Party stood alone in denouncing the prosecutions, with both Republicans and Democrats supporting the suppression of anarchist agitation. As a result, political ties between unions and the Socialist Party were strengthened.
In 1889, the Knights of Labor formally merged into the FOTLU to form the American Federation of Labor, a unified labor federation which would come to encompass a majority of American unions. Industrial unionism came to be the predominant form of unionism in the United States, with craft unionism taking on a secondary role, and the AFL’s close relationship with the Socialist Party was formalized in 1895, when the AFL was granted permanent representation on the Socialist Party’s Executive Committee. In 1890, in commemoration of Haymarket, the Second International adopted a resolution recognising May 1 as International Workers’ Day.
Nonetheless, the immediate political consequences for the Socialist Party proved to be a setback of sorts. 1886 was the first year in which the Party lost seats in Congress, and the repressive laws against labor agitation passed by the Thurman and Reed administrations in the wake of Haymarket were often used to justify police action against the Party itself, limiting their freedom of action and resulting in the imprisonment of numerous Party activists. Nonetheless, the party continued to grow; the moderate “Populist” Weaver was nominated in 1888, winning two states, Colorado and Nevada, for the Socialist ticket, an improvement on Lincoln’s bid.
A “Pure Marxist Program”: De Leon and the Late-19th Century
It was around this time that one of the most influential theorists and agitators of the Socialist Party entered the fray. Daniel De Leon, a Curaçaoan-American academic radicalized by labor agitation in New York in the 1880s, joined the Socialist Party in 1890, and the next year launched People, a radical english-language newspaper, which soon had a significant circulation in New York City. By this point, with the adoption of the explicitly Marxist Milwaukee Program in 1889, there were three factions of significance within the Socialist Party: The “Populist” right, made up of the remnants of the Greenback movement as well as moderate defectors from the Democrats and Republicans, backed by western farmers and miners; the “Lincolnian-Marxist” center, a synthesis of ex-Labor Republicans, as well as the ex-Lassallians, marginalized after the uptick in labor radicalism surrounding Haymarket and the adoption of the Milwaukee Program; and a small “International Marxist” left, primarily supported by Germans and other radical immigrant communities.
De Leon saw that if the International Marxists were to gain any substantial following, they would have to ‘become out and out American’, as he put it. De Leon, unlike most Internationalists, believed in the democratic promises of the US Constitution, though he was under no illusion socialism could simply be elected into being. De Leon believed that the United States, as one of the most developed economies in the world, was the most likely place for the world socialist revolution to begin. In terms of tactics, he sought to further the developments in trade unionism which had occurred in the 1880s, pushing for further integration of labor and the Socialist Party.
De Leon gained a reputation as a magnificent, eloquent, and learned speaker, effectively utilizing the ‘authority of being learned’ in his 1891 speaking tour, which spread Internationalist ideas across the country. The next year, De Leon won 31% of the vote for a seat in Congress, and People, De Leon’s Internationalist newspaper, gained in readership and prestige nationwide. The Internationalist faction, once clearly sidelined by the groups which were more capable of presenting themselves as continuations of a domestic political tradition, were now on the upsurge.
This was no doubt in part due to De Leon’s excellent skills as an organizer, which he soon turned to the trade union struggle. In 1893, De Leon aided James R. Sovereign’s bid for the Secretaryship of the AFL, resulting in the final defeat of the Gompers faction and the appointment of De Leon’s associate Lucien Sanial as editor of the union newspaper. From this position of strength, De Leon continued to advocate for industrial unionism over craft unionism, and steadily the radicals climbed in influence in the union movement.
Meanwhile electorally, the Socialist Party as a whole continued to gain ground. In 1892, Edward Bellamy, a utopian socialist supported by the Lincolnian-Marxists, carried both the states that Weaver had as well as newly admitted Idaho and Dakota, in a year which also saw an upsurge in support for the Republican Party (John Sherman would carry more states and electoral votes than any future Republican candidate). The true breakthrough however would come in 1896. For the Republican Party, the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan, a recently defected Democratic congressman, was meant to reinvigorate the lagging party. Instead, Socialist Senator James H. Kyle of Dakota, a Populist, added three states to the Socialist column to win second place.
Though the Socialists still made up only a bit more than a tenth of Congress, compared to a quarter for Republicans, they had set the foundations for their emergence as the primary opposition to the Democrats in the 20th Century. This was confirmed in 1900; The Republicans, weary of the Bryan experiment, nominated conservative Ambassador to France John Hay for President. This alienated the remaining Republican left, and with the right already having defected to the Democrats, the Republicans were entirely extinguished on the electoral map. Jacob S. Coxey, the leader of “Coxey’s Army” of unemployed marchers (and the latest in a series of compromise candidates selected between the Populists and Lincolnian-Marxists), was therefore the only opposition candidate to win electoral votes against President Alfred Thayer Mahan. This, combined with the Socialists outpacing the Republicans in Congress in 1898, firmly established the Socialists as the main opposition to the Democrats in the years to come.
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kernel
Gone Fishin'
I wonder if AustroMarxism will have a larger following ITTL, especially among socialists in Europe. Could it also be adopted by socialists in America as a theoretical way to unify the working classes of both North ans South?
The Socialists aren't really interested in American reunification, other than under a world republic in the case of the Internationalists. National Personal Autonomy seems to have been more popular in cases where clear ethnic borders made federalism/independence unfeasible (ie. the Habsburg Empire and the Bundists), but I've never seen it discussed as a relevant tendency in North America.
Also, no Third International means no 2 1/2 International. I don't think there's any reason to change the course of the Socialist movement in Europe before the Great War.
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