Union and Liberty: An American TL
- Thread starter wilcoxchar
- Start date
Part One Hundred Thirty-Eight: Turn of the Century South America
The next update's done, and this one's a long one!
Part One Hundred Thirty-Eight: Turn of the Century South America
Bolivia's Aristocratic Republic:
The late 19th century is widely regarded as the height of Bolivia's power in South America and an era of prosperity and stability for the Andean country. After a rocky start during the split of the Peru-Bolivia Confederation after independence, the economic fortunes of Bolivia soared in the middle of the century. Mining and basic industry in the western half of the country and nitrate production in the southwest triggered an economic boom in the 1860s and 1870s that allowed Bolivia to become one of the great powers of the South American continent. The economic boom was combined with the political leadership of Narciso Campero. Campero came to power in 1867 in a coup overthrowing the short-lived presidency of Mariano Melgarejo, who himself overthrew Manuel Isidoro Belzu, a populist authoritarian leader who had ruled Bolivia for nearly a decade.
After the ouster of Mariano Melgarejo, Narciso Campero took a leading role in reestablishing regular political institutions in the country. Campero attempted to rule outside of any politics as the head of a broad unified Partido Nacional. For the most part, Campero was successful in this role and under his rule stability and success returned to Bolivia. Campero was elected to the presidency in 1868 and 1872 with wide majorities with few complications. Though the property restrictions and lack of suffrage for indigenous Bolivians mar the fairness of the elections during this period from a modern perspective, Campero was frequently compared to Simón Bolívar and George Washington at the time in his efforts to entrench democracy in the Andean nation.
Narciso Campero stepped down from the presidency in 1880 after serving three terms. In his stead, Campero's hand selected Vice President Nicolás de Piérola succeeded him in the presidency[1]. De Piérola continued to lead Bolivia with little opposition in the Congress. However, Campero stayed a close adviser to de Piérola and was appointed supreme military commander during the Bolivian intervention in the Platinean War. De Piérola took advantage of Bolivia's strong economic and military position to assist Mokoguay and Tucuman against Argentina, cementing Bolivia's position as a premier power on the continent. During de Piérola's presidency, Bolivia also used its vast mineral wealth to begin issuing the Bolivian libra, a silver currency that gained wide use throughout South America and gave Bolivia unprecedented monetary stability in the late 19th century[2].
While Nicolás de Piérola secured Bolivia's position of power in South America, his successors began a slide toward corruption. Following de Piérola, the Partido Nacional came to be dominated by two men; Gregorio Pacheco and Aniceto Arce, who frequently traded off presidential terms during the 1880s and 1890s. Both presidents had made their fortunes in Bolivia's lucrative silver industry and by the 1880s had become two of the wealthiest men in Bolivia. Pacheco enacted some reforms with support of the Partido Liberal in the Bolivian Congress such as granting indigenous men the right to vote, and removing the property qualification for municipal elections. However, elections to the presidency and to both chambers of the Bolivian Congress still had literacy and property requirements, so most lower class Bolivians still could not vote in national elections.
Bolivia's long run of stability that coincided with the dominance of the Partido Nacional ended abruptly in the early 20th century. The outbreak of the Great War, while it had not directly involved Bolivia, led to a global economic downturn and a protracted recession in Bolivia. Additionally, the stability of alternating presidencies from Gregorio Pacheco and Aniceto Arce had ended with the deaths of Pacheco in 1899 and Arce in 1904. The continued dominance of the business elite in Bolivian politics, and especially the sale of important resource interests to foreign companies around the turn of the century ignited resentment of the current elite among both the working classes and the indigenous peoples of Bolivia, two groups which frequently overlapped. A drought in 1911 and the assassination of President Mariano Baptista led to mass protests in the rural highland regions, centered around Oruro and Cochabamba. By the next year, the protests had become organized into a full scale insurgency.
The insurgency was led by two members of the Bolivian military: general Bautista Saavedra Mallea[3] and Colonel Pablo Zarate Willka. Saavedra and Willka declared the Bolivian government unjust due to its treatment of the Aymara and Quechua populations and defected to organize a revolutionary guerrilla force in central Bolivia. After the occupation of a wide swath of territory by the guerrillas near Oruro, communication from the capital of Sucre was cut off from much of the rest of the country. Rather than make a push for the capital, Willka and Saavedra pushed north, taking La Paz, Sorata, and Puno, securing much of the area surrounding Lake Titicaca. After the capture of La Paz, Willka and Saavedra set up a provisional junta in the city. Saavedra was the clear leader of the junta, evoking the memory of Tupac and Tomás Katari in Saavedra and Willka to gain a greater following among the people. With Saavedra, a significant chunk of the Bolivian military had defected to the revolutionary forces and they now were poised to take over Sucre.
With the rise of the revolutionary forces, the Bolivian Revolution ended its first phase as Bautista Saavedra outmaneuvered Willka in the provisional junta in La Paz. Saavedra had the loyalty of much of the defecting military forces and launched a dual attack south against Sucre and west against Arequipa to secure the central corridor of Bolivia, and with it, control over the country. Many of the old elite fled Bolivia as the revolutionary army approached, going to Peru or Tucuman. However, soon after the overthrow of the Bolivian government by Willka and Saavedra, the two leaders began to split and feud regarding the future of the new government. Saavedra wanted to secure power in a strong central government, clearly seeing himself as an authoritarian voice for the people. Willka, aligned with other members of the junta such as Guillermo Billinghurst, Jenaro Reinaga, and Alejandra Chavarria[4], wanted to build a strong civil institutions and a new liberal constitution that would protect the rights of the indigenous peoples of Bolivia.
When Saavedra saw the majority of the new Bolivian government turning against him, he proclaimed himself president of Bolivia in an attempted coup against the ruling junta. Saavedra's loyal forces briefly maintained control over much of Bolivia, but pockets of resistance, especially the coastal region which was still held by forces loyal to the pre-revolutionary government, quickly weakened Saavedra's position. In 1913, Saavedra was killed in a battle at the plain of El Alto outside of La Paz as the two factions of the Bolivian Revolutionary forces fought for control of the new capital. Following Saavedra's death, the rest of the military mostly fell in line with the governing junta. The Convention of La Paz formally established a new Bolivian government and constitution with very progressive reforms. Billinghurst was a major influence on the new constitution, inserting Morelian language into the constitution regarding promises of land rights for indigenous peoples and language combining both Catholic and indigenous religious teachings. However, the new Bolivian constitution went even further. Alejandra Chavarria, great-great-granddaughter of Tomás Katari, helped enshrined the rights of women and women's suffrage in the Bolivian constitution, as well as bringing further merit to the adoption of "katarismo" and the connection of the Bolivian Revolution to the indigenous rebellions against Spanish colonial rule. In 1917, for the first elections of the new Bolivia, the three leaders created the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Guillermo Billinghurst became the first leader of the PRI after Willka declined, and was elected the first President of Bolivia under the La Paz Constitution. Billinghurst retained a high popularity throughout his presidency and his administration began the dominance of the populist PRI in Bolivia for decades to follow.
The Platinean Miracle:
The decades preceding the turn of the 20th century were a transformative time for much of South America, not just for Bolivia. With the unification of Mokoguay under the leadership of Paraguayan Francisco Solano López, there was now a powerful counterweight to both Brazil and Argentina in the influence around the Rio de la Plata. Solano López was the younger member of a political dynasty that had ruled Paraguay for nearly forty years before the creation of Mokoguay, and the near dictator was eager to expand his power in South America. The federal crisis in Argentina and the alliance with the Rio Grande Republic and Uruguay laid the groundwork, but Argentina's closure of the Parana River to the free flow of international commerce in 1882 provided the trigger for the Platinean War that let President Lopez fully flex Paraguay's military might.
Few observers had expected the Mokoguayan nations to perform well in the Platinean War initially as Argentina had the upper hand at the start of the war. However, many international observers underestimated the Paraguayan industrial miracle Francisco Solano Lopez had engineered. The Paraguayan dictator attracted enormous foreign investment during the 1860s and 1870s, exploiting Paraguay's abundance of natural resources to jump start his nation's economy. Lopez managed to court both British and French investment, despite the enmity between the two countries, and used the two nations to encourage exports from Paraguay and internal development. One of the first railroad and telegraph networks in South America was completed in 1865 between the newly constructed steel factory at Ybycui[5] and the capital of Asuncion. This industrialization along with the neutrality of Brazil during the Platinean War greatly aided Mokoguay in turning the tide against Argentina in the 1880s.
Once the Platinean War came to a close and Mokoguay affirmed its independence and sovereign status, the question turned to the governance of the nation. Politicians in Monteivdeo and Porto Alegre were immediately voiced concern over the potential dominance of Paraguay and particularly López in Mokoguay's government, especially when Francisco Solano López asserted himself as Mokoguay's first president with a slim approval from the founding Congress of Asuncion. To assuage the other states' fears of Paraguayan dominance, President Lopez presented them with a compromise in the form of nominating Uruguayan José Eugenio Ellauri as his Vice President. This was a deliberate choice by López; Ellauri was seen as a weak leader who could serve as a rubber stamp for López even if he was required to step down from power. It is thus fortunate for the young nation that Francisco Solano López died in 1884, just a year into his formal term as President of Mokoguay.
José Eugenio Ellauri became the second President of Mokoguay and his rule proved just as weak as López had thought. However, with the Mokoguayan Congress directing Ellauri's movements, the danger of an authoritarian ruler taking over the country was avoided. A brief National Coalition government established a new constitution in 1886, taking inspiration from the American and Bolivian constitutions of the time in its drafting. During the 1890s and early 1900s, the Colorado Party and the Liberal Party formed as the two major parties in Mokoguay. While the exception of the Liberal presidency of Gaspar de Silveira Martins from 1894 to 1902, however, the Colorado Party held the presidency from 1886 to 1930.
The Partido Colorado was the dominant political party in Mokoguay during this early period largely because of its role in the rapid pace of Mokoguay's industrialization known as the Platinean Miracle. While Francisco Solano López had begun the boom of the Mokoguayan economy in Paraguay, it would be later leaders and the relative stability of the country that would spread this rapid industrialization to the rest of the country. One of the most prominent and impactful leaders of Mokoguay during the Miracle era was Jose Batile y Ordoñez. Batile, noticing the success of Paraguay's industry decades earlier, repeated the nationalist industrialization for other areas. The railroads were extended from Asuncion to connect to Mokoguay's major port cities including Porto Alegre and Montevideo. This was a very auspicious moment to improve the country's infrastructure. The Brazilian Civil War in 1905 and its aftermath made Mokoguay a much more appealing entrepot for goods heading into and out of South America. Additionally, the Great War made domestic manufacturing much more useful than relying on finished goods coming in from across the Atlantic, and made Mokoguayan goods valuable throughout the continent. Batile also made improvements to the administration of Mokoguay's federal and state governments. To ensure all three members had a stake in the country's governance, the executive offices were moved from Asuncion to Montevideo and the seat of the national judiciary was relocated in Porto Alegre. This was also intended to protect the country in times of war, as the de facto seat of government could be set up in any of the three cities if needed. A further proposal by Batile to establish a National Council was defeated by the national legislature[6].
During Batile's presidency, another young politician and jurist was rising through the political ranks and would soon enter on the political stage. Born in Sao Borja on the left bank of the Uruguay River, Getulio Vargas quickly rose through the ranks of lawyers in Porto Alegre[7]. Vargas became a renowned legal orator and scholar, especially after arguing a number of cases in Porto Alegre following the judiciary's move to the Riograndense city. Shortly afterward, the young Vargas entered politics, being elected as a member of the Partido Colorado to the General Assembly of Rio Grande and six years later to the National Assembly. In many ways, Vargas was similar in outlook to Batile. Both were Mokoguayan nationalists and vehemently opposed both European meddling in the country's affairs and attempts by Mokoguay's neighbors to influence the direction of the fledgling country. Vargas, like Batile, thought state investment in public enterprises was the best way to improve Mokoguay's economy and to strengthen the economy from the danger of foreign influence. However, Vargas sometimes felt the state needed more control of the economy than even Batile and following Colorado presidents were willing to permit. In 1928, Getulio Vargas led a break by a large group of legislators from the Partido Colorado, not to join the Liberals, but to form their own Partido Popular. The Partido Popular was similar to the PRI in Bolivia in many ways, and in the elections of 1930 surged to an unexpected victory in the polls largely at the expense of the Liberals. In 1930, Getulio Vargas was elected President of Mokoguay and ended the nearly half century dominance of the Partido Colorado.
[1] I tried to use a mix of not just OTL Bolivians but people who would have been in TTL’s Bolivia but not OTL as well. For example, Nicolas de Pierola was from Arequipa and was president of Peru in OTL.
[2] In OTL, de Pierola did mint a libra currency in Peru. Tied to the pound, the Peruvian libra did indeed give Peru a prolonged period of economic stability during the late 19th century.
[3] I don’t think OTL Saavedra quite fits the equivalent personality I wanted here, but I went for a more “means to an end” scheming for Saavedra’s involvement in assisting Willka.
[4] Jenaro Reinaga and Alejandra Chavarria were the parents of Fausto Reinaga, an early forerunner in the modern Bolivian indigenist movement and an inspiration for OTL katarismo.
[5] Ybycui was indeed the location of the steel factory in Paraguay that helped Paraguay industrialize quickly before the War of the Triple Alliance.
[6] Batile also proposed a National Council on the Swiss model for Uruguay in OTL, but it was rejected by popular referendum. Uruguay did eventually have a National Council of Government instead of a single office of president between 1952 and 1967.
[7] While he was descended from paulistas, Getulio Vargas was born in Sao Borja and did grow up and start his career in Rio Grande do Sul. Also the “left bank vs. right bank” of the Uruguay River ITTL is a good sign of whether you speak Portoñol or Spanish, though Uruguay is much more mixed.
Part One Hundred Thirty-Eight: Turn of the Century South America
Bolivia's Aristocratic Republic:
The late 19th century is widely regarded as the height of Bolivia's power in South America and an era of prosperity and stability for the Andean country. After a rocky start during the split of the Peru-Bolivia Confederation after independence, the economic fortunes of Bolivia soared in the middle of the century. Mining and basic industry in the western half of the country and nitrate production in the southwest triggered an economic boom in the 1860s and 1870s that allowed Bolivia to become one of the great powers of the South American continent. The economic boom was combined with the political leadership of Narciso Campero. Campero came to power in 1867 in a coup overthrowing the short-lived presidency of Mariano Melgarejo, who himself overthrew Manuel Isidoro Belzu, a populist authoritarian leader who had ruled Bolivia for nearly a decade.
After the ouster of Mariano Melgarejo, Narciso Campero took a leading role in reestablishing regular political institutions in the country. Campero attempted to rule outside of any politics as the head of a broad unified Partido Nacional. For the most part, Campero was successful in this role and under his rule stability and success returned to Bolivia. Campero was elected to the presidency in 1868 and 1872 with wide majorities with few complications. Though the property restrictions and lack of suffrage for indigenous Bolivians mar the fairness of the elections during this period from a modern perspective, Campero was frequently compared to Simón Bolívar and George Washington at the time in his efforts to entrench democracy in the Andean nation.
Narciso Campero stepped down from the presidency in 1880 after serving three terms. In his stead, Campero's hand selected Vice President Nicolás de Piérola succeeded him in the presidency[1]. De Piérola continued to lead Bolivia with little opposition in the Congress. However, Campero stayed a close adviser to de Piérola and was appointed supreme military commander during the Bolivian intervention in the Platinean War. De Piérola took advantage of Bolivia's strong economic and military position to assist Mokoguay and Tucuman against Argentina, cementing Bolivia's position as a premier power on the continent. During de Piérola's presidency, Bolivia also used its vast mineral wealth to begin issuing the Bolivian libra, a silver currency that gained wide use throughout South America and gave Bolivia unprecedented monetary stability in the late 19th century[2].
While Nicolás de Piérola secured Bolivia's position of power in South America, his successors began a slide toward corruption. Following de Piérola, the Partido Nacional came to be dominated by two men; Gregorio Pacheco and Aniceto Arce, who frequently traded off presidential terms during the 1880s and 1890s. Both presidents had made their fortunes in Bolivia's lucrative silver industry and by the 1880s had become two of the wealthiest men in Bolivia. Pacheco enacted some reforms with support of the Partido Liberal in the Bolivian Congress such as granting indigenous men the right to vote, and removing the property qualification for municipal elections. However, elections to the presidency and to both chambers of the Bolivian Congress still had literacy and property requirements, so most lower class Bolivians still could not vote in national elections.
Bolivia's long run of stability that coincided with the dominance of the Partido Nacional ended abruptly in the early 20th century. The outbreak of the Great War, while it had not directly involved Bolivia, led to a global economic downturn and a protracted recession in Bolivia. Additionally, the stability of alternating presidencies from Gregorio Pacheco and Aniceto Arce had ended with the deaths of Pacheco in 1899 and Arce in 1904. The continued dominance of the business elite in Bolivian politics, and especially the sale of important resource interests to foreign companies around the turn of the century ignited resentment of the current elite among both the working classes and the indigenous peoples of Bolivia, two groups which frequently overlapped. A drought in 1911 and the assassination of President Mariano Baptista led to mass protests in the rural highland regions, centered around Oruro and Cochabamba. By the next year, the protests had become organized into a full scale insurgency.
The insurgency was led by two members of the Bolivian military: general Bautista Saavedra Mallea[3] and Colonel Pablo Zarate Willka. Saavedra and Willka declared the Bolivian government unjust due to its treatment of the Aymara and Quechua populations and defected to organize a revolutionary guerrilla force in central Bolivia. After the occupation of a wide swath of territory by the guerrillas near Oruro, communication from the capital of Sucre was cut off from much of the rest of the country. Rather than make a push for the capital, Willka and Saavedra pushed north, taking La Paz, Sorata, and Puno, securing much of the area surrounding Lake Titicaca. After the capture of La Paz, Willka and Saavedra set up a provisional junta in the city. Saavedra was the clear leader of the junta, evoking the memory of Tupac and Tomás Katari in Saavedra and Willka to gain a greater following among the people. With Saavedra, a significant chunk of the Bolivian military had defected to the revolutionary forces and they now were poised to take over Sucre.
With the rise of the revolutionary forces, the Bolivian Revolution ended its first phase as Bautista Saavedra outmaneuvered Willka in the provisional junta in La Paz. Saavedra had the loyalty of much of the defecting military forces and launched a dual attack south against Sucre and west against Arequipa to secure the central corridor of Bolivia, and with it, control over the country. Many of the old elite fled Bolivia as the revolutionary army approached, going to Peru or Tucuman. However, soon after the overthrow of the Bolivian government by Willka and Saavedra, the two leaders began to split and feud regarding the future of the new government. Saavedra wanted to secure power in a strong central government, clearly seeing himself as an authoritarian voice for the people. Willka, aligned with other members of the junta such as Guillermo Billinghurst, Jenaro Reinaga, and Alejandra Chavarria[4], wanted to build a strong civil institutions and a new liberal constitution that would protect the rights of the indigenous peoples of Bolivia.
When Saavedra saw the majority of the new Bolivian government turning against him, he proclaimed himself president of Bolivia in an attempted coup against the ruling junta. Saavedra's loyal forces briefly maintained control over much of Bolivia, but pockets of resistance, especially the coastal region which was still held by forces loyal to the pre-revolutionary government, quickly weakened Saavedra's position. In 1913, Saavedra was killed in a battle at the plain of El Alto outside of La Paz as the two factions of the Bolivian Revolutionary forces fought for control of the new capital. Following Saavedra's death, the rest of the military mostly fell in line with the governing junta. The Convention of La Paz formally established a new Bolivian government and constitution with very progressive reforms. Billinghurst was a major influence on the new constitution, inserting Morelian language into the constitution regarding promises of land rights for indigenous peoples and language combining both Catholic and indigenous religious teachings. However, the new Bolivian constitution went even further. Alejandra Chavarria, great-great-granddaughter of Tomás Katari, helped enshrined the rights of women and women's suffrage in the Bolivian constitution, as well as bringing further merit to the adoption of "katarismo" and the connection of the Bolivian Revolution to the indigenous rebellions against Spanish colonial rule. In 1917, for the first elections of the new Bolivia, the three leaders created the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Guillermo Billinghurst became the first leader of the PRI after Willka declined, and was elected the first President of Bolivia under the La Paz Constitution. Billinghurst retained a high popularity throughout his presidency and his administration began the dominance of the populist PRI in Bolivia for decades to follow.
The Platinean Miracle:
The decades preceding the turn of the 20th century were a transformative time for much of South America, not just for Bolivia. With the unification of Mokoguay under the leadership of Paraguayan Francisco Solano López, there was now a powerful counterweight to both Brazil and Argentina in the influence around the Rio de la Plata. Solano López was the younger member of a political dynasty that had ruled Paraguay for nearly forty years before the creation of Mokoguay, and the near dictator was eager to expand his power in South America. The federal crisis in Argentina and the alliance with the Rio Grande Republic and Uruguay laid the groundwork, but Argentina's closure of the Parana River to the free flow of international commerce in 1882 provided the trigger for the Platinean War that let President Lopez fully flex Paraguay's military might.
Few observers had expected the Mokoguayan nations to perform well in the Platinean War initially as Argentina had the upper hand at the start of the war. However, many international observers underestimated the Paraguayan industrial miracle Francisco Solano Lopez had engineered. The Paraguayan dictator attracted enormous foreign investment during the 1860s and 1870s, exploiting Paraguay's abundance of natural resources to jump start his nation's economy. Lopez managed to court both British and French investment, despite the enmity between the two countries, and used the two nations to encourage exports from Paraguay and internal development. One of the first railroad and telegraph networks in South America was completed in 1865 between the newly constructed steel factory at Ybycui[5] and the capital of Asuncion. This industrialization along with the neutrality of Brazil during the Platinean War greatly aided Mokoguay in turning the tide against Argentina in the 1880s.
Once the Platinean War came to a close and Mokoguay affirmed its independence and sovereign status, the question turned to the governance of the nation. Politicians in Monteivdeo and Porto Alegre were immediately voiced concern over the potential dominance of Paraguay and particularly López in Mokoguay's government, especially when Francisco Solano López asserted himself as Mokoguay's first president with a slim approval from the founding Congress of Asuncion. To assuage the other states' fears of Paraguayan dominance, President Lopez presented them with a compromise in the form of nominating Uruguayan José Eugenio Ellauri as his Vice President. This was a deliberate choice by López; Ellauri was seen as a weak leader who could serve as a rubber stamp for López even if he was required to step down from power. It is thus fortunate for the young nation that Francisco Solano López died in 1884, just a year into his formal term as President of Mokoguay.
José Eugenio Ellauri became the second President of Mokoguay and his rule proved just as weak as López had thought. However, with the Mokoguayan Congress directing Ellauri's movements, the danger of an authoritarian ruler taking over the country was avoided. A brief National Coalition government established a new constitution in 1886, taking inspiration from the American and Bolivian constitutions of the time in its drafting. During the 1890s and early 1900s, the Colorado Party and the Liberal Party formed as the two major parties in Mokoguay. While the exception of the Liberal presidency of Gaspar de Silveira Martins from 1894 to 1902, however, the Colorado Party held the presidency from 1886 to 1930.
The Partido Colorado was the dominant political party in Mokoguay during this early period largely because of its role in the rapid pace of Mokoguay's industrialization known as the Platinean Miracle. While Francisco Solano López had begun the boom of the Mokoguayan economy in Paraguay, it would be later leaders and the relative stability of the country that would spread this rapid industrialization to the rest of the country. One of the most prominent and impactful leaders of Mokoguay during the Miracle era was Jose Batile y Ordoñez. Batile, noticing the success of Paraguay's industry decades earlier, repeated the nationalist industrialization for other areas. The railroads were extended from Asuncion to connect to Mokoguay's major port cities including Porto Alegre and Montevideo. This was a very auspicious moment to improve the country's infrastructure. The Brazilian Civil War in 1905 and its aftermath made Mokoguay a much more appealing entrepot for goods heading into and out of South America. Additionally, the Great War made domestic manufacturing much more useful than relying on finished goods coming in from across the Atlantic, and made Mokoguayan goods valuable throughout the continent. Batile also made improvements to the administration of Mokoguay's federal and state governments. To ensure all three members had a stake in the country's governance, the executive offices were moved from Asuncion to Montevideo and the seat of the national judiciary was relocated in Porto Alegre. This was also intended to protect the country in times of war, as the de facto seat of government could be set up in any of the three cities if needed. A further proposal by Batile to establish a National Council was defeated by the national legislature[6].
During Batile's presidency, another young politician and jurist was rising through the political ranks and would soon enter on the political stage. Born in Sao Borja on the left bank of the Uruguay River, Getulio Vargas quickly rose through the ranks of lawyers in Porto Alegre[7]. Vargas became a renowned legal orator and scholar, especially after arguing a number of cases in Porto Alegre following the judiciary's move to the Riograndense city. Shortly afterward, the young Vargas entered politics, being elected as a member of the Partido Colorado to the General Assembly of Rio Grande and six years later to the National Assembly. In many ways, Vargas was similar in outlook to Batile. Both were Mokoguayan nationalists and vehemently opposed both European meddling in the country's affairs and attempts by Mokoguay's neighbors to influence the direction of the fledgling country. Vargas, like Batile, thought state investment in public enterprises was the best way to improve Mokoguay's economy and to strengthen the economy from the danger of foreign influence. However, Vargas sometimes felt the state needed more control of the economy than even Batile and following Colorado presidents were willing to permit. In 1928, Getulio Vargas led a break by a large group of legislators from the Partido Colorado, not to join the Liberals, but to form their own Partido Popular. The Partido Popular was similar to the PRI in Bolivia in many ways, and in the elections of 1930 surged to an unexpected victory in the polls largely at the expense of the Liberals. In 1930, Getulio Vargas was elected President of Mokoguay and ended the nearly half century dominance of the Partido Colorado.
[1] I tried to use a mix of not just OTL Bolivians but people who would have been in TTL’s Bolivia but not OTL as well. For example, Nicolas de Pierola was from Arequipa and was president of Peru in OTL.
[2] In OTL, de Pierola did mint a libra currency in Peru. Tied to the pound, the Peruvian libra did indeed give Peru a prolonged period of economic stability during the late 19th century.
[3] I don’t think OTL Saavedra quite fits the equivalent personality I wanted here, but I went for a more “means to an end” scheming for Saavedra’s involvement in assisting Willka.
[4] Jenaro Reinaga and Alejandra Chavarria were the parents of Fausto Reinaga, an early forerunner in the modern Bolivian indigenist movement and an inspiration for OTL katarismo.
[5] Ybycui was indeed the location of the steel factory in Paraguay that helped Paraguay industrialize quickly before the War of the Triple Alliance.
[6] Batile also proposed a National Council on the Swiss model for Uruguay in OTL, but it was rejected by popular referendum. Uruguay did eventually have a National Council of Government instead of a single office of president between 1952 and 1967.
[7] While he was descended from paulistas, Getulio Vargas was born in Sao Borja and did grow up and start his career in Rio Grande do Sul. Also the “left bank vs. right bank” of the Uruguay River ITTL is a good sign of whether you speak Portoñol or Spanish, though Uruguay is much more mixed.
Last edited:
TTL Bolivia seems to be following the path of OTL Mexico.
Hope TTL Vargas is more democratically inclined than IOTL.
I spotted a couple of typos:
Keep it up, Wilcox!
Hope TTL Vargas is more democratically inclined than IOTL.
I spotted a couple of typos:
It should be Gaspar da Silveira Martins
it should be Jose Battle y Ordoñez.
Keep it up, Wilcox!
Whoops, how did I manage to miss that it was Batlle, not Batile. I swear it was an 'i' every time I saw it.TTL Bolivia seems to be following the path of OTL Mexico.
Hope TTL Vargas is more democratically inclined than IOTL.
I spotted a couple of typos:It should be Gaspar da Silveira Martins
it should be Jose Battle y Ordoñez.
Keep it up, Wilcox!
Thanks! Not sure how many more maps I'll do for Union and Liberty. Definitely for the 1912 election and an closing world map, but I'm not sure if I'll do any more besides those.
So just going back over this entire TL, but I was wondering, what happened to Veracruz after it seceded to become an independent city? IIRC, I don't remember it actually being mentioned again.
Part One Hundred Thirty-Nine: Geography In Motion
Part One Hundred Thirty-Nine: Geography In Motion
Halford Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, and World Systems Theory:
During the 19th century, the predominant theory of geopolitics that developed was international realism. With proponents such as Arthur Schopenhauer and John Stuart Mill, they took a very Hobbesian approach to examining the global political sphere[1]. The main principle of international realism stated that each state acted independently, and in a lawless system of the world. This explained the many wars over the course of that century of time from the First Napoleonic War to the Great War. However, during the tail end of this period, the countries of the world became increasingly interconnected as trade crisscrossed the globe more and more. This led to the development of a new theory among many geostrategists of the time as the world became globalized.
The first and most pronounced theorist of this new geopolitical thought was the British-born academic Halford Mackinder. An Oxford geographer, Mackinder had closely studied the theories of John Stuart Mill. Mackinder's early work was mainly in consolidating the principles of physical geography and human geography into a single discipline, but his later work built upon his education in the natural sciences. From correspondence with botanist Arthur Tansley, Mackinder began to examine the function and processes of states as similar to an environmental system. The start of the Great War and the later foundation of the Weltkongress spurred Mackinder's studies, as he saw the globalized world break down in 1906 and reform itself with the institution of the Weltkongress six years later. Mackinder published a paper, "The World as a Connected System" in the Geographical Journal in 1913. In the paper, he proposed the importance of navigable river systems for the development of global powers. Mackinder's argument was that rivers provided both a basis for strong agricultural centers but also a vast transportation network that allowed trade and commerce to prosper. In this paper, Mackinder named the Mississippi River watershed as the key to the United States' rise as a great power and the Rhine-Elbe region as the key to the rise of Germany. "In specifics, the one key to the success of the United States is its bountiful farmland in the watershed of the Mississippi and the hills rich in coal and iron on the fringes of this system that propel the industry of that country." Mackinder also lent the terms that were later used in expansions on his theory: he listed these watersheds as the "heartland" of the two nations and their industrial and economic centers[2], while he called the surrounding areas of the two countries and their major trading partners the "periphery" of those nations.
While Halford Mackinder was the original theorist behind what became known as the world-system theory of geopolitics, it would not fully catch on among international relations scholars until the end of the decade. Karl Haushofer, who served as a German officer in the Great War, encountered Halford Mackinder and his ideas during the peace talks in Vienna in 1913 where Mackinder was part of the British delegation. Haushofer took Mackinder's theories to the University of Vienna later that year when he began teaching there, and struck up a collaboration with fellow professor Joseph Schumpeter. The two scholars observed the first years of the Weltkongress with interest, and during the following decade published several papers together. One of these, "The European Conflict Between the Heartland and the Periphery", framed many of the wars in the 19th century as a struggle for power between the "heartland" of Europe; France and Germany, and the "periphery"; Britain, Russia, Spain, and Italy, with the heartland ultimately victorious following the Great War. According to the two scholars, this victory was inevitable with the power from the Seine-Rhine-Elbe as the heart of Europe. Haushofer and Schumpeter also coined the term "world-system" while expanding upon Mackinder's ideas into a more general theory[3].
The crux of Haushofer and Schumpeter's work on world-systems theory rests upon the growth of commercial and institutional interconnection around the world in the early 20th century. Compared to previous decades, the early 20th century had a record amount of intercontinental trade. As Schumpeter once remarked, he could "drive in an automobile assembled in the Rhineland with tires made of rubber from Tanganjika to a cafe where I could drink Brazilian coffee made from Chinese porcelain." These ideas required looking at the world not as a collection of states as the earlier Westphalian model did, but as a network of economic and institutional spheres that did not necessarily coincide with political borders. The French, German, and British colonies and European satellites, and the budding American and Bolivian spheres in the New World certainly gave credence to that interpretation of the contemporary world. This theory now forms the basis of the "idealist" theory of international relations[4], a counter to the "realist" theory proposed by Schopenhauer and John Stuart Mill. The idealism of the theory stems from the idea that international institutions and commerce can lower incentives for countries to war out of their own self-interest. With Haushofer and Schumpeter both in Vienna, it is natural that the Weltkongress emerged as the symbol of idealist geopolitical thought as it aimed to solve disputes between nations through cooperation and dialogue rather than war.
A Confluence of Industry and Ideas:
As theories of the emergence of truly global powers arose, so too did theories around the emergence of unprecedented urbanisation. British economist Alfred Marshall was one of the original researchers into the idea of how great cities arise. While Marshall's work was mainly an attempt to bring more mathematical rigor into the study of economics, sections of his "Principles of Economics" were expanded upon to explain the rise of Manchester and Liverpool as one of the first industrial and manufacturing centers in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Lancashire's textile manufacturing quickly became the ur-example of the Industrial Revolution's creation of cluttered, specialized factories and the wave of urbanisation in the 19th century[5].
By the dawn of the 20th century, this trend of urbanisation had not only gained steam in Great Britain and the rest of Europe, but had potentially quickened its pace even more across the Atlantic in the United States. While westward movement and settling of the Great Plains and Oregon country is mythologized in the formation of the United States, the great movement of people from farms to American cities cannot be discounted. This is especially true when one looks at the emergence of the Confluence megapolitan area. From the mid-19th century and early 20th century, the area along the Mississippi River and its tributaries from Chicago to Memphis that forms the backbone of the country experienced the greatest rate of population growth a region of the United States has ever seen in its history. Cities such as Chicago, Saint Louis, Indianapolis, Cairo, and Memphis exploded out of their humble beginnings along the riverfronts to sprawl outward and upward as factories, companies, and people drove economic growth.
In examining the formation of the Confluence urban area, two industries in particular stick out as these Marshallian industrial districts. The first is the meat packing industry, and the grain and shipping industries that tied in with it. As Americans settled the Great Plains, farming and ranching became heavily dominant in the states along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. States including Illinois, Kearny, and Demoine quickly became agricultural powerhouses by the National War and continued afterward, producing extensive amounts of corn, wheat, and oats. Additionally, meat packing became a paramount industry in the Old Northwest and the Great Plains. Hogs in Illinois and Demoine and cattle in Kearny, Calhoun and Houston led American meat production through the turn of the 20th century. With this vast agricultural production boom, the need to efficiently process and transport the grain and meat arose. The Mississippi and Ohio rivers provided a preexisting infrastructure for transporting goods, and the invention of refrigeration allowed them to be transported over longer distances. With rivers and railroads intersecting around the region, cities along the rivers soon developed meat and grain processing facilities as they were natural break of bulk points.
With as expansive as the meat packing industry was throughout the Old Northwest and the states that border the Mississippi River, several cities could be said to have developed Marshallian districts for meat and livestock processing. Chicago and the Union Stockyards and Saint Louis were of course two of the biggest centers of livestock processing in the 19th century. However, Cairo, Illinois and outlying towns such as Thebes[6] and Paducah quickly rose to compete with both cities as a hub for meat packing. The growth of Cairo's meat packing industry was spurred after the National War by Timothy Blackstone[7]. Blackstone made his initial fortune as the chief engineer and president of the Chicago and Missouri Railroad, but left to become president of the Alton, Cairo, & Wabash Railroad in 1866 after the National War. The Alton, Cairo, & Wabash Railroad heavily developed infrastructure in southern Illinois as the region recovered from the National War. In particular, Blackstone's efforts connected the river towns of Alton, Cairo, and Shawneetown, drawing people to those cities. Blackstone further developed Cairo with the founding of the Future City Stockyards two miles north of downtown Cairo. The Future City Stockyards quickly grew with meat processing plants from other companies around it. Cairo sprawled north annexing Future City and Urbandale until Cairo stretched to the Cache River. Blackstone's railroad and stockyards also combined with the Vanderbilt Steamship Company in providing fast and cheaper transportation in the Confluence region on both land and water. By 1900, Cairo even rivaled Detroit in terms of cargo volume going through its port[8]. Additionally, Blackstone encouraged innovation in the industry, including the founding of Blackstone Agricultural University in Cairo. One of its first graduates was Alonzo Mather, who pioneered an innovation in livestock cars to provide feed and water for the animals during transit. This enabled livestock to be in transit further in a single interval, making transport of livestock to the slaughtering plants less expensive. Combined with the Future City Stockyards and surrounding plants adopting stricter safety and quality standards in the 1890s before the Roosevelt administration implemented national food quality standards, Cairo remained at the cutting edge of livestock processing into the 20th century.
A large portion of the surge in population and urbanisation of the Confluence region was driven by the exodus of African-Americans north during the turn of the 20th century. The city of Brooklyn, Illinois, a center of black settlement in the Old Northwest as early as the 1830s, grew exponentially as blacks moved north. Brooklyn and other areas on the outskirts of Saint Louis became attractive neighborhoods for the settlement of African-Americans. Cities such as Brooklyn, Dessioux, and East Saint Louis[9] became some of the largest black communities in the Saint Louis-Alton area by 1900. Cairo by 1900 was the largest majority black town in the United States. The black neighborhoods of Cairo were mostly located north of the Future City Stockyards and the Swift Company plant in Golden City where the Cache met the Ohio River. The banks of the Cache had been wetlands but the logging of cypress trees during the 19th century drained much of the swamp. However, the wetland area was still cheap and with the arrival of the meat packing industry the area of northern Cairo became a lower class but still relatively prosperous neighborhood. Many of the residents of Golden City and nearby Mound City were unskilled workers in the meat packing plants, but they still had it better than the poorer blacks in the rural South of the time. So, with the prosperity of the meat packing industry, cities such as Cairo and Saint Louis helped lift people of all colors and classes out of relative poverty and continued to grow into the 20th century.
The second Marshallian district of interest in the Confluence region is that of Indianapolis, Indiana and its rise as the premiere automobile city in the United States. While it does not lie in the Confluence metropolitan area by most strict definitions, being more connected with the parallel metropolitan region connecting the city northwest with Chicago, Indianapolis is still very much impacted by its proximity to the Confluence area[10]. Indianapolis long had a tradition in the production of moving vehicles, being home to many of the main carriage companies in the United States through the 19th century. This gave Indianapolis an edge in the formation of car companies as the entrepreneurs in Indy already had the knowledge to easily transfer from making carriages to making motorized cars. Additionally, Indianapolis sat at the center of many of the production centers of raw materials needed for auto manufacture. Copper and iron arrived from Marquette through the steelyards on the southern shores of Lake Michigan or from the southeast Missouri mines through Cape Girardeau. Rubber for tires sailed up the Mississippi from Africa and South America. Above all with early gas powered cars for tractors and long haul trips, the oil and natural gas fields of nearby Muncie gave Indiana a leading edge over other states.
With easy access to raw materials and its advantageous position at the crossroads of many transportation routes, Indianapolis quickly became a hub for automobile production. The presence of both gasoline and electric car manufacturers kept competition between companies fierce and led to many innovations in the first decades of the 20th century coming out of Indiana. One example of this is with the two major taxi companies in the United States. John Hertz founded the Yellow Cab Company in Chicago in 1910. However, soon after Hertz started expanding Yellow Cab to other major cities, Hertz moved to Indianapolis to establish Yellow Cab's national headquarters and a much larger manufacturing facility. Five years later, a competing national taxi company was started by Morris Markin, who had previously worked as an auto body engineer at Duesenberg. Markin's Marquis Cab Company built not just taxicabs but buses and streetcars, making advances in electric vehicle technology. In 1922 the Marquis Cab Company built its main assembly plant near its headquarters in Lafayette, Indiana, halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis, where the company assembled its cars for nearly forty years.
With the prominence of auto manufacturing in Indianapolis, it comes as no surprise that the first organized auto races occurred in Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was constructed in 1911. While the concept for the speedway was much grander and was conceived by Carl Graham Fisher years earlier, financing became tight during the Great War so cutbacks and delays forced Fisher's vision to wait several years[11]. However, when the track finally opened, its first event, a series of motorcycle races held on July 15, 1911, attracted nearly 75,000 spectators. The first officially recognized race on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was held several months later. In a coincidence, the race was to be held on September 30, 1911 - just three days after the Great War armistice was signed. The first race quickly became a celebration of the end of the Great War, and the Indy 500 became synonymous with Armistice Day for many in Indianapolis. Errett Lobban Cord, future president of Auburn Automobile, won the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911. The next year, Gil Andersen, a Norwegian-American working as an engineer at Stutz Motors, became the first non-American to win the Indianapolis 500. The early years of the Indy 500 were consistently used as a testing ground for car companies and attracted brilliant engineers to Indianapolis and its auto companies, helping to keep Indianapolis as a leading technological innovator in automobiles for the past century[12].
[1] See this update for more details
[2] Mackinder possibly coined the term "heartland" in OTL as well. In OTL, however, it was part of his Geographical Pivot of History. You can read the full article here.
[3] This is essentially Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory but it's developed a half century or so earlier.
[4] Idealism is better known in OTL as the liberal theory of international relations.
[5] The inspiration for this section is I'm reading a book on urbanization and the book I read before that discussed Boulder as a Marshallian district for knowledge. I realized that would be a good way to frame the urbanization of the Confluence region.
[6] Thebes, Illinois is slightly northwest of Cairo. Yes, there is actually a Thebes, a Cairo, and a Memphis in close proximity on the Mississippi River.
[7] In OTL Timothy Blackstone remained in Chicago, where he owned the Chicago and Alton Railroad from 1864 to 1899 and was one of the first presidents of the Union Stockyards.
[8] Sidenote and fun fact: In 1900, Detroit was the largest port in the United States, handling even more cargo than New York.
[9] Brooklyn, Illinois was one of the first black communities in the United States in OTL. Dessioux is in the area north of Saint Louis north of the Missouri, about where West Alton is.
[10] The Chicago-Indianapolis metropolitan area in TTL runs for the most part along the OTL I-65 corridor between the two cities.
[11] The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was constructed in 1909 in OTL, but because of the earlier Great War it's delayed a few years ITTL.
[12] One of the reasons for Detroit's eventual decline in OTL was the consolidation of the Detroit auto industry by so few companies made it so there was no real need to constant innovation and the Detroit automakers stagnated. Here, that may or may not happen, but it would be less likely and lead to a more robust car industry.
Halford Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, and World Systems Theory:
During the 19th century, the predominant theory of geopolitics that developed was international realism. With proponents such as Arthur Schopenhauer and John Stuart Mill, they took a very Hobbesian approach to examining the global political sphere[1]. The main principle of international realism stated that each state acted independently, and in a lawless system of the world. This explained the many wars over the course of that century of time from the First Napoleonic War to the Great War. However, during the tail end of this period, the countries of the world became increasingly interconnected as trade crisscrossed the globe more and more. This led to the development of a new theory among many geostrategists of the time as the world became globalized.
The first and most pronounced theorist of this new geopolitical thought was the British-born academic Halford Mackinder. An Oxford geographer, Mackinder had closely studied the theories of John Stuart Mill. Mackinder's early work was mainly in consolidating the principles of physical geography and human geography into a single discipline, but his later work built upon his education in the natural sciences. From correspondence with botanist Arthur Tansley, Mackinder began to examine the function and processes of states as similar to an environmental system. The start of the Great War and the later foundation of the Weltkongress spurred Mackinder's studies, as he saw the globalized world break down in 1906 and reform itself with the institution of the Weltkongress six years later. Mackinder published a paper, "The World as a Connected System" in the Geographical Journal in 1913. In the paper, he proposed the importance of navigable river systems for the development of global powers. Mackinder's argument was that rivers provided both a basis for strong agricultural centers but also a vast transportation network that allowed trade and commerce to prosper. In this paper, Mackinder named the Mississippi River watershed as the key to the United States' rise as a great power and the Rhine-Elbe region as the key to the rise of Germany. "In specifics, the one key to the success of the United States is its bountiful farmland in the watershed of the Mississippi and the hills rich in coal and iron on the fringes of this system that propel the industry of that country." Mackinder also lent the terms that were later used in expansions on his theory: he listed these watersheds as the "heartland" of the two nations and their industrial and economic centers[2], while he called the surrounding areas of the two countries and their major trading partners the "periphery" of those nations.
While Halford Mackinder was the original theorist behind what became known as the world-system theory of geopolitics, it would not fully catch on among international relations scholars until the end of the decade. Karl Haushofer, who served as a German officer in the Great War, encountered Halford Mackinder and his ideas during the peace talks in Vienna in 1913 where Mackinder was part of the British delegation. Haushofer took Mackinder's theories to the University of Vienna later that year when he began teaching there, and struck up a collaboration with fellow professor Joseph Schumpeter. The two scholars observed the first years of the Weltkongress with interest, and during the following decade published several papers together. One of these, "The European Conflict Between the Heartland and the Periphery", framed many of the wars in the 19th century as a struggle for power between the "heartland" of Europe; France and Germany, and the "periphery"; Britain, Russia, Spain, and Italy, with the heartland ultimately victorious following the Great War. According to the two scholars, this victory was inevitable with the power from the Seine-Rhine-Elbe as the heart of Europe. Haushofer and Schumpeter also coined the term "world-system" while expanding upon Mackinder's ideas into a more general theory[3].
The crux of Haushofer and Schumpeter's work on world-systems theory rests upon the growth of commercial and institutional interconnection around the world in the early 20th century. Compared to previous decades, the early 20th century had a record amount of intercontinental trade. As Schumpeter once remarked, he could "drive in an automobile assembled in the Rhineland with tires made of rubber from Tanganjika to a cafe where I could drink Brazilian coffee made from Chinese porcelain." These ideas required looking at the world not as a collection of states as the earlier Westphalian model did, but as a network of economic and institutional spheres that did not necessarily coincide with political borders. The French, German, and British colonies and European satellites, and the budding American and Bolivian spheres in the New World certainly gave credence to that interpretation of the contemporary world. This theory now forms the basis of the "idealist" theory of international relations[4], a counter to the "realist" theory proposed by Schopenhauer and John Stuart Mill. The idealism of the theory stems from the idea that international institutions and commerce can lower incentives for countries to war out of their own self-interest. With Haushofer and Schumpeter both in Vienna, it is natural that the Weltkongress emerged as the symbol of idealist geopolitical thought as it aimed to solve disputes between nations through cooperation and dialogue rather than war.
A Confluence of Industry and Ideas:
As theories of the emergence of truly global powers arose, so too did theories around the emergence of unprecedented urbanisation. British economist Alfred Marshall was one of the original researchers into the idea of how great cities arise. While Marshall's work was mainly an attempt to bring more mathematical rigor into the study of economics, sections of his "Principles of Economics" were expanded upon to explain the rise of Manchester and Liverpool as one of the first industrial and manufacturing centers in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Lancashire's textile manufacturing quickly became the ur-example of the Industrial Revolution's creation of cluttered, specialized factories and the wave of urbanisation in the 19th century[5].
By the dawn of the 20th century, this trend of urbanisation had not only gained steam in Great Britain and the rest of Europe, but had potentially quickened its pace even more across the Atlantic in the United States. While westward movement and settling of the Great Plains and Oregon country is mythologized in the formation of the United States, the great movement of people from farms to American cities cannot be discounted. This is especially true when one looks at the emergence of the Confluence megapolitan area. From the mid-19th century and early 20th century, the area along the Mississippi River and its tributaries from Chicago to Memphis that forms the backbone of the country experienced the greatest rate of population growth a region of the United States has ever seen in its history. Cities such as Chicago, Saint Louis, Indianapolis, Cairo, and Memphis exploded out of their humble beginnings along the riverfronts to sprawl outward and upward as factories, companies, and people drove economic growth.
In examining the formation of the Confluence urban area, two industries in particular stick out as these Marshallian industrial districts. The first is the meat packing industry, and the grain and shipping industries that tied in with it. As Americans settled the Great Plains, farming and ranching became heavily dominant in the states along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. States including Illinois, Kearny, and Demoine quickly became agricultural powerhouses by the National War and continued afterward, producing extensive amounts of corn, wheat, and oats. Additionally, meat packing became a paramount industry in the Old Northwest and the Great Plains. Hogs in Illinois and Demoine and cattle in Kearny, Calhoun and Houston led American meat production through the turn of the 20th century. With this vast agricultural production boom, the need to efficiently process and transport the grain and meat arose. The Mississippi and Ohio rivers provided a preexisting infrastructure for transporting goods, and the invention of refrigeration allowed them to be transported over longer distances. With rivers and railroads intersecting around the region, cities along the rivers soon developed meat and grain processing facilities as they were natural break of bulk points.
With as expansive as the meat packing industry was throughout the Old Northwest and the states that border the Mississippi River, several cities could be said to have developed Marshallian districts for meat and livestock processing. Chicago and the Union Stockyards and Saint Louis were of course two of the biggest centers of livestock processing in the 19th century. However, Cairo, Illinois and outlying towns such as Thebes[6] and Paducah quickly rose to compete with both cities as a hub for meat packing. The growth of Cairo's meat packing industry was spurred after the National War by Timothy Blackstone[7]. Blackstone made his initial fortune as the chief engineer and president of the Chicago and Missouri Railroad, but left to become president of the Alton, Cairo, & Wabash Railroad in 1866 after the National War. The Alton, Cairo, & Wabash Railroad heavily developed infrastructure in southern Illinois as the region recovered from the National War. In particular, Blackstone's efforts connected the river towns of Alton, Cairo, and Shawneetown, drawing people to those cities. Blackstone further developed Cairo with the founding of the Future City Stockyards two miles north of downtown Cairo. The Future City Stockyards quickly grew with meat processing plants from other companies around it. Cairo sprawled north annexing Future City and Urbandale until Cairo stretched to the Cache River. Blackstone's railroad and stockyards also combined with the Vanderbilt Steamship Company in providing fast and cheaper transportation in the Confluence region on both land and water. By 1900, Cairo even rivaled Detroit in terms of cargo volume going through its port[8]. Additionally, Blackstone encouraged innovation in the industry, including the founding of Blackstone Agricultural University in Cairo. One of its first graduates was Alonzo Mather, who pioneered an innovation in livestock cars to provide feed and water for the animals during transit. This enabled livestock to be in transit further in a single interval, making transport of livestock to the slaughtering plants less expensive. Combined with the Future City Stockyards and surrounding plants adopting stricter safety and quality standards in the 1890s before the Roosevelt administration implemented national food quality standards, Cairo remained at the cutting edge of livestock processing into the 20th century.
A large portion of the surge in population and urbanisation of the Confluence region was driven by the exodus of African-Americans north during the turn of the 20th century. The city of Brooklyn, Illinois, a center of black settlement in the Old Northwest as early as the 1830s, grew exponentially as blacks moved north. Brooklyn and other areas on the outskirts of Saint Louis became attractive neighborhoods for the settlement of African-Americans. Cities such as Brooklyn, Dessioux, and East Saint Louis[9] became some of the largest black communities in the Saint Louis-Alton area by 1900. Cairo by 1900 was the largest majority black town in the United States. The black neighborhoods of Cairo were mostly located north of the Future City Stockyards and the Swift Company plant in Golden City where the Cache met the Ohio River. The banks of the Cache had been wetlands but the logging of cypress trees during the 19th century drained much of the swamp. However, the wetland area was still cheap and with the arrival of the meat packing industry the area of northern Cairo became a lower class but still relatively prosperous neighborhood. Many of the residents of Golden City and nearby Mound City were unskilled workers in the meat packing plants, but they still had it better than the poorer blacks in the rural South of the time. So, with the prosperity of the meat packing industry, cities such as Cairo and Saint Louis helped lift people of all colors and classes out of relative poverty and continued to grow into the 20th century.
The second Marshallian district of interest in the Confluence region is that of Indianapolis, Indiana and its rise as the premiere automobile city in the United States. While it does not lie in the Confluence metropolitan area by most strict definitions, being more connected with the parallel metropolitan region connecting the city northwest with Chicago, Indianapolis is still very much impacted by its proximity to the Confluence area[10]. Indianapolis long had a tradition in the production of moving vehicles, being home to many of the main carriage companies in the United States through the 19th century. This gave Indianapolis an edge in the formation of car companies as the entrepreneurs in Indy already had the knowledge to easily transfer from making carriages to making motorized cars. Additionally, Indianapolis sat at the center of many of the production centers of raw materials needed for auto manufacture. Copper and iron arrived from Marquette through the steelyards on the southern shores of Lake Michigan or from the southeast Missouri mines through Cape Girardeau. Rubber for tires sailed up the Mississippi from Africa and South America. Above all with early gas powered cars for tractors and long haul trips, the oil and natural gas fields of nearby Muncie gave Indiana a leading edge over other states.
With easy access to raw materials and its advantageous position at the crossroads of many transportation routes, Indianapolis quickly became a hub for automobile production. The presence of both gasoline and electric car manufacturers kept competition between companies fierce and led to many innovations in the first decades of the 20th century coming out of Indiana. One example of this is with the two major taxi companies in the United States. John Hertz founded the Yellow Cab Company in Chicago in 1910. However, soon after Hertz started expanding Yellow Cab to other major cities, Hertz moved to Indianapolis to establish Yellow Cab's national headquarters and a much larger manufacturing facility. Five years later, a competing national taxi company was started by Morris Markin, who had previously worked as an auto body engineer at Duesenberg. Markin's Marquis Cab Company built not just taxicabs but buses and streetcars, making advances in electric vehicle technology. In 1922 the Marquis Cab Company built its main assembly plant near its headquarters in Lafayette, Indiana, halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis, where the company assembled its cars for nearly forty years.
With the prominence of auto manufacturing in Indianapolis, it comes as no surprise that the first organized auto races occurred in Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was constructed in 1911. While the concept for the speedway was much grander and was conceived by Carl Graham Fisher years earlier, financing became tight during the Great War so cutbacks and delays forced Fisher's vision to wait several years[11]. However, when the track finally opened, its first event, a series of motorcycle races held on July 15, 1911, attracted nearly 75,000 spectators. The first officially recognized race on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was held several months later. In a coincidence, the race was to be held on September 30, 1911 - just three days after the Great War armistice was signed. The first race quickly became a celebration of the end of the Great War, and the Indy 500 became synonymous with Armistice Day for many in Indianapolis. Errett Lobban Cord, future president of Auburn Automobile, won the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911. The next year, Gil Andersen, a Norwegian-American working as an engineer at Stutz Motors, became the first non-American to win the Indianapolis 500. The early years of the Indy 500 were consistently used as a testing ground for car companies and attracted brilliant engineers to Indianapolis and its auto companies, helping to keep Indianapolis as a leading technological innovator in automobiles for the past century[12].
[1] See this update for more details
[2] Mackinder possibly coined the term "heartland" in OTL as well. In OTL, however, it was part of his Geographical Pivot of History. You can read the full article here.
[3] This is essentially Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory but it's developed a half century or so earlier.
[4] Idealism is better known in OTL as the liberal theory of international relations.
[5] The inspiration for this section is I'm reading a book on urbanization and the book I read before that discussed Boulder as a Marshallian district for knowledge. I realized that would be a good way to frame the urbanization of the Confluence region.
[6] Thebes, Illinois is slightly northwest of Cairo. Yes, there is actually a Thebes, a Cairo, and a Memphis in close proximity on the Mississippi River.
[7] In OTL Timothy Blackstone remained in Chicago, where he owned the Chicago and Alton Railroad from 1864 to 1899 and was one of the first presidents of the Union Stockyards.
[8] Sidenote and fun fact: In 1900, Detroit was the largest port in the United States, handling even more cargo than New York.
[9] Brooklyn, Illinois was one of the first black communities in the United States in OTL. Dessioux is in the area north of Saint Louis north of the Missouri, about where West Alton is.
[10] The Chicago-Indianapolis metropolitan area in TTL runs for the most part along the OTL I-65 corridor between the two cities.
[11] The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was constructed in 1909 in OTL, but because of the earlier Great War it's delayed a few years ITTL.
[12] One of the reasons for Detroit's eventual decline in OTL was the consolidation of the Detroit auto industry by so few companies made it so there was no real need to constant innovation and the Detroit automakers stagnated. Here, that may or may not happen, but it would be less likely and lead to a more robust car industry.
Veracruz became essentially a US puppet, but it did become a thriving port of entry for goods going into and out of the Mexican region.
You mentioned years ago that there would be a Confluences megalopolis centered on a prosperous and Black-majority Cairo. It has been interesting seeing how various events over the course of the TL set that up (Vanderbilt locating there, Cincinnati losing investment and population due to war ravages, the creation of a confluence state, other entrepreneurs locating there, etc...)
Thanks! That was one of the few early long term plans I had for Union and Liberty, and its been interesting figuring out how to make it happen.
Part One-Hundred Forty: The 1912 Progressive Nomination
Part One-Hundred Forty: The 1912 Progressive Nomination
Roosevelt's Shadow: It is difficult to overstate how much of a dominating personality Theodore Roosevelt played in the early Progressive Party. Roosevelt had been instrumental in the emergence of the Progressives from the earlier Populist Party, and served as the first President ever elected by the Progressives. Thus, amid the growing uncertainty of the post-Great War world, it came as a shock to the United States that President Roosevelt would not run for a third term. Roosevelt's reasons were many. He felt he should stick to George Washington's legacy of limiting oneself to two terms as President. Roosevelt, while enjoying his role as the driver of the Progressives, had the foresight to realize that the party needed to have someone else at the helm if it was to survive beyond him. In a 1912 speech announcing he would not run again, Roosevelt was blunt: "a party built and run by just one man will assuredly die with that man." But according to Roosevelt's private diaries, he also was growing stressed with the requirements of the presidency and bored with its confining him to Washington for such long periods. The travels to Europe for the Peace of Vienna had seemingly ignited Roosevelt's wanderlust, and it would be impossible to fulfill it while he was President. So, in February 1912, President Theodore Roosevelt announced that he would not be seeking a third term as President and would step down in 1913.
The obvious man to succeed President Roosevelt as the leader of the Progressive Party was naturally his Vice President, William Howard Taft. Taft, who had been Roosevelt's Secretary of War during his first term and was elevated to Roosevelt's running mate to replace William Hope Harvey. It is commonly accepted that Taft was chosen to replace Harvey so that Roosevelt would have a capable wartime successor if Roosevelt had died. However, Vice President Taft shied away from the early stages of the 1912 presidential campaign. Taft, rather than jumping into the electoral ring to succeed Roosevelt in 1912, traveled to Europe to aid in overseeing the American participation in the Peace of Vienna and the creation of the Weltkongress. Taft was one of the more vocal proponents of the Weltkongress following the Great War, so it was a good move by Roosevelt to ensure the participation in the United States in the initial stages of its formation. Taft, as the Vice President and a former Republican, also was influential in convincing Congress to ratify the American entrance into the Weltkongress as a founding member. However, Taft's travels in Europe sent him away from the potential campaign trail and led to Taft declining to run for President in 1912 upon his return from Europe.
Proponents of Taft claimed that Roosevelt sent Taft to Europe to sideline the potential of his campaign because Roosevelt did not want Taft to run, however a modern perspective shows that this is not true. William Howard Taft, it needs to be noted, had a strong judicial background before entering into politics, and his ultimate goal was to join the Supreme Court rather than achieve any high elected office. While Taft would reach that vaunted position, he also felt that his judiciary experience could be very welcomed in the arbitration of the Peace of Vienna. President Roosevelt apparently agreed with that assessment, and Taft's experience was welcomed very much by Root, Hoover, and Holmes in the peace negotiations. After Taft returned to the United States from Europe, the Vice President dove into his role of selling the Weltkongress to Congress and the American public wholeheartedly, offering little of his opinion on the Progressive primary and presidential race during the campaign.
With both Roosevelt and Taft declining to run for the Progressive nomination, the race for the Progressive nomination was wide open. The open race created the divisions that had been present in the Progressive nomination race of 1904 before Roosevelt had stepped in as a unifying figure, and many of the generation of Progressives who ran for that nomination ran again in 1912. Some newcomers did run, however they did not make it very far. Senator Willis C. Hawley, one of the Progressive supporters of maintaining the tariffs on Britain and Canada after the Great War[1], won the Champoeg primary as a favorite son candidate and came in a close second to Wallace in the Oregon primary. However, Hawley's support in the Northwest did not translate well into other regions of the country. Herbert Hoover, then a young upstart businessman and diplomat, briefly floated a run for president at just 38 years of age, Hoover had made a name for himself during the Great War for his organization of food relief on the Canadian front. Hoover made a splash with the announcement he would run for the Progressive nomination shortly after he returned from the Vienna negotiations and won the Connecticut and Vermont primaries, but his momentum fizzled as the summer wore on. Herbert Hoover's early run would, however, mark a transition point for the man and prepare Hoover for his later and more successful future in Progressive politics.
The two front runners for the Progressive nomination thus were two veterans and founding members of the Progressive Party who had both ran for the nomination in 1904: Secretary of Agriculture Henry Cantwell Wallace and former governor and Senator from Indiana Albert Beveridge. Wallace and Beveridge had become visible representations of the rural and urban wings of the Progressive Party since the party's inception. Henry Cantwell Wallace came out ahead of Beveridge in the primaries, winning those in Demoine, Itasca, and Shoshone. Wallace appealed to many Progressives who wanted a return to the Populists' focus on farmers. Even before his appointment as Secretary of Agriculture, Henry C. Wallace fought to gain support for the McLaurin Amendment to the Tariff of 1902[2] that raised tariffs on agricultural goods. While Agriculture Secretary, Wallace advocated an idea he had spearheaded in Demoine for a state-owned grain elevator to give farmers fair prices for their produce and provide insurance when prices were low. The idea was popular in Demoine and Itasca where both states established state-owned mills and grain elevators, and Wallace continued to advocate farmers' insurance as Secretary of Agriculture.
In a contrast to the rural appeal of Henry Cantwell Wallace, Albert Beveridge was the urban candidate, having been a Congressman representing a booming Indianapolis as well as Indiana's Senator and governor. Beveridge had been one of Roosevelt's earliest supporters in 1904, almost attaching himself to the first Progressive President's hip in every way save being his running mate. He had been a strong proponent of the expansion of American power during the Great War, calling for American entry into the war even before President Roosevelt publicly floated the possibility. In this push Beveridge held a desire for the United States to bring order to the North American continent, and as such Beveridge was also one of the biggest supporters of the annexation of California. Here Beveridge and Roosevelt found common ground, and Beveridge pushed hard for the annexation, though he was out of Congress and back in Indianapolis by this point. As an urban Progressive, Albert Beveridge also desired to increase fairness and regulations for urban industries and living. This included calls for a federal minimum wage, child labor regulations and mandatory primary schooling, and shorter and regular set work hours. Beveridge's speeches were almost socialist at times, with one speech to Indianapolis steelworkers claiming that "large business left to itself brings chaos and ruin, and it is up to the government to rein them in and provide justice to the worker."[3] Beveridge supported the formation of labor unions and other Progressive causes to bring about a more moral society, such as the temperance movement.
Thus, the Progressive convention in Chicago was a battle between the rural and the urban; between the quite literal grass roots laid out by Henry C. Wallace and the top-down approach to achieving a better and more just society from Albert Beveridge. President Theodore Roosevelt had made no formal endorsement prior to the Progressive convention, but it was clear to most observers that the President would certainly prefer that Beveridge be his successor. Roosevelt did after all make his start in politics as a lawman. As the convention opened, the delegates were split. While the urban delegates had increased much in the last eight years, many of the original Populists were still influential in rural regions. For instance, despite the growth of Chicago and Cairo, it was Illinois Congressman Frederick Hinde Zimmerman[4] who led the Illinois delegation and officially placed Henry C. Wallace's name into consideration. The votes after the first ballot were divided, with Wallace slightly ahead of Beveridge while Hoover, Hawley, Georgia Senator Thomas E. Watson, and others gained a scattering of support. The second and third ballots shifted only marginally, with neither Wallace nor Beveridge gaining an advantage.
This went on for another day, but on the sixth ballot, the deadlock was broken. President Roosevelt had arranged to give a speech on the fourth day of the convention. Most people assumed the presidential nomination would be over and done with by then so there was not much thought given to the President's speech when it was originally scheduled. However, as the time of the speech drew near, whispers sprang up over whether President Roosevelt would give a formal nomination that might push one candidate over the finish line. There was little doubt of who that candidate would be, but the question on everyone's minds was would Roosevelt forsake his Agriculture Secretary to endorse Albert Beveridge. To the delight of the Beveridge camp (but not surprise), President Roosevelt indeed gave his endorsement to Albert Beveridge for the nomination for President of the United States in 1912. However, Roosevelt's speech also expressed generous support for the Wallace's achievements serving in Roosevelt's administration. In a so called grand compromise between the urban and rural factions of the Progressive Party, the delegates almost unanimously nominated Henry C. Wallace as Beveridge's running mate.
[1] Yes, that Hawley.
[2] See this update. Senator Anselm McLaurin of Mississippi proposed a compromise amendment to get the Tariff of 1902 passed.
[3] This is a curious sentiment when put up against the socialist muralist Eugene Victor Debs, who also spent much of his life in Indianapolis. Debs' bright, colorful murals often depicted the solidarity of the worker in achieving justice and prosperity for themselves, rather than relying on others to hand it down to them. Many of Debs' murals can still be seen on the brick facades of Indianapolis, Chicago, and other cities in the Old Northwest.
[4] Frederick Hinde Zimmerman was a Grange member and one of the leaders of the Illinois Farmers' Institute.
Roosevelt's Shadow: It is difficult to overstate how much of a dominating personality Theodore Roosevelt played in the early Progressive Party. Roosevelt had been instrumental in the emergence of the Progressives from the earlier Populist Party, and served as the first President ever elected by the Progressives. Thus, amid the growing uncertainty of the post-Great War world, it came as a shock to the United States that President Roosevelt would not run for a third term. Roosevelt's reasons were many. He felt he should stick to George Washington's legacy of limiting oneself to two terms as President. Roosevelt, while enjoying his role as the driver of the Progressives, had the foresight to realize that the party needed to have someone else at the helm if it was to survive beyond him. In a 1912 speech announcing he would not run again, Roosevelt was blunt: "a party built and run by just one man will assuredly die with that man." But according to Roosevelt's private diaries, he also was growing stressed with the requirements of the presidency and bored with its confining him to Washington for such long periods. The travels to Europe for the Peace of Vienna had seemingly ignited Roosevelt's wanderlust, and it would be impossible to fulfill it while he was President. So, in February 1912, President Theodore Roosevelt announced that he would not be seeking a third term as President and would step down in 1913.
The obvious man to succeed President Roosevelt as the leader of the Progressive Party was naturally his Vice President, William Howard Taft. Taft, who had been Roosevelt's Secretary of War during his first term and was elevated to Roosevelt's running mate to replace William Hope Harvey. It is commonly accepted that Taft was chosen to replace Harvey so that Roosevelt would have a capable wartime successor if Roosevelt had died. However, Vice President Taft shied away from the early stages of the 1912 presidential campaign. Taft, rather than jumping into the electoral ring to succeed Roosevelt in 1912, traveled to Europe to aid in overseeing the American participation in the Peace of Vienna and the creation of the Weltkongress. Taft was one of the more vocal proponents of the Weltkongress following the Great War, so it was a good move by Roosevelt to ensure the participation in the United States in the initial stages of its formation. Taft, as the Vice President and a former Republican, also was influential in convincing Congress to ratify the American entrance into the Weltkongress as a founding member. However, Taft's travels in Europe sent him away from the potential campaign trail and led to Taft declining to run for President in 1912 upon his return from Europe.
Proponents of Taft claimed that Roosevelt sent Taft to Europe to sideline the potential of his campaign because Roosevelt did not want Taft to run, however a modern perspective shows that this is not true. William Howard Taft, it needs to be noted, had a strong judicial background before entering into politics, and his ultimate goal was to join the Supreme Court rather than achieve any high elected office. While Taft would reach that vaunted position, he also felt that his judiciary experience could be very welcomed in the arbitration of the Peace of Vienna. President Roosevelt apparently agreed with that assessment, and Taft's experience was welcomed very much by Root, Hoover, and Holmes in the peace negotiations. After Taft returned to the United States from Europe, the Vice President dove into his role of selling the Weltkongress to Congress and the American public wholeheartedly, offering little of his opinion on the Progressive primary and presidential race during the campaign.
With both Roosevelt and Taft declining to run for the Progressive nomination, the race for the Progressive nomination was wide open. The open race created the divisions that had been present in the Progressive nomination race of 1904 before Roosevelt had stepped in as a unifying figure, and many of the generation of Progressives who ran for that nomination ran again in 1912. Some newcomers did run, however they did not make it very far. Senator Willis C. Hawley, one of the Progressive supporters of maintaining the tariffs on Britain and Canada after the Great War[1], won the Champoeg primary as a favorite son candidate and came in a close second to Wallace in the Oregon primary. However, Hawley's support in the Northwest did not translate well into other regions of the country. Herbert Hoover, then a young upstart businessman and diplomat, briefly floated a run for president at just 38 years of age, Hoover had made a name for himself during the Great War for his organization of food relief on the Canadian front. Hoover made a splash with the announcement he would run for the Progressive nomination shortly after he returned from the Vienna negotiations and won the Connecticut and Vermont primaries, but his momentum fizzled as the summer wore on. Herbert Hoover's early run would, however, mark a transition point for the man and prepare Hoover for his later and more successful future in Progressive politics.
The two front runners for the Progressive nomination thus were two veterans and founding members of the Progressive Party who had both ran for the nomination in 1904: Secretary of Agriculture Henry Cantwell Wallace and former governor and Senator from Indiana Albert Beveridge. Wallace and Beveridge had become visible representations of the rural and urban wings of the Progressive Party since the party's inception. Henry Cantwell Wallace came out ahead of Beveridge in the primaries, winning those in Demoine, Itasca, and Shoshone. Wallace appealed to many Progressives who wanted a return to the Populists' focus on farmers. Even before his appointment as Secretary of Agriculture, Henry C. Wallace fought to gain support for the McLaurin Amendment to the Tariff of 1902[2] that raised tariffs on agricultural goods. While Agriculture Secretary, Wallace advocated an idea he had spearheaded in Demoine for a state-owned grain elevator to give farmers fair prices for their produce and provide insurance when prices were low. The idea was popular in Demoine and Itasca where both states established state-owned mills and grain elevators, and Wallace continued to advocate farmers' insurance as Secretary of Agriculture.
In a contrast to the rural appeal of Henry Cantwell Wallace, Albert Beveridge was the urban candidate, having been a Congressman representing a booming Indianapolis as well as Indiana's Senator and governor. Beveridge had been one of Roosevelt's earliest supporters in 1904, almost attaching himself to the first Progressive President's hip in every way save being his running mate. He had been a strong proponent of the expansion of American power during the Great War, calling for American entry into the war even before President Roosevelt publicly floated the possibility. In this push Beveridge held a desire for the United States to bring order to the North American continent, and as such Beveridge was also one of the biggest supporters of the annexation of California. Here Beveridge and Roosevelt found common ground, and Beveridge pushed hard for the annexation, though he was out of Congress and back in Indianapolis by this point. As an urban Progressive, Albert Beveridge also desired to increase fairness and regulations for urban industries and living. This included calls for a federal minimum wage, child labor regulations and mandatory primary schooling, and shorter and regular set work hours. Beveridge's speeches were almost socialist at times, with one speech to Indianapolis steelworkers claiming that "large business left to itself brings chaos and ruin, and it is up to the government to rein them in and provide justice to the worker."[3] Beveridge supported the formation of labor unions and other Progressive causes to bring about a more moral society, such as the temperance movement.
Thus, the Progressive convention in Chicago was a battle between the rural and the urban; between the quite literal grass roots laid out by Henry C. Wallace and the top-down approach to achieving a better and more just society from Albert Beveridge. President Theodore Roosevelt had made no formal endorsement prior to the Progressive convention, but it was clear to most observers that the President would certainly prefer that Beveridge be his successor. Roosevelt did after all make his start in politics as a lawman. As the convention opened, the delegates were split. While the urban delegates had increased much in the last eight years, many of the original Populists were still influential in rural regions. For instance, despite the growth of Chicago and Cairo, it was Illinois Congressman Frederick Hinde Zimmerman[4] who led the Illinois delegation and officially placed Henry C. Wallace's name into consideration. The votes after the first ballot were divided, with Wallace slightly ahead of Beveridge while Hoover, Hawley, Georgia Senator Thomas E. Watson, and others gained a scattering of support. The second and third ballots shifted only marginally, with neither Wallace nor Beveridge gaining an advantage.
This went on for another day, but on the sixth ballot, the deadlock was broken. President Roosevelt had arranged to give a speech on the fourth day of the convention. Most people assumed the presidential nomination would be over and done with by then so there was not much thought given to the President's speech when it was originally scheduled. However, as the time of the speech drew near, whispers sprang up over whether President Roosevelt would give a formal nomination that might push one candidate over the finish line. There was little doubt of who that candidate would be, but the question on everyone's minds was would Roosevelt forsake his Agriculture Secretary to endorse Albert Beveridge. To the delight of the Beveridge camp (but not surprise), President Roosevelt indeed gave his endorsement to Albert Beveridge for the nomination for President of the United States in 1912. However, Roosevelt's speech also expressed generous support for the Wallace's achievements serving in Roosevelt's administration. In a so called grand compromise between the urban and rural factions of the Progressive Party, the delegates almost unanimously nominated Henry C. Wallace as Beveridge's running mate.
[1] Yes, that Hawley.
[2] See this update. Senator Anselm McLaurin of Mississippi proposed a compromise amendment to get the Tariff of 1902 passed.
[3] This is a curious sentiment when put up against the socialist muralist Eugene Victor Debs, who also spent much of his life in Indianapolis. Debs' bright, colorful murals often depicted the solidarity of the worker in achieving justice and prosperity for themselves, rather than relying on others to hand it down to them. Many of Debs' murals can still be seen on the brick facades of Indianapolis, Chicago, and other cities in the Old Northwest.
[4] Frederick Hinde Zimmerman was a Grange member and one of the leaders of the Illinois Farmers' Institute.
Uh oh changed into an intrigued "Oh"
Part One Hundred Forty-One: The 1912 Democratic Nomination
I wanted to get this update done by the end of the month and barely did!
Part One Hundred Forty-One: The 1912 Democratic Nomination
The Democratic Nomination:
The Democrats had been smarting after going from electing President McKinley in 1900 to receiving fewer than 100 electoral votes in the 1908 election. President McKinley had remained an elder statesman of sorts, despite the failure of fellow Ohioan Calvin Brice to win any states outside the ex-Confederacy in the 1908 election. McKinley and a large "Eagle" wing of the Democratic Party, had supported American intervention in the Great War and many even supported the annexation of California. However, some opposed the annexation based on seeing it as merely an aggrandizement of Roosevelt's presidency and a drain on the United States' resources compared to leaving it a puppet reliant on American trade.
Since the Progressives had adopted presidential primaries in several states, the idea had caught on among the other parties as a way to gauge popular support for a candidate. This was aided by Progressive legislatures in Champoeg and Itasca, which passed laws in 1910 to require major parties to hold presidential primaries and bound convention delegates to the results of the primary. The Democrats were by far the most reluctant party in the move toward presidential primaries. Even so, by 1912 presidential primaries were established by the state Democratic Party in not only Itasca and Champoeg, but also in Michigan. The two binding primaries were held in states that had been heavily impacted by the Great War. Champoeg and Itasca had both saw their economies suffer during the war. Champoeg could be argued to have fared worse in the war. Champoeg was a major front in the early stages of the American invasion of California and the Modoc attack on the southern forts only stoked anger even further. The war stoked nativist sentiment in much of Champoeg outside of the Columbia River area, and among the already more conservative Democrats this sentiment only gained further appeal. It is not hard to see, then, why the Champoeg primary went to North Carolina Senator Furnifold McLendel Simmons. Simmons, a white supremacist who frequently used racial tactics to win elections and had built a strong Democratic machine as chair of the Democratic Party of North Carolina[1], proclaimed this victory as his ability to win votes outside of the ex-Confederacy. With the Champoeg primary as the first of the three Democratic primaries, it propelled Simmons to one of the top candidates among conservative Democrats.
Along with Champoeg, whose delegates were now bound for Furnifold Simmons at the convention, Simmons had the assured support of the North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Chickasaw delegations simply by the nature of those states at the time. However, almost as soon as the result of the Champoeg primary hit the country east of the Rockies, a movement among more centrist Democrats, especially in the Northeast, to oppose Simmons' bid for the nomination. Former Vice President George Oliver, who had run in 1908, was urged to run again by McKinley and a week after the Champoeg primary threw his hat in the ring. Fellow Pennsylvanian Alexander Mitchell Palmer also jumped into the race for the nomination. Palmer was an odd member of the Democratic Party. In the House, he frequently joined more with the Republicans or the Progressives on matters such as tariffs, war preparedness, and even on business regulations. However, Palmer's district in northeastern Pennsylvania was dominated by the Democratic machine of Frederick W. Taylor[2] and Palmer likely would have never won his seat if he had run with another party. In a national run for the nomination, though, Palmer did not gain much traction among the Democrats outside his district, but he did manage to raise his profile nationally as a critic of many of his fellow candidates from within the Democratic Party.
While Furnifold Simmons won the Champoeg primary, as the anti-Simmons campaigns gained steam the other primaries were much more contentious. Itasca's primary, which like Champoeg's was binding for the delegates to the national convention, saw a close race between Maryland governor Edwin Warfield, former Vice President George Oliver, and Saint Louis mayor Rolla Wells. Wells was a dark horse figure, and much of his support came on the back of endorsement by Pulitzer's news empire. However, even the support of Joseph Pulitzer was not enough to place Wells more than a close third place with just over 20% of the vote. Edwin Warfield won the Itasca primary narrowly over Oliver The Itasca win gained Warfield some momentum among moderate Democrats, but it was dented by George Oliver's victory in the non-binding Michigan primary. Through the summer, Edwin Warfield and George Oliver jockeyed for position to be the anti-Simmons while other candidates faded away as the convention drew near.
As the delegates gathered at the Democratic National Convention in Saint Louis, the general expectation was that Warfield and Oliver were roughly equal in support but fairly behind Simmons, and that either could become the main candidate to raise a challenge to Furnifold Simmons as a compromise was reached. However, the result of the first ballot shocked many observers. Furnifold Simmons came ahead with strong support from Southern states as expected. But Edwin Warfield turned out to be significantly ahead of George Oliver, drawing support from not just Itasca and the mid-Atlantic but also from many states in the Upper South. It turned out that Edwin Warfield's reputation as a viable national candidate had spread. For one, Warfield was nearing the end of his term as governor of Maryland, a rare Democratic governor of the traditionally Republican state since the National War. Additionally, Warfield and Maryland was seen as a way to connect the Democrats of the Northeast with the Democrats of the South once again. Favorite sons still found their way into the first ballot, such as the Missouri delegates still voting for Rolla Wells and Cuba putting forward governor Mario Garcia Menocal[3]. Meoncal is notable here as the first Catholic and the first Ibero ever placed into nomination for president from a major party. These candidates and Oliver's support were slow to dissipate in the face of the Simmons-Warfield race, but by the fifth ballot delegates were moving behind Edwin Warfield as the clear opposition to Furnifold Simmons. Both candidates remained unable to reach a majority on the next few ballots, but on the ninth ballot Warfield gained enough support to push him over the top. Next came the Vice Presidential nomination. This was also assumed at first to be a tumultuous contest among many candidates, but a statement from Edwin Warfield quickly smoothed the waters. Warfield made a speech to the convention shortly before voting began for the Vice Presidential nomination endorsing George Oliver as his preferred choice, stressing the need to put a unified voice to the less nationalist factions of the Democratic Party if the party was to gain the votes outside the South needed to regain the presidency. George Oliver was nominated for Vice President on the second ballot, making his second nonconsecutive appearance on the bottom of a Democratic ticket. George Oliver was also selected in particular for his association with McKinley and the two men's ability to gain Democratic support in Ohio and Pennsylvania, bound to be two crucial states that year.
[1] Furnifold Simmons was in OTL ran the North Carolina Democratic Party in the early 20th century and was key in disenfranchising blacks in the state. He also ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1920.
[2] Frederick Winslow Taylor, of The Principles of Scientific Management OTL, got his start at Bethlehem Steel. Here he remains influential in Bethlehem and becomes the boss of the Pennsylvania Democrats after Matthew Quay's death, adapting his ideas on efficient management from the factory machine to the political machine.
[3] While Mario Garcia Menocal is a member of the Partido Conservador in state and congressional elections, he caucuses with the Democrats and affiliates with the Democrats for nationwide electoral purposes.
Part One Hundred Forty-One: The 1912 Democratic Nomination
The Democratic Nomination:
The Democrats had been smarting after going from electing President McKinley in 1900 to receiving fewer than 100 electoral votes in the 1908 election. President McKinley had remained an elder statesman of sorts, despite the failure of fellow Ohioan Calvin Brice to win any states outside the ex-Confederacy in the 1908 election. McKinley and a large "Eagle" wing of the Democratic Party, had supported American intervention in the Great War and many even supported the annexation of California. However, some opposed the annexation based on seeing it as merely an aggrandizement of Roosevelt's presidency and a drain on the United States' resources compared to leaving it a puppet reliant on American trade.
Since the Progressives had adopted presidential primaries in several states, the idea had caught on among the other parties as a way to gauge popular support for a candidate. This was aided by Progressive legislatures in Champoeg and Itasca, which passed laws in 1910 to require major parties to hold presidential primaries and bound convention delegates to the results of the primary. The Democrats were by far the most reluctant party in the move toward presidential primaries. Even so, by 1912 presidential primaries were established by the state Democratic Party in not only Itasca and Champoeg, but also in Michigan. The two binding primaries were held in states that had been heavily impacted by the Great War. Champoeg and Itasca had both saw their economies suffer during the war. Champoeg could be argued to have fared worse in the war. Champoeg was a major front in the early stages of the American invasion of California and the Modoc attack on the southern forts only stoked anger even further. The war stoked nativist sentiment in much of Champoeg outside of the Columbia River area, and among the already more conservative Democrats this sentiment only gained further appeal. It is not hard to see, then, why the Champoeg primary went to North Carolina Senator Furnifold McLendel Simmons. Simmons, a white supremacist who frequently used racial tactics to win elections and had built a strong Democratic machine as chair of the Democratic Party of North Carolina[1], proclaimed this victory as his ability to win votes outside of the ex-Confederacy. With the Champoeg primary as the first of the three Democratic primaries, it propelled Simmons to one of the top candidates among conservative Democrats.
Along with Champoeg, whose delegates were now bound for Furnifold Simmons at the convention, Simmons had the assured support of the North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Chickasaw delegations simply by the nature of those states at the time. However, almost as soon as the result of the Champoeg primary hit the country east of the Rockies, a movement among more centrist Democrats, especially in the Northeast, to oppose Simmons' bid for the nomination. Former Vice President George Oliver, who had run in 1908, was urged to run again by McKinley and a week after the Champoeg primary threw his hat in the ring. Fellow Pennsylvanian Alexander Mitchell Palmer also jumped into the race for the nomination. Palmer was an odd member of the Democratic Party. In the House, he frequently joined more with the Republicans or the Progressives on matters such as tariffs, war preparedness, and even on business regulations. However, Palmer's district in northeastern Pennsylvania was dominated by the Democratic machine of Frederick W. Taylor[2] and Palmer likely would have never won his seat if he had run with another party. In a national run for the nomination, though, Palmer did not gain much traction among the Democrats outside his district, but he did manage to raise his profile nationally as a critic of many of his fellow candidates from within the Democratic Party.
While Furnifold Simmons won the Champoeg primary, as the anti-Simmons campaigns gained steam the other primaries were much more contentious. Itasca's primary, which like Champoeg's was binding for the delegates to the national convention, saw a close race between Maryland governor Edwin Warfield, former Vice President George Oliver, and Saint Louis mayor Rolla Wells. Wells was a dark horse figure, and much of his support came on the back of endorsement by Pulitzer's news empire. However, even the support of Joseph Pulitzer was not enough to place Wells more than a close third place with just over 20% of the vote. Edwin Warfield won the Itasca primary narrowly over Oliver The Itasca win gained Warfield some momentum among moderate Democrats, but it was dented by George Oliver's victory in the non-binding Michigan primary. Through the summer, Edwin Warfield and George Oliver jockeyed for position to be the anti-Simmons while other candidates faded away as the convention drew near.
As the delegates gathered at the Democratic National Convention in Saint Louis, the general expectation was that Warfield and Oliver were roughly equal in support but fairly behind Simmons, and that either could become the main candidate to raise a challenge to Furnifold Simmons as a compromise was reached. However, the result of the first ballot shocked many observers. Furnifold Simmons came ahead with strong support from Southern states as expected. But Edwin Warfield turned out to be significantly ahead of George Oliver, drawing support from not just Itasca and the mid-Atlantic but also from many states in the Upper South. It turned out that Edwin Warfield's reputation as a viable national candidate had spread. For one, Warfield was nearing the end of his term as governor of Maryland, a rare Democratic governor of the traditionally Republican state since the National War. Additionally, Warfield and Maryland was seen as a way to connect the Democrats of the Northeast with the Democrats of the South once again. Favorite sons still found their way into the first ballot, such as the Missouri delegates still voting for Rolla Wells and Cuba putting forward governor Mario Garcia Menocal[3]. Meoncal is notable here as the first Catholic and the first Ibero ever placed into nomination for president from a major party. These candidates and Oliver's support were slow to dissipate in the face of the Simmons-Warfield race, but by the fifth ballot delegates were moving behind Edwin Warfield as the clear opposition to Furnifold Simmons. Both candidates remained unable to reach a majority on the next few ballots, but on the ninth ballot Warfield gained enough support to push him over the top. Next came the Vice Presidential nomination. This was also assumed at first to be a tumultuous contest among many candidates, but a statement from Edwin Warfield quickly smoothed the waters. Warfield made a speech to the convention shortly before voting began for the Vice Presidential nomination endorsing George Oliver as his preferred choice, stressing the need to put a unified voice to the less nationalist factions of the Democratic Party if the party was to gain the votes outside the South needed to regain the presidency. George Oliver was nominated for Vice President on the second ballot, making his second nonconsecutive appearance on the bottom of a Democratic ticket. George Oliver was also selected in particular for his association with McKinley and the two men's ability to gain Democratic support in Ohio and Pennsylvania, bound to be two crucial states that year.
[1] Furnifold Simmons was in OTL ran the North Carolina Democratic Party in the early 20th century and was key in disenfranchising blacks in the state. He also ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1920.
[2] Frederick Winslow Taylor, of The Principles of Scientific Management OTL, got his start at Bethlehem Steel. Here he remains influential in Bethlehem and becomes the boss of the Pennsylvania Democrats after Matthew Quay's death, adapting his ideas on efficient management from the factory machine to the political machine.
[3] While Mario Garcia Menocal is a member of the Partido Conservador in state and congressional elections, he caucuses with the Democrats and affiliates with the Democrats for nationwide electoral purposes.
Wilcoxchar, who were the Presidents of California in this Timeline before the Great War? I'd like to Know if you have a List.
Part One Hundred Forty-Two: The 1912 Republican Nomination
And the last of the party nomination posts is done! Two more posts to go before the main part of Union and Liberty officially ends. I'm aiming to have the final post on New Years Eve, with the epilogue posts running into 2017.
Part One Hundred Forty-Two: The 1912 Republican Nomination
Stuck in the Middle:
If the Democrats were itching to get back into the White House, the Republicans were even more. They had been out of the White House ever since William Jennings Bryan lost to William McKinley twelve years ago and had struggled to find a way to recover. Ideologically, the Republican Party frequently found themselves ideologically squeezed on policy. The Progressives attacked the Republicans from the left, and the Democrats attacked the Republicans on the right, leaving the Republicans flailing against both sides. Frequently, all this would do is alienate potential supporters on both sides. For the party of John C. Fremont to rebuild, they would need to firmly reestablish themselves as distinct from the other major parties.
Early on, the front runners for the Republican nomination were two Senators, Champ Clark of Missouri and Lawrence Yates Sherman of Illinois. Both had previously run for president unsuccessfully, but now they each saw their chance. The 1912 Republican nomination was most notable for the absence of William Jennings Bryan, who would not return from the political wilderness for another year. Bryan was not completely silent - he made several speeches decrying American annexation of California and the United States' entrance into the Weltkongress - but Bryan remained silent on the nomination fight. The absence of Bryan greatly diminished the influence of rural Republicans and gave candidates from urban areas a boost. This spurred the likes of former New Jersey governor Leon Abbett, who launched a last chance candidacy in 1912 at the age of 76. Massachusetts Senator John Weeks entered the race for the nomination as a strong New England regional candidate, as did Job E. Hedges, chairman of the New York Republican Committee who was spurred on by New York City mayor Charles Evans Hughes[1].
The path to the nomination was difficult and became a divisive slugfest at many times during the campaign. Champ Clark won the Republican primary in Champoeg, but he was immediately set upon by Sherman and Hedges for his support for Roosevelt's intervention in the Great War. When Sherman made anti-Catholic remarks in a speech[2], Hedges, whose New York constituency heavily courted Catholic voters, jumped on him for using "Southern Democrat" language that would alienate voters. When Hedges said national regulation of wage and hour laws was overstepping the bounds of the federal government and cautioned against the concentration of power in the executive office that Roosevelt had built, Abbett, Sherman, and Clark called Hedges out on abandoning the average American. These constant attacks showed that the Republican Party could disagree with both parties on many issues individually, but finding a common stance was difficult.
Champ Clark's interventionist stance was a boon in previous years, but it became a hindrance in 1912. Isolationism and opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy had been one of the greatest differences between the Republicans and the Progressives, and with the Democrats leaning toward empire with Brice's nomination in 1908 and George Oliver's returning influence, there was feeling that the party needed an isolationist as the nominee to set them apart. In Itasca, it was another story. Itasca had gained territory from the Great War, true, but it was at a cost of trade for many of the state's Republicans, Especially Duluth had suffered with the decline of Great Lakes trade during and after the war. The Itasca primary was won in a narrow contest between Sherman and Weeks. Champ Clark quickly faded from the nomination race after coming in fourth in Itasca and received only a handful of delegates at the convention. Marquette, Vermont, and oddly for this early in the 20th century, Vandalia also held Republican primaries[3]. All three nonbinding primaries went for different candidates. Lawrence Yates Sherman, coming off his victory in Itasca, also won the neighboring state of Marquette. Vermont went to John Weeks, while Vandalia was a surprisingly close three way race between Weeks, Hedges, and Sherman.
As the Republican National Convention opened in Madison Square Garden, there was no clear front-runner for the nomination. On the first ballot, Weeks, Sherman, Hedges, and even William Jennings Bryan were all close in the top four positions. Weeks came out ahead on the first ballot with a lock on the New England delegates, but it was not nearly enough for him to make a strong push without winning over several rival candidates. The shocking support for Bryan created a loud rumor of a "draft Bryan" effort or Bryan wanting to jump back into the political fray. However, while Bryan did attend the convention as a delegate, he stated outright that he would not accept the nomination of the Republican Party that year. The balloting went on for several days with little movement and no sign of support coalescing behind any one candidate. On the twelfth through sixteenth ballots, Champ Clark briefly bubbled up to the top tier of candidates, but he faded back down soon after back with Abbett and other favorite sons. The balloting for the Republican National Convention went on for over sixty ballots and six days before a nominee was chosen. Supposedly, after the fifty-eighth ballot, Lawrence Yates Sherman met with Charles Evans Hughes and Job Hedges at two o'clock in the morning. They hammered out an agreement, and Hedges, while he did not withdraw himself from the nomination, directed Hughes to use New York delegates to quietly build support for a compromise ticket. By the sixty-fifth ballot, that ticket had shown itself. Weeks bled support starting with Connecticut delegates while Abbett withdrew from the nomination, lending support to Sherman. On the sixty-fifth ballot, Sherman had received just shy of the majority of votes with Hedges and Weeks now as his main opponents. Hedges, the great orator that he was, made a grand speech about the need for compromise among Republicans and that "we have shown with this convention that we are the broadest coalition of Americans of any of the major parties. We Republicans, when faced with opposing ideas, do not dig ourselves in like the donkey or butt heads like the moose. No! Republicans seek out dialogue, we seek out moderation, and we seek out compromise to create the best path of many for these United States to follow to prosperity!"
Job Hedges' Convention Speech has gone down as one of the greatest in political history[4]. Hedges had suddenly found a message for the Republican Party, a message of moving forward but doing so with moderation, cautiously testing the waters but forging ahead on a path when that path was tested and proven. However, while it was Hughes and Hedges that created the circumstance, it was Lawrence Yates Sherman who would be the party's nominee. Hedges had great appeal in New York and areas touched by New York City, but he could not compete with Sherman in appealing to both the Mid-Atlantic and the Old Northwest, two key regions for the Republicans to keep. Sherman did see Hedges as valuable, however. The last time the Republicans had won the state of New York was when John C. Fremont himself won reelection in 1868. The dream of the Republican Party to carry New York once again drove Job E. Hedges to the vice presidential nomination, with Sherman's support of course[5]. With Hedges on the ticket, and the growth of New York City as an urban area, that dream had a greater possibility of coming true than it had in a long time.
[1] Job E. Hedges was a close associate of Charles Evans Hughes and in OTL was the Republican candidate for governor of New York in 1912.
[2] Sherman appears to have been somewhat anti-Catholic in OTL. One of his concerns that led him to oppose the League of Nations was that too many members were Catholic countries so the League would be dominated by the Vatican.
[3] With Vandalia solidly Republican, the state GOP extended the primary to the presidency as well as state offices.
[4] Hedges was a very good orator. Even Mark Twain supposedly called Hedges "the best extempore speaker he had heard."
[5] Choosing the Vice President from somebody with such an obscure position is surprisingly not that odd for the time period. In OTL, Chester Arthur was New York GOP Committee Chairman when he was picked, and Garrett Hobart was Vice Chair of the Republican National Committee.
Part One Hundred Forty-Two: The 1912 Republican Nomination
Stuck in the Middle:
If the Democrats were itching to get back into the White House, the Republicans were even more. They had been out of the White House ever since William Jennings Bryan lost to William McKinley twelve years ago and had struggled to find a way to recover. Ideologically, the Republican Party frequently found themselves ideologically squeezed on policy. The Progressives attacked the Republicans from the left, and the Democrats attacked the Republicans on the right, leaving the Republicans flailing against both sides. Frequently, all this would do is alienate potential supporters on both sides. For the party of John C. Fremont to rebuild, they would need to firmly reestablish themselves as distinct from the other major parties.
Early on, the front runners for the Republican nomination were two Senators, Champ Clark of Missouri and Lawrence Yates Sherman of Illinois. Both had previously run for president unsuccessfully, but now they each saw their chance. The 1912 Republican nomination was most notable for the absence of William Jennings Bryan, who would not return from the political wilderness for another year. Bryan was not completely silent - he made several speeches decrying American annexation of California and the United States' entrance into the Weltkongress - but Bryan remained silent on the nomination fight. The absence of Bryan greatly diminished the influence of rural Republicans and gave candidates from urban areas a boost. This spurred the likes of former New Jersey governor Leon Abbett, who launched a last chance candidacy in 1912 at the age of 76. Massachusetts Senator John Weeks entered the race for the nomination as a strong New England regional candidate, as did Job E. Hedges, chairman of the New York Republican Committee who was spurred on by New York City mayor Charles Evans Hughes[1].
The path to the nomination was difficult and became a divisive slugfest at many times during the campaign. Champ Clark won the Republican primary in Champoeg, but he was immediately set upon by Sherman and Hedges for his support for Roosevelt's intervention in the Great War. When Sherman made anti-Catholic remarks in a speech[2], Hedges, whose New York constituency heavily courted Catholic voters, jumped on him for using "Southern Democrat" language that would alienate voters. When Hedges said national regulation of wage and hour laws was overstepping the bounds of the federal government and cautioned against the concentration of power in the executive office that Roosevelt had built, Abbett, Sherman, and Clark called Hedges out on abandoning the average American. These constant attacks showed that the Republican Party could disagree with both parties on many issues individually, but finding a common stance was difficult.
Champ Clark's interventionist stance was a boon in previous years, but it became a hindrance in 1912. Isolationism and opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy had been one of the greatest differences between the Republicans and the Progressives, and with the Democrats leaning toward empire with Brice's nomination in 1908 and George Oliver's returning influence, there was feeling that the party needed an isolationist as the nominee to set them apart. In Itasca, it was another story. Itasca had gained territory from the Great War, true, but it was at a cost of trade for many of the state's Republicans, Especially Duluth had suffered with the decline of Great Lakes trade during and after the war. The Itasca primary was won in a narrow contest between Sherman and Weeks. Champ Clark quickly faded from the nomination race after coming in fourth in Itasca and received only a handful of delegates at the convention. Marquette, Vermont, and oddly for this early in the 20th century, Vandalia also held Republican primaries[3]. All three nonbinding primaries went for different candidates. Lawrence Yates Sherman, coming off his victory in Itasca, also won the neighboring state of Marquette. Vermont went to John Weeks, while Vandalia was a surprisingly close three way race between Weeks, Hedges, and Sherman.
As the Republican National Convention opened in Madison Square Garden, there was no clear front-runner for the nomination. On the first ballot, Weeks, Sherman, Hedges, and even William Jennings Bryan were all close in the top four positions. Weeks came out ahead on the first ballot with a lock on the New England delegates, but it was not nearly enough for him to make a strong push without winning over several rival candidates. The shocking support for Bryan created a loud rumor of a "draft Bryan" effort or Bryan wanting to jump back into the political fray. However, while Bryan did attend the convention as a delegate, he stated outright that he would not accept the nomination of the Republican Party that year. The balloting went on for several days with little movement and no sign of support coalescing behind any one candidate. On the twelfth through sixteenth ballots, Champ Clark briefly bubbled up to the top tier of candidates, but he faded back down soon after back with Abbett and other favorite sons. The balloting for the Republican National Convention went on for over sixty ballots and six days before a nominee was chosen. Supposedly, after the fifty-eighth ballot, Lawrence Yates Sherman met with Charles Evans Hughes and Job Hedges at two o'clock in the morning. They hammered out an agreement, and Hedges, while he did not withdraw himself from the nomination, directed Hughes to use New York delegates to quietly build support for a compromise ticket. By the sixty-fifth ballot, that ticket had shown itself. Weeks bled support starting with Connecticut delegates while Abbett withdrew from the nomination, lending support to Sherman. On the sixty-fifth ballot, Sherman had received just shy of the majority of votes with Hedges and Weeks now as his main opponents. Hedges, the great orator that he was, made a grand speech about the need for compromise among Republicans and that "we have shown with this convention that we are the broadest coalition of Americans of any of the major parties. We Republicans, when faced with opposing ideas, do not dig ourselves in like the donkey or butt heads like the moose. No! Republicans seek out dialogue, we seek out moderation, and we seek out compromise to create the best path of many for these United States to follow to prosperity!"
Job Hedges' Convention Speech has gone down as one of the greatest in political history[4]. Hedges had suddenly found a message for the Republican Party, a message of moving forward but doing so with moderation, cautiously testing the waters but forging ahead on a path when that path was tested and proven. However, while it was Hughes and Hedges that created the circumstance, it was Lawrence Yates Sherman who would be the party's nominee. Hedges had great appeal in New York and areas touched by New York City, but he could not compete with Sherman in appealing to both the Mid-Atlantic and the Old Northwest, two key regions for the Republicans to keep. Sherman did see Hedges as valuable, however. The last time the Republicans had won the state of New York was when John C. Fremont himself won reelection in 1868. The dream of the Republican Party to carry New York once again drove Job E. Hedges to the vice presidential nomination, with Sherman's support of course[5]. With Hedges on the ticket, and the growth of New York City as an urban area, that dream had a greater possibility of coming true than it had in a long time.
[1] Job E. Hedges was a close associate of Charles Evans Hughes and in OTL was the Republican candidate for governor of New York in 1912.
[2] Sherman appears to have been somewhat anti-Catholic in OTL. One of his concerns that led him to oppose the League of Nations was that too many members were Catholic countries so the League would be dominated by the Vatican.
[3] With Vandalia solidly Republican, the state GOP extended the primary to the presidency as well as state offices.
[4] Hedges was a very good orator. Even Mark Twain supposedly called Hedges "the best extempore speaker he had heard."
[5] Choosing the Vice President from somebody with such an obscure position is surprisingly not that odd for the time period. In OTL, Chester Arthur was New York GOP Committee Chairman when he was picked, and Garrett Hobart was Vice Chair of the Republican National Committee.
